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Lessons In Truth
Lesson 9
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[Lessons In Truth]
[Emily Cady's Works] [Unity on the Web Home Page]
The Secret Place of the Most High
Lesson Nine
1. There is nothing the human heart so longs for, so cries
out after, as to know God, "whom to know aright is life
eternal."
2. With a restlessness that is pitiful to see, people are
ever shifting from one thing to another, always hoping to
find rest and satisfaction in some anticipated
accomplishment or possession. Men fancy that they want
houses and lands, great learning or power. They pursue
these things and gain them, only to find themselves still
restless, still unsatisfied.
3. At the great heart of humanity there is a deep and awful
homesickness that never has been and never can be satisfied
with anything less than a clear, vivid consciousness of the
indwelling presence of God, our Father. In all ages,
earnest men and women who have recognized this inner hunger
as the heart's cry after God have left seeking after
things, and have sought, by devoted worship and by service
to others, to enter into this consciousness; but few have
succeeded in reaching the promised place where their "joy"
is "full" (Jn. 16:24). Others have hoped and feared
alternately; they have tried, with the best knowledge they
possessed, to "work out" their "own salvation" (Phil.
2:12), not yet having learned that there must be an
inworking
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as well as an outworking. "By grace (or free gift) have ye
been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves (nor
of any human working), it is the gift of God, not of works,
that no man should glory" (Eph. 2:8-9).
4. To him who "dwelleth in the secret place of the Most
high," there is promised immunity from the "deadly
pestilence" and "the snare of the fowler," from "the terror
by night," and "the arrow that flieth by day" (Ps. 91); and
even immunity from fear of these things. Oh, the awfully
paralyzing effect of fear and evil! It makes us helpless as
babes. It makes us pygmies, whereas we might be giants were
we only free from it. It is at the root of all our
failures, of nearly all sickness, poverty, and distress.
But we have the promise of deliverance from even the fear
and evil when we are in the "secret place." "Thou shalt not
be afraid for the terror by night" (Ps. 91:5), and so forth.
"In the day of trouble he will keep me secretly in his
pavilion: In the covert of his tabernacle will he hide me"
(Ps. 27:5)." In the covert of thy presence wilt thou hide
them from the plottings of man:
"Thou wilt keep them secretly in a pavilion from the strife
of tongues" (Ps. 31:20).
5. The secret place! Why call a secret place? What is it?
Where may we find it? How abide in it?
6. It is a secret place because it is a place of meeting
between the Christ at the center of your being, and your
consciousness--a hidden place into which no outside person
can either induct you or enter himself. We must drop the
idea that this place of realization of our
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divinity can be given to us by any human being. No one can
come into it from the outside. Hundreds of earnest persons
are seeking, night and day, to get this inner revealing.
They run from teacher to teacher, many of them making the
most frantic efforts to meet the financial obligations thus
incurred.
7. You may study with human teachers and from man-made
books until doomsday; you may get all the theological lore
of the ages; you may understand intellectually all the
statements of Truth, and be able to prate healing formulas
as glibly as oil flows; but until there is a definite inner
revealing of the reality of an indwelling Christ through
whom and by whom come life, health, peace, power, all
things--aye, who is all things--you have not yet found "the
friendship of Jehovah" (Ps. 25:14).
8. In order to gain this knowledge--this consciousness of
God within themselves--many are willing (and wisely so, for
this is greater than all other knowledge) to spend all they
posses. Even Paul, after twenty-five years of service and
of most marvelous preaching, said: "I count all things to
be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus
my Lord. . .and do count them but refuse, that I may gain
Christ" (or the consciousness of His divine self) (Phil.
3:8).
9. Beloved, that which you so earnestly desire will never
be found by your seeking it through the mental side alone,
any more than it has heretofore been found through the
emotional side alone. Intuition and intellect
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are meant to travel together, intuition always holding the
reins to guide intellect. "Come now, and let us reason
together, saith Jehovah" (Is. 1:18). If you have been thus
far on the way cultivating and enlarging only the mental
side of Truth, as probably is the case, you need, in order
to come into the fullness of understanding, to let the
mental, the reasoning side rest awhile. "Become as little
children" (Mt. 18:3), and learning how to be still, listen
to that which the Father will say to you through the
intuitional part of your being. The light that you so crave
will come out of the deep silence and become manifest to
you from within yourself, if you will but keep still and
look for it from that source.
10. And conscious knowledge of an indwelling God, which we
so crave, is that of which Paul wrote to the Colossians, as
"the mystery which hath been hid for ages and generations:
but now hath it been manifested. . .Christ in you, the hope
of glory" (Col. 1:26,27). "The secret place of the Most
high" (Ps. 91:1), where each one of us may dwell and be
safe from all harm or fear of evil, is the point of
mystical union between man and Spirit (or God in us),
wherein we no longer believe, but know, that God in Christ
abides always at the center of our being as our perfect
health, deliverance, prosperity, power, ready to come forth
into manifestation at any moment we claim it. We know it.
We know it. We feel our oneness with the Father, and we
manifest this oneness.
11. To possess the secret of anything gives one
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power over it. This personal, conscious knowledge of the
Father in us is the secret that is the key to all power.
What we want is the revelation to us of this marvelous
"secret." What will give it to us--who can give it to us
except Him, the "Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the
Father" (Jn. 15:26)? Surely none other. That which God
would say to you and do through you is a great secret that
no man on the face of the earth knows, or ever will know
except yourself as it is revealed to you by the Spirit that
is in you. The secret that He tells me is not revealed to
you, nor yours to me; but each man must, after all is said
and done, deal directly with the Father through the Son
within himself.
12. Secrets are not told upon the housetop; nor is it
possible to pass this, the greatest of secrets, from one to
another. God, the creator of our being, must Himself
whisper it to each man living in the very innermost of
himself. "To him that overcometh (or is consciously in
process of overcoming), to him will I give the hidden
manna, and I will give him a white stone (or a mind like a
clean white tablet), and upon the stone a new name written,
which no one knoweth but he that receiveth it" (Rev. 2:17).
It is so secret that it cannot even be put into human
language or repeated by human lips.
13. What you want today and what I want is that the words
that we have learned to say as Truth be made alive to us.
We want a revelation of God in us as life, to be made to
our own personal consciousness as health.
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We no longer care to have somebody just tell us the words
from the outside. We want a revelation of God as love
within us, so that our whole being will be filled and
thrilled with love--a love that will not have to be pumped
up by a determined effort because we know that it is right
to love and wrong not to love, but a love that will flow
with the spontaneity and fullness of an artesian well,
because it is so full at the bottom that it must flow out.
14. What we want today is a revelation to our consciousness
of God within us as omnipotent power, so that we can, by a
work--or a look--"accomplish that which I please and it
shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it" (Is. 55:11).
We want the manifestation to us of the Father in us, so
that we can know Him personally. We want to be conscious of
God working in us "both to will and to work" (Phil. 2:13),
so that we may "work out" our "salvation" (Phil. 2:12). We
have been learning how to do the outworking, but have now
come to a point where we must learn more of how to place
ourselves in an attitude where we can each be conscious of
the divine inner working.
15. Mary talked with the risen Jesus, supposing that He was
the gardener, until suddenly, as He spoke her name, there
flashed into her consciousness a ray of pure intuition, and
in an instant the revelation of His identity was made to
her.
16. According to the same sacred history, Thomas Didymus
had walked daily for three years with the most wonderful
teacher of spiritual things that has ever
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lived. He had watched this teacher's life and had been
partaker of His very presence, physical and mental. He had
had just what you and I have thus far received of mental
training and external teaching. But there came a time when
there was an inner revealing that made him exclaim, "My
Lord and my God!" (Jn. 20:28). The secret name, which no
other man could know for him, had that moment been given to
him. There had come, in the twinkling of an eye, the
manifestation to his consciousness of the Father in him as
his Lord and his God. No longer simply our Father and our
Lord, but my Lord and my God--my divine self revealed to me
personally.
17. Is not this that which you are craving?
18. Each man must come to a time when he no longer seeks
external helps, when he knows that the inner revelation of
"my Lord and my God" to his consciousness can come to him
only through an in-dwelling power that has been there all
the time, waiting with infinite longing and patience to
reveal the Father to the child.
19. This revelation will never come through the intellect
of man to the consciousness, but must ever come through the
intuitional to the intellect as a manifestation of Spirit
to man. "The natural man receiveth not (nor can it impart
them) the things of the Spirit of God; for they are
foolishness unto him; and he cannot know them, because they
are spiritually judged" (1 Cor. 2:14), and they must be
spiritually imparted.
20. In our eagerness we have waited upon every
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source that we could reach for the light that we want.
Because we have not known how to wait upon Spirit within us
for the desired revelation, we have run to and fro. Let no
one misunderstand me in what I say about withdrawing
himself from teachers. Teachers are good and are necessary,
up to a certain point. "How then shall they call on him in
whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in
him whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear
without a preacher?" (Rom. 10:14).
21. Books and lectures are good, teachers are good, but you
must learn for yourself that Christ, the Son of God, lives
in you; that He within you is your light and life and all.
When you have once grasped this beyond a doubt with the
intellect, you cease looking to teachers to bring you
spiritual insight. That Christ lives in you, Spirit itself
must reveal to you. Teachers talk about the light, but the
light itself must flash into the darkness before you can
see the light.
22. Had the Master remained with the apostles, I doubt
whether they would ever have gotten beyond hanging on His
words and following in the footsteps of His personality.
23. Jesus knew that His treatments for spiritual
illumination, given to His apostles from His recognition of
Truth, would act in them as a seed thought, but He also
knew that each man must for himself wait upon God for the
inner illumination which is lasting and real. God alone can
whisper the secret to each one separately.
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24. The inducement of power was not to come to them by the
spoken word through another personality, not even through
that of Jesus, with His great spiritual power and
discernment. It was to come from "on high" (Is. 32:15) to
each individual consciousness. It was the "promise of the
Father, which. . .ye heard from me" (Acts 1:4). He had
merely told them about it, but had no power to give it to
them.
25. So to each of us this spiritual illumination that we
are crying out after, this inducement of power for which we
are willing to sell all that we have, must come from "on
high," that is, to the consciousness from the Spirit within
our being. This is the secret that the Father longs with an
infinite yearning to reveal to each individual. It is
because of the Father's desire within us to show us the
secret that we desire the revelation. It is the purpose for
which we come into the world--that we might grow step by
step, as we are doing, to the place where we could bear to
have the secret of His inner abiding revealed to us.
26. Do not be confused by seeming contradictions in the
lessons. I have said heretofore that too much introspection
is not good. I repeat it; for there are those who, in
earnest desire to know God, are always seeking light for
themselves, but neglect to use that which they already have
to help others.
27. There must be an equal conscious receiving from the
Father and giving out to the world, a perfect equilibrium
between the inflowing and the outgiving, to keep perfect
harmony. We must each learn how to
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wait renewedly upon God for the infilling, and then go and
give out to every creature that which we have received, as
Spirit leads us to give, either in preaching, teaching, or
silently living the Truth. That which fills us will radiate
from us without effort right in the place in life where we
stand.
28. In nearly all teaching of Truth from the purely mental
side, there is much said about the working out of our
salvation by the holding of right thoughts, by denials and
affirmations. This is all good. But there is another side
that we need to know a little more about. We must learn how
to be still and let Spirit, the I AM, work in us, that we
may indeed be made "a new creature" (Gal. 6:15), that we
may have the mind of Christ in all things.
29. When you have learned how to abandon yourself to
infinite Spirit, and have seasons of doing this daily, you
will be surprised at the marvelous change that will be
wrought in you without any conscious effort of your own.
30. It will search far below your conscious mind, and root
out things in your nature of which you have scarcely been
conscious, simply because they have lain latent there,
waiting for something to bring them out. It will work into
your consciousness light, and life, and love, and all good,
perfectly filling all your lack while you just quietly wait
and receive. Of the practical steps in this direction we
will speak in another lesson.
31. Paul, who had learned this way of faith, this way of
being still and letting the I AM work itself
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into his conscious mind as the fullness of all his needs
was neither afraid nor ashamed to say:
32. "For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father, from
whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that he
would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, that
ye may be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the
inward man; that Christ may dwell in your heart through
faith; to the end that ye, being rooted and grounded in
love, may be strong to apprehend with all saints what is
the breadth and length and height, and depth, and to know
the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye might
be filled unto all the fulness of God" (Eph. 3:14-19).
33. And then he gives an ascription: "Unto him that is able
to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think,
according to the power that worketh in us" (Eph. 3:20).
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