NEITHER DO THEY SPIN"
Nicol C. Campbell
My Path of Truth
The School of Truth
Johannesburg, 2nd ed., 1954.
[212] Quite a number of people are confused about the meaning of Truth, as to just exactly what It is, and what It can do for them. We have been taught that we have to sow before we can reap, and give before we can receive the blessings of God expressed in our personal lives. Then we are also told that it is a 'free gift, not of works, lest any man should boast.' There seems to be some confusion here, on the one hand we have to do to receive, on the other it is a 'free gift'; however, it is very simple to deal with these contradictory directions. If you, individually, have the inner consciousness of the Presence of God in you as either your health, happiness, abundance, or success, then those qualities are manifest through you. The 'free gift, not of works' is specifically for the person who has built up the realisation of God working in him, through him, and for him as that which he desires. But the vast majority of people with whom we come into contact do not possess that awareness. Some have it in regard to health and lack other qualities, others have it respecting wealth alone, and some have it only where happiness is concerned, [213] but how is mankind in general to obtain these free gifts from God?
I have said on other occasions that you have to spend your prosperity, and (because I have not always been understood aright), I would like to make my meaning very clear on that point.
It happened once that a lady came to see me shortly after I had made that statement from the platform and said that she had been speaking to a member of my audience and her interpretation of spending her prosperity was to go out and buy exactly what she wanted on the assumption that God would provide it for her. I certainly never said anything like that! I said that, if you had the consciousness of prosperity, you could buy whatever you wanted, but, if you have not that awareness, it is obvious that, when the bill is presented, you will not have the quality or capacity of faith necessary to meet the liability. If you have an absolute recognition that the Prosperity of God is already fulfilled in you and through you, then I say, 'Go and take what you want,' adding, with Emerson, 'and pay for it.'
I have met most of you and each one of you--at one time or another--has said to me, 'I do not find it anything but easy to express a specific thing like health, happiness, or supply, even though I have implicit trust in the Presence of God in me.'
Such a statement is perhaps easily made, but to have a positive belief in the Immanence of God in you is, without question, simultaneously to have the thing in manifestation.
[214] If I say to you that I know God to be my prosperity, I am not making a wild statement, I am not inferring that I believe in God as my supply, I mean that I am inwardly conscious of that prosperity and that I can afford to live according to this spiritual perception of affluence, even though I may not have one single penny in the bank.
If you tell me that you have absolute faith in God as health and you are reflecting disease, then you are mistaken, and the truth is that you have not faith in Him as health. There is a vast difference between believing in God and having faith in Him and knowing Him. There is a wide distinction between being aware spiritually of the Presence of God--in which case you could not but be materially cognizant of it as the tangible thing desired--and in merely believing in His Immanence as that thing, in which event it would not express for you because, instead of having the spiritual knowledge that invariably gives rise to outward manifestation, all you would have, would be a quality of hope which would be quite impotent to bring forth for you since it would be based on nothing higher than fallible, human thinking and would have no safe and sure foundation. I have often pointed out to you that, until you can realise that there is unequivocally no separation between you and the specific good you desire, that good will always appear to be in the tomorrow.
People tell me that they "work" for their good. They work for the consciousness of prosperity, of happiness, and of health. Why? Do you work for any awareness of the living Substance that you breathe in, which is [215] your very life, or do you accept your natural birthright with thanksgiving? You are not even sensible of your breathing! It goes on automatically and, when you start to 'work' on it, you get out of breath. You have to forget about it before it falls back into its regular alternation of inhalation and exhalation.
I do not have to work for something that is mine! It is me. God-spirit is me as prosperity. He is me as health, as happiness. When I begin to work for these, I admit separation, I acknowledge the fact that they do not inhere in me, and in my striving after them I break the contact between myself and God. It is a matter of realising our oneness with Him, and, when there is any question of affluence, let us be quite sure that we have the consciousness thereof before we begin spending something of which we may have no spiritual awareness. The best way to gain this is to give, for then 'ye shall receive', "Sow and ye shall reap." Let us therefore be unconcerned about 'demonstrating'; if we have a certain amount of happiness and abundance, and still lack health, we have to give of it, even if we are sick or diseased. We have to try to realise that we are this very quality, that God-being-us is our health.
Quite apart from the 'free gift not of works, lest any man should boast' we have another statement of tremendous importance concerning the lilies that 'toil not, neither do they spin, yet Solomon, in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of these.' What does the lily do? Is not all the beauty of that flower--form, colour, and texture, merely the expression of God's self-awareness as Beauty manifesting through the entity that we [216] call 'lily'? It simply unfolds itself from the bulb as perfection but the human being is so conscious of his limitations, of his lack, unhappiness, or illness, that he begins to strive to bring perfection forth instead of keeping his mind within, identifying himself with his true Self and letting this Self Which is the very Life, Love, and Soul of his being--God--externalise Itself naturally.
There is another way of demonstration, by and through the exercise of will power, if you can persist in it, but it is a long and hard road, and when, ultimately you do succeed in bringing about what you are seeking you are utterly worn out and depleted. Faith does not need to struggle for It is Knowledge, a consciousness in the individual that 'I am it', that Love is the Presence of Health even where the malady seems to be. In that case, where is the need of demonstration? What is, does not have to be brought forth! We make the mistake of allowing the body to attempt to overcome something in order to contact the soul, while actually the soul is trying to contact the body so that it can find through it its own self-expression. When you come to the point of realisation, you have reached the place where your Spirit within you, your individual soul, tries by way of your desires, to free itself through your bodies as peace, health, and supply. It is not something that you have to battle for.
Can you imagine the Master and the other great world teachers sitting down all day long in meditation, trying to identify themselves with God, trying to drag His Substance into being either as health, happiness or [217] supply? Of course not! They were so aware of their true identities that through this certainty, this understanding of Truth, they were able to say: "The Father has already accomplished it, before I even call for anything, He has already responded through me, and while I am yet speaking, it is finding expression." It is a tremendous thing this inner conviction that 'I and my Father' are not separate, but one, so that we can never for one single moment get away from His presence, and not for a second of time can He be absent from our bodies or affairs because He is that pulsating Presence of Life, that we cannot define, but which holds within Itself absolute fulfilment for each and all of us.
I know how you strain and struggle, for I used to strive and toil in the same way to bring about a demonstration of--maybe--five shillings! praying, praying, praying to God to give me the Substance of that money; and, when the realisation dawned, I discovered that it was not I praying for five shillings, but the soul within me pleading for freedom through me, and, when I stopped clamouring, having thrust the thought of lack from my mind, the good I was seeking became manifest as naturally as my breath comes and goes when I am breathing rhythmically.
Let me repeat, it is not a question of compelling, it is one of awareness, and that you cannot define. I cannot tell you what it means or explain how it feels to be conscious of something as an integral part of myself. When I, or you, have the awareness of God as health, happiness, or supply, we cannot put into words for one another what this is. It is inexplicable, but it is not by [218] any means an abstraction, it is an exact experience. It is a full consciousness, an unqualified knowledge that the thing itself is in being, in existence, and it is that--not money, not health, not even happiness--that every single human being is seeking. That is why we of the School try to make you feel what it is like to have the awareness of God in some specific direction and it happens sometimes that one of you tell me of the consciousness of some particular thing that you have attained that has not yet unfolded for me. I partake of it, understand it, interpret it, but I cannot feel it until it has been my own personal experience.
This profound, intimate perception is what the Master had in mind when He said: "Ye shall know the Truth"--the Truth that every single thing is already in being, EXISTS, and that every single desire cherished in the human heart is the Truth unfolding Itself through that person, and, when the individual becomes aware of it, he is "set free" from all his limitations.
He no longer looks--as you do--for results. You, because you have not yet recognised that your desire is an integral part of yourselves, look for manifestation, and that very looking is an admission of separation. If a thing is within me, it does not make sense for me to look outside myself for it.
It is not easy when you have creditors to satisfy not to look to channels, not to wonder whence the supply is coming, or what idea God will give you that will bring it forth, but the idea and the Substance are one, and the idea is within you, and is itself the solution you are seeking, it is your prosperity and, if you will turn within [219] and recognise it as such by identifying yourself with it, not by striving for it, but just by knowing it and seeing it with the inner eye, it must, and will, express itself on the outside in your concrete, visible world.
This might happen through some channel that is a thousand miles away, for distance is of no importance; that avenue, that is to all human sense so remote from you, is intimately connected with you. There is--let me say it again--no separation. You are just as much parts of me as your arms are parts of your bodies; and we are all as much a part of God as the universe is part of itself. It is this realisation, this integration of ourselves with our Maker that we are seeking; when we really grasp it, we shall know that every human being is part of the One, so that your good is my good and mine is yours. As I share your successes of either health, happiness, or abundance, so do they become a part of me; if, however, I envy you your good, that envy also becomes a part of myself and is all I shall eventually receive, I shall get nothing else.
It has been stated by a psychologist that doctors are beginning to discover that most of the diseases to which human beings are subject are closely bound up with their own emotions and repressions. Cancer, for instance, is only the outer expression of an inner turmoil; the sufferer is tormented by some condition in his life that he cannot overcome; he feels fenced in on all sides, either by the circumstance itself or by some moral or conventional law that he cannot defy, and it is this sense of frustration, this inability to give vent to his feelings, that causes these to boil over in this particular form of disease.
[220] Two thousand years ago Christ gave us the answer to this. There is nothing that psychology uncovers today that He did not, in His time, teach concerning the source and origin of freedom. He said: "Love one another." Love frees us, it is the all-embracing solution, it liberates us from our complexes, our inhibitions, our diseases, and our fears.
If, for example, you say something unkind about me, there are two courses open to me. I may react constructively because I have learned to love, in which case the injury will bounce right off and have no effect upon me; or I may want to be revenged on you and, if I cannot satisfy the urge, my inner tumult will increase and increase until ultimately it must burst out in some form of negation.
"This is My commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another, as I have loved you," said the Christ, "for this love is the Truth, and the Truth shall set you free." Can you receive this in the consciousness that it is a GIFT, not something to be worked for, but something to accept. Can you understand that the thing you desire, that you are so fervently seeking--health, happiness, or prosperity--is yours already? Do not try to analyse, only accept--without demur, just as, without question, you receive the oxygen that gives you life. If you can do this, then 99 per cent of your battle is won. You can then live in a state of peace where all anxiety leaves you, where all worry dissolves itself, where all fear goes up in smoke. That is the kind of faith that the Master had and that many thousands of people have won today. They did not achieve it by [221] striving but by giving up the battle. After years of struggle, fighting, straining, they came to the point of letting go. They realised that, although they could produce a certain measure of material success, they were yet impotent to bring the things they so greatly desired to pass; but, when they abandoned the issue and emptied their minds of all the conditions, fears and negations that they had entertained for so long, their body temples were consciously flooded with the Spirit of God--the health, happiness, supply, and security, that constituted the solutions to all their problems and all was well.
Like the lilies we have not to toil, nor need we spin, for it is the Father's good pleasure to fulfil in, through, and for us, His Kingdom of Perfection, this day.
As we hold, faithfully and persistently, to the Truth, before our journey closes, we shall find the stubborn thistle (of negation) bursting into glossy purples that out-redden all voluptuous garden roses.
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