‘For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation’ Romans: 10:10
I shall dwell upon the words righteousness and salvation. I would like you to apply these words and to try experimenting with them.
Every woman strives to attain independence. While still single, she craves to get away from her father’s house, to break free from her mother and father, to become a mistress in a house of her own. This striving is natural and Divine. When she gets married and enters her new life, she brings her dowry into her house – shirts, pillows, bed clothes; she gives away some of these; she organises her house and feels thrilled with this new house so appropriately tidied by her. Indeed, unhappy are the homeless women. A person who has no home is a person who has no character. The body is the house of the human soul in spiritual life. According to the same principle, just like with women, the soul should enter the body and organise it. Some people want to get rid of their bodies and they say, ‘When will I break loose from my body?’ There are bodies out of which one can break loose. These are the unhealthy damp cellars without windows, where people get rheumatism. Getting out of them does not mean that we have to get out of the healthy houses. Paul says in the Scripture that there is a home made not by human hand.
The concept righteousness derives from the expression to make things right. Which human being is righteous? The one that does not sin. But in order not to sin, one should have knowledge, should understand the meaning of things around oneself, and should make the right choice.
You strive for freedom. Each woman should have this freedom, but provided that she is able to use it to build the happiness and health of her husband, of her children. No husband, to a woman who is not free, is happy. Do you think that ill women are free? Women, whose hearts and minds are constantly disturbed, are not free. I do not mean that your mind should not be excited. Disturbance and excitement are two different concepts. Minds and hearts may only be excited on the surface, but should not be disturbed at the bottom in order not to be troubled. The latter is an indication of their shallowness, of only 10 centimetres depth. I ask you what can you do at a depth of 10 centimetres? If we take a cloth of 10 centimetres length, what can we make out of it? First and foremost for women is to have a deep heart – of at least 10 kilometres depth. Anybody trying to disturb you at such a depth will surely get drowned. What do little children do when they come across a shallow puddle of about 10 centimetres depth? They get into the water, disturb it, and enjoy it. Men, when they come across such shallow women, disturb them and feel satisfied. Then women in their turn say, ‘We are very unhappy’. There is a good deal of turmoil in shallow waters – frogs croak there all summer long – a lot of commotion and noise, which abates only in winter. This is to say that your hearts should not be shallow; there should not be any commotion in there.
I ask you what is the cure for such a puddle of stagnant water? You will pour a stream of fresh water into this puddle; you will dig a gutter so that the fresh water can wash the entire residue from the past away. Christ’s teaching is a fresh stream, which should enter your hearts and wash them; after cleaning them, it will leave the residue to fertilise your fields. You may ask how to dig such a spring. The spring of fresh water will find you on its own accord. Christ told the Samaritan, ‘The water I shall give you, will be the spring of life, running constantly within you.’ Hence this spring should be understood to mean salvation.
When a person finds oneself in a desert, where there is no water, one’s mouth becomes dry, one feels irresistibly thirsty and water is the only salvation, otherwise one is doomed to drop dead. Just like the traveller in the desert, many women die of thirst with their camels – with their baggage. You have heard the word spring. When you go out for a walk outside Sofia, I would like you to try the water of such springs. But the high life ladies, and indeed most of the people, go for a walk not farther away than Boris’s Gardens1, at that they walk along the same alleys every time, where there is nothing else but dust. They inhale as much dust as possible and when they come back home they say, ‘What a nice walk we had!’ I say you just filled yourselves with dust. People, when they adopt Christ’s teaching, often use the same trite phrases and afterwards they say, ‘I got a headache from listening’. This is because you inhaled dust. This is not a place for righteousness and salvation.
The words righteousness and salvation have seven meanings. I now talk about one of the meanings and if you understand it, I shall then move on to the other meanings. There comes a friend and says, ‘Let’s go for a walk, but not very far away, because I have a headache, I have palpitations, I am not used to it’. This shows that you are a person with short legs, while the Truth needs long legs to walk. Thus you will come, involuntarily, to a situation where you will commit a crime. As soon as one’s legs shorten, a person starts thinking of devilish things. Some say, ‘I can’t go to Vitosha2.’ Now, if you can’t go to Vitosha, how will you go to Christ? Christ’s Path is narrow and steep; it is a Path of the sensible human will. Tell yourselves in your mind, ‘I will go with my friends to Vitosha!’ If you can’t go in real life, at least follow them mentally; travel the whole way with them in your thoughts! This is Life’s philosophy.
When you meet your beloved, before the marriage, they call you angles, they love you, they can die for you, they can’t live without you, they kneel before you, and what a weeping, sobbing and pretence there is. However, this is not because they can’t do without you; this is a way to impress you and they want to say, ‘Let them see what the Lord is like!’ When they get married, women start kneeling. This is your philosophy. Rather than the men kneeling, it is you who kneel. Why so? Because your minds and hearts are shallow. Do not get me wrong! If I take a measure and try to fathom the depth of your minds and hearts, I will merely ascertain one fact, as it is. The words I say to you, I interpret them, I use them figuratively, do not take them in their everyday meaning. Your hearts can be shallow and deep at the same time. If residue continuously enters your hearts, the bottom will be filled and they will become shallow. There are lakes, which have become shallow, but there are lakes, which have become deeper… Why should women feel a desire to see men kneeling before them? To kneel, this is the law of selflessness, of self-sacrifice. The angles, formed when kneeling, show that one is ready to go low down and sacrifice oneself. When you stop and sacrifice yourself for somebody else, it means that you kneel before that person. But when a lad kneels before a girl, he lies to her. Tell me how many Bulgarian girls there are who have an ideal relationship with their husbands and have never exchanged bad words? I shall leave you to think it over and to find the Truth on your own. The Truth must surface – nothing more and nothing less! I do not want to present this Truth to you so glamorously, as I do not want it to dazzle you. I put it through many clouds, to make it acceptable to your eyes, thus wanting to spare you the illusions, which cause everyday unhappiness, because these illusions take you away from God.
When God sent one woman or one man to the Earth, He gave them a budget. It is unfair if somebody eats up your budget. No one has the right to take it from you, unless you give it voluntarily. You tell somebody, ‘You make no sacrifices for me.’ There is no need for anyone to make sacrifices for you, because if a person makes a sacrifice for you, in order to elevate you, such a person will go down. This is the Divine law – one is going up, while another one is going down. If the man is going down, the woman is going up; if the woman is going up, the man is going down. Well now, when you walk you cast an anchor, catch the man and keep him down, so that neither he nor you go up. You stop at one place and keep looking at each other. Such are contemporary women – they stop their men and do not let them go up. This accounts for why you sleep – since you cannot go to the other world, you cannot go up or go down. When you are asked why you sleep, you answer, ‘To go to the Lord’. When you say, ‘I slept fine’, this is so because you were up, but your impression from there is flattened, and there is only a shadow of something pleasant which stays with you. Sometimes you say, ‘I did not sleep well, I had bad dreams’. This indicates that you must have stopped your man from something. This unnatural situation is sometimes the result of utter self-interest, which is found with women. Self-interest generates self-interest, unhappiness generates unhappiness, and grief generates grief.
When I talk about suffering and unhappiness, I mean grief as a wrapping of the Divine Truth. And contemporary people wrap grief in joy and, thus they sweeten it from the outside. There are such pills – coated in sugar, but bitter inside. The Lord, now, supports neither homeopathy nor alopathy. The former cures with small doses of bitter powders, so that these can be effective; while the latter – with big doses of bitter powders; and there is no more pain. When one is healthy, one needs no pills. I know many people, who, every now and then, take automatically a pill of aspirin or quinine, not to fall ill. Thus, they impress on themselves the thought that they may fall ill. Keep telling yourselves, one word every day, each of the words said should be positive. This will improve your situation.
All of you who listen to me, please make the following small experiment, and I allow you one year for this, and afterwards you will be free: the first six months will be positive – you will plough, will sow, will reap, and the other six months will be passive – you will be gathering new energy. Don’t you doubt that everybody can do what I say! It’s ridiculous of you to say that you cannot do it. Some day I will gather small children and I will make an experiment with them and I will prove small children can do what you can’t; small children will do it, because they have greater faith. You may say, ‘We may deceive ourselves’. You may deceive yourselves the first year, but you won’t deceive yourselves in the second year. You should dispose of the thought that you may deceive yourselves. There are no deceits where the Lord works and you should know this line, ‘All that will happen to those who love the Lord, is for their good.’ You will adopt this motto: ‘Whatever happens to us, the Lord will convert it for the better.’ And then let all the bad thoughts, bad desires come, let all bad people take a stand against you; you should fear not! There should be no fear, keep fear away from you!
I shall now dwell on the verb can. What experiment have you done so far? You used it only in the first person singular, ‘I can’. From now on you shall have to use it in all the forms: ‘I can, you can, he can, she can, we can, you can, they can’. When you come across any obstacle, you will say to yourself, inside your soul, ‘I can, we can, it can be done! It is me who can. It is you, Lord, inside me, within my soul, who can. Your Great Spirit, that guides me, can!’ You will then use the three forms in the plural too. Your faith and your Purity will help everybody who is up there to join efforts to implement the Divine idea in your life. In this Path it will take Divine patience and persistence until Light takes the upper hand within you. This experiment you shall have to do any time when you feel weak. You will do it between 4 and 7 o’clock in the morning. Let those of you who can, get up in the morning 4 o’clock sharp and willingly do this experiment. When the Sun rises in the morning you will say:
(in the first person singular), ‘I can! – Let my Sun rise in my soul like this.
(in the second person singular), ‘You can! – Let God’s Sun rise in my soul like this.
(in the third person singular), ‘He/she can! – Let the Sun of my spirit rise like this.
(in the first person plural), ‘We can! – Let the Sun of our Angels rise like this.
(in the second person plural), ‘You can! – Let the Sun of the Great Lord of Peace rise in our souls like this.
(in the third person plural), ‘They can! – Let the Sun of all Suns rise in our spirits like this.
Six Suns should rise within you like this. You should dwell for four minutes on each Sun; altogether twenty-four minutes shall be spent on the rising of the six Suns.
The rule that you will have to observe is as follows: you will get up quietly, calmly and after washing your face in the bathroom, you will be quiet not experiencing a single disturbance – you should fear nothing. You may not feel quite well while getting up; you may feel as if the world is wrong. But you should stand up and say the above words quietly – everybody to themselves. You will take a notebook, and each morning for six months running, you will write down at what time you got up and how many times you were late. Having uttered these words you will feel something pleasant in the pit of your stomach and your spirit will be elevated. You need six years to get to know how these Suns rise. Keep doing this experiment for six months and please share and recommend this experiment to some of your female friends. You will start on 6th of April. Some may ask whether it is possible to get up so early and so on. You should not entertain such thoughts! You will put down in your notebooks what the weather was like and there should be separate columns for: clear, cloudy, rainy or windy weather. All weather conditions are favourable. If it is rainy or cloudy, do not ever complain during these six months. If it is rainy, you will say, ‘The weather today is rainy – God purifies it and the fields will yield better crops.’ You will try to apply all of this. Moreover, you will require that your friends make a promise to do it.
During the first month, when you say all the six points, you will emphasise the first one most; during the second month you will again say all the six points, but you will lay the emphasis on the second one and so on. I want you to be quiet, tranquil and the blessing that will come will be as much as you need. The rain, when falling, will give each plant as much moisture as it needs. I want you to generate a favourable wave and you will try to learn the lesson from everything that happens to you during these six months. You will try to see the good side of the unpleasant things and to find out the benefit. You will say, ‘It will be for the better for those who love the Lord!’ Then you will use the following sentences:
I believe in You, Lord, who spoke in the past.
I believe in You, Lord, who is speaking to me now.
I believe in You, Lord, who will speak to me in the future.
Let Your Light descend upon all of us.
Let Your Name be glorified.
Let Your Kingdom come.
Let Your Will be done on the Earth, the way it is done up there in Heaven.
In the daytime, if you are inspired to read a psalm or anything else, read, but only if you really feel an urge deep down in yourself. Having read the above mentioned sentences, think about things that can elevate you, think of everything that is most beautiful in the world and you will see that the nicest pictures will be given to you. This is the only way to rectify your past and to lay the pre-conditions for good circumstances in your future. This is the way along which you will be able to strengthen your will and to ennoble your mind and heart. The world, of course, will follow the same course but everything will turn out for the better.
There will be moments during these six months when you will feel deficient in salt; you will then use the following sentence: ‘Lord, warm my heart with Your Love!’ If your mind goes dim at times, you will say, ‘Lord, enlighten my mind with Your Spirit!’ or ‘Lord, through Your Spirit, grant Light to my mind!’ Then keep staying quiet; perhaps one hour, two hours, three or four hours may pass, but anyway you will get the effect.
After the six Suns rise one after another, results will come. During these six months you will try to be on good terms with your husbands, children and people surrounding you, and will speak only of useful things. If you make a mistake and say something bad about somebody, you will put it down in your notebooks – you have to be honest with yourselves.
Another rule: if one of you cannot manage on her own, she will ask another sister to help her, if the two together cannot manage, they should ask a third one and they will say their prayer together. You should always try to get together in the mornings, up to 12 o’clock at the latest, because the influences are good then.
This is how one can be righteous and saved. This is the first meaning of these words.
Pass on this duty, this piece of advice to all of your beloved female friends. If you are deeply motivated, share these ideas with other people also; then you will be blessed and so will be they. This is the way your light will shine before the people close to you.
Peace to everyone!
Master’s lecture
Delivered on 5 April 1917
1 Boris’s Gardens is the central park in Sofia
2 Vitosha is a mountain near the town of Sofia
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