Lessons in Truth · 8 of 12

The Secret Place of the Most High

In the progress of these simple lessons, some may object to the language being too “orthodox”—too much of the religious side of the question. I use Scriptural terms simply because I prefer them; but it is all essentially one and the same thing. It is not Mental Science nor Christian Science, as such, that you want. It is not any ism, for each is but one side of the truth. It is truth we are after; and at the center of all these various forms of presenting the truth the thing itself is one. So let us be big enough and broad enough, no matter on what side of the truth we have thus far been seeking the light of the world, to put away all prejudices, all the limitations which the mere form of words may heretofore have made in our minds, and be open to all there is for us.

T here is nothing the human soul so longs for, so cries out after, as to know God, “whom to know aright is life eternal.”

With a restlessness which is pitiful to see, people are ever shifting from one thing to another, always hoping to find rest and satisfaction in some anticipated accomplishment or possession. Men fancy that they want houses and lands, great learning or power. They pursue these things and gain them, only to find themselves still restless, still unsatisfied.

At the great heart of humanity there is a deep and awful homesickness, which never has been and never can be satisfied with anything less than a clear, vivid consciousness of the indwelling presence of God, our Father. In all ages earnest men and women, who have recognized this inner hunger as the heart’s cry after God, have left seeking after things, and have sought, by devoted worship and by service to others, to enter into this consciousness; but few have succeeded in reaching the promised place where their “joy is full.” Others have hoped and feared alternately; they have tried with the best knowledge they possessed to “work out their salvation,” not yet having learned that there must be an in-working as well as an outworking. “By grace [or free gift] ye are saved through faith; and that not of yourselves [or of any mortal working]: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.” To him who “dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High” there is promised immunity from the noisome pestilence and the snare of the fowler, from the terror by night, and the arrow that flieth by day; and even immunity from fear of these things. Oh! the awfully paralyzing effect of fear of evil! It surely “doth make cowards of us all.” It makes us helpless as babes. It makes us pygmies, where we might be giants were we only free from it. It is at the root of all our failures, nearly all sickness, poverty and distress. But we have the promise of deliverance from even the fear of evil when we are in the “secret place.” “Thou shalt not be afraid of the terror by night,” etc. “In the time of trouble he shall hide me in his pavilion: in the secret of his tabernacle shall he hide me.” “Thou shalt hide them in the secret of thy presence from the pride of man: thou shalt keep them secretly in a pavilion from the strife of tongues.” The secret place! Why called a secret place? What is it? Where may we find it? how abide in it?

It is a secret place because it is the place of meeting between the Christ at the center of your being and your consciousness—a hidden place into which no outside person can either induct you or enter himself. We must drop the idea that this place of realization of our divinity can be given to us by any human being. No one can come into it from the outside. Hundreds of earnest souls are seeking night and day to get this inner revealing. They run from teacher to teacher, many of them making the most frantic efforts to meet the financial obligations thus incurred.

You may study with human teachers and from man-made books till doomsday; you may get all the theological lore of the ages; you may understand intellectually all the statements of truth, and be able to prate healing formulæ as glibly as oil flows; but until there is a definite inner revealing of the reality of an indwelling Christ through whom and by whom cometh life, health, peace, power, all things—aye, who is all things—you have not yet found the “secret of the Lord.”

In order to gain this knowledge—this consciousness of God within their own soul— many are willing (and wisely so, for this is greater than all other knowledge) to spend all they possess. Even Paul, after twenty-five years of service and of most marvelous preaching, said, “I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ” (or the consciousness of his Divine Self).

Beloved, that which you so earnestly desire and seek will never be found by seeking it through the mental side alone, any more than it has heretofore been found through the emotional side alone. Intuition and intellect are meant to travel together, intuition always holding the reins to guide intellect. “Come, and let us reason together, saith the Lord.” If you have been thus far on the way cultivating and enlarging only the mental side of truth, as probably is the case, you need, in order to come into the fullness of understanding, to let the mental, the reasoning side, rest awhile. “Become as a little child,” and, learning how to be still, listen to that which the Father will say to you through the intuitional part of your being. The light you so crave will come out of the deep silence, and become manifest to you from within you, if you will but keep still and look for it from that source.

This conscious knowledge of an indwelling God which we so crave is that of which Paul wrote to the Colossians, as “the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations, but now is made manifest…Christ in you, the hope of glory.” “The secret place of the Most High,” where each one of us may dwell and be safe from all harm or fear of evil, is the point of mystical union between soul (or conscious mind) and Spirit (or God in us), wherein we no longer believe, but we know, that God in Christ abides always at the center of our being as our perfect health, deliverance, prosperity, power, ready to come forth at any moment we claim it into manifestation. We know it. We know it. We feel our oneness with the Father, and we manifest this oneness.

To possess the secret of anything gives one the power over it. This personal, conscious knowledge of the Father in us is the secret which is the key to all power. What we want is the revelation to us of this marvelous “secret.” What shall, who can give it to us except He, the “Spirit of Truth, which proceeded from the Father”? Surely none other. That which God would say to you, and do through you, is a great secret which no man on the face of the earth knows, or ever will know, except yourself as it is revealed to you by the Spirit which is in you. That secret which He tells me, is not revealed to you, nor yours to me; but each soul must, after all is said and done, deal directly with the Father through the Son within himself.

Secrets are not told upon the housetop. Nor is it possible to pass this, the greatest of secrets, from one to another. God, the Creator of our being, must himself whisper it to each soul living in the very innermost of itself. “To him that overcometh [or is consciously in process of overcoming] will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone [or a mind like a clean white tablet], and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.” It is so secret that it cannot even be put into human language or repeated by human lips.

What you want today, and what I want, is that the words which we have learned to say as truth be made alive to us. We want a revelation of God in us as Life, to be made to our own personal consciousness as health. We no longer care to have somebody just tell us the words from the outside. We want a revelation of God as Love within us, so that our whole being is filled and thrilled with love—a love that does not have to be pumped up by a determined effort because we know that it is right to love and wrong not to love, but a love that flows with the spontaneity and fullness of an artesian well, because it is so full at the bottom that it must flow out or burst.

What we want today is a revelation to our consciousness of God within us as Omnipotent Power, so that we can by a word or look “accomplish that whereunto the word is sent.” We want the manifestation to us of the Father in us, so that we can know him personally. We want to be conscious of “God working in us to will and to do,” so that we may “work out our salvation.” We have been learning how to do the out-working, but have now come up to a point when we must learn more of how to place ourselves in an attitude where we can each one be conscious of the Divine inner working.

Mary talked with the risen Jesus, supposing it was the gardener, until suddenly, as he spoke her name, there flashed into her consciousness a ray of pure intelligence, and in an instant the revelation was made to her innermost soul of his identity.

According to the same sacred history, Thomas Didymus had walked daily for three years with the most wondrous teacher of spiritual things that has ever lived. He had watched this teacher’s life and been partaker of his very presence, physical and mental. He had had just what you and I have thus far received of mental training and external teaching. But there came a time when there was an inner revealing which made him exclaim, “My Lord and my God!” The secret name which no other man could know for him had that moment been given to him. There had come, in the twinkling of an eye, the manifestation to his consciousness of the Father in him as his Lord and his God. No longer simply our Father and our Lord, but my Lord and my God—my Divine Self revealed to me personally.

Is not this that which you are craving?

Each soul must come to a time when it no longer is satisfied with or seeks external helps— when it knows that the inner revelation of “my Lord and my God” to its consciousness can only come to it through an Indwelling Power, which has been there all the time, waiting with an infinite longing, but an infinite patience, to reveal the Father to the child.

This revelation will never come through the intellect of man to the consciousness, but must ever come through the intuitional to the intellect as a manifestation of Spirit to the soul. “The natural man receiveth not [nor can it impart them] the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned,” and they must be spiritually imparted.

In our eagerness we have waited upon every source we could reach or hear for the light we wanted. Because we have not known how to wait upon the Spirit within us for the desired revelation, we have run to and fro. Let no one misunderstand me in what I say about withdrawing yourself from teachers. Teachers are good and are necessary up to a certain point. “How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher?”

Books and lectures are good, teachers are good, until you learn by the hearing of the ear that Christ, the Son of God, lives in you; that he within you is your light and life and all. When you have once grasped this beyond a doubt with the intellect, you are forever through with external teachers; and every day you look to them after this you put off the day of revelation for yourself. That Christ lives in you, Spirit itself must make real to you. Teachers talk about the light, but the light itself must flash into the darkness before you can see the light.

Had the Master remained with the disciples, I doubt if they would ever have gotten beyond the place of hanging on his words and following in the footsteps of his personality. With the knowledge and power he possessed he might at any time have spoken the word which would have opened the eyes of their understanding; but he did not.

Jesus knew that his treatments for spiritual illumination, given to his disciples from his recognition of truth, would act in them as a seed thought, but he also knew that each man must for himself wait upon God for the inner illumination which should be lasting and real. God alone could whisper the secret to each one separately.

The “enduement of power” was not to come to them by the spoken word through another personality, even that of Jesus with his great spiritual power and discernment. It was to come from “on high” to each individual consciousness. It was the “promise of the Father which ye have heard of me.” He had merely told them about it, but had no power to give it to them.

So to each of us this spiritual illumination which we are crying out after, this “enduement of power” for which we are willing to sell all that we have, must come from “on high,” i. e., to the consciousness from the Spirit within our being. This is the secret which the Father longs with an infinite yearning to reveal to each individual soul. It is because of the Father’s desire within us to show us the secret, that we are drawn to desire the revelation. It is the purpose for which we came into the world—that we might grow step by step, as we are doing, to the place where we could bear to have the secret of his inner abiding revealed to us.

Do not be confused by seeming contradictions in the lessons. I have said heretofore that too much introspection is not good. I repeat it; for there are those who, in earnest desire to know God, are always seeking the light for themselves, but neglect to use that which they already have to help others.

There must be an equal conscious receiving from the Father and giving out to the world, a perfect equilibrium between the inflowing and the outgiving, to keep perfect harmony. We must each learn how to wait renewedly upon God for the infilling, and then go and give out that which we have received to every creature, as the Spirit leads us to give, either in preaching or teaching, or in silently living the truth. That which fills us will radiate from us without effort right in the place in life where we stand.

In nearly all teaching of Truth from the purely mental side, there is much said about the working out of our salvation by holding right thoughts, by denials and affirmations. This is all good. But there is also another side which we need to know a little more about. We must learn how to be still and let Spirit, the “I Am,” work in us, that we may indeed be made “new creatures,” that we may have the mind of Christ in all things.

When you have learned how to perfectly abandon yourself to Infinite Spirit, and have seasons of doing this daily, you will be surprised at the marvelous change which will be wrought in you without any conscious effort of your own.

It will search far below your conscious mind, and root out things in your nature of which you have scarcely been conscious, simply because they have lain latent there, waiting for something to bring them out. It will work into your consciousness light and life and love and all good, perfectly filling all your lack while you just quietly wait and receive. Of the practical steps in this direction we will speak in another lesson.

Paul, who had learned this way of faith, this way of being still, and letting the I Am work itself into his conscious mind as the fullness of all his needs, was neither afraid nor ashamed to say:

“For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,

“Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named,

“That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man;

“That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love,

“May be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height;

“And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fullness of God.”

And then he gives an ascription of praise: “Unto him that is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us.”