Outer World Responds to Imaginal Acts

“All that you behold; tho’ it appears without, it is within, in your Imagination, of which this world of mortality is but a shadow” (Blake, Jerusalem, Plt. 71). You cannot conceive of something that is not already contained within you. If you imagine it and enter into that state as though it were true, the outer world will respond to bear witness of this imaginal activity within you.

Now you try it. And if you prove it to your own satisfaction that it does work, then you come to this conclusion—you’ll read it in the 13th chapter of the Book of Acts: “I have found in David the son of Jesse a man after my own heart, who will do all my will” (13:22).Now if the entire world responds to my imaginal activity, well then, that is David who will do all my will, for, he is doing my will. Well, if the Lord said David does my will and I by a simple imaginal act command the outer world to respond to it as though I struck a chord and everything in sympathy with the chord struck must respond to bear witness to this that is active within me, well then, who is the Lord? If I notice the world responding to what I am imagining, and David is one after my own heart who will do all my will, I see who David is: David is the outer world responding to my will. Now, it’s not “will” as the world will use it…I will “will” it to be so. No, I will imagine it to be so. I am inwardly convinced that it is so. If I imagine that it is so and persist in that imaginal state as though it were true and the world responds, I have found David. And I have found the Lord…the Lord being my own wonderful human Imagination.The imaginal act in its response is David…there is David.

Now in Hebrew thought, history consists of all the generations of men and their experiences fused into one grand whole; and this concentrated time into which all the generations are fused and from which they spring is called eternity. Now we are told in Ecclesiastes that “God has put eternity into the mind of man, but so that man cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (3:11). Only in the end will we find out what God has put into man’s mind. Well, he’s put eternity which would contain all things. If all the generations of men and all of their experiences fused into one grand whole is put into the mind of man, every conceivable variety of experience is contained within that one grand whole. The word translated eternity is also translated “the world.” But it is also translated and quite often in scripture as “the youth, the stripling, the young man” and these are three titles used of David. He said, “I have found David the son of Jesse.” Well, Jesse means “I am” and that’s the name of God. “I have found in David”—the Son of God, the son of Jesse—“a man after my own heart who will do all my will.” Well, now I see that he really is the entire vast world of humanity and all of their experiences, but I do not know this until the very end. In the very end of the journey I find him personified as a single youth; not as unnumbered people, one single eternal being. For, eternity is personified as youth and not as an old man as the Greeks did. It is simply one single being and he is the youth called David. I will know this only in the end.

Now here is the day after the great event that tens of millions celebrated yesterday, and I wonder what percentage of them really understood what they witnessed. Listen to these words, this is the 20th chapter of John: And Peter went into the tomb and he saw the linen clothes lying, and the napkin, which was on his head, lying not with the linen clothes but rolled up in a place by itself (20:6-8). Well, you would wonder, “Why on earth would you put that into a story that is so dramatic, so all-together marvelous, why would you tell it?” You see the linen clothes and you see the napkin and they are not together, they are separated, and he finds this in the tomb. Now we are told that when he was brought to the tomb the tomb was called the skull, and there he was buried. There he was first crucified and there he was buried. So Peter goes into the tomb that’s the skull, but him they do not see. He and his partner when they went in did not see the one that was put there, but they found the linen clothes and they found the napkin, and they were not together. The napkin was rolled up in a place by itself.

If you take it as a secular story, you will think a man died, had him in linen clothes and they covered his face with a cloth called a napkin, and then when they went in the third day the tomb was empty…he wasn’t there but the linen clothes…well, you will think in terms of these. But that is not the symbolism of scripture. The linen clothes represent the physical body and that’s what they found. They found the physical body, the garment that he wore, but they did not find him. You would say then he was dead. No, that is not the story that is being told. They found the napkin. Well, in ancient times the word napkin had a far wider range of meaning than it has today. We have a dinner napkin, a cocktail napkin…we also have today a sanitary napkin. But this was a different kind of napkin. This napkin symbolizes the placenta, the afterbirth. If you know the true symbolism of scripture it is telling you a birth took place and it came from this. For, the napkin symbolizes simply the afterbirth…and here is the body that you found. Well now, something was born.

Now, this is in the Book of John, it is not in the other three gospels. John insists on a birth from above. Matthew and Luke who tell the story of the birth do not tell it in this manner and you would on reading that story imply a woman called Mary gave birth to a little child, as you were born, as I was born, but it differed from us. That’s not the story. When you see the story in John, who is the most profound of all the New Testament writers, you see the birth and then you see who Mary is. Mary was the skull; Mary was that womb in which God entered. Or as Blake said, “God himself entered death’s door with those who enter and lays down in the grave with them, in visions of eternity, until they awake and see Jesus and the linen clothes lying which the females had woven for them” (Milton, Plt.32). Well, my mother wove this garment, this fleshy garment. My mother wove it in her womb, this is the linen cloth that mother wove and she wove it for me. When it came forward, then following it came the placenta. The uterus had to expel it…it had to be discharged. It was no part of her. Here is the napkin telling that something entirely different took place, some birth, some unusual birth…something that was not known to man before…and it took place in the skull. The drama begins in the skull and ends there.

So here, unnumbered millions yesterday attended this service and they heard that he is risen. Well, yes he is risen, and so will you, for he is speaking of you…the whole story is all about you. God actually became as we are that we may be as he is, and he entered death’s door, which is my skull, your skull. He enters and then has visions, visions of eternity, and all these horrible visions that you and I have which come forward as physical effects in our world—wars, famines, convulsions—everything in the world you and I imagine or it couldn’t happen. So when I imagine a state and I find a response coming from without, I have found who God is. But “All things are made by him and without him is not anything made that is made” (Jn.1:3). But he also has to have one who will do all of his will. Then I find that 500 different people, male and female, were responsive to my imaginal act, and they seemed to be the instrument through which it became visible in my world—then I have found David. For, if David is a man after my own heart who will do all my will then humanity is David. But, in the end of my journey the whole is fused into a single youth and that youth is then personified as David. And strangely enough, coming from within you, then you stand and you face him, and he calls you Father. As told us in scripture, he will call God, the Lord, Father—“I have found David and he has cried unto me, ‘Thou art my Father’” (Ps.89:26), and when he calls you Father the journey is at an end. But it took all the generations of men and all of their experiences to bring you to the point of confronting all of it fused into a single being, and that being is David. That’s in store for every one in the world. Every child born of woman will discover eventually that he is the God who created the entire vast universe. He is the God who wills everything to happen; so in the end he forgives every being because everyone did his will. But everyone summed up simply means to him David: “I have found in David the son of Jesse”—which is I AM, my own son—“a man after my own heart who will do all my will” (Acts13:22).

Now in scripture you find these words, I, Jesus, tell you I am the root and the offspring of David (Rev.22:16). I created humanity, all these bodies that were dead, and then I entered them and animated them. They became animated, they could respond to my imaginal act. And then I came out of humanity. Having played unnumbered parts I came out of humanity, so I am now the offspring of humanity. I am the root, therefore the Father, and yet in the end I come forward from it as I promised myself that I would. So, go say unto David, “When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your son after you who will come forth from your body. I will be his father, and he shall be my son” (2Sam.7:12,14).

So, I created humanity, came forth, and buried myself in humanity. For, a seed must fall into the ground and die before it is made alive. Unless it dies it remains alone, but if it dies it brings forth much (Jn.12:24). So God must die, so he comes into humanity. Humanity is made of the dust, the earth, so the seed falls into the earth called man. And then in man because it comes from God and is God, he says “I am.” That’s the name of God forever and forever. So here in these bodies you say “I am,” well, that’s God. Then you imagine a certain state and the world responds, good, bad or indifferent. Well, if it responds it’s doing your will. So whether it be a single person who did it or unnumbered persons who did it, they represent David…for I have found David who does my will. So regardless of your present name, your present race, your present anything, you are David if you respond and make visible to me that which I have imagined. I not only have found David in the response, I have found the cause of that response, and I have found it in myself—that my imaginal act was the cause of the response of the world relative to me. So I have found the Father and the Son.

In the end of my journey, when I come to the very end and I am setting myself free from this world of death comes this wonderful mighty act. And the whole thing is fused before me into one single youth and he stands and there he is as described in the Book of Samuel, just as he’s described in Samuel. And here is eternity that was buried in me: “God has put eternity into the mind of man yet so that man cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (Ecc.3:11). So all of a sudden, I’m in the end and the journey is over, and I am enhanced by reason of the experience of creating bodies that are dead, entering the bodies that are dead, and playing a part. I play all the parts and you will play all the parts. Your presence here tells me you have played them or you wouldn’t be here, because no one comes unto me save my Father calls him…and I and my Father are one. So you wouldn’t be here as you are without an interest. Your presence night after night proves that interest, and therefore proves that you are at the end of playing all the parts…with the same identity, no loss of identity. But you have played the part of the well-known and the unknown, of the wealthy and the poor, of the disgraced and the honored. You have played everything in the world, for everything is contained within you, and you can’t conceive of a plot in the world that is not now a reality in you. But you need not animate it. If you enter into that state and assume that you are it, well then, not one power in the world could stop that from responding. And if it takes a dozen or ten dozen or a thousand men and women to respond to bear witness to that active state within you, they must respond, for they will do your will. “I have found in David a man after my heart who will do all my will.” Not once has he ever failed me in doing my will…and humanity is David.

That is the Hebrew thought concerning history. This is their real concept…when I say “their” I do not mean the person you will know who is calling himself a Jew. I’m speaking of the Sanhedrin; I’m speaking of the giants in that wonderful setup. Yet the giant did not understand the word when he said you must be “born again.” His name was Nicodemus and he was a member of the Sanhedrin and he said, “How can a man who is old re-enter his mother’s womb and be born again?” (Jn.3:4). He said, “You, a master of Israel and you do not know? Except you are born from above you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” In other words, you cannot enter the new age. And this whole drama is simply one being playing all the parts…one being expanding himself by first limiting himself to his own creation.

So he creates humanity. It’s part of the structure of the universe and it’s dead. Now he animates it. It is said, “He breathed upon them.” Well, the word breath and the word spirit are one and the same in Hebrew and in Greek. So to breathe upon is simply to possess it. I possess the body and as I possess it, spirit enters it. That is animating it. But I am now in a body that is dead. I must now go through the horrors of the journey, and when I reach the very end of it then I begin to awake. And I awake just where I started the dream…I awake in Golgotha, the skull, the tomb, which is the skull of man. That’s were I entered, and that’s where I awake, and when I awake I emerge from it. I look back at that which I occupied for 6,000 years and it is ghastly pale. It’s the linen clothes that my mother wove in her womb. And then I depart, leaving, and the body expels that which is the napkin. And I come out, and others come to find me. They find only the discarded body and they find now the thing which symbolizes my birth. It’s only a symbol of my birth from above.

Having had the experience I can tell you exactly how it happened. You start in the skull and you end in the skull…and the whole drama begins in man. The drama is all about God and there is nothing but God. It is God who created it, it is God who is playing it, and in the end it is God who extracts himself, and he rises from his own state which was a dead state. That is resurrection.

But if you think in terms of one little being called Jesus Christ, you miss it completely. That is not the mystery. Jesus Christ is your own wonderful human Imagination, and that is God himself. When you imagine a state wait for the response…it will come. Everything will come. It will come just like any sound that you make will bring a response, because in your world there is something that is attuned to the note that you struck. It will come. Everyone in the world will play the part they must play if I remain faithful to any state into which I enter.

So when Paul makes the statement, “Remember Jesus Christ descended from David according to my gospel,” he’s telling you now that it’s my gospel and that he experienced it. He does not deny the descent of Jesus Christ from David, yet he knows that David was created by Jesus Christ. He buried himself in it and died…forgets himself completely as being the one who created it, and then extracts himself from it…now far more luminous than when he entered it, far more translucent then when he entered it, far greater in power and wisdom than when he entered it. For God is truth and truth is an ever-expanding illumination and there is no limit to the expansion. So when he comes out and he begins to expand, he is enhanced by the experience of coming into the world of death and overcoming death. So resurrection is simply the rising from the dead, and the dead is simply theses bodies in which we are now encased.

So the little napkin…don’t look for it as the world sees it. It’s a symbol just as I have told you. I know what I am talking about. You won’t find it; I didn’t find it. I knew what happened, but I knew why John placed the word napkin there and gave such importance to it, such significance, because he was the one person who stressed the necessity of being born from above. “You must be born from above.” Well, the one sign of birth would be that. If you come and you find that, then you find a body. And that belongs to the body, but it was not with the body, because it can’t be with the body after the birth. It’s only with the body prior to the birth. But when the birth takes place, when the offspring comes out, that is then discharged from the uterus. And it’s a sign that something came out of this, but this one they do not see, for he is now born from above. And no one can see Spirit with mortal eyes. So they came in and they saw the remnant of the things he wore, but him they did not see.

This is the story as told us if one understands the symbolism of scripture. And the day will come that you’ll experience it. Everyone will experience it, and you and I will once more be back into the one body we occupied before the descent into these bodies. For the body of the risen Christ is not something that is finished; it is in the process of erection, made up of the redeemed, made up of everyone who has had that experience. And everyone must have that experience, so eventually that body will be the most glorious thing in eternity, for it will be far more luminous and more wonderful than it was prior to the descent into its own creation of death. It was done deliberately.

You didn’t do one thing that was wrong to come into the bodies of death called man. You are God. You are not some little worm coming out of the slime, moving from there into some little bird, and from the bird into something else, then something else, and finally man. No, all of this is part of the structure of the universe. You descended into man and animated man…all of us. And no more can descend into humanity than the number of the sons of God and it takes all the sons of God to make God.The word is plural, the Elohim…these are the gods, the sons of God that together make up the I AM. And you can’t have more in this world than there are sons of God. So every child born of woman could only be born and be animated because a son of God, an ancestral being is in it and animating it, controlling it, and putting it through all the paces by putting himself through; and in the end he extracts himself from that body. That body was his David, his beloved, because the whole vast world is David, because the world has to respond to his will.

Someone now sitting in a dungeon feeling abused, by some intense Imagination entering into the image conceived by her is causing disturbances in the world. She is completely unknown, buried in a dungeon, and she is treading the winepress. While completely unseen and unknown by the world she is causing a response in the whole vast world. Who knows who is actually causing the response today in this conflict, that conflict and the other? No one knows. Some unseen person can be the source of the conflict. We don’t really know.

And we go forward giving what is called advice, more and more so-called good advice when scripture doesn’t speak of giving any good advice; it speaks only of giving good news.Go and tell them the good news, that you created it, and you will simply extract yourself from it.And so, you are the immortal being.Don’t give any good advice. Let people be just what they want to be. I don’t care what they are, let them be. They want to grow beards and long…well, there was a time that everyone grew a beard. Let him grow his beard, let him grow his mustache, let him do all the things in the world as long as he doesn’t interfere with you. As far as you are concerned if you don’t want to grow one, don’t grow one. And no one will disturb you if you in your own wonderful way imagine you are free, free as the wind, and live in that state. And the world will respond to you and treat you with all the respect you do. But if you get entangled in it, trying to work against shadows—for they’re all shadows if they respond to my imaginal act then they’re shadows—how can they be causative in my world? If I give them the power of causation, then I’m transferring what rightly belongs to me to them, and they’re only shadows. The whole vast world bears witness of the activity taking place within us, and so the whole world only mirrors what I am doing within myself. That’s all that it’s doing. If I know that, I am set free!

I keep on to the very end. And when this terrific series of events begins to unfold within me and I’m at the very end of the road, tell the story. Tell it to encourage your brothers, because we’re all brothers. “Go and tell my brothers I am ascending unto our Father. Go and tell them I am ascending unto our God” (Jn.20:17). And when we get there we are the Father and we are the God. It is not you and I as brothers and he as Father; we together, collectively, are the Father…we are God. So go tell my brothers I am ascending unto my Father, your Father, unto my God and your God. So in the end we are only one, one wonderful being. And the body is now being slowly erected out of the redeemed and everyone will be redeemed. I can’t conceive of one being lost. One of my brothers lost in the world of death? Why, I would leave the ninety and nine and go in search of him. I could not leave one in a body that is still not yet awakened. He would have to be redeemed or the temple is missing a stone and it’s not finished. So everyone in the end is going to be redeemed. Yes, Hitler, Stalin, all the so-called monsters of the world, for they only responded to the fears and the frightening, horrible things that men set in motion.

My friend, who is here tonight, gave me a letter last Friday and she said that she rarely buys a paper, but several weeks ago she bought a Sunday paper and going through it she came across a story, a short story of this woman who called herself “a great medium” and, naturally, California is going to go right into the Pacific. So she took all of the members of her family and went off to Spokane. Then she said, “Weeks went by and a friend of mine called and she brought in a paper. As I told you I do not buy papers and that was simply an occasion when I bought that Sunday paper. So she brought in a paper and I took the paper and went through the pages and here I came upon a little news item; the same woman, the same medium who took her family from California and went off to Spokane died suddenly of a fatal heart attack, age twenty-nine.” All right, so California did disappear, as far as she is concerned her world vanished. She is now in a world like this, but it need not be in her little California. She’s in some section of time best suited for the work yet to be done in her to bring her to the knowledge of who she is. This frightened little thing…so she died at age twenty-nine. And she is one of the great soothsayers who has frightened so many in this state. Friends of mine left it, went off to Arizona. But they don’t realize you can only take yourself with you. You can go from here to the ends of the earth. If you make your bed in hell, you’re still there, because God is there and you are God. You can’t get away from being God, although you may not know that you are, and so if you are afraid here you’re going o be afraid there.

So in her case the fear possessed her. It’s like Job…he said, “My fears have come upon me” (Job3:25). He was so afraid, he was creating his own disaster and then it came upon him. Now we are told in the end that it was God who brought it. But in the end he realized who God was: God was himself. He said, “I heard of thee with the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee.” Now I know, I experienced…I was praying to a God external to myself and all of my fears came upon me while I pleaded with a God who did not exist to do something about it. In the end, the very last chapter, the 42nd chapter, “I have heard of thee with the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee” (42:5). He now sees the symbol that reveals to him that he is God the Father. And all that he had lost returned to him because it had to return…but it was double. Because when God comes out of this and extracts himself from this fabulous experience, everything that he was is doubled when he comes out.

That’s the story of Job. Job didn’t do anything wrong; he simply imagined the wrong things. It began with a so-called devil. Well, the devil doesn’t exist outside of man. The devil is doubt, that’s all that it is. Satan is the doubter. And so, I doubt the reality of my imaginal acts…all right, so that’s Satan. I can’t believe in the reality of the unseen imaginal act. Well, then don’t, but you still will imagine anyway. You will not believe in the reality of this imaginal act, but you’ll turn from this, you’ll turn to another, because you can’t stop imagining, for imagining is God and imagining animates the world.That is the power of the world. So in the end, I have heard of thee, but I didn’t see you. Now my eye sees you, and then all the things that were taken from him are now returned a hundred-fold.

So here, this wonderful birth that was celebrated yesterday is the birth from above, but they celebrated it only as resurrection. Resurrection and birth from above are two sides of the same coin; it takes place the same night. And it doesn’t have to take place on any first Sunday after the full moon in Aries. That is simply a mark set up by the priesthoods of the world. It can take place at any moment in time and it is still taking place every moment of time. For, the temple is being constructed and the whole thing is being rebuilt on a more glorious scale out of living bodies. For, we are the living stones that will now form the New Jerusalem.

So believe me when I tell you your own wonderful human Imagination is Jesus Christ. That is the being that entered death’s door, you skull, and that is the being who is dreaming the world in which you live and that is the being which will emerge. When he does, you are Jesus Christ and there never was another one and there’s only one. So when I awake, I am he; when you awake, you are he; and we all awake, we are he. And so, together we form the one being and that one being is the Lord God, the Creator of it all.

So don’t envy anyone, don’t condemn anyone, for a judgment is an activity of your own Imagination and with what judgment you judge will be judged on you. You’ll fulfill it. So leave them alone.You’ll find people always trying to get you into a certain little circle to make you pass an opinion. What do you think of the hippies? What do you think of is one? What do you think of that one? Well, I’m quite sure if any of us had a memory long enough, we could go back and trace everything we now see in the world to some ancestor. If we go back far enough all were our ancestors: we had hippies, we had thieves, we had murderers, and we had everything. I think it was Lord George when he tried to bring in a change in the land reforms of England, and he got up in the House where he was prime minister, and he was trying to bring about some reform of the land reform. He turned to the opposition and he said that “every Englishman today in order to trace ownership of his land must go back to the ancestor who first stole it.”Well, he got a lovely reaction on that, because you can’t go back far enough unless you find the one who stole it. We speak of kings today…no one was originally born a king. He had to steal that position and maintain it by arms, because who ever appointed him as king? Who appointed anyone in a position of that nature? You go back far enough and they all stole it. So when he was trying to bring about land reform in England he said, “You can lay claim to this land only by going back far enough to find the ancestor who stole it.”

Now, you don’t have to go back and change anything. Leave it just as it is. He wants a thousand acres, let him have it, a 100,000 acres, let him have it. You are satisfied with just simply living in a lovely apartment, all right, take the apartment. But you will say, “Well, I can’t afford it.” If you say that you can’t afford it, that’s your imaginal act. I would suggest to you when you say that you can’t afford it, this night to sleep in that apartment, mentally, as though you occupied it, with all the funds necessary to pay for it. And in a way you do not know the world will respond and you will get the necessary funds to pay for it. If you don’t want that and you want to own your own home then sleep in a place as though you owned it and the necessary funds will come; because the world only responds, it doesn’t cause. It responds to your own imaginal act, for there’s only one God and that God is in you as your own wonderful human Imagination.

Now, before you judge it, may I ask you to try it. If you try it, you can’t fail! And if you really try it and you prove it in the testing, well then, you become one who will spread the good news to your brothers, and tell everyone that you meet how things work in this world. So they will not feel, “Well, I didn’t have it at birth. I didn’t have the good chances as a child. I didn’t have the parents who had it, the proper education.” Forget all of these things and just simply take this principle and you can’t fail. “For an assumption, though false, if persisted in will harden into fact” (A. Eden). That is true. So when you know what you want, just assume that you have it, and persist in that assumption as though it were true, mentally seeing the world that you would see if it were true. And as you walk, you are calling a response to it. And eventually, in the not distant future, you will find yourself occupying that state physically in this world.

Well, now don’t forget it. We go to sleep after we realize our dream and try to hold onto the dream that is now solidly real in our world and try to protect it with secular means. Don’t! Hold on to it only in your Imagination, for we are given a warning that this man said, “I have all that it takes, more than enough. I will now build bigger barns to house and then take my ease” and the Lord said to him, “O fool, tonight your soul is required of thee.” You don’t have to hold onto anything…hold on only in your own wonderful human Imagination. If something is taken from you, all right, somewhere along the way you allowed it by assuming that you had lost it, toying with the idea what would it be like if it were true that I had lost it. And then you dropped it, forgetting that you did that, and then comes the moment that you lose it. If you want to lose it, all well and good; if you don’t, then hold onto your things only in Imagination and don’t build barns to house them.

But don’t forget the story of the birth as told in John. He does not describe it as Matthew does, and as Luke does, but he tells us it is essential to enter a new age. And then, in the very end he gives it to us in the most beautiful symbolism, but the symbolism is not understood. They see death. And yet it’s only through death that one lives, so “The seed must fall into the ground and die before it is made alive. If it dies, it bears much; if it doesn’t fall into the ground it remains alone” (Jn.12.24). So God dies: “Unless I die thou can’st not live; but if I die I shall arise again and thou with me” (Blake, Jerusalem, Plt. 96). And I rise out of death.

Now let us go into the Silence.

* * *

Now are there any questions, please?

Q: If I’m imagining a thing a certain way and I’m involved with another person who’s also doing imagining about the same thing, but there’s a difference in opinion and they’re thinking an opposite way, what’s going to happen?

A: The minute you know that he is doing it in the opposite direction you’ve transferred the power that rightly belongs to you to the other. There is no he; he only reflects what you are imagining. But the minute you believe that another has power greater than yourself, you are now dividing the power that is rightly yours and giving it to hm. It doesn’t really matter what others are thinking, what are you thinking? And so, it is entirely up to you to either believe completely in the unity of God, the oneness of God. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one” not two. So when they say, “If the Lord is one” you say “I AM, that’s his name forever.” He didn’t say “we are” but “I AM.” So the minute that you say he is doing it, well, you’ve taken the one grand confession of faith, the shema, and divided it. That is not the confession of faith.

When asked to name the greatest of all Commandments, that’s what he named. He did not name any of the Ten Commandments; he named the shema, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one” (Deut.6:4). So when I say, well, I’m doing this and someone tells you but he is doing the opposite, who is he? He is put into this world to bear witness to all that I do, not to take from me the power that is mine. So he never gave it to another. Let the whole vast world do what they feel like doing. You will find in the end that it’s all been resolved.

I have heard women say to me,“You know, I want that man and only that man, and I don’t want any other man; and don’t give me any criticism about it. I want him.” I said, “But he’s married.” “It doesn’t matter, I want him”…the only man. But, I’ve gone to their weddings and it was not that man. What they really wanted was to be happily married and they tied it to a man. What they wanted was the state of blissful marriage. I’ve gone to their weddings and they always get a little smile on their faces, a littleembarrassment, because they know the discussion that they had with me about that man.

I’m not speaking of only one woman, I’m speaking of quite a few that I knew back in New York City who had these problems that they had to have that man…and it wasn’t that man. And as time went by, they realized that he never could have filled the bill. I know this from experience, so I’m not concerned when they tell me, “Now, don’t try to dissuade from this person…it has to be this person.” I’m not interested…tell me what you want and don’t give me all the problems about what’s going to stop it.

The minute you start that, you are taking the shema and shattering the entire confession of faith: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord.” And I can’t even say “we are” in that confession, I have to say “I am.” And “When I go to the people and I say that the Lord has sent me, and I say he is the God of our fathers, the God of Abraham, and the God of Jacob, and the God of Isaac, what shall I say? Just say, ‘I AM has sent me unto you” (Exod.3:13).’” He didn’t say, “Go and say we are”—like three fathers, one of Abraham, one of Jacob, and one of Isaac—the same one—and his name is I AM, and that is my name forever and forever. So the minute I go out and I say “you are” that’s something that is a shadow. And “he is” that’s even further away. So I must walk in the assumption that I am that which I want to be as though I were. And you get closer and closer to that wonderful confession, and you live by it.

Until Friday. Thank you.