Nicol C. Campbell
My Path of Truth
The School of Truth
Johannesburg, 2nd ed., 1954.
[116] How many people consciously accept God as their protection? I find, as I think most workers in the School and most teachers of Truth do, that people come to God only when they are in dire necessity. When they want health in place of disease, happiness for discord, and opulence instead of lack. In other words, they wait for the manifestation of negation in their lives before they pray to God. Then, when they have the pressure of circumstances to contend with, in the form of problems that are insurmountable in as far as any human means are concerned, they turn to Him and wonder that they have not the quality of faith--that is the consciousness of God as being the fulfilment of their particular need--that would bring to them what, in their own minds, they lack.
They act like a child that says to himself, "I am not going to bother to study and to do my homework; perhaps, when I am older, I shall see about it," and then finds, when he is older, that everything has grown much more difficult, and, instead of having the consciousness of success, that he could have earned by application, he has nothing of the sort and has to start from the beginning, with many wasted years behind him.
[117] If God is something on which we can rely, and every single one of us knows that this is so, there seems to me to be no excuse for not trusting in Him, since we know, according to the Bible, that in order to please Him we must have faith.
This does not mean that we have to please some anthropomorphic being by way of good deeds before he will listen to us, but, in order to find the awareness of the Presence or Power that we call God, we have to develop faith. This will be at first but a blind belief since it is impossible for us to know that God is this, that, or the other until we have had a specific experience illustrating this, such as God working in our minds, bodies and affairs.
I realise that some twenty odd years ago, although for my whole life, as far as I can remember, I believed in God, I used, in the old orthodox way, to go to bed and pray to Him in fear, and trembling, hoping, whenever I got into trouble, that He would hear me, but, now that I realise that God has to be earned, by the dedication to Him of the very best that my mind, emotions and actions have to offer, it seems sensible to me to go all out, to do everything in my power to prove Him, and when I say "prove Him" I do not mean "tempt Him." I mean to prove Him to be the fulfilment of my any and every desire.
I know, as I look about me, that something must have created this universe--whether it took seven days or seven periods of time does not matter--there must have been an architect to produce such a wonderful [118] scheme of things, there must have been a colossal power, a tremendous, thinking, dynamic force to bring me, and all that we see around us, into tangible manifestation.
In every religion, not only in the case of Christianity, it has been taught that, if man develops faith in God--not just a blind belief, though that too will bring results--the hard way--but if one can engender a conscious faith, whatsoever he desires he shall receive, without any qualifications, or limitations whatever.
This is a wonderful assurance. Is it perhaps too good to be true, or can simple people like you and me and the next man learn to know God as a benign Presence, presiding over their lives and their affairs?
I could spend an eternity talking to you about Him, you could bring the crippled and the sick to the School and see them healed, you could see the poverty-stricken rehabilitated, see homes in which hatred and discord had given place to love and harmony, and in spite of these proofs (seen but not personally experienced) of what the Love of God invoked by faith can do for those who come in trust to Him, if your own lives went awry, you would not have the faintest idea how to bring about your salvation. I meet very many people who have made an exhaustive study of God. There is nothing you can tell them about the Law and how or why it works, but when it comes to what you call demonstration, that is having their prayers answered, they are at a loss as to how to approach Him. They say, "Yes, I can see that it is being done, I can see these living miracles (that is what they call them, though we know that they are in accordance with natural, spiritual laws), [119] the manifestation of these wonders, but there appears to be something lacking in myself for I do not know how to bring them about. To put it crudely, I have not clicked, and, try as I may, concentrating all that I have of mind upon it, it still does not work for me."
There are others who have no learning whatsoever, who know nothing about spiritual law, who neither know nor understand who or what God is, yet they have within themselves the consciousness--a realisation that you cannot place or pin down--that tells them that no matter how dark conditions are, how diseased the body appears to be, or how near to the brink of absolute failure they may have come, God will take care of them. They recognise that in their extremity lies the opportunity for God, the Spiritual Light, to bring Himself into consciousness, and from consciousness into materialisation.
To me it sometimes seems unfair--and so it may appear to you too--that some people just grasp it naturally while others, no matter how hard they try, are unable to take it in. Those in the first category accept good as their heritage and enjoy health, happiness, and abundance and whatever else they need; among the others you come across some who have wonderful health but are indigent; then those who have great wealth and sickly bodies, and even some that have both health and riches and no happiness at all; always for these people something is lacking and this is so because their minds are so accustomed to accept without question what the senses tell them that they find it extremely difficult to [120] summon up that quality of faith that permits them to put their trust in God.
Now you and I can achieve this consciousness. It takes some doing for it is not easy to break any habit of years and years standing--such as smoking for instance--the harder you try to give it up, the more you strive within yourselves, the more difficult it becomes. As you fight against it, so it fights back at you, but with persistence we must win through.
I wish I could make you understand that simple childlike faith is not by any means a simple, childish thing, but that it is an inner realisation that can be built up. You can tell yourself, until you accept it, that the spiritual power that is you, with a capital "Y", is now the thing itself in manifestation in You. It does not have to come from outside or through some particular channel to you; it comes by paying constant attention to the Self within Which is the opposite of the lack. The Life of God is not disease, the Abundance of God is not want, the Harmony of God is not discord, but we must keep our minds consistently attuned to the Truth; if we would understand this, we must "practice the presence" of the good until we can turn our backs upon the problem without fear; we may have to admit that there is still no manifestation, no health in the body, abundance in the affairs, no peace nor love, but inside there will arise a conviction, an inner realisation, a feeling of expectancy that things are about to change and they will indeed begin to do so.
We shall be creating an outlet for the Substance of God that is within us, and which has, by our manner [121] of thinking, become the major part of our human minds thinking.
Even though you cannot see a sign of a cloud the size of a man's hand, I can tell you that it is being done, because of my own personal experience in overcoming every type of problem that has been along these lines.
I could not in the beginning say from practical experience that I knew that God would express this, that, or the other particular thing for me because that was still a nebulous and abstract idea within me, but I could maintain that there was, waxing in me, an inner conviction, something that was eliminating my fear, because I felt that the power of the problem was commencing to wane. I found that what appeared to be insurmountable was beginning to diminish, it was not worrying me so much, I was less nervous, not so sensitive with regard to it, the pendulum was starting to swing from the negative side towards the positive one.
It was rather as if I wanted, while clouds were about, to ignite a piece of paper by means of a magnifying glass; I would know that, if I kept the glass there long enough and correctly focused, the clouds would ultimately float away and the sun come out again, then, though there would not be an instantaneous burst of flame, the paper would gradually curl up, begin to smoulder, and finally catch fire.
Just as steadily and patiently do we have to focus our attention upon God, then, despite the clouds of circumstance that are so magnified and distorted in our minds that there is no room therein for the out-picturing [122] of the spiritual idea which is God, for, if we do not waver, the Truth will become manifest unto us.
You get disheartened, you say the sun will not come through, the clouds will not blow over, your arm is getting tired and you do not even know whether, if the sun comes out, the paper will burn or not and so for lack of perseverance--the one little extra step taken in trust--you meet with recurrent failure. Nevertheless, there is a promise, one that you can either accept or reject, to the effect that your extremity, of whatever nature, shall be God's opportunity. Here then, is your chance to begin to build up the consciousness of faith as long as you do not make the mistake of focusing your minds and emotions upon the condition; naturally, if you do that, you will be concentrating on the lie, and whatever you see--if you look at it long enough--you will begin to accept and that which you conceive, either negatively or positively, will start to mould itself into form, ready to express itself in your bodies as disease, or in your affairs as lack, failure, or unhappiness.
We have to turn away from appearances, to compel ourselves not to fight illusory conditions that have no power over us except that with which we have invested them; that are a part of our lives only because we have received them with kindness and been so excellent a host to them that they are loath to leave us. We have bound them to ourselves with chains and it is we who must force ourselves to break the fetters of our own false beliefs. It is of no use to claim that we do not believe in these untruths, for, if that were the case, we should not be experiencing them. You state that you have no [123] faith in disease, poverty, or unhappiness, yet how can you back that up when these are present with you, for the one and only reason that you acquiesce in them.
We do not ask you to fight any sort of discord, we are asking you instead to challenge it by declaring: "You have no reality, no power at all, you are a part of me ONLY because I have believed in you, but now I am making a right about turn, I am going to believe in your opposite good, in God, in Love, in Power, in health, and beauty."
It will take time to do this, just as it did for you to build the negative concepts into your consciousness, but you will accomplish it if you put your minds to it.
I was just as afraid as you are, just as disheartened, as full of complexes and questionings, but I knew that there was a Law, and that I could depend on It. I had to build up faith in good, and my first step was to start telling myself that I believed in this power of good, accepting that it is All-power and All-knowledge and that I was an extension of It, the manifestation or projection of Life into consciousness.
God-Spirit, when He brought forth you (and me), built up for Himself a suit of clothes to house the entity created within His Being of which we shall each become conscious--whose existence we shall definitely sense--at that moment when, through the practice of right thinking, we have begun to understand the Truth and so to recognise our own spiritual selves. When this unfoldment has taken place within us, when at last we have perceived the real man, encased in its envelope of flesh and blood, the first sign following upon our new [124] understanding will be an actual manifestation of the Presence of God within us. The Life-Force will start expressing Itself through us, negation will begin to be eliminated from our experience, discordant conditions will dissolve into their native nothingness as a fire dies down and flickers out when it is no longer fed with fuel.
When this happens you will find that you have completely changed; your old way of thinking will have altered, becoming optimistic, the idle chatter of individuals will not affect you any more, you will be--as Christ said-- "in the world, but not of it." You will say of mundane things, 'None of these things move me', because, having cast them aside, they will no longer form part of your thinking.
As God, the Spirit of Life, becomes expressed, through the speeding up of the vibrations in His body temples, He will begin to manifest as health through you.
When this happens to me, I find I have more energy, greater strength, more studying power, I can do my work better, everything becomes simplified, then supply starts to come in and, when that increases, I begin to build up a greater faith in God. So does one thing follow on another. As my faith grows, my supply grows, and, as my supply grows, so does my faith also. It is the same with my health and my happiness.
No one can take anything away from you unless you consent to part with it. When people come and talk to you negatively about disease, unhappiness, failure, and poverty and you agree with them, these become manifest in your lives, because, when two of you agree upon anything, at that moment you set in motion the [125] unseen spiritual Law that creates, or causes to be created for you, the good--or the not-good--as you determine.
God is not something that you cannot know, feel, or understand--a protective power somewhere up in the sky--He is a living Presence. He becomes something that drives you on, that makes you realise that you can take this or that step, that there is nothing to fear though you have no evidence in support of this.
Your friends may laugh and scoff at you because of the steps--incomprehensible to them--that you take in faith; let them do so, ultimately they will applaud you and begin to ask, "What have you discovered? What is happening in your life? You are beginning to express health, whereas before you were almost an invalid. You are becoming quite successful, and the channels of God's supply are opening up for you. You are happier, and, what is more, conditions no longer seem to affect you. The same conditions that come into your life came into mine, and to me they appeared as mountains, while to you they are less than molehills! What does it all mean?"
In time they will see your light, and it is only because of that light, your example, that it will make sense to them when you say, "This is what I know! What you see in me and my affairs is just the expression of Love, of God as Divine Love, finding Himself through me as Divine Consciousness."
Let me say to the younger people THIS IS THE TIME TO START. Begin before you form too many negative habits, to give to God, in your minds, your [126] hearts and your actions the very best you have; start practicing His Presence in the case of every minutest problem, put Him to the test, build so into your consciousness this Presence of God, the protection of God, that when the inescapable difficulties that crop up in the lives of all of us confront you, you will be prepared. Your citadel will stand upon a rock from which the waves (problems), that beat against it, will bound back and subside into the sea of nothingness whence they came.
And to the older folk I would say, if they feel it will be difficult to change the established order of their thinking (I know they cannot do it of themselves alone, for I cannot either), "Tell God to do it for you." Let the physical body turn within and say to the Spirit: "This body is in tribulation, things have reached a desperate point. You rather be my opportunity, You take charge. I cannot solve anything by myself, so I am going to give my undivided attention to You and refer all things to You! What can I lose by it? I am going to believe that 'he that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty' and although ten thousand fall on one side and a hundred thousand on the other it shall not come nigh me!" Shall I tell you why this must work? Because All-love, All-power, All-knowledge, all that is universal protection surrounds each one of us, and, as it encompasses, blesses and shields us, we are delivered from all harm and we shall be enabled, by the standard that we are demonstrating, to help others also to find our consciousness of God.
[127] If we do not possess this awareness of the indwelling Spirit, we are like a lot of sheep following one another in fear and trembling. Man is a gregarious creature and a crowd takes either a negative or a positive stand according as the one faction or the other predominates. Since like attracts like, let us be a good example, not merely saying that we believe in God but showing our affiliations by our active faith. As Shakespeare wrote, "Assume a virtue if you have it not," let us then "assume" our faith even if it is not very strong, for then other people will help to establish it unto us.
Let us assure you that just to feel the protection that they think you have, they will come to you as a thirsty man in a desert seeks out water, then the power of Love, this Almighty Presence, will absorb them into Its own consciousness. You will have created an ever widening benign circle, or a gigantic snowball, that grows and grows as each tiny snowflake comprising it--every human being you contact--passes on this new way of thinking until all shall receive it, and establish the Kingdom of God here on earth, and all mankind will be free.
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