Nicol C. Campbell
My Path of Truth
The School of Truth
Johannesburg, 2nd ed., 1954.
[128] The other evening I saw one little drop of water fall into a tumbler, and, as it struck the bottom, it somehow made me identify myself with it. There to me, in that tumbler, was just one drop of consciousness, and I asked myself this question: "I wonder if the drop is aware of the void in the glass or only of its own presence therein? Do not the tumbler and the drop represent for me an illustration of myself and my awareness of God? Here is my particular state of consciousness, the drop, and here is my mind, the tumbler. I have only a drop of consciousness of the Presence of God, yet as I am able to fill the tumbler with many drops so can I fill my mind with the Presence of God and have fulfilment."
Now my drop of consciousness reflects in my body and affairs as my realisation of the Immanence of God. I advertise to you just the quantity and quality of His Presence that is now reflecting through me, either as this one single particle, or as many, many drops which in the ultimate aggregate make up the consciousness that is the Christ.
If the drop is unaware of the void in the glass and is aware only of itself, so, too, is the Spirit of God conscious only of Itself and not of the void or lack [129] around it, and the more aware I become of this Presence, the more will It begin to reflect Itself through me.
This may seem perhaps a little involved, but the point that I want to try to stress tonight is the reality of God and the unreality of conditions. Although He is everywhere evenly present in the same place at the same time, He cannot be cognizant of the void, the lack; the disease, the misery, or the unhappiness in your lives or mine, because all of these are entirely outside of His Being.
In spite of the fact that He is ALL-knowledge, and All-power, He can only know His own nature, and that being perfection it is impossible for Him to see our voids, lacks, or imperfections. He cannot see the lack of health in my body, of supply in my affairs, or the dearth of success in my consciousness caused by my ignorance of His Presence within me.
I have been pressed into livingness by Him, but my awareness of His indwelling Presence may be only one drop, either adequate or not to meet my needs represented as health, happiness, success, or supply, and this will be obvious to the observer for it will be either reflected, or not, as the case may be, in my body and affairs.
This, I think, is the most difficult Truth for the average student to understand. How, he asks, can God be All-presence and All-knowledge and yet be unaware of all the misery and unhappiness in me and round about me?
Is the one tiny drop in the tumbler sufficient to keep us alive, just above the dead line, enough for only a certain measure of happiness? Have we only one tiny glimmer of light? Even if this is so, we have seen that all the darkness anywhere cannot destroy one single pin [130] point of light, and this light, which is Refulgence Itself, cannot see the darkness because of its own luminosity.
In you and in me is that tiny light of Truth. We have just sufficient consciousness of God to get along, some happily, some unhappily, some in affluence, some in poverty, some as successes, some as failures, some with peace, others with discord. But the light we can never extinguish, and, if we were the focal point of all the electricity that is being generated in this city, we could have either the pin point, or we could put in a million globes and have all the radiance we could possibly desire.
You believe that! You accept it, because you know it to be a fact. You know that you could hang the whole town with globes and have so much brilliance that you would be blinded by it! So it is with us and God. God can be in you and me but a tiny speck of light--the amount that our own consciousness has accepted of Him--but we can fan this minute spark until it reaches a transplendency where our awareness of Him enables us to ask anything of Him, what we will, and we shall receive it. But, "you ask and receive not, because you ask amiss." You have not learned to create the requisite capacity within yourselves. There are always certain qualifications in your minds. You think, "If such and such a thing should happen, if perhaps this one or that one would come to my aid, my troubles would be over," but this intervention from outside would not give you the consciousness which it is essential that you develop.
If I pay your debts whenever you owe money, you will never learn to know God as your supply. It would be like my carrying a child and never allowing it to walk, [131] the result would be that it never would walk. It is only by a mental and emotional effort that we begin to build up this consciousness that gives us the Kingdom.
We see very faintly through a dark glass, just enough to awaken in us a certain measure of belief. We see people around us overcoming negative conditions and we say to ourselves, "It must be true what we have been taught, and if he or she can succeed, so can I!" We admit to ourselves that we have brought certain Karmic debts with us into our lives, that we have ourselves created the conditions that oppress us, and we realise that these are the result of our separation in consciousness from our Creator, from Perfection, expressed as health, happiness, understanding, or fulfilment.
You complain perhaps that you ask and ask yet nothing happens! But you must ask in faith. You must believe, and, if you cannot believe that you have already received--the highest form of consciousness with regard to this physical world and its good--that good will always be ahead of you. When, however, in spite of disease or discord you can say, "I know that God is my health and harmony"; when in spite of lack--when there is not a single penny visible to the human eye--you can say, "I know that God is my prosperity"; when you are not in any way concerned about the apparent deficiency because you are sure of God's Presence in the very place where that is claiming to be, at that moment you will live and move and exist in health, happiness, abundance, and success.
Should the conditions persist, then it becomes obvious that there is not sufficient consciousness of Grace.
Let us suppose that we are all torches equipped with [132] tiny globes. If we walk out into the dark, we shall hardly be able to see that way, nevertheless we shall know that the surrounding darkness cannot extinguish our lights, and that it is open to us to put in larger globes. As at present we are just about able to see far enough to take one step at a time, would it not be sensible to provide our torches with globes of greater capacity? If these still do not suffice, we can invest in longer torches with even larger globes wherewith we shall be enabled to see hundreds of yards ahead.
If we find ourselves to be lacking in the good things of life, we are like the person with the tiny globe and we are just managing to get along in the obscurity in which we are living.
But, I am myself the light--and you are it also.
We reflect our degree of radiance, dull or bright as it may be, and we show to all and sundry, by the conditions obtaining in our lives, exactly what we believe in and the extent of our faith in God.
No matter what our circumstances may be, He is able to change them, and there is no power, since He is All-power, to prevent this. He is All-knowledge also, so the solution of every problem is already known to Him, and being--as He is--the Presence of All-good, none of us need to search outside of himself to obtain this; we have but to become conscious that it is ours, already within us.
Faith is not something nebulous or abstract, it represents All-power-as-God working through man, but it is either that one drop or the hundreds of drops in the glass.
I could have said to you over twenty years ago, "I [133] believe that God can do anything; I believe sincerely that He can heal any type of chronic disease; I believe that He can find ways and means to be my supply, to give me happiness," but my mere belief would have been of no value. Belief of itself does not produce anything, it has to grow into faith by constant practice, faith has to become knowledge, and knowledge has to grow into wisdom; when that has been attained, you become as sure of God, when you have nothing, as you are when you have everything, because you realise that you live, and move and exist in Him, All-good.
It is always a question of greater realisation, of greater spiritual absorption of His presence, greater mental acceptance of it, a higher emotional condensation of it, and finally an active living in this consciousness that produces outward expression in and through the physical body, and the affairs.
When it comes to the debts you have brought with you, which you will be required to pay in accordance with the dictum, "as a man soweth so shall he also reap," and you ask who created this condition, do you imagine that God brought upon you disease, unhappiness or lack? If God is by nature All-presence and Perfection and you are suffering from a condition which is the antithesis of this Presence of Good, is it possible that He can be the author of it?
There is only one spiritual law and that law is good, and, as the power and substance of God are Light, these cannot produce darkness, disease, unhappiness, or lack, for that which is perfect cannot bring about its own opposite. It is we ourselves, alone, who are responsible for what is lacking in our lives because sometime, somewhere, [134] either in this phase of existence or another, we have broken the link between ourselves and God, but the very power we used then to do this we can use now to re-establish it. We can once again snap on the switch which will connect us with Him and none but ourselves can cut it out. Once we have established contact with God as our happiness and fulfilment, no one in the whole world can dispossess us of one atom of our good.
No human being can take anything away from us or prevent health, happiness, and success from coming to us for these are spiritual qualities, states of consciousness within us, and, as we drop from our minds one set of ideas, we make room for new and better concepts, which automatically move in, and the "Life abundant," of Which the Master spoke, begins to manifest in, through, and for us.
Thus it is that, although we may now be expressing disease, unhappiness, lack, or discord, we are still absolutely at one with God as is a microphone one with electricity. In sound and light we have power manifesting in two divergent ways, on the one hand is power which we cannot see but which we can hear, on the other there is power which is inaudible, but which we can see: it is a case of the condensation of the same power into two different media, but the essential essence remains the same. The microphone and light are one with electricity, the electricity here, there, and everywhere is one with that down in the power station as well as with all the current seen and unseen permeating the entire city.
So, in Truth, are we; just a number of globes that are at one with the Presence of God, the unseen, intangible [135] presence of Life. Thus when, without any fear--and, irrespective of external conditions, without any shadow of doubt--we can say, because we have affiliated ourselves with God, that He is this, that, or the other thing to us, then nothing in the whole universe will be able to prevent its manifestation, because whatever we have in our lives of lack will be filled with this Presence of Life, expressing as any specific thing we need.
This presence of God-Life can be condensed into consciousness as happiness, peace, or supply. We do not have to seek outside of ourselves to find it. You are no more dependent upon me for health or any other good than I am dependent, spiritually, upon you. Every human being is merely a hand of God, but the hand of God, if it is closed by me, automatically closes every other human being's hand, as far as I am concerned.
If I want to be happy, the happier I make others--and I like making people happy--the happier I shall myself become, for I shall be expressing the emotion of love, and happiness is the state of consciousness forever aligned with it.
So it is also with my health. You cannot deprive me of health, I cannot divest you of it, nor can any other human being dispossess us of it, but you have to live in the consciousness of this health, radiating it, expressing it, talking it, living it, thinking it, and acting it!
It is the same with prosperity, with all spiritual qualities, they must form part of your own consciousness, part of your daily thinking. I can be living in a slum, but, if I begin to accept the spiritual Kingdom that is within me, and start to live in it in my thoughts--my emotional world--then just as a lift goes from the ground [136] floor to the 50th, or 80th, storey in New York, so will God, Life, Power, raise me from the consciousness of nothingness to that of fulfilment.
We are too prone to blame other people for our failures, and we are too envious of others for the good things that they possess, but actually it is not the things that we should covet but their state of consciousness which brings these into their lives.
If you have the one little drop, you know that it has been condensed from the invisible substance called liquid air, that you can put it into a refrigerator and condense it into ice, in which state it will be almost as hard as a pebble. It will, in fact, appear to be just as hard; nevertheless, if you put it out in the sunshine, you can watch it dissolve back into its water form and then evaporate to become again the unseen etheric substance from which it derives.
If conditions are now solidified in my body or affairs, how can I get them to dissolve and then evaporate into the native nothingness from which they sprang? He needs my body for manifestation just as I need His Life--we are inseparable. You and I cannot do without God, nor can He do without us. We are the physical expressions of His consciousness, God experiencing Himself as power and knowledge to a greater or lesser degree in and through man. Therefore I can go to Him, within me, and begin to trust, and to trust is the first step to the consciousness of power, and there is only one power and it is All-power, and that All-power eliminates the void of good, the negative condition. The fear thoughts that [137] bind me to misery or unhappiness are dissolved into their native nothingness just as the ice was dissolved by the sun. Once this is accomplished, I have a clear mind through which this perfect essence can manifest itself. It can do this instantaneously or, as so many of you have witnessed, it can take weeks and months for this to happen, depending entirely upon the strength of your desire and the steadfastness of your faith.
You must try to understand. It is not what you pray for that you obtain, it is what you expect. You can pray and pray but, unless you expect to receive what you are asking for, you will never have it. Sometimes something is offered to you which is of value and you are afraid of it, and because of your fear it comes to you; while others, who desire it ardently and take every practical step to obtain it, do not receive it because of their state of tension, fear and anxiety.
That is how it is with prosperity, or happiness, or health. If you could build up the same emotional faith-positive as you have faith-negative, you would have the most wonderful demonstrations. You can observe these things in your daily lives, not because I say so but because it is a simple truth. Let us try to build up a greater consciousness of God the good; let us accept the truth that, at the present moment, this God-life around us and in us is unlimited. I may express just a tiny speck of consciousness but, since I want my mind to be filled with a greater awareness of God, let me start to think constructively, to feel constructively, to speak, and to act constructively and, when I have learned to feel, think, speak, and act in this way, that will be the moment when I shall have put my mind, heart, and actions into [138] tune with this tremendous colossal Law of Which I can ask what I will and it shall be done unto me, so that whatsoever I subsequently ask, shall indeed be manifest in and through me without delay.
But the good cannot manifest for me until I have created the capacity, until I have eliminated the mental chaos within myself, the emotional negations. You see, it is difficult and yet it is easy; if you could open your hearts now and say, "I accept it," at that very instant it would begin to press itself into livingness through you, either as health, or as the spiritual ideas governing your success, supply, or happiness.
Since, however, your all-encompassing prosperity cannot externalise until it has a channel through which to manifest, you should start at once to expand your consciousness, to accept mentally that God is not a person but an Intelligence, conceived of entirely apart from physical embodiment, and comprising knowledge, power, beauty, and perfection, and you should remember that this spirit lives, moves, and exists in you, who are its physical embodiment, just as much as you live in It, who is God, your Father. You are the bodies of God spirit, the bodies of good, power, knowledge, beauty, joy, Truth, peace, all the spiritual qualities that are changeless, but you must be able to receive these, you must be worthy of them.
When you have the garden of your minds prepared, all negation cleansed from it, then the seeds of Truth will begin to shoot up and you shall see them reflected as fulfilment in every department of your lives. The material things are valueless to you unless you have the spiritual understanding that lifts them above the emphemeral and [139] establishes them as permanences in your consciousness and your daily experience.
So you and I--all of us-- will agree here and now that this is the Truth and we will cherish the knowledge, not the blind belief, that God is good, all good. And we will realise that we are the vehicles of this good and although, at the moment, we may be reflecting but a tiny glow of the Light of Truth, we will resolve to fan it alive with trust and love, that the expansion unto God-consciousness may take place within us. And "Ye shall ask what ye will and it shall be given to you," for you will then KNOW the unreality of all things temporal, and God the REAL will be the living stream of good, flowing in, through, and for you.
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