Post: #1

Teachers

“But you, do not be called ‘Rabbi’; for One is your Teacher, the Christ, and you are all brethren.”
Mathew 23:8

Christ understands these words a little bit differently than society does. From a purely organic standpoint, the world has a few institutes that are Divine: the father, the mother and the home, for example. These are the first institutes on Earth; there is no establishment that is nobler or brighter than the home and also there is no higher title than that of a father or a mother. True, there are many fathers and mothers on Earth, but, in fact, they are stepfathers and stepmothers. The father and the mother play an important role when it comes to the organic world, for they transmit through their blood the qualities of their own souls to their children. The upbringing of children is determined by the qualities that the mother instills in the child from a very early age. By the word blood I mean not the ordinary blood, but that kind of blood which remains unchanged, the kind of blood that remains the same throughout all of life’s events. At this time I will not dwell on the difference between this twofold blood. All I can say now is that it is not that transient, changeable blood, but the other blood, which is like the rose essential oil that floats above the rose water and which has a real value in itself. The noble seed that the mother introduces into the child’s blood is like a valuable essential oil from which thereon spreads and wafts fragrantly among those who later surround this grown-up child. Nothing can be introduced and sown in man afterwards; what contemporary people call upbringing is nothing but training.

When the mother raises her child the process takes place in the roots: it is there, in the roots, where this process changes the form of the mind and the heart. With training, on the other hand, there is nothing but an external polishing. One can train a monkey or a dove but as soon as they are placed in their natural environment, they are sure to revert to their original life. They have done experiments in the United States where the government allots great amounts of money to the education of American Indians; some of these Indians graduate from various colleges and universities but as soon as they go back to their people they forget what they have learned and become wild again. A real change can only take place in one of those Indians if he is converted and embraces Christianity completely.

Such is the situation of a Teacher when it comes to the spiritual life: to be a Teacher or a Master means to give birth to someone. Christ does not say, “Do not teach”, but says, “Do not assume the title of a teacher”, or the title of a sick mother, because such a mother is bound to give birth to a scrawny child. If the mother has certain physical, mental or spiritual weaknesses, her child will be the same way, too. Can the contemporary teacher teach his students how oxygen and carbon bond, for example, provided that he, himself, does not understand the properties of these elements? He can conduct experiments, but these elements would not yield to him, because he has not yet become a master of these elements. Another teacher might teach the rotation of celestial bodies up in space, but if you were to ask him to mathematically define the rotation of these bodies around the Sun by using one meter, and not hundreds of thousands of meters or kilometers he would not be able to define it precisely. I, too, can do such calculations but they will not be accurate; I understand if the difference is a matter of a few centimeters or millimeters, but when the difference is a matter of a few kilometers or hundreds of thousands of kilometers, then this I do not understand, for these are all just hypotheses and assumptions. Often times you pause and say, “Why did not certain things happen this way or that way?” Who is to blame if you were the ones doing the wrong calculations? Everybody makes mistakes in life, after all. When you want to build a house, you call an architect to draw the house plan and make an estimate for how much wood, stones, iron, nails, sand, whitewash, etc. you may need and you buy these materials. However, if you do not put these materials together correctly, your building will collapse and you will be injured under its ruins.

I am going to use an anecdote taken from Bulgarian life to explain my thought. This story took place some time in the forties or the fifties. A Bulgarian from the Southern part of the Balkan Peninsula, somewhere around Soloun,1 worked as a gardener with his father. As he was twenty years old and was not profiting much from the gardening, he grew tired of hoeing and decided to look for another trade that would suit him better. He took a job with a dressmaker thinking to himself, “Now this is an easy trade; all I have to do is sit here and take my time.” A week later a Turkish bey2 walked into the dress-maker’s shop and asked the owner to bring the yard-stick and the scissors to his home and to tailor him birbuchuklija3 pants from cloth.

However, the shop owner was not feeling good and, instead, sent his apprentice of a week and told him, “You go now and I will come later.” The apprentice followed the bey to his house and waited there an hour or two, but as his master did not arrive, the bey turned to the apprentice and told him, “Well, you look old enough to me to know this trade. Can you tailor the pants for me?” The apprentice answered, “Yes, I can.” The bey produced a big roll of cloth and said, “I want you to cut out birbuchuklija pants for me.” The apprentice took to cutting here and there, but the bey noticed that what the apprentice was cutting out did not look like birbuchuklija pants and told him, “This did not turn out to be pants, but can you, at least make me a saltamarka4.” The apprentice took to measuring and cutting here and there, again, but the Turk noticed that this was not shaping up to be a vest either. Finally, he said to the apprentice, “Now, you will make me a tobacco pouch, at least, and if you can’t do that either, I am going to beat you up.”

Just like the Bulgarian from the story, many of you have barely been with a master for a week, yet you take the yardstick and the scissors and are ready to tailor and to be teachers. Christ says, “Do not be such teachers.” If one is to be a teacher, he needs to have positive knowledge, i.e. he needs to have only one way of understanding, without exceptions. If you use one means to heal and, at the same time, you use the same means to kill, this does not mean that you have positive knowledge. If you use a knife to perform surgery and cut out the diseased flesh from a man’s body, but then you use the same instrument to cut this man’s throat, you cannot claim that you have used your knife correctly, for this is committing a crime. Some may say, “We haven’t done such a thing.” Oh, I know of many such teachers who have cut their disciples’ throats; they have also cut the legs, arms and ears of a few others- all this is morally speaking. It was not God who appointed these people as Teachers. They are all imposters. In every church there are teachers like these who, like the Bulgarian from the story, have only spent a week at the school but are already preaching.

Now, what is it that you should understand by the word Teacher or Master? This word is related to the purely Spiritual world. It is not teaching when you instruct people how to build churches or how to seed flowers and cabbage; no, this is not teaching. Good teaching implies an act of higher self-awareness when a purely spiritual process takes place. With good teaching the Master and the disciple need to focus their entire consciousness fully on the task that they have to accomplish; there needs to exist an exchange similar to the one between a mother and the child she raises, for the Teacher needs to convey certain truths and the student needs to use them correctly.

I will use another example to explain this. The story has it that there was an Englishman who went on a hunting trip to India. One day, as he was coming around a turn on the path, he felt a strong blow on his left arm. The blow came from a tigress. All she wanted to do was just break his left arm so that he could not fire his gun that was hanging from his right arm. The tigress then dragged him to her den where her three or four small cubs were waiting. She put him on the ground, pressed down his head and told him, “Now you will be quiet because I am going to teach my little ones.” Then she urged her cubs to try and throttle him. They circled around him but were afraid to approach him. After a while the hunter attempted to lift his head to see what was going on, but the tigress pressed down his head again and repeated, “I told you to be quiet, for I am teaching my little ones.” As you can see, the tigress, too, was a teacher. Somehow the hunter escaped, but later when he would relate the story he would say that the hardest part for him was when the tigress would press down his head so that the cubs could throttle him.
Anyone knows how to destroy; however, teaching implies a person who can teach one how to build in one’s mind and heart; a person who understands the deep meaning of the elements that can rejuvenate and build a new spiritual abode: a Spiritual body with which you can come back from the dead, as the Scripture says. God is waiting for this body to be built.

How are children born? In order for them to survive, they need to be born in the ninth month or, in some cases, in the seventh month, but this is not random and it is not about what month the parent wants his child to be born. The law is this: the nine-month period needed for the body to be formed should be completed. How does the body begin to form? First the extremities are formed: legs and arms, and then the brain and stomach are formed and, finally, the lungs are formed. As soon as the latter are formed breathing commences and then, if the child is not born right away, it may die.

Therefore, what Nature creates first is not the lungs but the extremities: the legs and the arms. The sublime in you is formed the same way: the human Spirit keeps learning in the mother’s womb, as well; it does not hibernate, but works together with the mother’s Spirit to create the body. According to the same law, the student and the Teacher need to work simultaneously together with the help of the Spirit.

That is why Christ says, “One is your Teacher.” And why is it that people love Christ? Because He gave something to the world: “I gave Life to those who do not have it so that they can have abundant Life.” You want to become Teachers. Let me ask you this then: what are you willing to give to the one whom you want to teach? If you taught someone and he became a worse person after that, then I say that you have not taught him anything. There is one great weakness that prevails in Christians today as well as in the modern churches and that is the weakness to preach, to instruct. This is not a bad aspiration in itself, but one needs to know the laws of teaching. The common laws require that a person who wants to be a teacher should have certain qualifications. That person then needs to take a test before a committee and only after that can they issue that person an employment paper and an appointment order with which he is officially appointed to the teaching position. Much the same way in the Spiritual world, too, one needs to wait for the Divine Spirit to enlighten and direct him. One who has not been enlightened by God’s Spirit does not have the right to teach and instruct because he will be breaking the Divine law. We will understand the meaning of teaching only when we grasp the deep meaning of these words of Christ’s; these words have an internal as well as external meaning. (I am talking here of internal Christianity, about that Christianity which can connect us to all areas of the Invisible World.) You say you want to be a Teacher, so I then ask you where you have studied and what school you have graduated from. “But I have read the Bible and I know the Gospel”, you say. No, this is not enough.

“But I know the Christian faith.” No, this is not enough. “But I belong to this and that church.” All I want to know is this: have you studied in Heaven, in that Institution for Higher Education where the Angels study? Do you understand the internal laws of Nature: how man is built, what his mind and heart are like, and how his soul is related to his Spirit? “I have read about these things.” What have you read? “Now, the soul is this far-fetched concept, this idea of a certain combination.” What is it a combination of? The human mind is supposedly a combination of abilities, but how do these things become combined? So you think that you know something, but I am not talking of a combination of individual parts, my friend, but of a real combination.

And it is because of this confusion in us that we speak so obscurely about the mind and the heart, without knowing where the heart is located. The heart resides in three places: one, the physical, is the one that you know of, but where is the heart of your feelings and that of your mind? You meet a person and you say of him that he is bad, but why is he bad? Years ago there was a bull in America who went crazy in appearance and scared all people around him. They decided to kill him but then a boy stepped forward who was able to read the minds of animals. This boy put his hand on the bull’s head and asked him, “What is wrong with you?” “There is a thorn in the back side of my leg and it is bothering me”, the bull told the boy. After they took the thorn out of the bull’s leg the bull calmed down. Likewise, one day you become crazy and people start pouring water over you. But then I say that there is no need for hoses, for there is a thorn in the back side of your leg; you need to pull out this thorn and that will take care of it. But now you have all kinds of learned people- professors and doctors- and they are all so ridiculous when they start talking about what went wrong with a man’s brain and they give a diagnosis. “There is such and such infection”, they say, “Surgery is necessary.” I see nothing but a little overheating of the brain.

Some four or five months ago some people came to tell me that a doctor’s son fell ill with a cold and later had complications until, finally, the doctor found that there was an infection in the brain and that the boy needed surgery. I said, “No surgery is necessary, for there is a ninety-nine percent chance that the child will die if you operate on him. He will get better without the operation.” But, what they do is go ahead with the surgery and the child dies. Of course, to the doctors the surgery was “successful”. What I am saying here is that people also perform spiritual surgery in spiritual matters, and what they do is cut out certain parts in order to get better, but this is not healing.

Modern people say that in order for someone to right his ways, he needs not to be beaten up like before, but he needs to be scalded like this, “You are a rascal, a thief; you are this and that.” Do you think that when all these sounds of yours enter his ears you will help change him? Not in the least, for the law is different and it goes like this: if you want to discipline someone else properly, first you need to discipline yourself. If you are bad, everyone around you will be bad. If I see a mother, who has conceived, and who takes to being angry and speaking ill of others, I can predict the consequences for her and I can describe fully the character and the fate of her baby; I can tell what will happen to him in the future. If a mother loses her temper easily, she should not think that the baby she gives birth to will be a saint and will take care of her in her old age, for one day this baby will take revenge on her and will say, “I wish I’ve never been born.” The same way, the student will say to his Teacher, “I wish you’ve never taught me.” A Teacher needs to be as pure as crystal water, in the full meaning of the word; he needs to be exemplary and there should be not the slightest trace of hesitation, faltering and disbelief. When Christ gives this instruction, he wants to point out the great danger to which we expose ourselves as well as the great responsibility that we take before Him for the maiming of some souls. Every mother and every teacher who does not know how to discipline and educate will be punished.

Now, the views that modern people hold of the Divine laws, of Heaven and of the Angels, are obscure and wrong, for modern people have no idea about these laws and about Heaven. First of all, Heaven is organized in a very smart way and knows its work; and then, between the Angels and people there exist certain relations just like between us and the plants and the animals exist certain relations. And then, since we do not know how to teach an animal, we bestow forty or fifty blows with our pole and our staff onto the animal, which we use to plow the field with and we think that, by doing this, we are fulfilling our role. God says, “I will teach you some day how to manage oxen and how to plow your field.” Some think that God cannot bring them down to a lower level, that God cannot take people back in their development. If God has turned some Angels into snakes and into animals with horns, he can surely make so you grow hooves. He can turn you into Angels as well as into devils; He can change your form as well. And because forms are important in the world- for they regulate our lives- we need to pay them special attention. If I were to build an unhygienic house for you with no windows on the Southern side, but only leave a few on the Northern side, and if I were to build this house deeply into the ground, at that, then do you know how you would feel after you have lived in this house for six or seven years? You will have a number of doctors coming and going into and out of your house much the same way that all those teachers who tell you that you do not need to have windows into the Spiritual world are first-rate liars. That is where the Sun of Life is. I would even say that your roofs should be made of glass so that the Sun can shine on you from above. If you have bright houses that were built like this, your forms will change and you will become very beautiful. I can do an experiment and you, too, can do an experiment on what I am teaching you and you will see what results you will have in four or five years. I am not teaching you that you should escape life, for this world, as I see it, is very good and people are very good; what I see, however, is that people have a thorn in their leg. Apostle Paul says that this is so and begs God to pull out this thorn. The thorn can be stuck in a different spot, too, but most often it is in the heel of the foot because it is with the feet that we are being held down onto this world. We need to learn to pull out this thorn scientifically, because Christianity, in my opinion, is a profound science.

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Post: #2

LoP Guest  Wrote:

Teachers

“But you, do not be called ‘Rabbi’; for One is your Teacher, the Christ, and you are all brethren.”
Mathew 23:8

Christ understands these words a little bit differently than society does. From a purely organic standpoint, the world has a few institutes that are Divine: the father, the mother and the home, for example. These are the first institutes on Earth; there is no establishment that is nobler or brighter than the home and also there is no higher title than that of a father or a mother. True, there are many fathers and mothers on Earth, but, in fact, they are stepfathers and stepmothers. The father and the mother play an important role when it comes to the organic world, for they transmit through their blood the qualities of their own souls to their children. The upbringing of children is determined by the qualities that the mother instills in the child from a very early age. By the word blood I mean not the ordinary blood, but that kind of blood which remains unchanged, the kind of blood that remains the same throughout all of life’s events. At this time I will not dwell on the difference between this twofold blood. All I can say now is that it is not that transient, changeable blood, but the other blood, which is like the rose essential oil that floats above the rose water and which has a real value in itself. The noble seed that the mother introduces into the child’s blood is like a valuable essential oil from which thereon spreads and wafts fragrantly among those who later surround this grown-up child. Nothing can be introduced and sown in man afterwards; what contemporary people call upbringing is nothing but training.

When the mother raises her child the process takes place in the roots: it is there, in the roots, where this process changes the form of the mind and the heart. With training, on the other hand, there is nothing but an external polishing. One can train a monkey or a dove but as soon as they are placed in their natural environment, they are sure to revert to their original life. They have done experiments in the United States where the government allots great amounts of money to the education of American Indians; some of these Indians graduate from various colleges and universities but as soon as they go back to their people they forget what they have learned and become wild again. A real change can only take place in one of those Indians if he is converted and embraces Christianity completely.

Such is the situation of a Teacher when it comes to the spiritual life: to be a Teacher or a Master means to give birth to someone. Christ does not say, “Do not teach”, but says, “Do not assume the title of a teacher”, or the title of a sick mother, because such a mother is bound to give birth to a scrawny child. If the mother has certain physical, mental or spiritual weaknesses, her child will be the same way, too. Can the contemporary teacher teach his students how oxygen and carbon bond, for example, provided that he, himself, does not understand the properties of these elements? He can conduct experiments, but these elements would not yield to him, because he has not yet become a master of these elements. Another teacher might teach the rotation of celestial bodies up in space, but if you were to ask him to mathematically define the rotation of these bodies around the Sun by using one meter, and not hundreds of thousands of meters or kilometers he would not be able to define it precisely. I, too, can do such calculations but they will not be accurate; I understand if the difference is a matter of a few centimeters or millimeters, but when the difference is a matter of a few kilometers or hundreds of thousands of kilometers, then this I do not understand, for these are all just hypotheses and assumptions. Often times you pause and say, “Why did not certain things happen this way or that way?” Who is to blame if you were the ones doing the wrong calculations? Everybody makes mistakes in life, after all. When you want to build a house, you call an architect to draw the house plan and make an estimate for how much wood, stones, iron, nails, sand, whitewash, etc. you may need and you buy these materials. However, if you do not put these materials together correctly, your building will collapse and you will be injured under its ruins.

I am going to use an anecdote taken from Bulgarian life to explain my thought. This story took place some time in the forties or the fifties. A Bulgarian from the Southern part of the Balkan Peninsula, somewhere around Soloun,1 worked as a gardener with his father. As he was twenty years old and was not profiting much from the gardening, he grew tired of hoeing and decided to look for another trade that would suit him better. He took a job with a dressmaker thinking to himself, “Now this is an easy trade; all I have to do is sit here and take my time.” A week later a Turkish bey2 walked into the dress-maker’s shop and asked the owner to bring the yard-stick and the scissors to his home and to tailor him birbuchuklija3 pants from cloth.

However, the shop owner was not feeling good and, instead, sent his apprentice of a week and told him, “You go now and I will come later.” The apprentice followed the bey to his house and waited there an hour or two, but as his master did not arrive, the bey turned to the apprentice and told him, “Well, you look old enough to me to know this trade. Can you tailor the pants for me?” The apprentice answered, “Yes, I can.” The bey produced a big roll of cloth and said, “I want you to cut out birbuchuklija pants for me.” The apprentice took to cutting here and there, but the bey noticed that what the apprentice was cutting out did not look like birbuchuklija pants and told him, “This did not turn out to be pants, but can you, at least make me a saltamarka4.” The apprentice took to measuring and cutting here and there, again, but the Turk noticed that this was not shaping up to be a vest either. Finally, he said to the apprentice, “Now, you will make me a tobacco pouch, at least, and if you can’t do that either, I am going to beat you up.”

Just like the Bulgarian from the story, many of you have barely been with a master for a week, yet you take the yardstick and the scissors and are ready to tailor and to be teachers. Christ says, “Do not be such teachers.” If one is to be a teacher, he needs to have positive knowledge, i.e. he needs to have only one way of understanding, without exceptions. If you use one means to heal and, at the same time, you use the same means to kill, this does not mean that you have positive knowledge. If you use a knife to perform surgery and cut out the diseased flesh from a man’s body, but then you use the same instrument to cut this man’s throat, you cannot claim that you have used your knife correctly, for this is committing a crime. Some may say, “We haven’t done such a thing.” Oh, I know of many such teachers who have cut their disciples’ throats; they have also cut the legs, arms and ears of a few others- all this is morally speaking. It was not God who appointed these people as Teachers. They are all imposters. In every church there are teachers like these who, like the Bulgarian from the story, have only spent a week at the school but are already preaching.

Now, what is it that you should understand by the word Teacher or Master? This word is related to the purely Spiritual world. It is not teaching when you instruct people how to build churches or how to seed flowers and cabbage; no, this is not teaching. Good teaching implies an act of higher self-awareness when a purely spiritual process takes place. With good teaching the Master and the disciple need to focus their entire consciousness fully on the task that they have to accomplish; there needs to exist an exchange similar to the one between a mother and the child she raises, for the Teacher needs to convey certain truths and the student needs to use them correctly.

I will use another example to explain this. The story has it that there was an Englishman who went on a hunting trip to India. One day, as he was coming around a turn on the path, he felt a strong blow on his left arm. The blow came from a tigress. All she wanted to do was just break his left arm so that he could not fire his gun that was hanging from his right arm. The tigress then dragged him to her den where her three or four small cubs were waiting. She put him on the ground, pressed down his head and told him, “Now you will be quiet because I am going to teach my little ones.” Then she urged her cubs to try and throttle him. They circled around him but were afraid to approach him. After a while the hunter attempted to lift his head to see what was going on, but the tigress pressed down his head again and repeated, “I told you to be quiet, for I am teaching my little ones.” As you can see, the tigress, too, was a teacher. Somehow the hunter escaped, but later when he would relate the story he would say that the hardest part for him was when the tigress would press down his head so that the cubs could throttle him.
Anyone knows how to destroy; however, teaching implies a person who can teach one how to build in one’s mind and heart; a person who understands the deep meaning of the elements that can rejuvenate and build a new spiritual abode: a Spiritual body with which you can come back from the dead, as the Scripture says. God is waiting for this body to be built.

How are children born? In order for them to survive, they need to be born in the ninth month or, in some cases, in the seventh month, but this is not random and it is not about what month the parent wants his child to be born. The law is this: the nine-month period needed for the body to be formed should be completed. How does the body begin to form? First the extremities are formed: legs and arms, and then the brain and stomach are formed and, finally, the lungs are formed. As soon as the latter are formed breathing commences and then, if the child is not born right away, it may die.

Therefore, what Nature creates first is not the lungs but the extremities: the legs and the arms. The sublime in you is formed the same way: the human Spirit keeps learning in the mother’s womb, as well; it does not hibernate, but works together with the mother’s Spirit to create the body. According to the same law, the student and the Teacher need to work simultaneously together with the help of the Spirit.

That is why Christ says, “One is your Teacher.” And why is it that people love Christ? Because He gave something to the world: “I gave Life to those who do not have it so that they can have abundant Life.” You want to become Teachers. Let me ask you this then: what are you willing to give to the one whom you want to teach? If you taught someone and he became a worse person after that, then I say that you have not taught him anything. There is one great weakness that prevails in Christians today as well as in the modern churches and that is the weakness to preach, to instruct. This is not a bad aspiration in itself, but one needs to know the laws of teaching. The common laws require that a person who wants to be a teacher should have certain qualifications. That person then needs to take a test before a committee and only after that can they issue that person an employment paper and an appointment order with which he is officially appointed to the teaching position. Much the same way in the Spiritual world, too, one needs to wait for the Divine Spirit to enlighten and direct him. One who has not been enlightened by God’s Spirit does not have the right to teach and instruct because he will be breaking the Divine law. We will understand the meaning of teaching only when we grasp the deep meaning of these words of Christ’s; these words have an internal as well as external meaning. (I am talking here of internal Christianity, about that Christianity which can connect us to all areas of the Invisible World.) You say you want to be a Teacher, so I then ask you where you have studied and what school you have graduated from. “But I have read the Bible and I know the Gospel”, you say. No, this is not enough.

“But I know the Christian faith.” No, this is not enough. “But I belong to this and that church.” All I want to know is this: have you studied in Heaven, in that Institution for Higher Education where the Angels study? Do you understand the internal laws of Nature: how man is built, what his mind and heart are like, and how his soul is related to his Spirit? “I have read about these things.” What have you read? “Now, the soul is this far-fetched concept, this idea of a certain combination.” What is it a combination of? The human mind is supposedly a combination of abilities, but how do these things become combined? So you think that you know something, but I am not talking of a combination of individual parts, my friend, but of a real combination.

And it is because of this confusion in us that we speak so obscurely about the mind and the heart, without knowing where the heart is located. The heart resides in three places: one, the physical, is the one that you know of, but where is the heart of your feelings and that of your mind? You meet a person and you say of him that he is bad, but why is he bad? Years ago there was a bull in America who went crazy in appearance and scared all people around him. They decided to kill him but then a boy stepped forward who was able to read the minds of animals. This boy put his hand on the bull’s head and asked him, “What is wrong with you?” “There is a thorn in the back side of my leg and it is bothering me”, the bull told the boy. After they took the thorn out of the bull’s leg the bull calmed down. Likewise, one day you become crazy and people start pouring water over you. But then I say that there is no need for hoses, for there is a thorn in the back side of your leg; you need to pull out this thorn and that will take care of it. But now you have all kinds of learned people- professors and doctors- and they are all so ridiculous when they start talking about what went wrong with a man’s brain and they give a diagnosis. “There is such and such infection”, they say, “Surgery is necessary.” I see nothing but a little overheating of the brain.

Some four or five months ago some people came to tell me that a doctor’s son fell ill with a cold and later had complications until, finally, the doctor found that there was an infection in the brain and that the boy needed surgery. I said, “No surgery is necessary, for there is a ninety-nine percent chance that the child will die if you operate on him. He will get better without the operation.” But, what they do is go ahead with the surgery and the child dies. Of course, to the doctors the surgery was “successful”. What I am saying here is that people also perform spiritual surgery in spiritual matters, and what they do is cut out certain parts in order to get better, but this is not healing.

Modern people say that in order for someone to right his ways, he needs not to be beaten up like before, but he needs to be scalded like this, “You are a rascal, a thief; you are this and that.” Do you think that when all these sounds of yours enter his ears you will help change him? Not in the least, for the law is different and it goes like this: if you want to discipline someone else properly, first you need to discipline yourself. If you are bad, everyone around you will be bad. If I see a mother, who has conceived, and who takes to being angry and speaking ill of others, I can predict the consequences for her and I can describe fully the character and the fate of her baby; I can tell what will happen to him in the future. If a mother loses her temper easily, she should not think that the baby she gives birth to will be a saint and will take care of her in her old age, for one day this baby will take revenge on her and will say, “I wish I’ve never been born.” The same way, the student will say to his Teacher, “I wish you’ve never taught me.” A Teacher needs to be as pure as crystal water, in the full meaning of the word; he needs to be exemplary and there should be not the slightest trace of hesitation, faltering and disbelief. When Christ gives this instruction, he wants to point out the great danger to which we expose ourselves as well as the great responsibility that we take before Him for the maiming of some souls. Every mother and every teacher who does not know how to discipline and educate will be punished.

Now, the views that modern people hold of the Divine laws, of Heaven and of the Angels, are obscure and wrong, for modern people have no idea about these laws and about Heaven. First of all, Heaven is organized in a very smart way and knows its work; and then, between the Angels and people there exist certain relations just like between us and the plants and the animals exist certain relations. And then, since we do not know how to teach an animal, we bestow forty or fifty blows with our pole and our staff onto the animal, which we use to plow the field with and we think that, by doing this, we are fulfilling our role. God says, “I will teach you some day how to manage oxen and how to plow your field.” Some think that God cannot bring them down to a lower level, that God cannot take people back in their development. If God has turned some Angels into snakes and into animals with horns, he can surely make so you grow hooves. He can turn you into Angels as well as into devils; He can change your form as well. And because forms are important in the world- for they regulate our lives- we need to pay them special attention. If I were to build an unhygienic house for you with no windows on the Southern side, but only leave a few on the Northern side, and if I were to build this house deeply into the ground, at that, then do you know how you would feel after you have lived in this house for six or seven years? You will have a number of doctors coming and going into and out of your house much the same way that all those teachers who tell you that you do not need to have windows into the Spiritual world are first-rate liars. That is where the Sun of Life is. I would even say that your roofs should be made of glass so that the Sun can shine on you from above. If you have bright houses that were built like this, your forms will change and you will become very beautiful. I can do an experiment and you, too, can do an experiment on what I am teaching you and you will see what results you will have in four or five years. I am not teaching you that you should escape life, for this world, as I see it, is very good and people are very good; what I see, however, is that people have a thorn in their leg. Apostle Paul says that this is so and begs God to pull out this thorn. The thorn can be stuck in a different spot, too, but most often it is in the heel of the foot because it is with the feet that we are being held down onto this world. We need to learn to pull out this thorn scientifically, because Christianity, in my opinion, is a profound science.

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So, what are you doing, brother...? I am not seeking to purchase the materials for my own house, but rather build it myself... on a foundation that I have chosen, and tested, for myself. Something like packing your own parachute, I assume. If I fall (fail)... well... I have nobody to blame but myself. I can place it nowhere else. I have, at least, this assurance...

What else would you have us do? Scientifically, speaking, that is... I suppose it is all a matter of what you are willing to place your own faith in. Mine finds its correspondences in my heart, and that is a good place to start. As good as any... that way, when I am finished building my own 'temple,' I am not living in a 'house'... I am the House. A brick House...