Why Man Must Forgive Himself: Universal Freedom through Forgiveness, 1971

LECTURE: Why Man Must Forgive Himself:
Universal Freedom through Forgiveness
April 9, 1971

LECTURE TRANSCRIPT

This afternoon our subject involves forgiveness.  It tells us why we must learn to forgive ourselves and why we must learn to forgive others.  I presume that the average person has little idea how much a part a lack of forgiveness plays in physical illness.  There are many people in the world today who are sick solely because they refuse to forgive someone else.

How this works is interesting.  In a way forgiveness creates a flow, and a flow is necessary if you want to prevent arthritis.  That’s what I said and it happens to be true.  Arthritis is often the result of crystallized feelings that we have, a resentment against ourselves or a resentment against someone else.  It is interesting how you can break up the ice packs or the congestion in your own thought and feeling world by the ritual of forgiveness, you know, thaw out.

Now at first the whole idea may lambast you.  You may say, “Well, I don’t have any feelings.  I don’t resent anything that people do.”  But let me call to your attention that one split second of thought and feeling needs to be forgiven because it has a way of solidifying and providing a sedimentation in the bottom of the test tube of the individual life.  It falls down, maybe it’s only a speck of little dust, but all congestion in our feeling world is the result of a failure to forgive someone.

Now maybe you forgive everybody but yourself for your own mistakes.  This must be remedied by you.  No one else can possibly cleanse your being of resentment except yourself because probably no one else knows it except the good Lord and he isn’t telling such things to other people.  I’ve never known God to gossip.  He’s too busy.  The Spirit, the great, great, creative Spirit, is too busy.

Now I would like to send to my office this afternoon for a copy of my book Hiawatha.  Is one of our assistants or ushers here?  I’m just doing this on an impromptu basis but I would like to read a passage from Hiawatha to you.  I will give you the key.  I hope this is the right key.

And while we’re on the subject of keys, forgiveness is the greatest key in the world.  Now you have to actually do something about this ritual of forgiveness if you want to really have a freeing‑up take place in your consciousness, the flexing of the muscles of your con­sciousness.  If you want to really feel free and watch the burdens roll off your back, start practicing forgiveness.

When you first read about this subject, I mean, read about it in the Beacon, I daresay you little realized just how important it really is.  But it is important to you because it will change you and it will also change other people that you are associated with.

I don’t know whether or not everyone in this audience is aware of the fact that everything you touch with your physical fingers has a more or less permanent akashic imprint put upon it.  When you shake hands with someone, or when you touch anything, you leave some of your substance deposited on that.  And layers and layers and layers are builded up of substance.  People who are clairvoyant, clairaudient, clairsentient, I don’t know if that’s the one or not, does that have‑-

     Student:  I think there’s another one but I don’t know where it is.

     MLP:  This is the one, will you excuse me just a moment, please, have to examine this.  Yes, this is probably all right.

So forgiveness is a very vital ingredient in the nature of becoming Godlike or manifesting or exhibiting the qualities of God.  Of course, if we were all completely Godlike, we would have nothing to forgive but because we are human, because mankind has descended from the great cosmic heights envisioned by the Spirit in the divine image, man has something to forgive.

Now the sinister force may not be believed in by some, and I understand it has no reality, but while you are living in a physical body and subject to all kinds of laws involving the thoughts of others and the feelings of others and the radiation of other people’s energy imprint, you have to reckon with these.  And that’s why you have a tube of light given to you by your Presence.  If there were no arrows and slings of outrageous fortune that you had to deflect, you would have no need to have a tube of light.  You need a tube of light from your Presence because of these energies of darkness that are everywhere manifesting in the world.

Now Michael the Archan­gel, I’m quoting the scriptures, when contending with the devil, durst not rebuke him openly but said, “The Lord rebuke thee.”  So we see that Michael, who sometimes wears the helmet of crystalline impregnated light substance with faith in that helmet, when he goes into the astral realm to do his work to help free people, finds a need to have a crystalline helmet upon him.  Don’t you think it would be a pretty good idea if you and I had on our tube of light all the time and stood guard?

You know, it is in unguarded moments that mankind find their greatest defeats, when they are so smug in their feeling and say, “Well, at last I’ve made it.”  You have never made it until your course is complete and should never have an attitude of smugness.  All of us should maintain that basic humility that the law requires because born out of humility will come the great flow of the winds of the Holy Spirit.  And then mankind can ventilate all of his stored‑up emotions and feelings, the pent‑up and frozen emotional substance, the water of his being that’s all frozen with ice.  He can melt it but he does it by the Holy Spirit, by the son of God, by the radiance of the light itself.

I want to read you, then, from this work that by God’s grace I had the ability many years ago when I was Professor Longfellow at Cambridge to write and I want to read this to you.  “The Peace Pipe.”

On the mountains of the prairie,
on the great red pipestone quarry,
Gitche Manitou, the Mighty,
he the master of life descending,
on the red crags of the quarry
stood erect and called the nations,
called the tribes of men together.
From his footprints flowed a river,
leaped into the light of morning,
o’er the precipice plunging downward,
gleamed like [word missing] the comet.
And the spirit swooping earthward
with its finger on the meadow
traced the winding pathway for it,
saying to it, ‘Run in this way.’
From the red stone of the quarry
with his hand he broke a fragment,
molded it into a pipe head,
shaped and fashioned it with figures
from the margin of the river,
took a long reed for a pipe stem
with its dark green leaves upon it,
filled the pipe with bark of willow,
with the bark of the red willow
breathed upon the neighboring forest,
made its great boughs shape together
till in flame they burst and kindled
and erect upon the mountain
Gitche Manitou, the Mighty,
smoked the calumet, the peace pipe,
as a signal to the nations.
And the smoke rose slowly, slowly
through the tranquil air of morning,
first a single line of darkness,
then a denser, bluer vapor,
then a snow white cloud unfolding
like the treetops of the forest,
ever rising, rising, rising
till it touched the top of heaven,
till it broke against the heavens
and rolled outward all around it.
From the vale of [word missing],
from the valley of Wyoming,
from the groves of Tuscaloosa,
from the far‑off Rocky Mountains,
from the northern lakes and rivers
all the tribes beheld the signal,
saw the distant smoke ascending,
the puquana of the peace pipe.
And the prophets of the nations
said, ‘Behold it, the puquana.
By this signal from afar off
ascending like a wand of willow,
weaving like a hand that beckons,
Gitche Manitou, the Mighty,
calls the tribes of men together,
calls the warriors to his council.’
Down the rivers, o’er the prairies
came the warriors of the nations,
came the Delawares and Mohawks,
came the Choctaws and Comanches,
came the Soshones and Blackfeet,
came the Pawnees and the Omahas,
came the Mandans and Dakotans,
came the Hurons and Ojibwas.
All the warriors drawn together
by the signal of the peace pipe
to the mountains of the prairie,
to the great red pipestone quarry.
As they stood there on the meadow
with their weapons and their war gear,
painted like the leaves of autumn,
painted like the sky of morning,
wildly glaring at each other,
in their faces stern defiance,
in their hearts the feuds of ages,
the hereditary hatred,
the ancestral thirst of vengeance,
Gitche Manitou, the Mighty,
the creator of the nations,
looked upon them with compassion,
with fraternal love and pity,
looked upon their wrath and wranglings
but as quarrels among children,
but as feuds and fights of children.
Over them he stretched his right hand
to subdue their stubborn natures,
to allay their thirst and fever
by the shadow of his right hand,
spake to them with voice majestic
as the sound of far‑off waters
falling into deep abysses
warning, chiding spake in this wise,
“O my children, my poor children,
listen to the words of wisdom,
listen to the words of warning
from the lips of the Great Spirit,
from the master of life who made you.
I have given you lands to hunt in.
I have given you streams to fish in.
I have given you bear and bison.
I have given you roe and reindeer.
I have given you brant and beaver,
filled the marshes full of wild fowl,
filled the rivers full of fishes.
Why then are you not contented?
Why then will you hunt each other?
I am weary of your quarrels,
weary of your wars and bloodshed,
weary of your prayers for vengeance,
of your wranglings and dissensions.
All your strength is in your union.
All your danger is in discord.
Therefore be at peace henceforward
and as brothers live together.
I will send a prophet to you,
a deliverer of the nations
who shall guide you and shall teach you,
who shall toil and suffer with you.
If you listen to his counsel,
you will multiply and prosper.
If his warnings pass unheeded,
you will fade away and perish.
Bathe now in the stream before you.
Wash the war paint from your fingers.
Wash the bloodstains from your faces.
Bury your war clubs and your weapons.
Break the red stone from this quarry.
Mold and make it into peace pipes.
Take the reeds that grow beside you.
Deck them with your brightest feathers.
Smoke the calumet together
and as brothers live henceforward.”
Then upon the ground the warriors
threw their cloaks and shirts of deerskin,
threw their weapons and their war gear,
leaped into the rushing river,
washed the war paint from their faces.
Clear above them flowed the water,
clear and limpid from the footprints
of the master of life descending.
Dark below them flowed the water,
soiled and stained with streaks of crimson
as if blood were mingled with it.
From the river came the warriors,
clean and washed from all their war paint.
On the banks their clubs they buried,
buried all their warlike weapons.
Gitche Manitou, the Mighty,
the Great Spirit, the Creator,
smiled upon his helpless children.
And in silence all the warriors
broke the red stone of the quarry,
smoothed and formed it into peace pipes,
broke the long reeds by the river,
decked them with their brightest feathers,
and departed each one homeward
while the Master of Life ascending
through the opening of the cloud curtains,
through the doorways of the heavens,
vanished from before their faces
in the smoke that rolled around him,
the puquana of the peace pipe.

     Thus ends the reading of a portion of the Song of Hiawatha.  I take this song today to be a theme song of our lecture.  And any lecture that cannot practically be translated into virtue for the people of this world is nothing but a vainglorious display of human words.  But herein in the idea, in the concept of forgiveness to ourselves and forgiveness to our fellowmen lies the means of deliverance that will work literal cosmic magic in our body, our mind, our soul and our spirit.  It will provide for us the fruit of cosmic abundance and a pathway, a doorway that will open leading to God.

Let us, then, today make a high resolve within ourself, a resolve that never again shall any human being upon the face of this earth from the personal standpoint be able to irritate or irk us.  You say that is a tall order.  “Why, I even irk myself,” you say.  Don’t be irked by yourself.  Why?  Because your Real Self is already perfect.  Your Real Self is made in the divine image, the divine magic, the divine eye magic, the divine image.

When you understand this, when you grasp this inner hieroglyph with your outer consciousness and then allow it to permeate through, and here we must understand the formation of the colander, so I want you to very carefully observe what I am going to do.  I’m going to try to show you how this works.

Man has four lower bodies, a cosmic square.  He has three higher bodies, a cosmic triangle.  This completes the perfection of the number seven.  We will be concerned primarily with the four lower bodies.  You have a physical body which is a reflection of emotional substance.

How many people in this world right today or in these rooms have not had experiences like I’m about to relate where some terrible things happens in the sense that you go somewhere and you’re going to talk to somebody.  And you know you have a controversial subject to discuss with them so you want to be oh so diplomatic.  You have in your heart to be so kind to this person and yet it’s a controversial subject.

So you come in with all the diplomacy you know how to muster and, lo and behold, the minute you get a word out of your mouth the other person begins to huff and puff like a steam engine with anger.  And they can hardly contain themselves.  Their face grows red and soon terrible words are spoken.

You return to your home and as evening draws near the words of the Master come clear, “Let not the sun go down upon thy wrath.”  But you find it very difficult, the injustice of it all.  Someone has maligned you, someone has hurt you, someone has wronged you and surely this someone is to blame.

And so you find your pillow and in the little pillow talk before you go to sleep, rather than practice the ritual of forgiveness, you go to sleep with a feeling of anger.  And out of your body rises the ka and out of your body rises a part of yourself, a wraithlike appearance.  And it carries itself over land and sea until it finds the home and the abode, the dwelling place of this individual.

When I tell you that psychic murder can be performed, you must believe it because it is true.  People can fall asleep at night and murder another person or make them physically ill or mentally ill or emotionally disturbed because their energies are not at peace with the Son of God and with the world.

These conditions can react, then, violently upon ourselves.  As the law comes full circle, there returns to our own domain exactly what we have sent out.  Have we sent out love?  Then love returns on wings of song and harmony.  Have we sent out hatred?  Then hatred returns, gathering more of its kind and more of its substance until our life is made miserable by the vibratory actions that we ourselves have initiated.

For it does not come from God.  It does not come from the Masters. It does not come from heaven.  It is a product of our own imagination and our own confusion.  It is a part of the chaos of man’s physical being but no part of God.

Let us, then, understand that we must learn how to practice the ritual of forgiveness and be most careful that we, like the old Indians, understand this adage, “Until you have walked in a man’s moccasins so many moons, be not hasty to judge him.”

In reality, we should never judge one another because it is most difficult to do unless one has the gift of discerning of spirits.  And then I think in most cases, as in the case of Jesus where he stood by the woman at the well and he looked at her and he said, “Thou hast had five husbands and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband.”  You see, the gift of discerning of spirits is so easy that it’s almost juvenile.  Once you have this gift, once you have this means of discerning the spirits of another, you can tell with such accuracy exactly what the vibratory action in a person’s thought and feeling world is that there is no question but what you are right.

But if you’re just practicing imagination, be very careful.  If you just think that you have this gift and do not actually have it, beware because many people are this way.  They think they have gifts and don’t have them.

But be careful how you judge.  Even if you have the gift of discerning of spirits and someone comes before you as Mary Magdalene came before Jesus and you see all these seven devils around these people, be very careful.  You are still dealing with the son and daughter of God.  See them in their rightful place.  See them perfect.  See them pure.  See them holy and you see yourself holy and you see yourself free.  And you yourself prepare the way for the coming of the Lord into your own consciousness.  All of us are subject to the same laws and limitations.  All of us are subject to the same expansions and identifications with cosmic light and cosmic power.

The greatest flattery to the great Masters than we can give, and this is not really flattery, it’s sincere flattery, is the imitation of the Christ, the imitation of the Master.  Do any of you suppose in this room that if you imitate Master Morya, Kuthumi, Maitreya, Mary the Mother of Jesus, or any of the great Cosmic Beings, do you suppose that you do them harm?  Are you robbing them of some of their virtue?  No, just be careful.

I remember several years ago meeting one lady and discoursing with her who fell into the illusion that the Masters were playing hide and seek with her constantly.  May I assure all of you here that they have better things to do.  The woman would say, “Did you notice Morya smiling at me behind the flower vase.”  “Kuthumi’s over here behind the curtain.”  “And you should see the Masters descending all the time into my bedroom.”

And so one finally developed a feeling that she was up to something, and she was.  It was the opposite of guilt by association; it was glorification by identification.  In other words, she wanted to identify with the Masters and she wanted everyone to believe that she was with the Masters and she was very, very devoted to them and they were very devoted to her.  And so she felt the need to have these almost lobollies[?][1] of imagination appearing to her here and there but in reality she was as remote from the Masters as Tibet is from our town here because the Masters do not appear just because we want them to.

One of the best ways to develop the appearance of the Masters in our world is to practice forgiveness to ourselves and others.  You see, as long as we hold resentment in our feeling world against any part of life, we have imprisoned energy.  And that energy is absolutely not free to move.

Now you have heard how these tiny elemental creatures that exist in the nature world that actually are the cosmic gardeners of God are more or less serving humanity through participating in the rituals of nature, the creation of springtime, the making of living things grow, the flow of the energy into the cells of the plant life and the development of trees, like tree devas and various beings that are associated with the nature kingdom.

This is all a part of God.  God is not really alone.  God is not alone in nature.  He is not alone in us.

Why, you even have a body elemental in your own body, and do you know something?  That body elemental is given the responsibility of keeping your vital subconscious functions working in order.  So it governs respiration, the rate of the heart, heart beat diastole and systole.  As soon as there’s a wound in the body, it immediately rushes in to close that wound.  The antibodies flow into that area by direction and not purely of just a botanical happenstance but because there is a vital intelligence within you that is a part of God that is called the body elemental.

Now when there is a car accident and someone is seriously suffering the effects of a trauma, at that precise moment the body elemental thinks right away if the person is conditioned to think negatively, “I may die.”  And because the body elemental thinks that the person may die, the body elemental becomes frightened by the fear that is in the world of the individual.  And so the vital functions, ­respiration, heartbeat, and all the things and even the countenance itself, begins to take on a look of power.  The blood is constricted in the veins and we find many conditions occur in the cardiovascular system which are definitely disturbing.

So what happens then?  The same thing happens in surgery, and you may say, “Well, how can this happen in surgery if a person is unconscious?”  Ah, yes, but your body elemental is never unconscious.  It’s awake all night long.

So you see when you’re actually on the operating table, at the precise moment of the surgery when the body elemental feels this cut, this sharp cut, and your organs being handled roughly by physi­cians and of course whether they realize it or not, to the body elemental it is rough even if they’re very careful with it, what happens is this drop in vital functions.

Now what happened then, to prove a certain point to you I’m going to tell you what happened.  The physicians of the world discovered that by a shot of morphine given when people are in a state of shock, that the person would not then manifest this change in the body functions of their cells.  Why?  Because the body elemental was fooled.  It did not feel this terrible sharp pain.  It did not feel this displacement of the bodily functions and it did not have the latent fear of death manifesting in its own conscious­ness, the consciousness of the body elemental.

And so you see what took place was that more or less smoothing out of the abnormalities.  And so the person recovered much quicker because the body elemental did not become disturbed.  So you see tiny elementals in ourselves and elementals in nature are all a part of this schema, this cosmic drama unfolding before us.

Now I remember lecturing in Minneapolis one time.  Two very tall young men came into the lecture and they sat down in the front row.  And of course it’s always bad when people come in and start trying to pick up the threads of your conversation in the middle.  And I had mentioned body elementals.  And one of the men looked at the other one and he said, “Body elemental, body elemental,” he says.  “How weird!  What’s that?”

Well, of course, I suppose years ago before anyone had ever seen an airplane, if you flew into some village in Africa with an airplane or a helicopter, that the people would have thought it was some great bird that came from the sun itself.  They would have been very super­stitious.  And the same would be true of many of our people here in America if they’d never seen one before, before the Wright brothers.

So you see in the lore of the spirit, as the Master has said, in spiritual matters we have to grow familiar with whatever nomenclature we choose to apply to spiritual things.  The language of the spirit is not necessarily completely the language of the outer world although there are similarities.

They have twenty‑six letters in the alphabet.  We have twenty‑six letters in our esoteric alphabet too.  But it’s what we mean by what we say.  I think this is one of the problems today in the matter of under­standing ourselves and therefore it is very important to each one of you today to understand thoroughly what we are talking about in this under­standing of forgiveness and how it actually affects the vital functions of man.

I’m going to show you this a little clearer.  Now we come to the point where this lady has jumped on the other gal.  She’s come home and she feels terribly disturbed.  Now what happens, then, to her physical body as a result of her emotional disturbance?  You tell me!  Plenty!

Why, she has these same traumatic experiences, some old illness that hasn’t bothered her for years may suddenly begin to erupt in a day or two.  She may feel much older than she felt before.  She becomes easily tired.  She doesn’t sleep well.  She wakes up with starts and jerks all because some jerk pulled her strength over some silly little thing.  Do you see what I mean?  All over nothing, a tempest in the figurative teapot.

And forgiveness would have cured it if she had left the presence of that person and said, “Well, Mighty I AM God Presence, this person doesn’t understand and won’t give me the chance to explain.  I call on the law of forgiveness for them.  I ask that the balm of forgiveness flow into that woman’s life and bless her and heal her from this condition and help me to understand just how I can do my part correctly in this matter.”

Enter into this affair with all of your light and power.  Aerate it.  Put it into the light of day.  Open up the windows.  Let the curtains blow.  It doesn’t matter.  We want light to flow and we want forgiveness in the whole situation.  Cleanse yourself right then and there.

Well, then you see, you go to sleep at night.  Oh, sometimes someone else may be still remaining so disturbed that they will project to you and wake you up.  It still can happen.  I don’t say that it doesn’t happen at all.  But it will be less devastating to your consciousness if you don’t participate in it.

You know two can play at that game very nicely and really have a tempest in a teapot, a great agitation over nothing.  But if just one is playing at it, the old boomerang law of the circle brings right back to their door the very thing they’re sending out.  And they’re liable to realize after awhile that forgiveness would have helped a great deal.

So let us understand this because in reality we are victims of our own illusions and our own problems.  We are victims of our own confusion.  And Christ doesn’t want us to be.  He doesn’t want us to be subject to these trivial things.

Can you imagine Jesus getting worried or concerned about some of these things?  Why, of course you can’t.  You know what he said to his own mother when he went up to Jerusalem to, to be counted in the taxpayers’ counting.  They had tax, internal revenue back there, you know.  And infernal revenue was very active.

And so they went up to be counted, you see, and Jesus got up there and he left hiss parents and you know how parents would feel if their twelve‑year‑old boy went off all alone in the multitude.  And he went off and where did they find him?  In the temple with the high priests of all things, with the very high priests.  And there he is discoursing with them.  And he’s telling them all of the wonders of God, expounding it to them, this little twelve‑year‑old child.

So the parents came in and of course naturally the first thing on their mind was to rebuke him for this and they said, “Why did you go off?”  This was wrong because they had to be human at that point, you see.

And so he looked at them and he said, “Wist ye not, don’t you know that I must be about my Father’s business?”  He wasn’t talking about Joseph either.  He was talking about his heavenly Father.  And so at a very early age he began to understand and he began to speak out on the things that he thought were correct.  And so they had to forgive him.

So you see, in the role of the spiritual disciple you may find sometime that you’re going to go through life and somebody’s going to offer you a drink or they’re gonna offer you a cigarette or they’re going to ask you to participate in some undesirable or unwholesome activity.  And you may be the only one in the whole crowd that is taking some stand for the Masters.

And you may say to yourself, “Well, how am I going to avoid this? They’re all doing it.  I might as well.”  But you’d better be careful because you have to shine at that point.  You have to let your Christ light shine.  You have to forgive those people and please don’t do anything that you have to be forgiven for.  If you do, if you have, if you’ve made a mistake, don’t continue to make it.

As I’ve said before, I say again, one of the smartest tricks in the dark force’s little bag of tricks is the idea of getting someone to make a mistake and after they’ve made the mistake say to them, “Well, now you’ve made it and you’ve proved how impure and how improper you are so why don’t you go all out?  You’ve got the excuse now.  You might as well pay a thousand dollars for what you’ve done as to pay the hundred for what you’ve done so go ahead and add more on to it.  There’s no hope for you anyway.  You’re lost.”

That is a lie and that is an absolute lie.  I don’t care how many mistakes you’ve made.  Mary Magdalene made as many as anybody ever did on the face of this earth as far as I can understand, and I believe today that she’s probably an ascended being, you see?  So I want to point that out to you, that God has forgiveness in his heart for the sins that we may have committed, for the errors we may have made or even the errors we may make either out of ignorance or sometime out of the light of what we think is knowledge but it may be completely incorrect.

So I want people today to “let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid” of facing life in this world.  Be brave of heart and face life with a full assurance that the laws of karma are the laws as you sow, so shall you reap.

And this doesn’t just mean, “I will return to you an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”  It means that if you give your cloak to a man that is naked that it will also return to you and you will wear a garment of the Lord, the garment of the Spirit upon yourself.  It means that you receive in return for the evil that you would do.  You receive in return for the good that you would do also.  And both laws are really aspects of the one law, the law of karma or the law of recompense or the law of return, “As you sow, so shall you reap.”

This happens to be the heart of the problem of confusion involving Christianity itself.  In the time of Christ the law of karma was preached in the Oriental manner and was quite understood by those who trained Jesus in Egypt when he was there in the temple of the great hierophant.  And at that time the Master Jesus appeared in the temple in Egypt before the hierophant who was the ruler of the temple.

And it would be almost as though someone appeared here before me.  By God’s grace he’s given me charge of this group.  If someone came in and that someone happened to be a person developed as well as Jesus, I would want to take my shoes off and get down and kiss their feet.  So Jesus came in, this great, masterful personality.  He looked at the hierophant.  The hierophant looked at him.  The hierophant said to him, “Will you teach me,” and Jesus said, “I come to receive your blessing.”

And the hierophant was astounded.  He was taken aback.  What should he do?  This great master comes to him to be blessed.  So then Jesus went on and continued, and he said, “Teach me all that you have to teach me.”  And he said, “But, Master,” he said, “you already know these things.”  Jesus said, “Nevertheless I will learn of thee.”  And he knelt on his knees before the hierophant and received his blessing.

This is the humility that I always want to stress even as I want to stress also the type of nonhumility that manifested in a woman that came here many years ago to a Keepers of the Flame meeting.  She was not a member of the Keepers of the Flame fraternity.  She came to the door and she says, “I demand to be admitted.”  I said, “My dear, we will be glad to admit you if you will become a member of the fraternity.”  She says, “I will not join anything unless I have a complete explanation of it.”

Previous to that encounter she had been bedded down in one of the local hotels and she had gone to the telephone there and called up here.  And she said, “I demand that you send one of your staff down to my room to explain to me the full understanding of the Keepers of the Flame Frater­nity.  I have traveled all the way from California and I want to know.”

So she came up in desperation because we would not do that and at the outside door here she stood and had her encounter with me.  And she said, “I want you to understand that I’m a very wise woman and I probably know far more than you people do here but I want to see just what you’ve got.”

I said to her, I said, “It appears to me that you’re being very rash but we cannot and will not admit you unless you become a member of the fraternity.”  Secretly I didn’t think she was a very good candidate.  [laughter]  But one has to realize that it takes all kinds of people to make a world but it doesn’t have to.  People can come with some humility.

Then I have another case of where a certain party had traveled over a large area of the United States to meet me.  They wanted above all things, they said, to meet me.  This was essential.  We had to meet they said.

So I said, “Well, I don’t like to turn a deaf ear toward you so I will meet with you.”  And they came in and they had a half hour interview.  During that half hour I hardly got a chance to open my mouth.  What they wanted more than anything else was to show me how much they knew and to bring all of this knowledge to me.  All I wanted to do was to be able to serve their needs but they never listened.  They only talked.  I didn’t care because if that’s what they wanted, then I was glad to give it.  If the therapy was one of listening, I would listen and so I did.

We have to understand that the ritual of forgiveness is all inclusive.  There are no areas of our life that are not invaded by the idea of complete forgiveness if we will let forgiveness flow.  We become the arbiter of the dam.  We can dam up the flow of our total energy pattern by involving ourselves in feelings against different people.

I have probably had more occasions to do this than most of you in this room and I don’t boast of it.  I’m just stating it as a fact.  Because of our work in serving humanity, we have the darker forces of the world often concocting some of the most vicious plots against us that you can ever conceive of.

I remember several years ago, this is a rather amusing story.  I thought it might be most relaxing to you, that I had a certain frozen custard stand where I used to go to near Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when I was then living at that particular part of the United States.  That’s before I lived in Virginia and before I lived in Colorado.  And so we passed by this custard stand and they made homemade custard, vanilla flavored and melting in your mouth, filled with lots of undesirable white sugar.­  [laughter]  So I was always quite interested in frozen custard.

And so I stopped in with two friends and telling them at the same time that this stand made the best frozen custard in all Wisconsin and that never in my life had I ever tasted anything so delicious and that they simply must stop in to have this frozen custard.  It melts in your mouth.

So we got in and seated at the stool.  And the girl took the order and she came back with one man’s ice cream custard and then the next man’s and she came to me and, lo and behold, plopped right down in the middle of it was a hunk of plaster that looked like off the wall with a lot of cobwebs on it.  [laughter]

So I said to myself, “Well, I just can’t eat this.”  So I called the girl back and I thought to myself, “I must be very careful of the feelings of these people.  I don’t want to attract any attention to this matter.”  So I whispered to her and I said, “As you can see, there is something in here.”  And she said, “Yes, I see it.”  She said, “I’ll exchange it for you.”

So she went away and, lo and behold, I waited fifteen minutes and no girl appeared!  And pretty soon she came in a procession.  There was the girl.  Behind her was the proprietor of the place and he marched up to me and in a loud voice he said, “We have strained this.  We have strained it through a sieve and we can’t find anything in it.  What are you trying to do, ruin my business?”  [laughter]

And I looked at him and I said, “No,” I said, “certainly not,” I said.  “In fact, I was just telling my friends what wonderful custard you make and that’s why we came in here.”  He says, “That is not true,” he said.  “You’re trying to ruin my business.”

And by that time everybody in the place was all agitated and people all around and all that never before had heard anything about it, they were all looking over at me and looking at him.  And I began to feel like I was looking for a convenient knothole through which to crawl in.  [laughter]

Well, I said to him, I said, “Mister, I assure you that I was doing none of these things that you say.  I was only trying to have justice,” I said.  “I didn’t believe that you would want me to eat something that wasn’t right,” and I said, “I thought that seeing this custard doesn’t cost you very much, that you wouldn’t mind changing it rather than have me sit here and pay for it without enjoying it and not even eating it.”

So he got madder and madder and madder.  Well, I took just so much of it and then I decided that I had had enough and he had already alerted everybody in the stand to what a terrible person I was and he didn’t believe a word I said.

So I called the poor little timid waitress over and she came over trembling and shaking.  She knew very well that if she said anything wrong, she’d lose her job.  So she came over and he was furiously interrogating her and he said to her, he said, “Now tell this man there was nothing in this.”

She looked at me and I said, “Young lady,” I said, “you know that there was something in there,” and she said, “Yes, there was.”  And then the proprietor practically exploded.  He was like a boiler with the steam just pouring out of the top of his head.

And so the man next to me said, “Yes, he’s right.”  He says, “We all saw it.”  So the two of ’em, now he said, “I know you’re trying to ruin my business.”  So he says, “Tell me what this was.”  He says, “What did you see?”

She says, “Well, it was a black thing.”  [laughter]  And she said, “The black thing had things coming out of it.”  [laughter]  And at that point it got worse and worse and worse, and so the people in there had their tongues in their cheeks.  They wanted to laugh and they didn’t dare.

And so it all happened this way that I finally said to him, “Well, I’m not going to pay for it but,” I said, “I will not ask you to replace it as long as you feel that way.”  So I just went out, didn’t pay for it and they paid for theirs and we walked out.

Now in a matter such as this what do you do about it?  You see it is a case of mistaken identity.  In other words, the person really didn’t know what kind of a person you were, and you have to forgive that person.  Now it would be awfully good for them if they could forgive you.

And, of course, I think a lot of people are concerned with the conduct of others and they say to themselves, “Well, that’s all right.  I’ll forgive him but he’s not going to forgive me.  So I think I’ll still hold a grudge.”  You cannot predicate your action on what the other person does.  You have to predicate your actions entirely on what is right in the eyes of God, and forgiveness is always right.  It’s never wrong.  You are never wrong to forgive.  Then you see you don’t dam up anything.  You just let the cosmic energy flow right through.

“Well,” you say, “what happens to the other guy?”  Well, dear hearts, you cannot live anyone else’s life except your own at a time.  There is a process, it’s a rather secret process known as the ritual of assumption whereby a man or woman can assume the identity of another person and act for them, visualizing certain activities such as the immaculate concept.  This can be used very constructively.  I will illustrate this.

I could have gone out of there if I want to do it and I could have visualized this man feeling very, very sorry.  And I could have visualized him making his peace with God and asking my forgiveness and his forgiveness in his mind.  And that probably would have helped him.  This is a sort of an assumptive technique.  The refinements of it are very involved.  I won’t go into that.  But it is possible to assume the role of another but you still in the final analysis cannot live their life.

So you have to try your best to be all things to all people.  You don’t have to be a doormat.  You don’t have to be walked on.  You don’t have to allow others to walk on you.  None of these things are necessary in the ritual of forgiveness.  You can be sweet and still hold your ground.  You don’t have to allow these penny influences to do a million dollars worth of damage in your world.

I once had a saying, I still have it, “You don’t have to use a stick of dynamite to blow your nose.”  [laughter]  And basically this comes right down to that, people who get emotionally unseated over a trifle are generally victims of very gross inferiority complexes.  And I do not, I do not feel angry with those who have these complexes.  I pity them and I pray for their speedy release.

But you know the best way you can get rid of an inferiority complex is forgiveness.  If you forgive yourself, then you stand just as tall as anybody else.

I’ll tell you something, the weight of national, of racial, of economic condemnation is very great.  There are many poor people in the world today who don’t have hardly enough to even eat and they condemn themselves for being poor.  Little do they realize the, the flow of karma that probably produced the condition.  Our economic circumstances are governed by karma.  Those who have millions of dollars today and don’t use them rightly, why, they’re going to probably come into embodiment later on and they just won’t have anything.

Most of you are familiar with the story about the very rich man who died and went to heaven and then asked for his mansion.  He said, “In my Father’s house are many mansions.”  He said to the guide, “Will you take me to the mansion that’s reserved for me.”  And so they came to a bunch of beautiful mansions and he looked at them and he says, “Those are lovely,” he said, “very lovely.”  He says, “I don’t quite like that.”  He says, “There must be something a little better than that.”

So the angel guide took him still further and further and further down and the mansions kept getting smaller and smaller and eventually he got to a little tiny shack.  It looked like a hobo would live in it.  “And,” he said, “this is where you live.  This is your mansion.”

And so the, the concept in that was that whatever we sent up to build our mansion is what we received in return.  If we send up the lumber of poverty and the consciousness of poverty for others and all of that, we don’t do any good with what we have in this world, naturally we don’t send anything up to heaven.

As one of the Masters said, “Only what you give away do you really keep.”  Isn’t that interesting!  It happens to be true.  It is the law of karma.

And so we have to understand that the law of forgiveness is the greatest law in the entire universe.  Now everybody in here today can benefit from this.  You don’t have to wait till the lecture’s over to start out.  You can have a catharsis of consciousness.

“Well,” you say to yourself, “have I been holding any grudges against anybody?  Have I held a grudge against myself?  Don’t I like the way I look?  Well, I made myself look just the way I am.”

You know, that couldn’t be held very true a few years ago for a lot of people because they at that time believed only in one lifetime.  Therefore they didn’t understand that their physical appearance is largely the result of how they’ve thought and how they’ve felt and how they’ve lived in past lives, everything, physical appearance, intellect, economic development.

And that of course is the main reason why you can’t possibly in this universe have a socialistic concept and have it accurately because if we tried to divide all the wealth of the world, it would soon find its way back in many cases to the same people that have it now.  And the same would be true of poverty.  People would find themselves poor again, you know, same old situation would happen right over again if you allowed it to happen.  And if you didn’t, you’d have complete tyranny and domination of all people because who is going to rule another?

In reality we are all given the sovereign right by God of living our own lives.  That is a wonderful opportunity.  It’s a course of great freedom.

We want to be very careful with these concepts that I’m talking about today because these concepts govern the release to you of your whole spiritual allotment of cosmic energy.  You are never, if you imprison God’s energy in little cages of your own making, say, “I won’t forgive this person.  They did me wrong.”  “I didn’t like the way that person did” and so on and on merrily careening through life.  After awhile you have so much energy frozen in your memory that you just can’t imagine it.

That’s why probably it would be a good thing if we also in addition to forgiveness began to forget, you see.  I rather keep these things in my memory not as a result of trying to have hatred against a man but because I thought it was very amusing.  In retrospect I realized it was very amusing in one way and very sad and very tragic in another.  Every time I tell this the audience nearly goes into stitches and of course it is quite a funny story.

I have now ten minutes after Three.  How the time has flowed away!  And I have another lecture starting at four.  Do you want me to go on with this or shall I stop?  [“Go on.”]  As long as you can stand still, I will also stand still for you.

Now I’m going to tell you a very interesting Christian story.  This is a very nice Christian story, not quite like Androcles and the lion where George Bernard Shaw has the fellow come out and pat the lion on the head and he says, “You’re a nice Christian boy,” you know, “and I’d like to eat you.”  Nothing like that.

But this happens to be a true, living and real story of what happened to me.  As I told you, I was raised in the Methodist Episcopal church and my Mother also subscribed to Unity’s school of Christianity periodicals, Weekly Wisdom, and all those others, you know.  So I had this background.

Well, I was visiting for the first time out of state, in Minnesota.  And I returned from Minnesota and I was coming down the street one very sunny warm afternoon and I saw what looked to me like a thousand people gathered around the local bank.  And I said, “I wonder what’s going on.”  So I asked the filling‑station operator and he said, “Oh,” he said, “there’s a human fly climbing up the bank.”

I said, “What do you mean?”  And he said, “Well,” he said, “he just goes up the side of the building, this human being.  At the top he has an inner tube tied hanging from a flagpole and he’s gonna bounce in that inner tube.”

So I walked about ten more feet and that was when I first realized that I had premonitions.  I realized right then and there that that man was going to be killed but I did not realize that that man was going to die right between my legs.  So I went up there and I stood right under where the man was and I watched him climb the building.

And he got in the inner tube and he says, “This inner tube comes from so and so’s tire shop.”  It wouldn’t mean anything to you anyway.  And he said, “It’s made of, it’s,” I believe it was a Goodyear.  I’m not sure.  And he said, “If this tube should break,” he said, “just call Hoggset’s Funeral Parlor.”

Well, it broke and his partner forgot to tie the knot in the end of the rope that was a safety rope.  And so he came head first down and his head crushed like an eggshell right between my legs.  I mean, I moved my legs back and his head hit the ground.  That was the end of him right then and there.

So I had an experience of hysteria and fear at the moment.  The brevity and shortness of life became very apparent to me and I said to myself, “Life is very short.”  Suddenly people can find themselves gone just like that.  And I looked across the way and there were all the telephone operators standing in the window and when the man fell, they all dropped like their drops on the board.  They all fainted one after the other.  And it was a very startling, traumatic experience for me.

So after this happened, in a state of shock I passed through two weeks of very dark feelings about death and life and all these things.  It really set me to thinking.  I was only about thirteen or fourteen at the time.

So I came to a field where we had a skating rink and there where the skating rink had always been in the winter now in the summer, this was summer, was a little tent.  And the tent was being erected by a certain church group, not my own.  And so I went over and I talked to them and they said, “Oh,” they said, “we’re followers of God.”  And I said, “That’s great.”  And they said, “We’re all sanctified holy people.”  I said, “What’s that mean?”  He says, “Oh, we’re sanctified holy by the Holy Spirit.”  I said, “Well, tell me about it.”

So they talked to me about it and the daughter of the minister was a rather beautiful young lady.  She was married.  She had one child.  And she had one of these self‑righteous looks which I didn’t at that time define as self‑righteous.  I thought that she was absolutely an angel in disguise!  I thought she was just perfectly magnificent spiritually and I desired to emulate her.

Now wait till you hear this because it’s going to show you a startling transformation in what we call Christianity.  I was a very impressionable person at the time.  And the man got up in front and he was some preacher!  He was large in the abdomen as well as the rest of his body.  And he got up there and he, he was a tearjerker.  Do any of you people know what a tearjerker is?

He got up there and he said, “I’m going to come,” he said, “to this town now and I’m going to live,” and he said, “I’m going to be buried in your little churchyard here in your town,” and down we went, you know.  Our hearts went down and sunk within us.  And then he went on and he said, “I can remember,” he said, “as a little boy with my poor hurt feelings burying my head in my mother’s old greasy apron.”

And this tearjerker went on and he pulled on my emotions until I’m telling you I was just about beside myself with the fact, the combination of this man dying between my legs on the concrete and this situation of tomorrow was the day of judgment and you’d better get right with God.

And so when he got up there that night and he said, “Now I want all you people,” he says, “to come down the sawdust trail,” he said, “and bow your heads and give your hearts to Jesus.”  So I did.  I did the best I knew how to do.  I was a very young child of thirteen and I walked down there and I thought, “Oh, I must have committed a lot of sins.”  Little did I realize how many sins that a person could commit at that age!  [laughter]  But I went down this trail and I knelt there and I prayed and I got up feeling quite a bit better because at least I had made some contrite public confession of my Lord.

So during the course of the summer we got acquainted with these people and I was a very sincere boy if you don’t mind my saying so.  I was very sincere about God.  That was the passion of my life.  And so I was then going to junior high school and I passed by this preacher’s house every single day.  He moved downtown about two blocks from the high school.

So as I passed by his house every once in awhile, not too frequently, but every once in awhile I’d stop there for fifteen minutes to an hour in the evening and I’d visit them.  And this is what I would say to him, I said, “Can you help me to understand God a little better?  Can you help me to understand my role with God?  I want you to tell me how I can become closely identified with God.”

Well, I never dreamed that that was any problem.  He never seemed to be able to quite answer me.  But one night I went by there late at night around six o’clock, just, I mean, well, late in the evening, I should say around six o’clock.  And he looked very troubled in heart and he turned to me with kind of a, you see, when I first met him many years before that oh he had a big smile and a glad hand.  And he just thought I was all right.

But now he didn’t look like he thought I was all right.  He looked like he thought I was all wrong.  And I, I had my heart troubled.  I was very troubled at the time.  And so the little old gal that was married to him, the one that looked very saintly, I’m not talking about the daughter who also looked saintly but the mother, this is the tone of voice she used.  She said, “Son, why do you come here and trouble us?  You’re going to make it necessary for us to call the sheriff and have you put out.”

Well, that was the first time I really, really began to understand anything.  Before that they’d never said anything like that.  I thought, “What in the world is happening to me?”  And I began to get waves of condemnation all over me.  What had I done?  I felt that I was probably the worst person in the world.  Why, Judas Iscariot was a piker beside of what I must be.

So she said this to me and then suddenly I got fiery angry inside but I subdued it and I said to her, “What?  You mean to say that you are going to pray me out of here?”  I forgot to tell you that.  Following the sheriff bit she said, “We are going to pray you out of here.”  So I said to her, “You’re gonna pray me out of here!”  She said, “Yes.”  I said, “Well, let me pray with you.”  [laughter]  And so I got down on my hands and knees and I said, “O Lord, take me out of here.”  [laughter]

Now my reason for telling you this is so that you will understand that the Christian church is more the church of Satan than it is the Christian church in some cases because she told me she thought that I had the spirit of Satan.  Here I was thirteen years old, devout and sincere in my relationship with God, and I had never done hardly anything that I know that was wrong.  I was even obedient to my mother except I was mischievous.  I had a little spirit of mischief in me but other than that I wasn’t bad.  One knows about what they are, you know.  [laughter]

So I was very, very concerned and I of course left there.  I never went back there again.  But as a result of that I began to feel the weight of their condemnation and they would not forgive me for whatever they imagined I had done wrong to them.  And so I had an experience with the Christian church.

Many years after that I completely trying to find God in the Christian church, in the orthodox church.  Later on I even joined the holy rollers at one time in my life [laughter] because I thought maybe that was the answer, I mean, the Oral Roberts variety.  Of course, he’s kind of modern today.  He has all these dance bands and songfests and everything.  And when I was in his prayer tower I heard them playing jazz music over the radio station so I’m not really too sure of that either.

But I, I went along the trail.  I kept trying to find some reality from God.  And do you know what happened?  I’ll bet you that I had at least five or more ministers tell me that I was possessed with the devil until I began to believe it.  I actually believed it!  I thought there must be something wrong with me.  Yet I knew in my own heart that there really wasn’t.

Well, somewhere along the line the Masters got in touch with me.  That was on the railroad when I was laying steel on the section.  One afternoon I heard the bell of the railroad train coming at me.  It was a very hot day.  They have a little bell, you know, they ring.  We were a section crew.  I was laying steel and all at once a cloud appeared all around me and the voice of the Master spoke out of this cloud and he said certain things to me that I had never heard before.

And I thought, “Well,” I said to myself, “this is hallucination.  This is confusion.  I don’t believe this at all.  Must be some of those devils that those fellows told me I had that are gettin’ into me.”  But when the Western Union boy appeared at the front door the next day to confirm what he told me in the message, I was a little bit deciding that maybe it wasn’t a fake after all.

Several years later here in Colorado Springs I said to the Master after a certain amount of worldly religion got ahold of me again, I said, “I’m not sure you’re of God.”  I said, “You’re getting me all upset here.”  I said, “You’d better take off, disappear.”  So he bowed very sweetly and smiled at me and said, “As you wish, my son.”  He was gone and it was many years later before he came back by invitation only.

And I have found out since about Theodora and Justinian.  I have found out since how Christianity somewhere in the Middle Ages was twisted to create a doctrine of condemnation where people were made to feel that God was a hateful God and that he wanted to burn people.

So I said to one man one day, I says, “What would you do if your child were disobedient to you?”  He said, “I’d give him a good licking!”  I said, “Well, would you put him in an oven and burn him?”  And he said, “No, of course I wouldn’t.  You don’t think I’m inhuman, do you?”  And I said, “Well,” I said, “why do people think that God is going to put people in Hades and burn them forever and ever and ever on top of all that?”

And so I began to think a little more about the purposes of God and I began to realize that God was truly forgiveness because how else would he ever get his aims accomplished.  Now you go ahead and you’ve got a slave out here, see.  And your desire is to bring the slave up to your standard so he’s an equal to the master.  But the slave doesn’t care to be the master.  The slave wants to be the slave.

So he says, “I don’t want any of that.”  And you say, “Now look, I’m gonna send you to college.  I’m gonna educate you.  I’m gonna make something great out of you.”  He said, “I don’t want to be great.  I just want to be me.”  So your whole plan collapses and you just have to let the guy that says “I just wanna be me” be me.  You see the point?

So you see, God has to succeed and his original aim was right, was it not?  Is there anyone here that can tell me that God did not have good designs in creating man?  I challenge anyone anywhere to try to tell me that God did not have good designs, the very best.  Why, the heart of man doesn’t even dream what God’s got in store for him.

So God has all these wonderful designs and then they are not fulfilled because man has free will and man does what he wants to do.  The slave says, “I don’t want to be master.  I want to be the slave.  I don’t want to go to school.”  He whimpers, he cries, “I just wanna be me.  I want to go fishing.”

We have to understand that in order to succeed God has to have cooperation on the part of the human race and people have to be willing to forgive themselves and get higher visions of what they can be of their own potential.  I want to tell you that forgiveness and a vision of what you can be as a person, not limited, mind you this, not limited by what you presently look like, what you feel like, your economic development, your economic situation, your education, your mistakes, your errors, everything.  None of this has anything to do with it.

Can you get the vision and are you willing to forgive yourself for your errors?  Start out today and start out tomorrow and every day as long as you live to forgive yourself and forgive people.  Don’t be afraid to forgive.  To forgive is divine.  To hold grudges against anyone is satanic.  It’s devilish and destructive and it’s karmic and it returns to your doorstep and it will keep you from all the spiritual good God has in store for you.

So, dear hearts, this afternoon I urge upon you the ritual of forgiveness.  Will you join me in this cathartic decree that I will manufacture by God’s grace for this occasion.

INVOCATION:

O our beloved I AM Presence, Holy Christ Selves of all mankind, beloved Saint Germain, our beloved Archangel Zadkiel, Archangel of the violet fire over the island of Cuba, we call upon you all now and upon the entire Spirit of the Great White Brotherhood to reenact the ritual of forgiveness individually in our hearts and minds and beings.

No matter who in this life or in all lives past may have wronged us, let us today let go of the ropes of condemnation that we hold as power in our hand.  Teach us the ritual of illumined forgiveness that we may be able to forgive with complete freedom all parts of life even as we plead with the powers of the Karmic Board and infinite power of light to forgive all mankind for their errors.

Love us free.  Forgive us free and teach us to be one with thee.  This we ask in the name of Jesus the Christ according to the ancient prayer that he also taught to his disciples.

We will give this toget­her.

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.  Thy kingdom come.  Thy will be done on earth even as it is in heaven.  Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our sins as we forgive those who trespass against us.  Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.  For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever.  Amen.  [“Amen.”]

END

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This Lecture, “WHY MAN MUST FORGIVE HIMSELF: UNIVERSAL FREEDOM THROUGH FORGIVENESS” was given by Mark L. Prophet on April 9, 1971 at the Class of the Resurrection Flame in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

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The Forgiveness Mantra – Kuan Yin

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Who is Mark L. Prophet?