I suppose we could say that what I have been saying to you represents my own discovery of truth. I don't mean my invention of it but my own way of coming to the discovery and realization of it. And that part of this work of the Infinite Way is to help others make a discovery within themselves of truth.

You can see that it would be fatal just to open the books and read them and swallow everything and just say, "That's it." -- and then go around quoting Joel and proving that that's it. That's really not the nature of the message of the Infinite Way. That is why we're not organized or rather it's one of the reasons we're not organized.

We're not prepared to say that, "This is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and we hope that you never read anything else."

This is more or less an impulse that there is within me to share with those who are led to me, my discovery and those things which I discovered, but above everything to reveal to them how I discovered it so that they may make these discoveries themselves.

Now as you know, I did not begin to perceive the nature of truth until I learned about meditation. I did have the spiritual experience, I had many of them, and I was doing spiritual healing work but I did not know the nature of truth. I could've quoted some things out of books but that was a long, long way from having any knowledge of truth. You might really say that I was living on quotations, and living on quotations is not a healthy diet. They're helpful in the early stages but that's all.

Now when I learned the secret of meditation that is when I began to learn the secret of life. And through meditation I have discovered things which are in the writings and which are in our class work but which can only be valuable to you when you discover them and realize them within yourself.

For instance, I might quote to you one statement which should make all other scripture obsolete and unnecessary.

"I and my Father are one. Son thou art ever with me and all that I have is thine."

Now you know if you really know that you have ended your search for truth, and you have ended your search for God, and you need no scripture, you need no teachers, you need nothing -- you have it all. And yet you know as well as I do that those words have been in the Bibles for hundreds of years and still here we are studying, meditating, pondering… Why? Even though you were to agree with the Master that that is the absolute truth -- "I and the Father are one." -- you are still far from the demonstration of it, the realization, in fact you may be just as far as you were before you even heard those words. It takes more than knowing words. It takes actual experience. I think it's in the first chapter of "Living the Infinite Way" that I have said that the Infinite Way is not another message on truth but the experience of God. And that's what it is because that's what it leads to. Reading the books isn't an experience of God but reading the books can lead to it if you follow through.

Now this is very important to know what I've just said because I'm going to lead to a point that probably is the modern language way of saying that, "I and the Father are one, and all that the Father hath is mine." And yet, it says something beyond that. Now this too, was a discovery, and this too was a revelation, and it was a revelation that came to me through meditation. And that is why meditation plays the important part in our work that it does. I believe you can learn anything you want with your mind but I do not believe that you can demonstrate any spiritual truth until you rise above the level of thought and mind into the intuitive spiritual faculty. And, so far, there is no way known on Earth of accomplishing that except by means of meditation.

Yes, it does come to some by a divine grace. For some unknown reason the finger of God reaches out and touches some people and there they are. They're in the full and complete spiritual consciousness without ever having taken the steps that we take leading up to it. There have been many such people. One of our happiest and yet unhappiest of men was one of those -- that was Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman was just a miserable man like the rest of us when in some unknown way for some unknown reason, except perhaps that there was an inner longing, the finger of God touched him and he entered the realm of spiritual awareness. What kept him miserable afterward was that he had to live in two worlds, and living in two worlds is a difficult thing.

Now for the rest the finger of God touches us just to the point of giving us an inner hunger -- an inner dissatisfaction. Sometimes that hunger and dissatisfaction becomes so great that we become diseased -- physically or mentally or morally or financially. And when that gets deep enough in us a cry goes out of us, "Oh God, oh God, oh God! Is there a God?" And that's usually the beginning of wisdom because from there on we are very apt to follow some way until we arrive.

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