Eric Butterworth Unity Podcast #36
Now you can never understand life or truth or yourself until you give up once and for all the idea that you live in a universe of favoritism or caprice or the fortuitous turn of events. Life is not a game of chance.
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But as we have said, we are going to consider today a formula for good fortune. This could imply some kind of a system where you might always come out a winner. A technique so that you could always make it big, and I suppose this might well be the deduction if a person is laboring under the belief that his life is been plagued by bad luck and that other people seem to get all the breaks. A person might say, “Yeah that’s what I need. I’d like to find a way that I could control the roulette wheel and the throw of the dice, pick the horses out of the track. Great, that’s what I need, a good formula.”
Well at the outset I should say that this is not exactly what I had in mind, but admittedly this could be the application because the same power of electricity, when the contact is made and the light is lit, enables a person either to write a Bible or to make the plates for counterfeit money. The same power is working. It had been said, and I think it was the Greek philosopher Zeno, that the most necessary part of learning is unlearning our errors. The study of truth for many persons is a kind of a technique for attracting good fortune and I think that most folks would justify this. Obviously we desire to get ahead in life, we desire to change things. We desire to have better health and more harmonious circumstances and perhaps greater prosperity and success in our work, of course.
Unfortunately this study of truth is quite often approached as a rote learning process with very little effort given toward the idea of unlearning some of the errors of human consciousness. For instance, the common belief is that life is basically lived from outside in, that it is mostly a matter of trying to get to the right places and be involved with the right people and to have the right circumstances out here. Thus when a person comes to the age of responsibility, he is required to go out into the world to make his fortune. This is the cliché that is used and it suggests a great deal of where the attitude may be. It is rare that a child is taught that his fortune essentially begins within him. That it is, as Browning would say, “The imprisoned splendor that must be released.”
So he’s introduced, usually, by well intentioned parents and teachers and associates to the idea of getting the breaks, being in the right place at the right time, knowing the right people, and looking for that great stroke of good fortune when he will get his big break in life. All the religious beliefs, no matter how sophisticated, all of these to the contrary notwithstanding, the average person’s living philosophy, and there’s a big distinction between one’s avowed philosophy and his living philosophy, the avowed philosophy may be the church he joins, and the articles of faith that he accepts, as the little child says, on confusion of faith. These are the things that we attest to. Someone says, “What are you?” “Oh, I’m a Baptist” Or “I’m a Methodist” or “I’m a Unity student.”
So these are the things that we give our intellectual acceptance to, but our living philosophy, something that we rarely take time to put together in terms of what do you really believe, the living philosophy of most persons centers around a point somewhere between the belief in kismet, the inevitability of fate and destiny, and the luck of the draw, with the effort to change that luck in every conceivable way. Most folks would say, “Well that isn’t what my philosophy is.” Yet if one carefully and analytically watches his thoughts and looks in the mirror of consciousness to see where his thought is basically centered, he will find that there’s a great deal of this.
This average person thinks that when something happens that he likes, he’s had good luck! When something happens he does not like, he’s had bad luck, and as a matter of fact, sometimes he’s down on his luck. In this consciousness, a person may do a lot of rather strange things. He may hang a horseshoe over the door if he’s a farmer. He may carry a rabbit foot in his pocket or some kind of an amulet or a charm or a lucky person on his person in some way, and religious people may well be more superstitious than any. Because you call these things what you will, all the little charms and medallions and figurines that people wear or carry or hang on doorposts or even put on the dashboard of their car. All of these essentially, no matter how we rationalize them, essentially are done for good luck. To alter what Voltaire calls “the concatenation of events”, which simply means the fortuitous occurrence of things over which we have no control.
Many people talk about sickness, unemployment, or difficulties in one’s human relationships, as bad luck. It is the most flourishing excuse for misfortune. It soothes the conscience, of course, because one can say, “Well it’s not my fault, I’ve just had bad luck.” It’s like the old tradition of saying, “I can’t help it, the devil got after me.” It presents one as an innocent victim of unknown, sinister forces over which he has no control. Just had bad luck, that’s all. You know I play golf a good bit and at the end of a round of golf, quite often a golfer will say, “Well I had bad luck today. I didn’t play very good.” I don’t think luck has an awful lot to do with it really, although we use that as an excuse more than anything.
It’s interesting how we are unaware of the process, the movement, of consciousness. In other words, the general consciousness of the spiritual immaturity that our minds have always seemed to be inclined toward lucky possibilities, games of chance, as a means of getting ahead, of changing our circumstances or as some would say, “striking it rich.” I don’t suppose there’s any way of really telling, I certainly have never seen any anthropological studies or sociological studies on this, but I don’t suppose we ever really know when man first gambled. I suspect that maybe Adam and Eve drew straws to find out who was going to take the apple first. I don’t know. But we know that we see in the Bible that the soldiers at the foot of the cross gambled for Jesus’ seamless robes, so obviously the practice was quite flourishing in that time.
Now I don’t know who comes up with figures like these or how accurate they are, but they certainly reflect something, but it has been said, these are some things that I read in the newspaper some time ago, an estimation that more money is gambled in one form or another in our country than the whole nation spends on, and get this, all of the education, grade school, high school, college, graduate school, the whole bit, all the medical processes of individual relationships with doctors and treatments and hospitalization and the whole bit, and all the religious institutions entirely all grouped together, but more money is actually invested in gambling in one form or another than all of this. Now whether or not this is completely right or not, and I suspect that it is, it certainly is something very striking. The question is why? This is not a moralistic indictment. It’s just a matter of looking at it, why this tremendous emphasis upon chance, upon gambling?
There’s no easy answer and I don’t think we should come up with any simplified answers. Probably a spiritual hunger, but maybe most important it is because most folks have never really come to understand the fact that they live in an orderly universe. That life is governed by law, by causation, and that you can never really get something for nothing. That there are no shortcuts to happiness and good fortune and we are victims of this self delusion that maybe if you strike it big, it’s gonna change your whole life.
Now, I should say here that despite the human cry of some of the sincere religious leaders against the Las Vegas type gambling operations that are coming to Atlantic City, I don’t feel that there’s a moral issue involved at all. I think it’s important that I say that, to show where I stand. It’s not a matter of immorality, it’s not a matter of going against God’s law, it’s not a matter of being a sinner or sinful and so forth. The main problem, and the one that I consider to be very serious, is that it is an insidiously misleading activity, leading to a frustration of the flow of one’s own unique individualization of the divine process.
Now I should say this too, that gambling that is done for entertainment, when a person can afford to lose the money that the odds say he will surely loss, is no more to be criticized than a person who watches television or goes to the theater or involves himself in any other kind of entertainment, but the sad part is when the motivation is not entertainment, but the desperate attempt to win fortune. In this case, even if you win, you lose. Simply because you have related to life, to universal law, from a very negative point of view, and you’ve taken yourself out of the divine process that works for good.
Now you can never understand life or truth or yourself until you give up once and for all the idea that you live in a universe of favoritism or caprice or the fortuitous turn of events. Life is not a game of chance. As is so easily said, and we can even nod our head to it, and yet most of us have been conditioned by circumstances and by teaching and by the relationships we have with people, and by the concepts, Fillmore would call them the race beliefs, that we have absorbed almost by the process of osmosis to something entirely different. Other words, life is a flow of circumstances governed by law that is inexorable and self executing and we really can’t get to the heart and root of this thing called the New Insight and Truth and that’s where we begin to deal with it on that level.
There are no experiences totally unrelated to consciousness. Nothing ever just happens. You say, “Well after all, I was in a very positive state of mind, I was walking down the street minding my own business, and all of a sudden on one of these terribly rainy days, a taxi cab came along very thoughtless of people and went through a puddle and from head to foot I was splashed. Totally unlucky.” There are no experiences unrelated to consciousness. There’s no point of dealing with the law of consciousness unless we’re willing to acknowledge that.
It’s not easy, it’s difficult, but once we begin to deal with it on that level or else we will have a hodgepodge of rationalizations, where we’re looking for positive power to solve our problems in other ways and yet we’re excusing ourselves as being the victims of fortuitous circumstances over which we have no control and other circumstances you can’t play it both ways people. You just can’t do it. We’re dealing with fundamental law, cosmic law, law in which we are always involved. So we must then give up once and for all the belief in bad luck and good luck, and even in the prayer that traffics in luck. Have you ever heard someone say, “I’ve been lucky, my prayers were answered.”? I’ve heard that often, haven’t you? Might’ve even heard it from your own voice, I don’t know. I’ve been very lucky, I’ve been treating for this thing and praise God, and the whole bit, things have worked out beautifully.
Emerson has a word for it, as he does about so many things, he says, “The dice of God are always loaded”, and that’s important. In other words, under divine law there are no favorites involved. If you have your finger in a light socket and you’re being shocked, to use a very gruesome kind of illustration, somewhat classic and traditional, it’s no stroke of bad luck that you’re getting a good shocking. And you may pray and treat and affirm and get all the practitioners in the world to work for you until you’re blue in the face, but to no avail until you let God move you to pull your finger out of the light socket. Kind of makes a lot of sense doesn’t it? We see it that crudely.
We’re dealing with fundamental law and if we were at cross purposes with the law, we get shocked in one way, shape, or form, or another. You get splashed from head to foot by the taxi driver who wasn’t watching where he was going, he had a big puddle that just happened to be there, but somehow cosmic law was at work. You were at that point at that time. You weren’t a little earlier, you weren’t a little later, it wasn’t you that stood by and said, “Isn’t it a shame,” when somebody else got splashed from head to foot. You were the one. Why? Well you were just unlucky. That’s the way we would normally strike it away. It’s not important of trying to put ourselves involved in all these things to the extent that we feel guilty that everything is bad about us because things happen, but to try to recognize that if a set of circumstances happens to be unfolding in your life, it must be in some way that you have your finger in the light socket. That’s all, and you can change that. You can change that. You can get into a new flow.
Jesus didn’t set aside law or break law or operate on a level different from that which you and I live. He didn’t have a special set of laws nor did he have any special dispensation operating out of the infinite. He simply demonstrated law in a spiritual way and He said all these things that I do, you can do too, and this is the key, you see. In other words, there is no special law for anyone. You can’t say that because one person has some spiritual identification because he’s a very holy person, a mystic, a teacher, and so forth, that he operates under some special set of circumstances. There’s no special law for anyone and yet anyone can specialize the law by dealing with the fundamentals of life at a higher and higher level of understanding, of consciousness.
There is a divine law of compensation that is at work at all times and it never, never, never fails. Our need is to realize that life is not a matter of making the best of what happens out here, but life is lived from within and you cannot always change the conditions that are out there, but you can change how they affect you. You can change what kind of emanation goes forth from you. This you can do, and in the large extent, far more than we would even believe at first, this tends to have an influence to change things out there also. So we need then to begin to think in terms of the dynamic radiation that emanates from us, and be more concerned with that than we are about watching to make sure the taxi cabs don’t come by on the outside. Be very sure that we are moving in a consciousness of oneness with the divine flow. In other words, to make yourself a living magnet to draw your good to you.
Remember Jesus says, and this is a statement that many folks find very difficult, He says, “To him that hath, it shall be given, and from him that hath not, shall be taken away even that which he hath.” Now to many persons this seems unjust. What it seems to imply is the rich always get richer and the poor always get poorer, and that’s what’s wrong with society. But see that’s to misunderstand the fundamental here. The fact is, and this is a fact that I think has been demonstrated over and over again, if as some folks and sort of a leftish political view might insist that if we could take all the money away from the rich people and spread it out so that everybody would have equal money, or to make up for the fact that the poor people have been poor for a long time, give them a little extra, you see, so that you redistribute all the wealth of society.
You know what would happen? We never look into this. We never really acknowledge the process, but for some, some people would say strange reason, because they would say a lot of people are just very unlucky, that in a matter of years, perhaps generations, maybe within a generation, the wealth would once again be evened out pretty much as it was before. That the rich person would tend somehow to draw to himself new riches, and the poor person somehow, in some way we rarely understand, he would tend to have taken away that which he has because he somehow does not have the luck, the fortune, the consciousness, whatever we will, to be able to hold onto to what he has and it would end the redistribution that would take place and we’d be right back where we were.
Now some may doubt this, but I think as I say, this kind of thing happens all the time. I’m not at all defending the kind of society where there’s an unequal distribution of the wealth, but I’m saying that in trying to redistribute wealth, and trying to bring a balance in society, we need to begin to work with consciousness. This is the problem, the rich get richer simply because somehow, maybe they don’t understand it, maybe we don’t understand the continuous experience of good luck in our life, as we would call it, but somehow there is a consciousness, there is a feel, there is an emanation, a projection of energy, that causes these things to take place in our life.
Somehow, the person who seems to be down on his luck, who’s underprivileged, who’s always had things go the other way, somehow and I’m not in any way discounting social systems and laws and restrictive policies that take place in society, but somehow there’s something more than that and if we’re going to alter it, we must begin to work with the law of consciousness. Work to help the person to get a greater sense of value, as a greater image of himself, a greater awareness of the divine activity so that truly, to him that hath, it shall be given, and if we want the person to have, if we want him to have more things coming to him, given to him, a greater standard of life and so forth, he must develop that hath, to him that hath, that consciousness, that awareness, that realization of the prospering law of life.
This is a very important thing. For instance, watch the simple little illustration, which is classic and oft told, of the magnet that attracts and holds iron filings. Simply little magnet, the horseshoe shaped piece of metal, painted red, with metallic tips and so forth, and we know how if you take this magnet and you run it through a box of sand, it comes up with iron filings just sticking out from it, bristling in all directions. It’s one of the things that we used to do as children, I’m sure. Now, an unmagnetized piece of steel, this is a piece of steel that looks exactly like the other, it’s horseshoe shaped, painted red, and has metallic tips and so forth, and you take that same piece with no magnetic qualities at all, run it through the sand and it comes up nothing. One pulls out the steel filings, one pulls out nothing.
They look exactly the same. What’s the difference? That one of them is, we say, magnetized, which means it has insouled within it, a magnetic quality and who understands magnetism? You can get all sorts of laws and processes and definitions from physics, but it’s very difficult to really understand, any more than you can understand electricity itself, but if we see it and we know it by how it works and it does work and we can say of the magnet, of him who hath shall be given, to him that hath not, shall be taken away even that which it hath, which means oh let’s feel sorry for the unmagnetized piece of steel. So we get a whole bunch of magnetic filings and we just heap them all up on the magnet, just lay it all across the top, and say “Isn’t it great, now that it has magnetic filings too?” and the first jostling and they all fall off.
To him that hath, it shall be given, and from him that hath not, shall be taken away even that which he hath. Call it unjust, call it unfair, call it bad luck, call it what you want, but that’s the way it is. Life works in this way. Consciousness is a fundamental law and consciousness is simply a matter of the process of insouling within our innate self, within our mentality, certain values, certain ideals, certain convictions, which put us in tune with the divine process that draws things to us and holds things away from us. It works in this way and it works inexorably.
We’re constantly attracting that which we make inevitable by the quality of our thoughts. To out that in a positive way in terms of how to change things in your life, you will attract to you the kind of things that you desire, the good fortune that you have in mind for yourself, whether it is health or peace or love or harmony or prosperity or whatever. You will begin to attract those things to you when you succeed in insouling within your mentality itself the kind of value, the kind of image, the kind of consciousness, which make these things inevitable. Not that has to do some special thing, but makes it inevitable. If you run the magnet through the box of sand, it is inevitable that it’s going to come up bristling with iron filings. It’s inevitable. You don’t have to say, “I wonder if it will?” Or “I’m gonna treat that it will.” You simply run it through, and up it comes, and it’s bristling with iron filings.
When your consciousness has insouled within it certain fundamental realizations, then you make the good that you desire inevitable. That’s the fundamental, that’s the thing that we wanna work with in understanding the truth, in terms of health and prosperity, these things tend to come when you create the conditions in mind that make that result an inevitable experience, and they will come surely and completely according to the patterns that are formed within your consciousness. This is what truth is all about and this is what Solomon had in mind when he said, “As a man thinketh within himself, so is he.” As you think in yourself, not as you have been consciously thinking, because the person who got splashed by the taxi cab head to foot doused with water and muddy water at that, wasn’t actually thinking of being doused by muddy water. Probably not. It was the furthest thought from his mind, but somehow, in some way beyond understanding or explanation, something in his consciousness was riding that wavelength that made him receptive and responsive to that particular experience rather than somebody else. That had him there at that particular time. Doesn’t make him a bad person, but it does make him, if he’s willing to acknowledge the truth, one who was involved in a consciousness in which he was out of the divine flow of harmony and order.
So, okay, so I see this now. This experience, whatever it is, as an indication that I need to get myself back into the realization of oneness with the divine law, that’s all. It doesn’t mean I have to condemn myself. Doesn’t mean I have to in any way make myself the guilty or the culprit, because obviously the cab driver is involved too and he wasn’t looking where he was going. He was very thoughtless. Sure, but that doesn’t help my problem. It doesn’t help me to spend all of my energies, or as we sometimes say to vent our spleen upon him and make him the culprit, because as far as I’m concerned, somehow my consciousness participated in it. When I realize that, then I have a choice.
You see if life is a series of bad luck, and we say, “Well I’m just an unlucky person. Everything bad happens to me. I’m having a stroke of bad luck. Everything goes wrong.”, then again as Voltaire was said, under the concatenation of events, there’s nothing I can do about it. There’s nothing I can do about it. So all I can do is hang my head and say, “Oh woe is me, everything is bad. Some people have all the breaks. I get the worst of the whole deal. Some people, if they fall in a river, they come up with a fish in their mouth, if I fall in a river all I ever do is get stuck in the mud”, you know and so forth. All these cliches that we talk about, but you can do something about it. If you know that consciousness is involved, that no experience is unrelated to consciousness, then I always have a choice. I can decide to change. I can alter that and I can begin to experience good fortune rather than misfortune.
Now, we’ve promised today a formula for good fortune. So let’s get down to it. If you had a formula by which you could be absolutely sure that you’re gonna have good luck and good fortune at all times, I’m sure you’d stop and kind of imagine this for a moment, you could just see all of the fears and anxieties and the concerns just sort of rolling away from you. You’d become confident, you’d become invulnerable, you’d become invincible. You would find yourself in a situation where certainly nothing would discourage you, nothing would defeat you, because you’d know that somehow because you’ve got the formula for good fortune, things are gonna work out for you, and there is such a formula and it’s ages old and it’s so simply that we could overlook it.
The formula can work for you as it has worked for millions of persons through the ages, and as it worked for you sometimes in your life even though other times it seems to be far from you. Quite often it is said of a person who is apparently lucky, we would say of him, “Well, he sure must live right.” You ever hear that? It may be that he just won a few races at the track or perhaps he won the lottery, he sure must live right. The person who won the million dollars on the lottery, boy he’s been living right, or he says that of himself, you know and so forth. This is an important way to say it, though it means something different than what probably is normally intended.
In other words, you must live in right relationship to the universe and to the laws that sustain all that is within it. What does that mean? What is it to live in right relation to the universe and the laws that sustain it? Can you just imagine now, one simple word, love? There it is, l-o-v-e. It boils down to that. Right relation to the law, right relation to God, right relation to people, l-o-v, love. In other words, it is a one word talisman.
Now right away you’re disappointed. I expected something more dynamic than that. Same old hat. There he goes again talking about love, you know. Pollyanna. All right. But you see the thing that is so often overlooked is that you are a whole person. It is not enough to work with your truth on specific situations while forgetting all the other areas of your life. For instance let’s just say that your great need is employment or need for betterment or success or prosperity within your employment. It’s perfectly legitimate need and it’s one that most folks experience in one way or another.
Now let’s say you go to a practitioner or truth teacher and he listens to your tale of woe, and he’s very hopeful and helpful and gives you a treatment or an affirmation, tells you, “Now you work with this and I’ll work with you and things will change.”, and your affirmation may be something like, “I am attracting my right and perfect place and I succeed easily within it. I’m attracting my right and perfect place and I succeed easily within it.” And you may use this over and over again. You may use many other different kinds of treatments or techniques and trying to demonstrate success on your job or in getting a job, and yet often to great consternation of everybody involved, you and maybe even the practitioner, it doesn’t happen. Good fortune still eludes you. You may be wondering, “What’s wrong? I’ve been using the treatment, I’ve been following the techniques, I’ve been knowing the truth, I’ve been having my prayer times. What’s wrong? Why doesn’t it change?”
Maybe we can get the insight from a simple little illustration. A youngster is out watering the lawn, trying to help his father with the gardening, and a lot of people are in the gardens these days. So he’s standing there with a hose and somehow no success, but no water is coming out of the hose and he stands there and he stands there and finally he turns to his dad and he says, “Daddy, this old hose is no good. It doesn’t work.”, and the father takes a look at him, sizes up the situation immediately, and he says to him, “Well son, the hose will work all right, but you’re standing on the hose.” You’re standing on it and in a way beyond understanding, it is often that we are standing on our own hose. We’re blocking the flow of love.
Paul gives us a very clear articulation of this formula for good fortune when he says, “To them that love God, all things work together for good.” To them that love God, all things work together for good, so all you have to do is love God. Just love God and everything is gonna work out. You’ll have good fortune. Just love God. Go away from here today loving God and your life will be changed. We’ve heard that before too. Sounds good. Well I will ask the question for you, because in my kind of thinking, I find that this question rises up often. It sounds good, how do you love God though?
How do you love God? I mean to love God is an abstraction. How do you love God? God, I love you, I love you God! People sing it in songs. God I love you, I love you, I love you, say it over and over and over, and I love you God, I love you God, I love you. What does that mean? I don’t mean to put this down you see, but I simply say we must begin to take a good look at ourself and see what is going on. You don’t love God because you say you love God. You know it’s like the husband says to his wife, “But of course I love you, don’t I come home at night? Don’t I bring the money home?”, and so forth. But you don’t love a person because you say you love a person. As a matter of fact, your love may even transcend saying it.
The important thing is, to love God, you need to look at God not as a person that is off somewhere that is gonna hunger for your affection. God doesn’t sit there and yearn and yearn that you’ll someday come back and say, “I love you.” And have His feelings hurt if you don’t, because if that’s the kind of God you have, you’re in trouble. Because he’s off there somewhere and the only time He gets involved in your life is if you can speak the magic words and stir Him up to action and find Him in a good mood when he’s not too busy with other things, then He’ll come and say, “Well all right. He’s doing the right thing. He goes to church, so I’ll come and help him for a while.” Then life is pretty precarious.
How do you love light? By opening the window or getting out in the sunshine, right? How do you love air? By breathing it, exhaling it, inhaling it. How do you love electricity? By turning on the light or turning on the switch that lets the electrical energy flow forth and heat the filament or turn the dishwasher or whatever. How do you love God? By making yourself receptive and responsive to the inward outflow of the divine action, in this case the divine action of love.
Now here is a very important idea that can help you to unlearn some of the errors of human consciousness. It’s a very simple thing. It’s a statement, something that we have to kind of meditate on until we begin to get the feel of it, and it goes simply like this, “You are a very important person to God, because you are God’s living enterprise.” You are a very important person to God, because you are God’s living enterprise. To carry this to a further degree, there is no way that God can ever be separated from you. God never runs off and leaves you. “Behold I will comfort you and sustain you. I will not leave you comfortless.” There’s no way that his activity of God can ever leave you. As my good friend Meister Eckhart would say, “Man is in the far country, but God is at home.” Now that’s a very important insight in the parable of the prodigal son.
In human consciousness we may get away from it all and tend to lose the sense, the relatedness, the oneness with the divine flow, and because that’s where our thought is, life is consciousness, that’s where we experience it. But God is always at the center of our being. God is our very being. God is our very ability to think, the mind by which we entertain ideas. God is the very heart process within us, through which we love. God is. Doesn’t come and go. So our prayer and our affirmation is not to try to get God to come and do something for us to change our luck, or in other words it doesn’t help anymore to rub the rabbit foot so we want God here so I can rub His hand a little bit. You see? This isn’t what the divine process is. The activity of God is everywhere, evenly present, in it’s entirety, can never be separated, or as someone has said, there are no God-empty spots ever.
But the black holes of consciousness are in the ways in which we think about this, so that we isolate and insulate ourselves from this realization and we act for all the world as if we are alone. And if we act it, consciousness allows us the complete freedom. If we think we’re unlucky, we’ll be unlucky because that’s the degree to which we take the process. It’s like taking electrical energy and instead of turning the light on full, we turn it way down dim with a rheostat or turn it clear off and isn’t it terrible we have no light? Of course you have no light, you’re standing on the hose, you see. You’ve rejected the free flow of the divine energy, but it is present, can never be absent.
So you are a most important person to God. You are God’s living enterprise. So instead of dwelling on how bad things are out there, how difficult your relationships have been, how unlucky you have been in the world, how you’ve been plagued with misfortune, get yourself centered at the root of your being, centered in the flow of God love. Not to make God do something for you, not to make love of God come somehow into your activity, it is already present, but you need to center your attention in that.
Whereas in most cases we’re looking out here in the world. We’re saying, “Why does he do that?” “Why does the cab driver do this?” “Why can’t they give me more?” “My life would be so happy if these people would just stop doing this.” “If things would change, if the economy would change, if the internal revenue service didn’t take such a big bite out of my money, everything would be fine, if things out here would change.” Instead of that approach, remember life is lived from within, out. So we turn within ourselves, not just when things are feeling good, but at the time when you feel desperate, when it seems that you’re unlucky, take time to be still and get yourself recentered. Not in any way trying to influence God, because there’s no way you can influence God.
If you’ve been trying to get God to be a greater power in your life then you’re wasting your time, because God can never be a greater power in your life because God is and you live in it. It’s the dynamic activity which is the very life of your life, the breath of your breath, the mind of your mind, always. The need is just to be still and know it. Know it. Get centered in it. That’s all. Get centered in it. This is the key to the whole flow of good fortune, to be centered in the realization of your oneness. To know that you have something working in you, on your side. You have something going for you. You have someone who is interested in you, if you wanna put it in the someone, in the personality, or if you want to think of it more in terms of principle, you have a divine process that is constantly working in you, and as Jesus puts it very succinctly, “The Father knows what things you have need of, even before you ask, and it is His good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”
So the divine activity within you has only one purpose as far as you’re concerned, and that is to work for your good fortune. Not if you pull the right strings, not if you say the right prayers, not if you go to church at the right time, that’s the divine action. It’s fundamental, just as fundamental as the electricity in your home, which will do wondrous things for you if you direct it and make the contacts. The divine action is always present within you. Ready, willing, and eager to flow forth through you in terms of good fortune, in terms of health, in terms of success and so forth. Something is working on your side, always. You have a good thing going. Marvelous to get that realization. So that your prayer and treatment is not to change anything or to change your luck, but to get yourself recentered.
So now you see, you love by being loving, by getting yourself consciously into the divine flow of love from within. This is important in that we understand love. We talk about love often and again it’s true that love is often thought of in a Pollyanna way, as kind of an emotional thing. Wouldn’t it be nice if everybody would love each other? Sort of a Sunday School, sort of insipid sort of approach. In other words, God wants you to love one another. That’s the way we kind of take it from Jesus teaching. Everybody love one another and we’ll have such a beautiful world. So let’s try to be loving to one another, folks. And I say so often, that misses the whole idea because to try to love is not to love. You do not love by trying to love. If you say I’m trying so hard to be loving to these people, because I know it’s important. Well you may get an A for effort, but a lot of people have A’s for effort and still come out with bad fortune, you see.
We can often say of the person, how come this very good, religious person suffers so much? I mean this woman is marvelous, she’s gracious, she’s gentle, she loves people, she goes to church, she tithes, she’s always been a good Christian woman or a good Jewish woman or whatever, how come? When have you ever heard that? Constant. It’s the question, the eternal why in the consciousness of man. Well, give her an A for effort. She got lots of A’s on her report card, but unfortunately a report card is not what counts. Consciousness is what counts. Why does the person suffer so? We don’t want to point fingers, but we wanna know that if things happen according to consciousness. If you run the electromagnetic process through the sand, you pull up the iron filings. If there’s no electromagnetism, no filings. To him that hath it shall be given and from him that hath not, it shall be taken away that which he had. How can you say that about this good religious person?
Well if you get to know that good religious person, very, very closely, and intimately, you will discover that that good religious person is also a worrying person, a fearing person, a person who is always disturbed about all the terrible things that are going on in the world. She does it out of sympathy, she’s the most sympathetic, or he, the most sympathetic person around. Always sympathizing with everybody from stray cats to all the errant people and isn’t it terrible? Wanting to help, praying for them, but still sympathizing with it all. So that sympathic consciousness, that vibration of worry and anxiety and fear and so forth, is the unmagnetized steel that draws no good out of life.
If you had to make a choice between being the good religious person and the person in a high state of consciousness, maybe you better decide on the high state of consciousness. I’m not saying that a person shouldn’t be religious, shouldn’t go to church, shouldn’t be involved in prayer and so forth, because I’m saying that when a person is in a high state of consciousness, he acknowledges these things. He sees the importance of them. He doesn’t go to church because he thinks maybe God will help him. If he goes to church, he goes because he simply wants to follow in the stream of consciousness that seems to natural and normal to him. He doesn’t go to church to get God, he goes to church to celebrate the activity which is a part of his life. This makes a big difference.
So you see then, that when I begin to live consciously in this divine flow from within, you begin to project an energy force that lights your way, that enables you to, as some persons might say, to live in the charmed circle of God’s love, and you find that you will be influenced by a process that perhaps scientifically might be referred to as syntropy, syntropy. Now I don’t know how many of you understand the word syntropy, maybe I don’t understand it either, but it’s a very interesting thing.
I do know what entropy is and Al Capp has given us a good demonstration, a good workable demonstration in the great scientific textbook of the day, and that is the funny papers. You remember in Little Abner, Al Capp had this little character Joe Btfsplk? Somebody asked me the other day, “Oh is that the way you pronounce the name?” I don’t know, I just dreamed it up myself. I suppose it’s supposed to be unpronounceable, but you remember Joe Btfsplk. He was the one that walked around with the black cloud over his head and everywhere he went he spread entropy. Things just didn’t work. I mean everything came to misfortune, it always rained and stormed when he was around, even if you crossed the street the sun was shining. Machines would break down. Feelings would arise, hens refused to lay, weapons would misfire, everything would go wrong when Joe Btfsplk was around.
This is a kind of entropy. An energy radiation and this is the Bible talks to as the Jonah, and there are many modern theater troupes today who feel that they will eject someone from the cast because somehow they feel he’s a Jonah, that everything works out in the wrong way, and you’ve known that kind of a situation. He’s an unlucky person, we say. This is entropy.
Now syntropy is just the exact opposite. In other words, when you’re living light, as the way we’ve usually put it, he lives right, when you’re living right, in the consciousness of love’s radiance, when you’re working with life rather than against it, when you realize that your good is not a matter of what happens out here, the concatenation of events, but what happens through you according to the level of your consciousness, when your spirit radiates genuine friendliness to people, non resistance to conditions, when you are cheerful not because of something that’s happened, but just because you sincerely want to be cheerful, when you’re happy because something is bubbling up within you, when you are secure and worry free, when you’re glowing with contentment and confidence and the conviction of the power of truth, then you become a contagious influence for good. You’re not only a joy to have around, but when you’re around, things work out.
I know this is something that we joke about sometimes, but Olga has this little thing, if she walks into a store, there may be nobody in the store, but within minutes the store gets busy. We’ve always remarked at this and we joke about it, but people, storekeepers have told her, “I wish you’d come in more often.” She walked into the tea shop and they’re sitting there wiling away, doing nothing, and within minutes people begin to come. All of you have that property to a certain degree in certain areas of your life, but the important thing is to begin to understand what is happening.
This is the syntropy process. That when you are projecting this energy force of good, when you are in the consciousness of this inward out flow of love, which is the great key to the universal forces that are so important to us, then in the syntropy of love, there’s a catalyst that turns everything into a good experience. It draws beautiful things to you. In other words, parking spaces open up when you drive up in front of a place, stocks go up as you buy them and they drop down dramatically as soon as you sell them. Dishonest people are honest when they’re dealing with you. Jobs open up, promotions come up to your attention, and generally things begin to work for good.
As a matter of fact, this syntropy of love becomes a kind of a catalytic force that turns the most grievous misfortune into good fortune in your life. Even the loss of a job becomes the opportunity for better employment that instantly opens up for you so that you could say that’s the most marvelous thing that happened to me. Like someone once said, and this is sort of a facetious turn of events here, that even a kick in the pants is a boost if you’re faced in that right direction, you know. So if you’re in the right consciousness, if you have this centropic flow of love through you, if you will, syntropy becomes a force that causes it to work for good, beautifully for good. Everything works out for good. I mean so even you got splashed with mud, you eventually begin to realize, my golly it’s cool anyway, you know. Maybe that’s stretching the point.
So the formula for good fortune essentially, simply, is l-o-v-e, love. Not the emotional kind of love, not the love changes everything dear, but love in terms of a divine force which is fundamental in life and in the universe, that you can tune into, center yourself on, and then let the energy flow of that force, flow through you easily to project itself so that you lose your suspicion, you somehow let go of your distance, your fear of people, something goes forth, an emanation from you, and nobody, nobody, can act in an unmannerly and unbearing or illegal way when he comes into the energy flow of your love. You can say, “Well that’s expecting an awful lot.” But that’s the ultimate, you see. That’s the kind of thing that enables us to begin to work from the inside out.
If you want to change things in your life, don’t look for a windfall on the stock market. I mean it’s nice to have a windfall. Don’t look for a killing at the race track. Don’t look for making it big with the lottery, because as long as you begin to look in that direction, as I have said, even if you win, you lose. Because once you have said is that my life will change if I can change my luck, but you see the point is if your life becomes better and harmonious and more successful and more related in love relationships that work out beautifully because you had a good luck situation, then you hang under the cloud of the concatenation of events, and therefore that which can come into your life to benefit your life through good luck, can suddenly change and through bad luck it can all disappear. This is why a person who has achieved any kind of good fortune in his life, at his own admitted estimation, because he had good luck, always has the fear that he’s gonna lose it just as easily as he gotten it and usually does. That which I fear comes upon me.
So I say don’t look for good luck to change it. Don’t look for some outer fortuitous set of circumstances to alter the direction of your good fortune, but get yourself centered in the realization that you are one with the dynamic activity that loves you, that is working for you from within, which wills you only good, which is ever seeking to give you the kingdom, as Jesus said, tune in under that consciousness. Center yourself in it regularly. Get the feeling that love flows forth from you even if you’ve had difficult love relationships with people. Basically it’s because you’re dealing with what Fillmore refers to as the plaything of human volition. Love is not an emotional thing. Love is a divine flow that may work through the emotions, may work through your senses, even through the sexuality, but this is not essentially what love is. Love is not emotion, love is not sense, love is not sex. Love is the divine process that you can tune in on and turn on and allow to flow through you.
So get yourself centered in this wonderful realization of love and let that love force flow forth from you to give you the friendly spirit. To give you that sense of relatedness to people, to give you that feeling that you’re in tune with this process, that you have something going for you, and you will walk certainly in what other people may call the charmed circle of God love. You’ll be under the cloud of sunshine instead of the dark cloud of Joe Btfsplk. Things will always work for good for you and people will begin to say, “Boy that’s a lucky person. He always gets the raises in salary, things always work good for him. What a lucky person.” But you know in your own mind that you’re not lucky, that you’re simply in tune with the divine flow, and that’s the key. Never chalk up good things in your life to good luck any more than you should chalk up the bad things to bad luck. Don’t let yourself get into this game playing process of human consciousness.
Know that there is something more important to life than this and when you get in tune with that divine flow, then things are going to work for your good easily and effortlessly and most important, you will know that the great one word talisman of life, simple as all get out is the word l-o-v-e, love, and you will begin to deal with this consciousness of put love into your thoughts, into your work, into your relationships, into everything. Not through human volition, but by getting in tune with it in yourself. Meditate on this realization in the morning. Let it flow through you and your whole being will be expressing and radiating this energy flow which we’re simply calling the centropic force of love, and you will be in tune with life. You will project some kind of an energy that is just as immutable and just as powerful as the electric energy in a magnet. It will tend to be dynamically positive in all situations and neutralize everything that is negative in your life and you will spread that syntropy wherever you go. Love then is the amazing formula for good fortune.
Let’s be still for just a minute. I want you just to rejoice with me in the realization that we are now centered in this great energy force of love. There’s nowhere to go to get it, no one has any greater access to it than you, not the greatest mystic of all time, not Jesus, not anyone that you can think of had any more relationship with love, anymore access to the love force of the universe than you have. It is yours, it is you. Just accept it and acknowledge it. Give thanks for it. Give thanks that right this very minute, in ways beyond knowing, that by your conscious intention, you turn the switch, you let the flow of love flow through you, and you go forth now spreading syntropy wherever you go. An energy force that will make things work together for good. It will keep you in the flow of circumstances that other people may call lucky, but you’ll know that consciousness is at work and you’ll rejoice and give thanks for the divine law. Praise God for this truth. The truth that makes us free and free indeed. And so be it.
