All that words can do is lead you to the truth, whatever that truth is, and the understanding that can be extracted from knowing the truth. Beyond that, you must have the "searchingness" that is equivalent to the scientific interest one might have in the physics of the universe. 

You are stuck with words, and if you have a bureaucratic heart but lack the soul that would enable you to extrapolate the meaning behind the words, you are left with verses and chapters. It's like a living death. 

Christianity, for a thousand years at least, ever since Christ passed away from the earth and left his ministry in the hands of mere men, has been busy sterilizing the meanings of scriptures instead of understanding the content of the words so fully that the words themselves can be forgotten. We should liken words to road maps. Once we have used a road map to go, say, to New York, we no longer need the road map once we arrive at our destination. If you keep studying the road map, imagining yourself to be on a journey while failing to get in the car, you will never get anywhere at all. 

It's the same with studying scripture. You dare not, under penalty of a living death, go that way. The scripture itself says that "the letter killeth," and the spirit of that, is you can derive it from the letters, the words of the laws, the experiences of other people as written in scripture or elsewhere, it permeates your being beyond the need of words. They will have done their job. 

Words are the only tool available to those who seek to lead us to understanding. They speak of the reality, but they do not contain it within themselves, any more than the word "tree" can offer you shade from the hot sun. We give too much attention to the words themselves we are in danger of stuck, hung up, on them and becoming spiritual bureaucrats, dead from the neck up, thinking we have something that we do not have. 

Consider the commandment of Jesus to "love God with all thy heart and thy neighbor as thyself." If you were able to extract the metaphysical meaning of those words, if you were able to understand the root of them with great clarity, to grasp it with everything you have, your heart, your soul, your mind, your strength--really understand it--your life would take a marvelous turn. Your health would improve, your family, your life. If enough people in this country were to understand that particular law upon which all other laws rest, the country would become a paradise. 

Life is in the present moment. This moment is always. Now is forever. You must live in the now, the now present. There are two modi operandi available to you. The one is like that of an animal in the present. Now listen carefully to see the difference if you have the perception to do so, although most people don't--it's like talking to the wall. I don't mean to be rude, but the great unwashed masses are incapable of this understanding. Most Americans are simply animals, as are most of the people in the world. There is little hope for them. Hope exists only for the individuals who stand head and shoulder above the masses by their yearning and they will understand what I am about to say. 

"if you live in the time presence,

you live in the now present and

you live forever."

There is time present, and there is time presence. Animals live in time present; for them, there is no time presence. Time presence contains the factor of objectivity, and animals do not have the soul or consciousness that human beings are supposed to have. We do, but we lose it. We submerge our consciousness in our devolving animal form. The fact that you are living in time present reveals that you are not living objectively, beyond your thought stream, beyond the irrational animal feelings and thoughts that drive and control you, and through which you are bonded like an animal to the environment. 

The environment is full of other animals, human beings that have become animals by virtue of some mysterious failing called "ego." Human beings are slaves. There is not a human being, or at least there are very few, who are not slaves. They can believe they are free only because they can not see that they are slaves. They are missing the objective state that would show then what slaves they really are. They are in a state of denial. If you do not see by this other way of seeing, this inner light that most of you have denied and put out, you have no way to see that you are a slave. You are free only because you cannot see, and will not see, that you are a slave. 

You have the illusion of freedom, and this freedom allows you to be more and more of an animal as you sink lower than a worm's belly, and the more you respond to temptation, the pressures of life, like an animal dancing under the ringmaster's cracking whip, you cannot see that hidden master, the subliminal suggestions that control and shape (or miss-shape) you. 

You cannot see what you have fallen to because just enough of the human nature remains in you to experience a twinge of guilt and shame whenever you get a glimpse of the conflict between what you are and what you could have been if you had followed the light of conscience at the edge of thought. You see it as the punisher and the enemy, and you look on anything that gives you a sense of freedom from it as your friend. That is the illusion you live under, but the fact is that you lack full awareness. Of course, you are conscious but you have no conscious because you drown in it drinking and smoking, eating and sexing, theater going and just plain living it up, losing yourself in the activity of the flesh. You are always arousing sensual feelings so that your consciousness will be drawn into the mindset, or thought process, of the fantasy world or holodeck of your own thinking, so that you can elude the time presence that preexists us and through which we should exist forever. 

Now, if you live in the time presence, you live in the now present and you live forever. It's a spiritual life. You are able then in the time present to be above time, beyond time. It's as though the rest of the world is represented by a fast-moving river, and in that river the rest of humanity floats on rafts without engines, with the river moving faster than the rafts or boats. The river represents time flowing over those boats, people without oars, pushing them toward a waterfall, an inevitable end, the end of time for them. They are helpless. Time is running out. 

We are all subject to everything in the universe: the moon, the sun, the stars. Creatures are subject to time; they live in time present and they do not have a time presence. In time presence you are raised above the time stream. It's like sitting on the bank of a river and watching everybody struggle. You can watch the time go by. To me it is always now. I get up in the morning and it's now. I'm driving my car and it's now, cleaning my teeth and it's now, and having my breakfast now, and coming to the office now. I don't feel time passing; it is always now. I can see time passing, but I don't experience it. 

Strangely, I always feel young even though I am not young. I live in time presence and I am talking to you from time presence. My words are shaped by what I am given to say. Unfortunately, most of you are not living. You don't know the difference between time present and time presence. The time presence: if you have union with it, you are in the Creator's time presence and His presence lifts your consciousness above the thought stream. 

If you live in your though stream, you are living in your brain, past and future. There is no such thing as past, no such thing as future. You are simply lost in the time stream, and when you are lost in the time stream you are like one of the animals. Instead of being influenced by time presence and basking in its sweetness and light, its purpose and meaning as it was preordained on earth as it is in heaven, you are subject to the forces that keep you happy as though you had any sense. 

"No man can worship two masters. You respond to one or the other."

If you are reacting emotionally, like an animal, you are subject to the world around you and influenced by forces you cannot and will not see. you have a sense of freedom, but this freedom is not free. It is free only from the truth that could set you free and show you what a pathetic slave you really are. You won't draw a sane breath as long as you live. You will live a meaningless existence. You'll have your pleasure and your creepy creature comforts, your cars and your parties and your friends, play canasta and go to the theaters and enjoy your life--go ahead, enjoy it. It becomes meaningless and empty, and if it doesn't, there is something terribly wrong and no one can fix it. If it hasn't become meaningless and empty by now, and you have the opportunity to live that life that leads to death, emptiness and the realization that something is terribly wrong, everything is going wrong with your life: your marriage, your health, your everything--what does it take to wake you up? To make you realize that you are existing in a wrong way? 

No man can worship two masters. You respond to one or the other. The trouble is that you don't realize you have a master--and it's the lower, not the higher. You are being shaped by this ringmaster cracking the whip, and you think you are a free person, an individual free-thinking person. But everything that is going wrong with you now has gone wrong with every other person who have ever lived under the same laws. They had the same excuses, the same logic, or illogic. 

He who represents time presence can lift you out of your unconsciousness, your thinking, feeling self, and make your consciousness subject to His ruling, His will on earth. His will, not yours; you don't have a will. The only will you have is to will which way you want to will. You can will your own freedom, you can will to do what the hell you want, to be what you want to be and play god and go to hell any way you want--that's your choice. That's not my choice. Maybe it isn't yours. Maybe you don't know how to get back. Maybe I can show you. Maybe, maybe not. It all depends on how sincere you are. 

Many of you live from your emotional reactions, and you think that's being human, but nothing can be further from the truth--that's a lie, a lie perpetuated for those who want to believe such a lie. Your emotional state is dehumanizing to you. In your delusions of grandeur, you cultivate these emotional reactions, these failings, these bondings that turn into bondage. They support your ego, and as long as you are caught up in an emotional state, you can hear only the lies you want to believe. You hear only what you want to believe in your brain, and the emotional state keeps your consciousness drawn in and away from the truth, the inner light, time presence or timelessness, the always "now" state of being, eternal youth, eternal life. 

The emotional ego life stimulates the emotional reactions of the animal, but because human beings have a consciousness, we should not cultivate the emotional state of animals and make it the life of our ego. We escape in to it for a sense of being alive and vital, and in doing so we become more of an ego animal, lee of a human being. Your soul becomes tainted with strange thoughts, strange lusts and angsts and cruelties as you are slowly drawn away from the ideal state that God had in mind when He created you and all there is. 

I'm not asking you to be a prune or a prude, some kind of Stoic, rigid and mechanical, a religious bureaucrat. No, far from it. I am certainly none of the above! I'm a carefree person. Carefree are those who hunger and thirst after the right way. It comes from the old English word "blithe" and it means "carefree." Blessed are those who hunger for that state of mind are unhappy with their birth "wrong," the way they were born. We all have to live under the gun, so to speak, because we were born to parents like animals, but the first man was not. 

Ever since Adam, mankind has been born of woman, and some of us have a nagging awareness of the dilemma it has put us in and long to be born again. "To be born again": what does it mean? It is to find a way to be lifted from our subjectivity to time, living like an animal, body and soul, in time present as it flows over us and takes us inexorably toward the waterfall, the abyss. 

Those who have the eyes and the ears to understand will understand. The rest can go to hell. That's where they're going anyway. Narrow is the way and few are those who find it. I'm not the only person to say that. I'm just hoping that my fellow Americans will wake up before it's too late, because if you are not ruled by the eternal now state of consciousness in which you were designed to live, you will be ruled by tyrants, as you presently are. 

You had your freedom in this country. You inherited it, and now you wonder why you are losing your freedom. That's the mystery. It's because you have no spiritual gut. You are no longer subject to Him who made the universe and created you in His image, even in your mother's womb, to be subject to Him. You have been re-created, re-birthed as it were, by the world, by corruption. You don't know how to deal with the moment. You respond to the pressures to temptation, and you don't know how not to respond. Slavishly you act out your programming and then make excuses for it. 

What a pathetic lot! All of you who listen to your psychologists and entertainers and gurus and religions--are you better off? Not really. You think you are, but that's the problem. Most of you who listen to me know that you're not, and you are the ones I want to help to come into that world of the right way, where you will be able to obey your conscience without conflict, anxiety, guilt. 

In the moment of truth, you meet the pressures of life, and you react by becoming upset in a way that separates you from the good. If you respond to pressure, as you all do, and think it's natural to be upset, you're out of you're gourd. it is not natural for you. It's natural for animals to react to pressure, to be intimidated and to respond. in human beings it's failing, and all other failings spring from that first failing, all of them. When you respond to pressures and temptations, all of them--like seeing some money and knowing you shouldn't take it. That's a temptation that excites you. You can feel your body tingling. Or in the case of you gentlemen, you may see a pretty woman who is not your wife, and you feel a temptation to do what you shouldn't. You can feel the rush that engulfs your consciousness and pulls it away from your being able to obey what is right in your heart. You are becoming dehumanized and you are being controlled, whether you see it or not. 

If you gather up the courage to stop making excuses, you might be able to see how far you have fallen. the excuse mechanism gives you the rationale for your compulsive, slavish behavior. It helps you to deny the truth of what is happening to you, unfortunately, because it keeps you from being saved from it. 

How many of you make excuses when you do something dumb? Hold up your hand. If you didn't raise your hand, you're a bloody liar. Excuses are the immutable evidence that you are not living your life properly. They have become your truth. You can rationalize anything at all, even the lies that occur to you to help your ego save face. Even those lies, which are excuses, become your truth. you don't manufacture them yourself--you don't create them. They come from the source, the father of all lies, the ringmaster who is cracking the whip over you. You are no ordinary animal, subject to ordinary environments, but you allow the evil lurking in others to screw with your brain and evolve those emotional reactions. They gloat over your susceptibility to their blandishments. I hope that some of you got the message. I'll never stop trying to make it available to you