Nicol C. Campbell
My Path of Truth
The School of Truth
Johannesburg, 2nd ed., 1954.
[201] From almost every direction I hear these words: "God cannot help me. These problems that have come into my life--problems that I, personally, have created--are now so stabilized in my consciousness that, no matter how hard I try, or how much faith I feel I have, I shall nevertheless take this burden with me to the grave."
It is not only by laymen that such sentiments are expressed, I hear them uttered by those who teach of the Presence of God; who teach us that He is divine Love, Omnipotence--all the power in the universe--Omniscience, all the knowledge there is.
We are told that, if we ask anything of the Father, we may have those things, and yet the very persons who preach this gospel, do not, in their own hearts, believe one word of what they say, and the only reason for this distrust of God's ability as Omnipotence, Omniscience, and Omnipresence to manifest Himself as All-good in their lives, is the simple one that they have never had the faith to put Him to the test.
There are two approaches to God, and you are free [202] to decide which of these you will use. The one way is the hard road of facing up to every single problem that is presented to you and then, by and through the development of faith, recognising only the Presence of God where the evil appears to be. When you can consciously put God in the place of every discord then, however steeped in the condition you may be, even if it be the worst type of chronic disease, or the most complete disharmony, poverty, or lack, it will have to disappear.
Every single human being can, and ultimately must, express his divine sonship as power and knowledge and as the consciousness of his true Self, Which is the Presence of God. Whether that is achieved on this plane of consciousness or not is entirely in the hands of the individual concerned.
We have been taught that "as below so above" and that the whole of God's universe is a natural one--that there is nothing supernatural or supernormal about it--and that it is governed by the simple laws by which we ourselves live, and move, and have our existence.
The acceptance of this teaching is the one way.
The second is by contemplation or meditation.
You can find the Presence of God as Knowledge, Power, or Love, and you can so identify yourself with Him, when you have renounced all the things of the world, that you become an integral part, knowingly, of what we would call the Cosmic Consciousness, but no matter how brilliant any architect may be, unless he has pracitcal experience, he cannot build his house; but the man with the practical experience can not only build his [203] house, he can design it and put it down on paper in the form of a plan.
Now I am a very simple, ordinary man, who takes the teachings of the Master and the other great leaders literally; and, if I can be shown one concrete example of a single human being who has overcome either chronic disease, chronic unhappiness, or chronic lack, then I maintain that the power that that person used, you and I can use also.
I hold that the Omnipresence of God is not more here than there, that His Spirit is not more in you than in me, or more in me than in you. Omnipresence, when you understand It, includes the whole of the universe, so that all of God's creation is permeated by His Spirit, evenly distributed, and the only difference between individuals is that you may have a greater consciousness, a greater awareness of the Presence of God in you, either as health, happiness, or supply than I have, or, of course, the case may be reversed so that I am the one with the greater understanding of this Truth.
If, however, God is the impersonal, spiritual Father of Whom we have been taught, and, if the overriding principle of God is perfect love, then for me to have more good than you have is an injustice. I feel it is unfair that I should have a greater consciousness of God as either happiness, health, or supply than you possess, and that you--no matter how hard you try--must remain in a constant condition of lack of these things.
I believe, regardless of what type of Karmic debt you have brought with you, that the bodies you possess are the creations of your own souls, just as my body is the [204] creation of my soul. All the defects in me, and all of those in you, were created respectively by us. Whatever symbolizes or represents our fate is something that we brought into being as experiences for our own spiritual growth. I believe also that our destiny, that which we are destined to be, is changeless, we have no choice as to that. From God we came out into activity, and to God, Creative Consciousness, we return.
I cannot have any option as to my destiny, regarding it I have no free will whatever, but in so far as my fate is concerned, that which I have brought with me--and your fate, which you have brought with you--these can, and must, be changed here and now.
I know it is not easy. I know the tortures through which you pass in your endeavours to attain a conscious faith. I know how difficult it is to believe that one has received when all the evidence before our eyes is negative; but, if you or I would persist in claiming the Presence of God, of All-good in our lives, and refuse to acknowledge the condition as having power over us, we should overcome that condition for, if we persist, it is not ourselves carrying the torch, but God doing this, through us. We are no more separate from God than is the ray from the sun. We are not worms of the dust, we are the Spirit of God projected into consciousness, vehicles through which He, Himself, as the Spirit of Life, is experiencing Himself on all planes of consciousness; we are not bodies, each with an indwelling spirit, we are spiritual beings equipped with physical bodies, therefore we are one with All-knowledge and All-Power and there is consequently no power in the condition save that which we have personally invested in it.
[205] You will remember the story of the disciples in the boat, how they saw coming towards them what appeared to be an apparition, or a ghost, and they were much afraid until suddenly they recognised the Master.
Whether this be fact or not is unimportant, it is the Truth illustrated that is significant. The story continues that Peter who was always impulsive, shouted out to Him, as you or I might have done--with gladness and surprise, at seeing the instability of the water overcome and Jesus walking on it as though that were a natural thing to do--and he cried out, "Lord, bid me to come unto you," and at Christ's response, which you will recollect was, "Come," he got out and walked. Then suddenly the reaction set in, and he thought, "What have I done? This just does not happen! One cannot walk upon water!" And you all know the sequel. He began to sink, and in his fear, he called to the Master, as we might have done, to help him, and Christ, putting out His hand, drew him in, asking sadly, "Wherefore didst thou doubt, Oh! thou of little faith?"
"Here I am," He must have thought, "setting you an example, you ask Me to call you, so I do, and you get out of the boat in all confidence and walk towards Me and then, instead of keeping your mind on Me, you suddenly realise the magnitude of this apparent miracle and you begin to sink, for lack of faith. Why could you not have trusted Me?"
With us it is much the same. For a time we are bolstered up by our faith, we feel an inner stirring of the Presence of God as knowledge or power, within ourselves, and we walk out fearlessly, gladly, triumphantly, and then suddenly the immensity of the thing that we are [206] doing strikes us and we begin to fear, to recognise conditions, to question and to argue, to reason with our limited intelligence that judges by what it can see, smell, touch, and hear, forgetting that behind the finite brain is the Intelligence of God, working independently and saying that through Him all things are not only possible to man, but are even probable.
Which road do you want to take?
If you want to follow the road of contemplation, meditation, then renounce the world and all your problems, go up into the hills and sit there quietly and practice the Presence of God, and you will find It.
You will be able to merge your identity with His, to know yourself as part of the Cosmic Plan, one with this Power, Knowledge, and Love, but only spiritually will you discern it and, as far as material things are concerned, you will not be able to overcome them.
You cannot become a great hurdler by sitting down on the track and imagining yourself jumping over hurdles, nor can you become a famous musician--even though you have been born greatly gifted--unless you practice continuously. Every single problem that comes to us is of no value to us if we cannot learn to retain our spiritual mastery, that is, to know ourselves as the Presence of God, Power, Knowledge, Love, in manifestation.
If I did not believe this, I assure you that I would not waste one minute teaching it; if I felt that being was something governed by the caprice of fate, that the good I have, had been allotted to me alone, what would be the object in talking about it? Why not use this faith entirely for the self? Why create responsibility? Why look for [207] more trouble? Is there not enough of that in the world already? But the fact remains that it is true. It is the only thing that I know to be true, the only thing about which I have any conviction at all. It is no mere, blind belief, I am not suffering from delusions, not dreaming dreams, but you in your misery, poverty, unhappiness, and lack are living in a nightmare which, though very real to you, is a phantasy as far as God is concerned--as illusory as is darkness, as unsubstantial as your shadow which is only a reflection of your physical self.
It is our own want of persistency in holding on to spiritual truth, the constant focusing of our eyes upon the conditions facing us, which we see as something greater than the Presence of God, that clothes these phenomena in reality for us so that, according to our faith, it is done to us.
I maintain--and I think I am right--that once we really know ourselves, and have an understanding of our true relationship to God, our actual unity with Him, at that moment we start off on the right foot. When we have recognised that we and our Creator are indivisibly one, we can build up our faith (as one builds up muscles) starting out from the conviction that any disease can be dissolved, any unhappiness can be changed to peace and harmony, any failure be turned into success, and any lack be transmuted into abundance.
I am not now judging only from my own experience but from what you, individually, and thousands of other students, have accomplished.
Can all these persons have been special servants of God? Were they being rewarded for something? And must the rest squirm in misery, squalor, and unhappiness? [208] Not if Paul stated correctly when he said, "We are temples of the living God," and Solomon adding that, if we will seek this knowledge with all our hearts--not with our heads--we shall find it.
But when? In our next incarnations? Or in the following ones, or in the ones after those?
If it is my destiny to go to God, of what value is it to me to know this if I do not strive after it?
Supposing I have to come from Cape Town to Johannesburg; it is a one-way journey, I may spend a week, a month, a year or a hundred years at any station, but in the end I must get there. That particular terminal is my destiny, my fate is the choice of road, the selection of conveyance, of transport and whether I fly or walk, take a motor-car or a train, travel I have to, though precisely how I go about it, is my own affair.
Of what value is the knowledge of God's Immanence to a starving man, to a diseased body, to a broken heart?
Christ's service to humanity lay in this: that when He healed them of their own false creations--not by changing God's purpose, but by aligning their own hearts and minds with the will of God for them--He proved to them that the Divine Will was for their good alone so that, instantly, they became free.
You, each and every one of you, shall know the Truth, and the Truth, the Presence of God, Divine Love within you, shall set you free.
I am far too practical to accept something abstract and nebulous, it is no use saying to me that God, be He an anthropomorphic being or a cold principle, loves me, yet loves to see me diseased, miserable, and unhappy. [209] For what? An ordinary human being would not treat the child of his bitterest enemy like that! No, we have to shut our eyes to the waves, to the tempest, to the problems that confront us. We have to lift up our vision, lift up our eyes unto the hills, unto the consciousness of the Presence of God within us, and the conditions will assume their proper proportions of nothingness.
It is just as difficult for me to do this as it is for you. It is no easier for me to know God as supply, or health, or happiness than it is for you to know Him as such. I have the same physical composition as you have, the same pair of eyes, and the same appearances present themselves to me--but they are lies, and both you and I must know it!
They are untruths housed in our own consciousness, they are something that we ourselves have thought up, and built up with ourselves while believing in our separation from the Presence of Good within us, a Good Which is waiting, eternally waiting, for our destiny to be fulfilled, for us to be set free.
If I could get you to make the same effort--or even half the effort that you make in trying to achieve something that you know, and can see, in a material way--to realise the Truth about your relationship to God, then you would find that freedom; but, because God is something abstract and invisible, and our minds and emotions are governed entirely by outside conditions, laws and causes, we fail to recognise Him for What He is.
Our affairs reflect our consciousness of disease, misery, unhappiness, and failure, yet it is not God creating these things for us, it is our acceptance of an [210] absence of good, our belief in a lack of His Presence Which, should we claim It, would fill full with harmony our beings and all of our concerns.
God gives you a wonderful plan, and all He asks in return for it is that you give Him the substance of faith, so that He can build it in concrete form for you; just as a builder takes his bricks and mortar and builds an edifice, so does God yearn to build for us, but He cannot do this with nothing with which to work. It is faith--your faith, my faith, any human being's faith--that is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen. It is the vibrating power of Life Which condenses Itself from a spiritual idea into an emotional consciousness and then into material solidity.
We are the architects, God's is the idea, and this He gives to us. We see the perfect picture and by our faith and actions we do not build it--God does that--but we give Him the wherewithal, and each one of us represents the hands of God that are used by Him.
Every atom of good that you express, every bit of good that I give out, goes forth like a boomerang, and returns, but in an increased measure, and every scrap of evil that we send out, goes also on its way and comes back again with a magnification that weighs us down.
Let us, therefore, keep before us the picture of Peter: first of all, full of trust, then encompassed by doubt, seeing the conditions, and finally lifted up by the words of the Master.
Let that be a parallel for our own lives, but let us keep our minds steadfast, and, when the adverse conditions present themselves, let us call quickly upon [211] the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, within ourselves. Let us give to Him a tiny atom of faith, so small that one cannot see it, on which He nevertheless can work to remove our mountains of difficulties--the lacks, the disease, the unhappiness, the failures, and the discord--because that is exactly what He will do for us when we open up the way.
At the beginning of this article I said that I know that it is your destiny to find fulfilment now, that now you can be set free, if you will but make the effort to trust, so, trust now in God, your good, and all the things shall be added unto you.
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