Christmas: The Redeeming Message

Tonight’s subject is “Christmas, The Redeeming Message.” If you owned the world, but really literally owned the world and all within it, and a billion dollars your servant, and at the end of your short journey here that was all, wouldn’t that be sheer nonsense? Well, Christmas, the redeeming message, is that man lives forever.

This is the story. There is a West Indian carol called “Mary’s Boy-child”: “Jesus Christ was born on Christmas Day and because of this birth man lives forever more.” That’s a recent thing from the West Indies. But centuries ago this story broke upon the world. Men wanted it, they speculated, but they couldn’t quite discover the secret hidden in the Old Testament. And they thought, and thought that by searching the scriptures, but they could not find the Christ of whom they spoke and of whose coming they foretold. They just couldn’t find it, because it wasn’t in the way they expected it.

Paul makes the statement in the second letter to the Corinthians, the 4th chapter, the 2nd verse, and he speaks of a treasure: “We have this treasure in earthen vessels.” When you read it, you wonder what is he talking about, we have this treasure in earthen vessels. It means “conditioned by human limitation: the limitation of human understanding, human language, the meaning of words, and especially that limit set to one person’s unveiling of his own inner consciousness to another.” How could one who is the first really tell it, for everyone knew him in the world as a normal person? And this has been going on for unnumbered ages and suddenly “at length for hatching ripe he breaks the shell.” And he tells it, and he tells it with all the limitations of the earthen vessel, called man. Well, how could he tell it to persuade anyone that this is what was foretold?

Now tonight I will tell it just as it happened. And I hope that someone in the audience—I know that there are many from time to time who may add to it memory images of what I’ve said. Others have taken it down on tape; others have taken it down in shorthand, but they’ve taken it down. The story that you’re told in the Book of Luke… Luke, if you listen carefully, in the very first four verses: “Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which happened among us, just as they were declared by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, so it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed.” He does not claim he was an eyewitness, but he followed closely those who were eyewitnesses.

In scripture, an eyewitness is one who has experienced it. The one essential to be an Apostle was to see the risen Christ, as told us in the first chapter of the Book of Acts. No one can be sent—for an Apostle means one sent—unless he himself experienced the risen Christ. It’s called “seeing the risen Christ.” You don’t see it as another; you experience your own resurrection; that is “seeing” Christ. “For Christ in you is the hope of glory.” “I tell you a mystery,” he said, “a mystery hidden from all ages, all generations, and now made manifest to his saints… this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:26, 27). And so, the one condition imposed upon one who would be sent is that he saw, that is, he experienced the risen Christ.

Luke does not claim that he saw it; therefore, he doesn’t claim he experienced it. But he claims, listen to it carefully, “Inasmuch as many”—and there were many prior to Luke—“who attempted to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us… a narrative compiled from the things told by those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning and ministers of this word, now it seemed good to me also to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed.” Now he does not claim that his record is a greater chronological exactitude than those who preceded him. What he is really claiming, that his narrative is really a better arrangement of the source material: he heard it, these things from those who really experienced it. He heard it and compiled it into a story, into a narrative.

I want to tell you tonight the story as it actually takes place. For after unnumbered years the story has been overlaid with all kinds of extraneous things, and it isn’t so at all. Next Wednesday, the whole vast world of Christendom, one billion of us, will tell the story and enact it in churches and homes all over the world. Yes, even in China, in Russia, there are those who believe it and who will tell the story, that a man and a woman had a child that was different, and that he was the savior of the world. And that is not true. The only savior of the world is God, called in the scripture Jehovah. “I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior… and besides me there is no savior” (Isaiah 43:3, 11). The name is, we call it, Yod He Vau He. In our language it’s I AM. But, if you understand the scriptures, the word Jesus, which is the anglicized form of the Hebrew word Joshua, means the same thing. So whatever you read of Joshua or you read of Jehovah, you can read of Jesus the same. It’s not a man. The gospels are not biographies of Jesus. They are really telling the story of salvation.

Christianity is based upon the affirmation that a certain series of events happened in which God revealed himself in action for the salvation of man. So you ask the question, “Did they really happen? Did they happen?” So as I stand before you, I can tell you they did happen. That I am not unique, I’m just as you are, with all the weaknesses, all the limitations of flesh, but all of them. And I had no idea the story was literally true in the depths of the soul of man. For like you I too was taught that this story took place on the surface of man, that the history of it was secular; that it actually took place in the Near East. But I know today that it didn’t take place in any Near East; it takes place in the soul of every child born of woman. And when that moment arrives no one knows; only God knows. No man can predict it. No man is wise enough to see that moment in time when at length for hatching ripe you will break the shell, and then the series of events unfolds in your soul and you are Christ Jesus. Christ Jesus in man, which is God in man, is Jehovah in man. God actually became man that man may become God.

This is the story, and may someone present this night have the ability to tell it. I did my best in the last chapter of my latest book The Law and The Promise. Without adding to it or taking from it, I told it just as it happened. But maybe you can do a far better story. And leave out the being called Neville completely. It hasn’t a thing to do with a man that stands before you now—it’s the story of every being in this world—and that being will take off this garment as something that vanishes, it makes no difference. But the being that experienced it you don’t see; you see the mask that he wears. I don’t see the real you; I see the mask that it wears.

This is exactly how the story unfolds in the soul of man. There will come a moment in your life, and you will not suspect it, you won’t have the slightest concept that it’s going to happen to you. Then out of the blue, you will find yourself awakening, really awakening; and you awake to find yourself in a sepulcher, and the sepulcher is your skull. You had no idea up to that moment that you were entombed. But at that moment as you begin to awake you awake to find yourself completely awake, as you’ve never been awake before. And where are you? In your skull, and it’s a tomb and you know it’s a tomb. At that moment, you make an effort to come out and you do come out. You come out in the same manner that you came out of your mother’s womb, head first, inch by inch. And you come out… just as you came out physically from your mother’s womb you come out spiritually from the skull, your own skull. As you come out and find yourself completely out, you’re bewildered. It never occurred to you before that you were dead.

We’re told in the Book of Genesis: “And the Lord God placed a profound sleep upon man and he slept” (2:21). There is no thought that the man awakened until this moment in eternity. There isn’t one word in scripture. The appeal is there, but there’s not a word that he awoke. In the 44th Psalm, the appeal is made to God. It’s God who fell asleep in man. “Arouse thyself! Why sleepest thou, O Lord? Awake! Do not cast us off forever!” (verse 23). So the command is by God to God who sleeps in man. He is individualizing himself in man. So, “Rouse thyself! Why sleepest thou, O Lord? Awake! Do not cast us off forever!” So, God awakes in man as that man. And he didn’t realize until that moment in eternity that he really was asleep. He thought he was awake.

This dream has been imposed upon man, which really is God, and he must dream the dream of this world. At the end of the dreaming of the dream, God awakes. And because it was dream, no matter how horrible he was in this world, it’s all forgiven. If tomorrow morning my wife said to me, “I had the most horrible dream. I murdered you and murdered our daughter and murdered all of our friends,” because I love her I would embrace her and try to comfort her because of the horror of her dream. I couldn’t condemn her; it was a dream. So at the end of this drama this whole thing is a dream, and the dreamer awakes, and awakening he is God. But he is subjected to the dream of this world, and the most horrible dreams we dream while we are subjected to it. And then we awaken from the dream to find we are the dreamer and the dreamer is God.

So I awoke—and you can take it down and this is true—I awoke to find myself in the sepulcher of my skull. I did not know until that moment that I had been, throughout the centuries, dead—for you wouldn’t put anyone in a sepulcher unless he’s dead. And so, I have been buried, buried in my skull, but I didn’t know it until that moment in time. Then the most fantastic power stirred me: I was resurrected from the dead. Resurrection is God’s most wonderful creative act. He awakens himself from this profound sleep that is so deep it is just like death. So I awoke from the grave, and then I came out. Now we’re told in Revelation, he is the first of those who woke from the dead, the first to be born from the dead. Everyone will be born from the dead in the same way. The story of Christ is the story of man. Every man will have the identical experience when he comes out from the grave, and the grave is his own skull.

Now, we are told in the Book of Luke that three came to witness this event. For the angel of the Lord appeared and said to them that “Unto you this day is born in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you: you shall find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger” (2:9-12). And they went and discovered the thing was true. They found the sign. Listen to it carefully: “This shall be a sign unto you: you shall find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.” The child is not the event. The child is no more the event than the flag flying over the White House is the President. It signifies his presence; it is not the President. Is he in residence? Well, I don’t know. Well then, look, see if his insignia is flying. And so, I will look, if the President’s flag is flying, he is in residence. When he’s not in residence, it’s lowered. So, “This shall be a sign unto you, you shall find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.”

But that is not the event that took place in heaven. What took place in heaven: you who have been asleep throughout the ages, you awoke by God’s most wonderful creative act. He woke you that is himself, for you and he are one. He simply disturbed the sleeper and woke him from his frightful dream. And then he came out of his skull in the form of being born. The sign of birth from above is always that of a child, so the child signifies your birth. But the child is not what you gave birth to: it’s you. The child is simply a sign and a portent of your birth.

And three men are present. They come just as you’re told in the 18th chapter of the Book of Genesis. Suddenly, he to whom the promise was made, called Abraham, for Abraham sat in the tent, in the door of the tent is in the tent, and suddenly he looked up and behold, three men stood before him. They were not seen approaching. They suddenly appeared; they were before him. And these three men are not seen approaching, they suddenly appear and they are before him. You see them and you know them. They know you but they don’t see you, for you are not here anymore. This event takes place in heaven. Although they will be invisible to anyone in this world, you are invisible to them, because this is something entirely different, an entirely new age where you are born. You have broken this life’s invidious bar as it were. You aren’t here anymore. And you’ve been born after being a dreamer for unnumbered centuries, dreaming the horror of this world. Then you awake and three men witness it.

Now you’re told, in the story one announces the fact and two question the fact. He does not argue the point. He presents the evidence—the evidence, not you, for he can’t see you—he presents the child. The child can be seen. That’s the flag, that’s the insignia, that’s the portent. So he who finds the child on the floor—which is a manger, the lowest point in that inn, for you’re in an inn—and he picks it up, presents the evidence. You take this heavenly child in your hands and you look into his face, and you ask—if you ask the same words that I asked—“How is my sweetheart?” And he looks into your face and smiles. Just as you’re told, his name is Isaac and Isaac means “he laughs.” He does, he laughs. Then the whole thing dissolves and you are back on this level to ponder this fantastic experience that you’ve had.

And then you know who Mary is. Prior to that if you were raised in a Christian faith, you thought Mary was a woman who lived two thousand years ago. And now you know who Mary is, and yet you are male, wearing a male garment. You may be the father of children as I am; I have a son and a daughter. And yet I gave birth to myself, and it was symbolized as that of an actual infant wrapped in swaddling clothes. So then I knew: “I am Mary and birth to God must give if I in blessedness for now and evermore would live.”

And so, I brought forth myself. God can only bring forth himself; he can’t bring forth another. Corn brings forth corn. Everything brings forth after its kind. This was stated in the beginning that this is the law forever and forever, the law of identical harvest (Genesis 1:11). So if God is bringing forth something, he brings forth himself. So God is begetting himself and bringing forth himself. But if he brings forth himself and begets himself, it has to be symbolized. What is the greatest symbol of birth but a child? So the child is the insignia that he did succeed in bringing himself forward and he’s born from above.

Now, Luke is not claiming that he actually had the experience, but he heard from those who had it. They were called eyewitnesses—and an eyewitness is one who experienced this birth—and then he wrote the narrative. Writing it as beautifully as he did men took it literally on this level. And so, you are going to find on Wednesday morning, you’re going to find a woman and a little baby, and a man, and then animals around, and all these things, and that is not it at all. So if someone here this night could be like a Luke and who would actually be present to hear how it happened, they could tell the story as it really happened. For it’s going to happen to everyone born of woman in this world. But that moment in eternity when it happens, no one knows; it comes like a thief in the night.

And how do I know this is what was foretold? Well, I go back into scripture and I read. I find it foreshadowed, I find it foretold in scripture. So I tried to explain to the world what happened to me. But again I come back to Paul, “This treasure is hid in earthen vessels.” So I try to tell it. Because of my limitations of language and your limitation of what I’m trying to say, we talk from different premises. You’ve been conditioned to believe that when he comes into the world, he’ll come as we came, through the womb of woman; and he doesn’t come through the womb of woman. And so, you believe if he does come he has to come that way, and that’s not the way that Christ comes into the world. Christ is simply God awake. And it’s God in man that must awake, and when he awakes he comes out of the skull of man. It’s called in the Bible Golgotha which means skull. That’s where God was placed. He was buried on Golgotha. “Unless I die thou canst not live, but if I die I will arise again and thou with me” (Blake, Jerusalem, Plate 96). So God is actually buried in the skull of every being in the world.

Now, for those who may say, “Well, if it doesn’t happen to me before I die here, will it happen?” Yes. It’s a peculiar mystery: you don’t really die. How can I persuade people in this world who actually die and I see the body actually incinerated, and tell them they didn’t really die? It’s a strange thing. You don’t vanish. The world does not cease to be at the point where my senses cease to register it, it doesn’t. My father at eighty-five died, as the world would see it. He’s buried in Barbados. My mother died at sixty-three. And so many of my friends by the dozens have died, but they haven’t died! It’s a wheel of recurrence, and they are playing it as though the play will play tonight when the curtain comes down and it goes up tomorrow night. You replay the play until a moment in the play you awake. You are the author of the play, the dreamer of the dream, and you leave the play.

Now, the next stage in this… if I would rewrite Luke, but I don’t have the qualifications to rewrite Luke, but I do know he didn’t make the claim that he was writing a chronological order, an exact order, because it did not happen that way. It happened differently. The drama begins with resurrection, and it ends in the drama in Luke with resurrection. The end of all the drama in the four gospels is resurrection, and that’s not so at all. It begins with resurrection. You resurrect and you didn’t know you were even dead. You didn’t know that you were asleep, because you seem so alive here. I am so awake! So the greatest act of God is to resurrect himself in man from the dream, this horrible dream. And it is horrible, where man seemingly dies, and he has disease, and he has pain, and he has all the frightful things in the world in this dream. And yet, at the end it is only a dream; therefore, he didn’t really go through it at all. Therefore, in the end you say, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” They were dreaming the most horrible dream in the world. So the next stage will prove it is God, and not some little tiny thing that you thought you were in the dream, but it was God who did the dreaming, and it is still God who you are now. He has individualized himself as you. He has completed the act, his purpose, to individualize himself as you.

Well, how will I know that God succeeded in his purpose to give himself to me? Well, God is a father. If God is a father and he succeeded in his purpose, which was to give himself to me, then I’m a father. If I’m a father, then show me my son. I can’t be a father unless there is a child. And so he does, he shows me my son. Then comes another explosion in your brain—it’s all taking place in your skull—and this fantastic explosion. After the dust settles, you look and you understand the words of scripture: “I will open the door and no one can shut it.” In Revelation, “I will open the door and no one can shut it.” And then you look and here is your son, he is David, the David of biblical fame. He’s leaning against the side of an open door. He turns around and looks you right in the eye and he calls you Father. You know you’re his father and he knows he’s your son, and then you know who you are. For David is God’s only begotten son, so if God’s only begotten son calls you Father, then you know who you are. There aren’t two Gods in this world; there’s only one God. So he calls you Father. He will call every being in this world Father; and then you will know that we are really one, that we aren’t billions as we appear to be in this world. We are completely individualized, granted, and yet one.

So David calls you Father and you call him Son to fulfill the 89th Psalm. For I only must fulfill scripture. I didn’t come here to make a pile of money. It’s nice to have money to cushion against the horrible dream that we dream. It’s nice to have the lovely things of this world, certainly, but that’s not the purpose of life. The purpose of life is to fulfill scripture. Well, the 89th Psalm is: “I have found David. He has cried unto me, ‘Thou art my Father, my God, and the Rock of my Salvation’” (verse 26). So I must find him. And you don’t find him by going searching for him. He explodes out of your own brain and stands before you. And he’s just as he’s described in the Book of Samuel, just as he’s described! You have never seen such beauty in your life as when you look into the eye of David. And that face of David, a youth, eternal youth, about twelve or thirteen and here, he’s being personified before you, eternity. For eternity is youth, not age. It’s David.

It is David who stood beside him, as told in the 8th chapter of the Book of Proverbs: “I am the first of his works of old,” the first (verse 22). He created me before anything else in the world, and I stood beside him as a child. “Before he brought forth the seas, the heavens, I stood beside him as a child.” It’s David. And so, when God succeeds in giving himself to you, he has to give you his Son. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son” (John 3:16). And his Son is not Jesus Christ; his Son is David. Jesus Christ is simply God Awake. Jesus Christ is God the Father. So David calls you Father. And that’s how the mystery unfolds. He asks the question “What think ye of the Christ? Whose son is he?” They answered, “The son of David.” He said, “Why then did David in the Spirit call him Father? If David does call him Father, how can he be David’s son?” (Matthew 22:42). So, David calls him Adonay, a word used by every son of his father, when he calls him Father. So he called me Father.

And then comes another scene. And this is the chronological order as I have experienced it. This is not as Luke told it, or Matthew told it, or Mark, or John. But they were not trying to be chronologically exact. They were simply compiling these oral traditions, and putting them into a narrative. It made sense the way they put it, because, on this level, birth would come first and death last. And if you survived death, then resurrection should follow it. But that’s not the order in God’s mystery. Resurrection comes first. You begin with resurrection. You awaken to find yourself entombed; and then you come out, and that’s birth. And the signal of the birth, or the thing that signifies it, is a babe. And “this shall be a sign unto you that something was born this day in the city of David that is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11). Well, what is the sign? Go and “you will find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying on the floor.” That’s where you find it. That was telling you that something was born this day in the city of David. Well, the city of David is Zion. Zion is not in the Near East; Zion is your own wonderful skull. That’s where it was born. You come out of your own wonderful skull, and the birth is symbolized as that of a babe.

You can take this, and you, too, can compile a narrative. I think the time has come to tell it—to tell it because after 2,000 years of misrepresentation people completely lost the entire picture of this great mystery. And they’re looking for a coming of another being called Jesus Christ in the flesh, and he can’t come at all. He comes in us. And he keeps on coming in every individual in this world until all have hatched out. When all have hatched out all will be the father of one son; therefore, all are one. Then you will know the mystery: that “The Lord will be king over all the earth; on that day his name will be one and the Lord one” (Zechariah 14:9). Therefore, the name is Jesus Christ, and everyone will be Jesus Christ, without loss of identity.

No one will lose identity. I’ll know you in eternity. But I will see you beautified beyond the wildest dream of man. I will see you with a character that is God. I will see you with the majesty that is God, with everything that is God, because you are God. All will be hatched out and all will be one. You’ll not be male or female; you’ll be man. Man will then, in that moment, be above the organization of sex as we understand it in this world. We don’t need the divided image of male-female to create. We create because everything is then subject to our own wonderful imaginative power. But we’re God completely awake.

And everyone, not one will be addled. It’s his purpose to save all. Save all, he saves himself; there’s no one else to save. All the commands in the world, as we read in the Bible, are given by God to God. Man can do nothing on this level. He simply is giving himself to individualize himself, and bring himself up as God. Because, there is no limit to the expansion of God; there was only a limit to the contraction of God. The contraction was Adam, humanity, the limit to opacity, yes. But no limit to translucency, none whatsoever, so that God will forever and forever be expanding. And when all are awake, and the play is over and his purpose realized, he still can expand. He can still be this composite God made up of others—one God made of all of us. We are the Elohim, and all the Elohim form Jehovah, the one Lord. Then tomorrow another act he will write, and then in that other act, a still further expansion of this infinite being that we are.

So, the story of Christmas is the story of salvation. It is God redeeming himself. Because he placed himself in a restricted area, and it was so restricted! What is more restricted than death? And the dreamers did not know that they were actually dead. They didn’t know they were dreaming, for their dreams were so real they were lost in the dream. When you fall asleep tonight, unless you awake from that sleep, isn’t the dream real? And don’t you bleed, and don’t you feel pain, and aren’t you afraid, and don’t you control, and don’t you run from others in your dream? Then you awake from it and say, “It was only a dream.” And while that dream lasted, it was just as real as this. For when you come back here, you don’t think this is a dream. Oh, no, this isn’t a dream, that was a dream. It’s a dream within a dream until man awakes from it all.

So Shelley was perfectly right. But he wasn’t speaking of some friend of his who died, as we see a friend die. He was speaking of one who awoke. For Shelley had the visions—he made his exit at thirty-six, but like all these brilliant intuitive minds they saw it so clearly. So they said he was full of incest, they said Shelley and his mother, Shelley and someone else. But, may I tell you, if I am the father of your son, my wife will one day have the experience of being the father of my son, and my son is David, yet she has borne me a child, well, isn’t that incest? Why, she’s myself. In the end, if we’re all the father of one son, then no matter what, you can call it by any other name, it’s incest. Well, they said of Shelley that he was incestuous. But this is what he said: “He has awakened from the dream of life. ’Tis we who lost in stormy visions keep with phantoms an unprofitable strife.”

So we think this is altogether real; and we strive for the highest office in this country; and we aspire for the highest office in a religious sense, and we strive for a higher office in some other sense, and it’s all but the dream. When we awaken from it, we are Jehovah. Jehovah’s only name to be known forever and forever throughout all generations is I AM. So who had the dream last night? Wouldn’t you say, “I did”? And if someone said to you, “What are you doing?” You would say, “I am dreaming.” And when you awoke from it you would say, “Well, I am awake.” You always precede whatever you say with “I am”; that’s Jehovah’s name.

So in the end, this series of events will unfold in the soul of every person in the world. But as Paul said in his second letter to the Corinthians, the 4th chaper, the 7th verse: “We have this treasure in earthen vessels.” That is conditioned by the limitation of human understanding, human language, the limitation of our understanding of words, and especially that limitation of an individual who had the experience of trying to unveil it, which is something you can’t share save in words to another. So tonight I have tried to unveil my inner consciousness that sailed and had that experience with you who, at the moment, have not had it. But you will have it!

And so that is Christmas. It hasn’t a thing to do with some physical event that took place 2,000 years ago. There was no Mary, who didn’t know a man physically, who bore a child physically from her physical womb, none whatsoever. The Mary, if Mary, is the one called Sarah, if Sarah, which is the back of your own wonderful skull. She was ninety years old and the numerical value of the word “she was ninety”; the symbolical value of that number is a fishhook. The first use of the word Jesus in the Bible is Joshua. Moses could not enter the Promised Land, that which was promised, it took Joshua to do it. Joshua is called Joshua Ben Nun, Joshua the son of Nun. Nun is a fish. He comes into the world to transform us into fishers of men, called fishermen, and he was called “the great fish.” And Sarah was ninety years old and ninety has the symbolical value of a fishhook, it’s Tzaddi. Look it up, the fishhook. What is he fishing for? What is he bringing out of himself? For everything comes out of man: “All that you behold, tho’ it appears without, it is within, in your own wonderful human Imagination, of which this world of mortality is but a shadow” (Blake, Jerusalem, 71). So he brings it out and that is the Sarah or that is the Mary.

But forget the Sarah, the Mary, it’s your own wonderful being and it’s coming out of your own skull. You are coming out of your skull, for that’s where you’re buried. And the whole drama of salvation begins with God’s mightiest act, which is resurrection. He resurrects you. And you didn’t even know that you were dead until that moment when you’re resurrected. When you’re resurrected, you find yourself entombed. What would you put into a sepulcher but the dead? And you are in a sepulcher, and the sepulcher is your skull. That’s exactly what the Bible tells you: he was buried in Golgotha and Golgotha means skull. That’s exactly where Jesus Christ was buried. Then Jesus Christ in you awakes to find himself entombed, and he comes out. As he comes out of the tomb, he’s born from above. And then comes the series of events as described in scripture. Then, Luke says: “I heard it from those who were eyewitnesses; and it seemed good to me now to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus.” Well, Theophilus means one who loves God; so if you say, I want to find the secret, God’s purpose, God’s plan, you are a lover of God, you are Theophilus. ‘That you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed” (Luke 1:03). So now you have been informed.

And to those who have been coming here over the years, and have taken it down in shorthand, tape, longhand, maybe they can compile a narrative and tell the story as it actually happened. But leave the speaker out completely, for this is only a garment that he wears. You have never seen me anymore than I have seen you, for we are veiled. This garment of flesh is a veil it comes through. I’ll recognize you, you’ll recognize me, but we’re lifted up to the nth degree of beauty compared to what you see now. So, leave out the first narrative… that was born from a woman’s womb… and tell the story of salvation. How the individual walking this earth as though he were alive, thinking he’s alive and thinking he’s awake, suddenly one day God hits him over the head as it were and he wakes. He didn’t realize until then that he had been asleep. And when he awakes, he doesn’t awake in a crib, he awakes in his skull, and finds himself completely sealed in his skull. He breaks the seal and comes out. It is now “at length for hatching ripe” and out he comes, comes out of a sealed tomb and the tomb of his skull.

Then he understands what the prophets could not see. Because they sought and they inquired what person, what time was indicated by the spirit of prophecy within them, when it was prophesied and predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glory. But they couldn’t. They sought throughout all the scriptures and yet they could not find by all their searching that Christ of whom they spoke, and whose coming they foretold. They couldn’t find him. It wasn’t there until you have the experience. So I’m telling you the experience before you have it, that when you have it you will know that it is true.

Until it happens, continue, and knowing it to be a dream, dream nobly. You can change the dream. The Bible recognizes only one source of dream: all dreams, all visions proceed from God. So if I can think of my home right now, that’s the waking dream. Well, now who’s doing it? Who’s doing it?—I am. That’s God. So I think of something else, well, who is doing it?—I am. That’s God. There’s only one source of dreams in scripture; and all dreams proceed from God, and God is I AM. So if I know I am dreaming, I can control the direction of my dream. If I don’t know I’m dreaming, then I am the servant, the slave of my attention, not its master. If I know I’m dreaming, I can direct my attention. Directing it, I can control the dream. Try it and see how it works. If today you’re poor—that’s a relative term—but if you think you are, assume that you are wealthy, which also is relative. But assume that you are, and remain faithful to your assumption, knowing that God is the dreamer and all things are possible to God, and you will actually crystallize it in your world of dreams. You can change the dream and make it come out just as you want to, any dream in this world, until that moment in time when you awaken from dream to find yourself Christ Jesus, God Awake.

So while you’re dreaming, dream the most noble dreams in the world. If you don’t know you’re dreaming, well then, you can’t change it. You are lost in your own creation. But if you know you are dreaming, you can control the direction of your attention and therefore control the dream. All dreams in the world proceed from God. So tonight, just assume. When you assume something, isn’t that a daydream? You’re told in possibly the greatest book next to the Bible, the works of Shakespeare: “Assume a virtue if you have it not. Refrain tonight, one night. It will seem easier tomorrow, and then the next night still easier.” At the very end, if you dare to assume it and restrain the impulse to go back to habit, then your assumption will harden into fact. You are still dreaming and will continue the dream until that moment in time when God awakes in you as you, and he’s individualized as you. So you try it.

Now we go into the Silence, for this is our closing night until January 7.

Q: ___(??) the story of how would you react to things that appear outwardly as tragedy? Then, would this move you in any way?

A: Sir, may I tell you, returning here still clothed as I am in a garment of flesh and blood, I cannot fully realize my divine inheritance. It cannot become actual, or not fully realized by me while I’m still wearing this. And while I’m wearing this, it has relationships like wife, children, brothers, sisters and so on, and reactions may not be as intense, but they’re still reactions on this level. Were I completely indifferent, it would be taken off tonight. But while I wear it, this garment that I wear is related to certain patterns in God’s eternal structure and reacts on that level. And so, I am identified today with America, and so react as an American. So any hurt or, I would say, a threat to what I consider a way of life that I like, I find myself still on this level reacting.

But my experiences I’ve told you and tried to record without embellishment are just as I experienced them, and they’re all stories of Jesus Christ. I say it without batting an eye, without bending a knee, without in any way apologizing for it: everyone eventually will be Jesus Christ. Well, Jesus Christ is God awake. This is God’s imposed sleep; to awake, and his awakening, which is an expansion beyond what he was before, is Jesus Christ. And everyone is God, and he will be Jesus Christ. In that day his name will be one, and the Lord is one. Not unnumbered little Jesus Christs running around. Just one being, and one being seemingly made up of unnumbered.

It’s a strange mystery. How could I say to anyone… as we’re told in scripture, “Before Abraham was, I am”? Well, you before Abraham and Abraham lived a thousand years before? Before Abraham was, I am. Well, I can say right as I stand here, I know it more surely than I know anything else: Before David was, I am. For the father comes before the son and he called me Father, and I knew when he called me Father I was. He never called me Father for any conviction on my part… I knew it. Therefore, was this not “before David was, I am”? David’s father in scripture is Jesse and Jesse is I AM. The word Jesse is any form of the verb “to be”: I am. He calls me Father, and in scripture Jesse is the father of David. And so here, at the age of fifty-nine, I am older than David, who predated our Christian era by a thousand years. So, before David was, I am. And if God is the only reality and all the things came after, and he succeeded in his purpose of awakening me as himself, then I can say, “Before the world was, I am.” So Proverbs 8: “I am the first of his acts of old. Before he created anything, I was with him as a little child.” And then he awakens me, awakens you, as himself. This is all God’s doing and there’s nothing but God.

Q: (inaudible)

A: ___(??) I can’t take too much time. But, I don’t drive a car. I have a car but it’s only for my daughter, but I don’t drive it. I just have never driven a car. But here I am driving a car, and seated in the back of the car to the extreme right is one whose name is Lee, and it’s a woman. And the party that has the dream turns to me, the driver of the car, and she said, “What is Lee waiting for?” And I answered, “She is waiting for Mort.” Well, Mort is the Latin for death. I said to her, “Only one more block and Oswald”; you can see the symbolism. No one thought of any attempt before.

Then, she said, suddenly before her came this enormous bell, the Liberty Bell, and the Liberty Bell began to toll. Well, there’s no symbol in our country recognized that really is more representative of the head of our country than the Liberty Bell. What is more representative of our president than the Liberty Bell? He’s supposed to keep alive the liberty that is ours and not to enslave us, that’s what he is supposed to do. And we elected him to office to keep our freedoms going. Then she said, unnumbered bells tolling from churches, all over the country all the bells are tolling. The car splits in two and as the car splits in two, suddenly—as it happens in dream—it’s put back together again. But the front part where I am, I’m driving, is completely protected, and the rear is completely unprotected. On the extreme right of that rear of the car sits Lee, and Lee is waiting for Mort.

Good night.