Showing results by narrator "John Marino" in All Categories

Today, I am going to talk about enthusiasm and how it makes all of life a joyous experience. Every normal person wishes to be well, happy and successful and there is nothing wrong with this. Sometimes we think that perhaps life withholds these good things from us, as though it didn't wish us to enter into the joy of living. And yet, Jesus said, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly."

Friends, the next voice you hear might be God's! Wouldn't it be wonderful if this were true? Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could hear the Voice of God? And perhaps we can. Perhaps we all have heard the Voice of God but haven't recognized it.

Man's three greatest needs are: to feel that he is needed, wanted and loved; to feel that he belongs to the universe in which he lives, and to have an object or objects upon which to lavish his affection. It is now known that most unhappiness comes from a sense of being rejected; of not being wanted, needed and loved. It is also known that a large percent of our physical troubles is a direct result of emotional congestions that follow in the wake of feeling that we don't belong to life.

Tonight's subject is: Pre-Existence. For every child born of woman, there is a son of God in the heavens, who is his ancestral Self. He is buried in you. He is the Reality of man. The Bible speaks of this son as Jesus Christ, the true identity of every child born of woman. God became man, that man may become God.

Through the whole life and teaching of Jesus we find this gentle approach. And yet he was always just, as well as kind. He didn't say that we could be saved in our mistakes, but that we must be saved from them. He knew that to err is human, to forgive is divine.

You know the story of Good Friday. A man is in a garden. It's night time. And one called Judas comes in search of him, seemingly to betray him. He comes into the garden, and it's dark, so he asks the simple question, "Where is Jesus?" Then the voice in the dark answered, "I am he."

Shakespeare said, "There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Whether or not this immortal bard was 100 percent right in this, one thing is certain: the mind does play some very weird tricks on us, some of them so startling as almost to convince us that we are actually obsessed.

We are meeting for the purpose of getting a fuller understanding of the powers that are latent within us. Our prayers, our meditations, and all of our words, should tend to the one point in the lesson - strength. Remember, this is a school in which the Lord of the universe is the teacher. As students, we should demonstrate the lesson as we proceed. As students of truth, we know that there is one universal strength, "in you all, through you all and above you all," and that man expresses that strength. And let us be "instant," as Paul says, in our prayer for strength.

Would you like to trade in your old car for a new model without any extra expense to yourself? Or would you like to refurnish your home? Wouldn't it be strange if your car or home could remodel themselves so that nothing about them could wear out? This sounds kind of fantastic, doesn't it? And yet, we are told that none of us is more than a year old physically, that our entire body is renewed every year.

Recently I read a book called Vanished Parts of Yesterday by Lord Frederick Hamilton. In it he tells the story of Catherine the Great - who, when she found the first violet of spring, ordered a sentry to be placed over it to protect it from being plucked. Forgetting to rescind the order, day and night, summer and winter, a sentry stood where 150 years ago, a violet bloomed. The new generation did not know why the sentry was there and he didn't either. It was simply a tradition!

There are records which show that thousands of years ago, in the secret temples in Egypt, there were people called Hermetics, who retired from the world for the purpose of getting closer to Divine Mind. They separated themselves from all religious thought, and made a unity with Divine Resource, the Cause Side of existence. They were like some of our scientists, experimenters in the laboratory of Being.

If I told you who you really are, it would shock you, for in this world you can be frightened, limited, and filled with doubt; yet I tell you that you are God himself, the very one who created and sustains the universe. When you first hear this you will no doubt resist it and believe the one who makes this statement to be insane because the idea seems impossible. But I tell you: God is in Christ reconciling the world to himself.

God started with a wish, saying; "Let us make man in our image." And we are told that we will be perfect as our father is perfect, and holy as our father is holy. Therefore, whatever God was, when his work is completed, man must be. We are told to be imitators of God as dear children, so we must discover how he became us in order to imitate him. It seems God lives as one possessed by a dream.

We have been talking about God's law and God's promise. God's law is conditional. You cannot be in one state and not suffer the consequences of not being in another state, and you and I are free to imagine any state in the world, and imagining that state we can occupy it. Occupying the state, we fertilize it; having fertilized it, it has its own appointed hour for fulfillment. Every vision has its own appointed hour it will flower; if it seems long, wait for it - it is sure and it will not be late.

Now, you have heard the expression time and time again: "Oh, he is reaching for the moon." It could be an ambition based upon your social desire. You want to transcend the limitation of your world where you were born. Or it could be some financial ambition, and friends who know your limitations will say of you: "He is reaching for the moon." Or it could be some tyrant trying to conquer the earth.

In the second chapter of the Book of Luke the story is told of Jesus' parents, worried and seeking him for three days, finding him and complaining, to which Jesus said: "How is it that you sought me? Know you not that I must be about my father's business?" I ask you not to put yourself in that frame of mind. Your earthly parents seek you and, at the tender age of 12, you dare to say to them: "I must be about my father's business."

If you awake in a dream and know exactly who is imagining it, you can control your dream. The same thing is true in this world. Become aware that it, too, is a dream. Awake! Remember who is imagining it, and control your day. Then one day you will completely awake to find yourself in that body which is the Lord Jesus Christ, to know that everything is your imagination pushed out.

Change your conception of yourself. Revalue yourself and you will automatically change your world. Man has always played the losing game by attempting to change his world, while he himself remained with his present values or conceptions of himself. Jesus discovered this law. So instead of changing men he changed himself. He said, "And now I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth." He found himself to be the truth of all that he saw his world to be.

The dream of life unfolds on this level, as well as on a higher one. On this level we see things happen and are given reasons for wars and revolutions, as well as the geological causes for the convulsions of nature. But we do not know and cannot perceive their hidden cause, for it lies in the imagination of man. All things spring, not from the ostensible causes to which they are attributed, but from that which is hidden - man's own wonderful human imagination!

We are told that when Jesus found Philip, he said, "Follow me."

Then Philip told Nathanael, "We have found him of whom Moses and the law and the prophets wrote."

Philip is one who is interested in the workings of the mind. Looking for one who is searching for the source of the phenomena of life, Jesus finds one in whom he can reveal himself.