BLUEPRINT FOR LIVING WEB SITE
(Opening the Door to the True Life)

Principles of Power
No.7: Knowing Is Believing. Believing Opens The Door To The True Life.(Ref. Basic Laws No.7)

                                                           True Knowing is not an intellectual process. It is a direct, experiential revelation. A child who has not learned to reason things out believes via immediate personal experience. The mental process, having not, as yet, been developed to any great degree, is initially bypassed. Jesus warned, "Unless you become as little children you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven" (1). What a challenge. With those words I'm sure He immediately lost a lot of His audience. He'd lose more in today's world  with its emphasis on high educational qualifications and know-how. He was really saying that whoever wished to walk through the Door of Truth must suspend his reasoning faculties, look into his own heart, see the rubbish which had accumulated over the years, see how becoming smart enough to do well in this World-Belief-System had smothered the child within and decide if he was willing to die to it all, to retrace his steps and go back on a heart journey to awaken the child again. He was saying that to grow up in this Fallen World was to put Reason on the throne of Self, to worship at the shrine of the self-made Man, to be in competition with one's fellowmen in a system which rewarded the shrewd and the smart and rejected the innocent and the uneducated. No wonder the poor and the afflicted loved Jesus. He treated them as if they were worth something.
                          Jesus met people where they were, not only physically but in their personal lives and the words He spoke reverberated throughout their plans, their ambitions, their most private beliefs and feelings. Most of the time He ignored what people said. Instead He looked into their hearts and they found they couldn't hide how they truly felt about life and their fellowman from His gaze. The ambitious hated Him. The helpless loved Him. He didn't reason with anyone. His actions spoke louder than any appeals to their understanding but when He spoke His words immediately and violently rode roughshod over all of their carefully nurtured, carefully protected ideas and beliefs and grabbed their hearts and their guts and lifted them out of themselves and into a realm where logic and reason had no say.
  All who heard Him were impacted. Those who had settled into the Fallen World's arms and built their personal kingdoms from out of that ungodly love-match rushed within themselves to protect their interests against such a threat. They immediately threw up their defensive bulwarks of hatred and antagonism and sought how they could justify destroying this person who saw through their self-centered ambitions. But those who had nurtured broken hearts and broken bodies for too long found themselves transported to a land spoken of only in whispered hopes and half-forgotten prophecies.
                     The words the Great King spoke were not ordinary words as humans know them, words which convey understanding of the things of this world, of cause and effect, of  how things work and how to crown oneself king of the castle no matter who gets trampled on in the process. His words were and are Words of Power, Words of Life - His Life, and they are the vehicles of His love for they are Him in Himself  and they took their eager hearers into His heart, into His Land of Always and Forever. When He said, "Be healed" (2), His compassionate heart wrapped itself around the hurting one. How could affliction, the distortion of God's gift of good health, stay in the presence of God's loving heart? "And He healedthem all " (3). When He spoke to the blind and the lame and reached out to touch them it was Absolute Perfection lovingly embracing each of Its creations and restoring what had been lost through deception eons before.
                This was the Light coming into the darkness of human suffering and revealing the consequences of what is called "sin", a word which is considered by most people nowadays to be old-fashioned or irrelevant but which really means "missing the mark" (4).  When we lose our way spiritually we miss the mark. In daily life,when we make mistakes or the item we purchased doesn't work as it should because we ignore the manufacturer's instructions, we miss the mark.
                    Similarly, in the spiritual life, when we ignore the Heavenly Manufacturer's instructions, we miss the mark. When we strive to make ourselves more fully "lord" of our lives, no matter which way - spiritually, mentally, physically or materially, we miss the mark.  Look around you.  Competitive war in the workplace, causing stress and heartbreak. Wars in which one nation destroys or enslaves another and hatred justifies itself in the human psyche. In past centuries plagues and natural calamities were the main causes of multitudes of people being wiped out but in the twentieth century it was man who, through his knowledge of new kinds of weapons, has been the cause of millions of people dying. Is this normal? If it is then heaven would have to be a logical extension and fulfillment of such a belief. Instead, deep in each human heart we look for a heaven where all of our worries and cares will be gone forever and,"every tear will be wiped away" (5).
                                           We need to listen to Truth. We need to become as little children again and sit humbly and innocently at Truth's feet and believe what we hear. We need to trust again, to let the light shine again in the darkness within. We yearn for peace and happiness in our own lives and in the world around us but we will never find it if we don't know exactly how we lost it in the first place and how we may get it back again. The smart people look down their noses at the childlike innocence that looks out to a messiah or a savior other than themselves. Smart people believe they are their own messiahs, that they make their own happiness, usually by accumulating enough money to be able to indulge in all sorts of power plays. One of the world's richest men, when asked how much money would he require to be totally content, replied, "Just a little more." Nevertheless, contrary to popular belief, money is not the root of all evil. It's the love of money that causes all of the trouble (6). Money as the universal means of barter is necessary but as  the messiah of our peace and happiness it doesn't have a great track record. However, because it can buy anything and most anybody it has an unparalleled record as a means of enslaving its owners and destroying the lives of many others. Jesus said, " You cannot serve two masters: God and Mammon (wealth, material gain etc.)" (7). In other words, we had better make up our minds. If we believe we can find our happiness through the security which money supposedly guarantees, fine, but God won't share Himself with the worship of a material god.

                    The little child, in its lack of understanding, looks to its parents for all of its needs. It sees them as the primary source of all it desires. If they gave it some money it wouldn't know what to do with it. However, as its reasoning powers develop the parents educate it in the use of money. At that stage it is being prepared to be able to eventually stand on its own two feet. The mistake most people make at this time is to emphasize, mostly by example, how money is needed, not just as barter, but as the primary form of security, peace and happiness in this life. The child begins worshipping the false god and in so doing loses its innocence and its childlike trust. The Fallen World revolves around the worship of this false god - the use of money or material goods for security's sake. Even a simple people living in primitive surroundings and depending on nature's bounty worship the false god of security thus. Their god can be taken from them. Proof that it isn't the True God. We must worship only the Giver, not the gifts. Jesus put it this way, " Your heavenly Father already knows perfectly well that you need them (food, clothing etc.) And He will gladly give them to you if you give Him first place in your life" (8).
                    Once we see how we have been continually fooled, how we have been indoctrinated from childhood by the teachings of the World-Belief-System to believe that what it offers guarantees our peace and happiness; once we begin to understand just how totally we have been taken in by its false promises, we are open to hearing the Truth. In this case "Seeing is Believing." When we patiently explain to our young son or daughter the method of solving a mathematical problem we finally say, " Now do you see it?", meaning, of course, do they understand. They answer, "Yes, I see now how it works." In that case, to see means to know. When we begin to see how life really is, and how it should be, we begin to "see" - to know the Truth. In knowing thus we are able to believe more easily and this opens the Door to the True Life.
                  When does this begin? Right now, as you read these words! Why do you think you are reading these words?  Do you think this is an academic exercise? Do you think these words are simply someone's theoretical ideas, his own opinion?  Jesus said, " The words I speak to you are spirit and life" (9).  All words are vehicles of power. They convey our desires, how we feel, what we believe. They affect us in a multitude of ways. When we accept what they say into our lives we are, to some extent,  accepting the person from whom they come. We are allowing that person to influence us to some degree. When God speaks into our lives we are challenged to accept His words and if we do accept them we are also allowing Him into our lives and into our hearts.
                       With God it is always Today, the Eternal Now. He is always speaking to us but we are not always able to hear what He is saying. Our spirit ears are too clogged up with the words of the Fallen World, spoken into them from childhood. We lost our innocence to words. Now the Living Word, Jesus, speaks Himself into our lives and, at first, we are upset. All of our ideas are put on their heads and we find ourselves suddenly on the edge of  an abyss. But what is to us an abyss is to God the beginning of a Great Adventure if we will be still and listen some more.
                     It isn't the changing of your circumstances that will set you free. It isn't moving to a better climate or up the ladder to a managerial position or winning the lottery that will bring heaven into your life. It isn't anything outside of you being changed in any way that will enable you to find the treasure that is your True Life. It's right before you, in plain sight, in you, where you are, right now. You are exactly where you are meant to be at this very moment. Getting free in the Fallen World's eyes occurs through the changing and manipulating of things and of circumstances but getting free in God's eyes occurs through changes within oneself first. So you see:
BASIC LAWS No.7: It Is No Accident That You Are Where You Are. If You Don't Get Free Where You Are, What Makes You Think You'll Get Free Elsewhere?
Footnotes: 1: Matthew,Cpt.18,v.3. 2: Matthew,Cpt.8,v.3. 3: Matthew,Cpt.12,v.15. 4: Strong's Concordance,No.264, New Testament.  5: Book of Revelation,Cpt.21,v.4. 6: 1Timothy,Cpt.6,v.10. 7: Luke,Cpt.16,v.13. 8: Luke,Cpt.12,vv.30,31.
9: John,Cpt.6,v.63.   back to contents (Principles of Power)                  next page