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LESSON 2, REVELATION
May Whitney read Rev. 1:4-6. Mr. Fillmore then asked for the Farrar Fenton translation of those verses, which was read by May Whitney.
MR. FILLMORE: In our lesson last Tuesday we found that John represents the spiritual love in us. And what is this spiritual love, what is it establishing as a standard for man? It is evident that this whole scripture is about man, the development of man. What are the seven churches in Asia? What is the meaning of Asia?
CLASS: Light and enlightenment.
MR. FILLMORE: That means that the churches represent what?
CLASS: Spiritual centers.
MR. FILLMORE: One author, I believe it is Butler, has a book called The Seven Creative Principles [Butler, Hiram E.], in which he shows that there are fundamental creative principles in nature. This seven is the number of the complete natural man. Twelve is the number of the complete spiritual man. We have first that which is natural and then that which is spiritual, as Paul says. In other words, we complete the natural man. John the Baptist comes right out of the natural world. Then comes the Christ man with his five additional fundamental faculties of mind. This begins here, you can see, according to the law. The seven churches—What are the churches? What do they represent? What is the church?
CLASS: The body. An aggregation of spiritual thoughts.
MR. FILLMORE: An aggregation of thoughts, of people who are worshiping God. So there must be seven centers of activity for the seven creative principles. And those seven centers of activity were designed as the seven avenues of expression of the soul. We know, all of us, what five of those are: hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling, feeling. What are the two additional?
CLASS: Intuition and telepathy.
MR. FILLMORE: Those are the two additional faculties which the race is just now taking up. We are coming to a new consciousness of the power of thought. That thoughts can be transferred on to another. Then there is that self knowing, intuition. Now I think these are the seven churches. But we know that they have seven avenues of expression in the soul. They are in Asia. That means to understand them you must get back of the physiology; you can’t understand the eye merely as a telescope. What is back of the eye? It is the mind, we are told; all opticians tell you there is a little something at the end of your optic nerve in the brain that determined the character of the thing that is reflected back there. All that we call seeing is a reflection on the retina carried on the optic nerve to the seat of seeing. The mind determines. So John is referring to the mind seeing. That is Asia,—the spiritual centers not as nerve centers nor ganglionic centers, but as mind centers. So that back of seeing is what -—when you say, “I see?”
CLASS: Discernment.
MR. FILLMORE: Back of hearing is what?
CLASS: Receptivity, that thing in us which will listen, and listening. We then get our discrimination into action.
MR. FILLMORE: What is a feeling? What church does that belong too? If we get these seven churches settled when we come to the next chapter where they are named and their character is brought out, we will know better what we are dealing with. What does feeling represent? What church is that?
CLASS: Love.
MR. FILLMORE: Yes, all feeling is an expression of love. So the real church that we deal with in spirit is love.
MR. FILLMORE: And smelling, what is that? It is pretty hard, we are told to get the difference between tasting and smelling, they are so closely associated. One might be called judgment and the other might be called wisdom. Which is judgment?
CLASS: Smelling.
MR. FILLMORE: Do you know that smelling is considered the highest of all of our five centers? I think that smelling would really be called wisdom, and then what would tasting be?
CLASS: Judgment.
MR. FILLMORE: They all start from the one root anyway, and that is sensation. Physiologically considered, but when we come into spiritual consciousness there is a differentiation, and they are not all merged into one, but they have their office, and you will find as you develop your spiritual centers you will be able to separate and see how one works without mixing itself too much with the other, and in discriminating the character of food we use both the taste and the smell, don’t we? Some people have smell developed so that they can tell immediately the character even of another person by their smell, the smell of the room, the smell of the house. You have gone into houses and you could tell the smell of that house whenever you went there. The I AM in a man can dominate in all facilities and educate them, and they will do whatever it tells them to do. Like taste you can educate your taste until the most offensive things will taste all right to you. Some people like Limburger cheese. You can force your taste to take things by holding your nose. Now the mind has still greater power, doesn’t it? All the functions have to work together as brothers cooperating.
MAY WHITNEY: Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and is to come.
MR. FILLMORE: Who is this.
CLASS: The spiritual man.
MR. FILLMORE: Yes, I think this whole book is about the development of the spiritual man. Whom do we call that spiritual man?
CLASS? Christ
MAY WHITNEY: “and from the seven Spirits before his throne.”
MR. FILLMORE: Who are the seven spirits before his throne? What is his throne; what is the throne of this spiritual man? Well, what would you say is the throne in you? It is my center of action; it is really that in me which I am. It is is the point of poise in one. I don’t know that you could really locate it.
CLASS: It is the center that is the physical is the heart, that in the spiritual body is the same as the heart.
MR. FILLMORE: The heart really is the center around which the idea of love is but there is a center around which all of the activities of the mind revolve. Every time that I say, “I”, I am proclaiming a center of consciousness. “I” is really the center, the I in its spiritual relation. If I say that I am the son of God, or I am the Christ of God, and realize that, the center in me is the throne of God. It is around that that these seven spirits act and revolve. Not around the I that is related to material things, not around the I that says my eye is a physical organ, not that eye, but the inner spiritual eye that says it is spirit. These spiritual faculties revolve around that. The is the throne upon and through which they act. We have been talking about those seven Spirits, haven’t we? In other words, we have raised in consciousness the five centers to their spiritual activity. Man must develop that throne first and know more about the throne of God around which intuition and thought transference act. If we go into the development of thought transference, what would be the result? We would set up activity upon a plane that we as a race haven’t developed to. Yet, in the matter of intuition we are all using that, more or less. We often get what we call a hunch or an urge from within to do a certain thing. We knew certain things to be true, yet we cannot give any outer reason. That shows that the power of the mind is constantly here acting. If we would develop it, we as many would no doubt have much better judgment and discernment. We wouldn’t make as many mistakes as we do. We find that this is the one next great step. We are all coming to that. We call it divine judgment, spiritual judgment. We find that as one of the spiritual faculties of the mind. All of these faculties we are talking about are natural, but they have their origin in Spirit. They are spiritual.
MAY WHITNEY: “and from Jesus Christ who is the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.”
MR. FILLMORE: There is a whole lot involved there. The firstborn of the dead, what does that mean?
CLASS: One translation gives it, the first of the dead to be born into life. (Another answer was given to this question but I lost it J.P.)
MR. FILLMORE: We have all kind of fallen asleep to our spiritual capacity, our spiritual nature. Jesus Christ was the first to apprehend and realize his spiritual nature.
MAY WHITNEY: “and the ruler of the kings of earth.”
MR. FILLMORE: What does that mean? Who are the kings of the earth? What does the king always represent
CLASS: Executive power
MR. FILLMORE: When we read in the Bible about the king we know it is the ruling ego. We find that all through the body are these centers of activity, and they are all under or should be under the rule of one I Am. Don’t we frequently let the appetite rule? You will find that you have a whole lot of these ruling egos in your subconscious or in you sense mind. They are ruling; they are kings. What is this king of kings?
CLASS: The ruler of the kings of the earth.
MR. FILLMORE: What doe the earth mean there?
CLASS: The Body.
MR. FILLMORE: You see, we are beginning to unfold this thing in a practical way. We know that we have a king within us, and that king is spiritual man, or the Christ man, the higher self, and it rules. It is the center. It has its throne and around it all of these senses should revolve and act and be obedient to it.
MAY WHITNEY: “Unto Him that loveth us, and loosed us from our sins by his blood; and he made us to be a kingdom, to be priests unto his God and Father”
MR. FILLMORE: Now, “Loosed us from our sins by his blood” —-we know that means this Christ man or this higher self, what does blood represent?
CLASS: The life.
MR. FILLMORE: The life, the consciousness of spiritual life. “Loosed us from our sins,” what it that? What are sins?
CLASS: Beliefs in evil; missing the mark.
MR. FILLMORE: Our shortcomings; falling short the attainment of our real spiritual being. That is what a sin is. Whenever we fail to bring forth the real spiritual character, that is a sin.
MAY WHITNEY: “and he made us to be a kingdom, to be priests unto his God and father, to him be the glory and the dominion.”
MR. FILLMORE: I think we all understand that. This Christ gives us a kingdom, a new kingdom to come into, a new realization of what we are, of what man is, of what God is, and we become priests. The priest is a teacher. We become teachers of the law.
MAY WHITNEY: “To him be the glory and the dominion forever and ever. Behold he cometh in the clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they that pierced him; all the rulers of the earth shall mourn over him.”
MR. FILLMORE: Here is a point we need to take up and get the understanding of it and not be misled by this idea that Jesus Christ is coming in the clouds. Paul refers to that same thing, “coming in the clouds with a great shout, and we are going to meet him in the air.” That has been interpreted as a literal thing. All the dead are going to be resurrected and have their bodies raised up and meet him in the air. What does this mean, to meet him in the clouds? What does this represent?
CLASS: The clouds represent a sort of muddy consciousness or thought. He is coming in the clouds, and we meet him while we are in this limited consciousness.
MR. FILLMORE: Well, clouds obscure what?
CLASS: The sun
MR. FILLMORE: That is it. So he comes into this obscure state of mind, and we can get the sunshine as we sing our song, and the clouds will disappear, and you get what we call a clear understanding. That is what that means. We are to get up into the air and deny the cloudy proposition, and there we will see. That is where the Christ is. Taking it literally, it is in the fourth dimensions. Jesus said, “The son of man shall appear in the heavens and he shall send forth his angels with the sound of a loud trumpet. You can see that that is all allegorical. When Jesus ascended he disappeared in the cloud, didn’t he? A cloud took him up. That means that is was cloudy to those people who lived on the earth plane. We have a basic idea about spiritual things, and that obscurity always our own consciousness, in our minds, and it is referred to there as clouds. When the clouds are cleared and we see these things, we say, “Why everything is spiritual; we live in a spiritual world.” And that will be the end of the word, the end of the earth. When we have come to that, we will be resurrected and we will truly lift up our bodies. We are just beginning to pierce the cloud.
MAY WHITNEY: “And every eye shall see him, and they that pierced him;”
MR. FILLMORE: How do we pierce it?
CLASS: We pierce it by denying.
MR. FILLMORE: We say, “I don’t see the Christ; where is he? That is calling the Christ mind in yourself. And we mourn over that because we get the result of that denial of the spiritual man. Every time we deny our spiritual reality, every time we deny Christ is with us right here at all times, we pierce it. He is spoken of as coming with a great shot. I think that is when we are in a high state of consciousness. There is a sort of something that you cannot explain, a great noise all around you because of that vibration; you realize that you are not in the same world that you are when you are in the material consciousness. When we have the deep silence and have that Pentecostal spiritual consciousness it just seems as if everything was in the air. You feel lifted up, and sometimes it does sound, in the silence, as if a lot of people were singing or shouting. I think that is the spiritual tympanum of the air. You get that high spiritual vibration. I have it very frequently and cannot always locate it. I look around to see where the noise comes from.
MAY WHITNEY: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, saith the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”
MR. FILLMORE: That means the “a” and the “z” of the Greek language. The alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the completion of all things, the summing up in the now of everything. That is what that means. In Spirit there is neither beginning or ending.
Transcribed by Beth Hitesman on July 3, 2018.
