Nicol C. Campbell
My Path of Truth
The School of Truth
Johannesburg, 2nd ed., 1954.
[11] It would be quite easy I think to be a student of Truth if we could always foretell our future and the type of problems that were going to be presented to us. We should not require any faith at all.
However, many students of Truth come to me and say, "Right out of the blue a very unhappy problem has been presented to me. As far as I know, I have been a good Truth student and have the type of faith in God that I ought to have. Why must this happen to me? One day I am filled with happiness and peace and have a secure position and the next I have nothing. Does it not rather contradict the love of God, or the protection of God, that such a thing should happen?" And my usual reply is something like this: "I am not concerned about the problem that has suddenly been presented to you. I am not concerned about how insurmountable it appears to be, but I am concerned with your particular reaction to this condition, for it is this that will determine the next step in your spiritual unfoldment. If you have not accepted the condition as a reality, and, if you feel that you are worthy of better things--if you really feel this in your heart--then you have nothing to fear. But you have a great deal to fear if you become bitter, [12] resentful, and filled with a consciousness of lack."
The problem is good-bad news. That sounds strange doesn't it? Good-bad news. Usually the person I am speaking to looks at me askance and says: "How can it be good-bad news? I have a family to support, certain commitments monthly, and now suddenly I have nothing: would you call that good-bad news?" "Yes," I reply, "it is good-bad news, because you have Life, or God, in the hollow of your hand, and no human being, or group of human beings, can possibly deprive you of your substance, of your supply, or of whatever good appears to be slipping away from you.
"So long as you have spiritual mastery, that is, when mentally and emotionally you have learned to react constructively, nothing can harm you. In the seeming condition of lack you will find a tremendous amount of good, not only spiritual, but also material. The theme that you have to work on, as did the people of old, is this: 'In Thee O Lord do I put my trust, let me never be ashamed'."
That appears easy, does it not? All I have to do is constantly to affirm, believe, and know that I shall not be ashamed for the faith that I have exercised in God, nor shall I be confounded. But it is not so easy, is it? When the need becomes pressing, when the eleventh hour arrives, not only do you feel that you cannot find God, but the whole condition shrieks failure at you. You cannot see God, hear Him nor feel Him, there is just awful silence and fear grips you; yet fear is a wonderful thing, because it is through fear and [13] by fear that you can build up a positive and constructive faith. It makes you realise how impotent you are, how ineffectual you, as a human being, are in relation to the universal scheme, the unlimited supply of Power and Knowledge that is God.
However the vacuum, the void that has suddenly come into your life, is something that is presented to every single human being. I have seen it innumerable times myself, when apparently God was really putting my faith to shame, and confounding it, and it seemed that this one time I was going to fail, that I had not sufficient faith to overcome the condition. But it never is so. I have never known God to fall short. I have, indeed, often been afraid, not in respect of God, nor His Knowledge, nor Power, but regarding my own capacity for faith. "Am I," I have asked myself, "strong enough to weather this storm, can I be absolutely sure of myself? I am sure of God, of course, but can I be sure that I shall not let God down? It is not a question of God's confounding me, or putting me to shame, but shall I put Him to shame and confound Him through my lack of faith?"
You know--you will remember--how human we are, how filled with emotions; one second we are happy, bubbling over, and the next we are right in the slough of despair. Emotionally, just in a flash of time our whole world seems to crumble away, but God is still there, and He is actually inviting you and me to come up higher, by and through this condition which is, nevertheless, none of His creating. Our souls have chosen this particular experience for [14] their own growth and the soul can never remain static nor can it retrogress. It must go forward, not only spiritually, but mentally and emotionally, physically and materially, so that we can ultimately attain to happiness and peace.
This problem from the blue will actually give us an expanded consciousness of the presence and power, knowledge and love of God. It is an exercise in faith, and it is only by and through this exercise that we can develop a greater degree of faith. This being so, think to yourself, "I am now going to expand. There is no reason for me to panic, there is no question of failure, of opposition; all these human beings, that appear to be the instruments producing unhappy experiences for me, are doing so only to cultivate my own quality of faith, to help me to grow, and as a result of that growth to bring a higher quality of goodness, mentally, emotionally, and materially into my life.
"It does not matter whether the lesson is one of disease, lack of supply, or unhappiness, there is only one Presence, God, and He is good, therefore I cannot possibly--not for one second--lack any good quality of His. I know that I live in this very presence of God Who is the substance of my own faith, therefore experience teaches me that there is a time to prepare, a time for me to sow like the farmer who prepares his ground, cultivates it, fertilizes it, and then puts in his seed, after which he waters it, and then there is nothing more that he can do. He cannot make the seed grow, neither can he do one single thing more [15] to bring this about; he has no option but to sit by and wait."
Now you know your own mind and heart, how you have been thinking, feeling, and living during these past years. Which have you built up, a greater faith in God, or a greater fear of conditions? Have you so cultivated the garden of your mind that you know that you will have beautiful flowers and not weeds?
If you are honest with yourself, you will know: "This is how I have thought, and felt, and acted over the past years; this is how I have prepared my ground, this is the type of seed--good or bad--that I have sown, BUT I do not have to stand by should I see it coming up as weeds, nor do I need to leave it there. It can only stay there when I allow this, if I do not wish it to remain, I can plough it under."
And so God gives to you and me the power to plough over these apparent conditions of lack that suddenly present themselves to us in our minds, our bodies, or our affairs.
It will not take years and years to rebuild the consciousness of supply. Now, this instant, is the accepted time, NOW is God our fulfilment. In God there is no question of time. On whatever plane of consciousness upon which your soul can express itself, there will be the fullness of God. But it is your reaction, your physical reaction, to the condition that will either retain it in your consciousness or eliminate it, and allow the pure Spirit of God to flood you with His perfection.
[16] I once had a discussion with a lady, who came to see me in my office, on the subject of faith and love. I put several questions to her, the type that are put to us daily. People come to us who feel that they are breaking down, that their problem is too much for them, that they will not be able to overcome it, that they have inadequate faith, or that God has let them down and they want to know the answers.
Her reply to me was: "One has to have faith and one has to have love before the good can manifest itself," and I answered, "I am fully aware of that, I know that practicing the law of love brings me into tune with the Universal Power that we call God but, when Christ said: 'According to your faith it shall be done unto you', he made no qualification whatsoever. He did not say: 'According to your faith, and if you love, it shall be done unto you'. He said: 'According to your faith it is done unto you'."
Whether you have believed in God or not, loved Him or not, whether you have lived a good life or not, it makes no difference whatever, your sins are forgiven. Sins are in your own consciousness. You retain them, He sets you free from them instantly. They do not have to be worked out over a long period of trial and error. Now is the accepted time. Love brings happiness, faith can, and will, bring fulfilment in so far as material things are concerned, but love alone can give you happiness. You want what we call true prosperity. You want health, happiness, and abundance, but greatest of all you want PEACE OF MIND, and that is something only love can bring.
[17] However, if you find that you have not been able to stimulate the type of love of which Christ spoke, it is still according to your faith that it is done unto you. Every human being in this world lives by faith, either of a negative or positive nature.
Faith is, as I have told you before, merely power in action, and you must realise that by and through faith you cannot create anything evil, though by negative faith, which is fear, you can separate yourself from the good. So, when you release constructive faith, you are not destroying something that is present--it is not like the furniture in a room that you have to remove before you can bring new furniture in, you are simply recognising the positive good where you have been seeing negative evil. It is like darkness which is but a lack of the opposite good, a lack of light, lack of understanding, lack of the knowledge of Truth; so, if I appear to be manifesting disease in my body now, or lack in my affairs, or disharmony in my life, it is not something tangible, something real, something which I have built for myself, it is only that I have separated myself, in my own consciousness, from God--God Who is good, the light in the darkness, the health in the disease, the harmony in the disorder, the steadfastness in the place of my fear.
Therefore, although my ground appears to be barren, like the Christ I can say: "Say not ye there are yet four months and then cometh the harvest? Behold I say unto you, Lift up your eyes and look on the fields, for they are white already unto harvest." I [18] cannot escape my good, I cannot escape my light or my love, my health, my harmony, or my supply. I cannot get away from God because I am the manifestation of that very substance that He IS, so according to my faith I can fill this present lack--my barren fields--with as much good as I desire: and any sudden bolt from the blue means nothing, absolutely nothing, if I react to it constructively.
If I affirm that sweetness will come in the place of bitterness, that abundance shall fill this condition of lack, that peace shall replace this discord, that health shall take the place of this dis-ease, it shall be so, because the faith which you have, and which I have, is the Faith Which is God. God is all knowledge and all power expressing His fullness in this apparent void, pressing Himself into consciousness, and He does not require days, weeks, months, or years to do so.
The substance, that is slipping away, is the lesser substance, and God is now opening the windows of your mind to your greater abundance, to the enlargement of your supply, your success, your happiness, your health.
Remember that no human being can deprive you of any good whatever. You have the spiritual mastery in your own hands, you are not receiving from God, you are God-spirit Itself, the whole Universal Power expressing Itself in consciousness. Remember when you say, "In Thee O Lord do I put my trust, let me never be ashamed," it is Spirit talking to Itself. How can God let Himself down? How can God be ashamed of Himself? How can God confound Himself?
[19] In every instance it is a question of your own separation. Through your reaction to these problems you can separate yourself from God, from all that is good, and according to the sense of separation it is done unto you.
But the living Substance is as real as any concrete object. Though you cannot see it, the Substance from which any such thing is manifested, from which you too are made manifest, the life, the light and the beauty are real and tangible now, waiting to express themselves in the form in which you invite them by your reaction.
I know that it gave me tremendous inner peace and happiness to realise that I am the temple of the living God, and that nothing, nothing whatsoever, can interpose between me and my good. No human agent can in any way deprive me of anything that is perfect and beautiful and harmonious in my life, and that is the understanding that I want you to have.
I know that you will feel very blue and miserable on occasion; I know that you will feel completely cut off and a thousand times in your lives you will say: "God, why have You done this to me, why have You deprived me, why have You suddenly brought this problem into my life?" You need to talk to someone, and that is how you will talk to God. But that is not important.
Remember that you cannot create anything that is evil, that nothing that appears to be evil in your own life, can remain there when you reject it, even if for days, weeks, months, and years you have believed that [20] it is so; when you suddenly turn your back on it and see the real and true, judging righteous judgment, the judgment that God, the Universal Presence, judges by, that instant will this lack be filled full of His living Substance.
Such is the quality of faith that you must develop.
If you should stop applying Truth today--if you try to run away from It for a week or a year, or ten years--then to the very place at which you stopped, to the self-same problem that you refused to face, you will be brought back and compelled to tackle it, even if it takes you ten or twenty years to overcome it. Wherever you go, you will take your mind with you; wherever you are, there will be the problem also; you will not be able to escape it, you will have to face it, to declare that it is a liar-- non-existent.
And when, finally, you do face it, what will you find? Those giants of despair, that appeared to be so overwhelming in your life, those sudden insurmountable hurdles, will, when you walk up to them, fade away, for they never had any reality, they will ever false creations of your own mind.
Health is within you, happiness is within, success is within, supply is within. Your complete freedom is within. That is the Truth, the one Truth you have to learn, the Truth that, according to your faith over days, weeks, months, and years, it is now being done unto you, by yourself, not by any other human being.
Just think of it, the realisation that you are now free, that you are NOW this temple of God, the temple of all that is in God, not just a fragment nor a bit of [21] Him but the sum total of all, that He is and has, is now within you.
When you understand, this is the time to thrust out your chest, to lift up your head, for you are free. No longer are you cowed by personalities, no longer are you afraid of individuals, of problems, or conditions. How can you be when you know who you are? How can any problem remain in your life when you have the answer, the solution of every difficulty, within yourself? All you have to do is to declare it, to know that you are already set free.
But, as long as you bind yourself, you literally chain yourself to the hell in which you are living. You bind yourself tighter than any lock or bars could do, you saddle yourself with your disease, your misery, your unhappiness, and your failures, but in an instant, the moment you know it, the moment you feel that inner conviction, you are free. It does not take any period of time, the instant that you KNOW, health will begin to express itself, happiness will start to manifest itself, success and supply will commence to gravitate to you because NOW IT IS DONE.
Let us, therefore, in future remember when we say, "Dear Lord, I have put my trust in Thee, let me never be ashamed or confounded," let us remember to reverse it and instead to pray: "In me, O Lord, have You put Your trust, let me never confound You, nor put You to shame."
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