Actually I’m the student. A lot of people think that’s not true. But a lot of you have had little babies in your house, and you have to find out very fast what they’re teaching you so you can do things for them. When I get in front of a group of people I have to find out very fast what you’re after so that I can give it back to you. That makes me a student, and, in reality, it makes you the teacher. Then when the information comes back to you, that information becomes your teacher and you once again become the student.
On the level below us we’re a teacher, because the people on that level don’t know what we know yet. And on the level we’re on we’re workers. We’re just doing our best to live this day and to live it the very best we can. And on the level above us we’re students. So at any given point our work is cut out for us.
Many years ago my mother would come up with old homilies like, “There’s no rest for the wicked and the righteous don’t need it.” That meant that I got up and did dishes or took out the garbage. One day she said that to me and I just looked at her, and she said, “Didn’t you hear me?” I said, “Yes, but I’m deciding if I’m wickedly righteous or righteous wicked.” She said, “I’ll let you know when you get to one or the other.” She looked at me with that look that says, “Go right now.” So I said, “Mom, you haven’t been out of the house all day. Why don’t you come driving with me and tell me about it?” And, slowly, I got her involved in going to the car.
It was amazing that while we were out there and I was driving she was my friend. I asked her a lot of the questions that you really want to ask parents, but that might seem inappropriate. So I just started asking her questions like, “What is the biggest thing that I do that makes you the most angry?” And she said, “You’re just too sharp with the answers. You come back too fast with them.” I said, “Mom, I don’t know where those come from. You ask me questions and it just comes up. I don’t sit and think, plan, debate, or figure out who’s going to say what. I just have this answer. And when some of my teachers ask me I just have this answer.”
She said, “Yes, I’ve heard you’re a smart-mouth at school.” I wasn’t sure that I liked being called a smart-mouth, but I couldn’t stop it. Have you ever had somebody ask you something and before you know it the answer comes out, and it’s the truth? And you say it and that truth kills everybody especially you, because they say, “Who do you think you are?” And you know you hit it straight on. If you’re wrong, they smile and let you continue on with your wrongness. I have done baby blessings for years, and the Soul of that child tells me many things about the mother and the father and the house and what goes on in the house. We think that a baby can’t know those things because it hasn’t been in that part of the house.
The Church of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness teaches Soul Transcendence. We’re trying to get people to remember that they do that, and that they can do that. We’re trying to get them to recall it consciously. It’s like remembering you once again to your abilities, to remind you once again that you have them, to bring you back once again to that instantaneous answer that appears out of nowhere, the answer that you never thought of and that you never knew before you said it.
Often when you see someone that you haven’t seen for a while, this thing comes out of your mouth and it’s the very thing they’re hiding, that they don’t want you to know. You just lay it right out there and they don’t know whether to hit you, to kiss you, or to kill you. How could you know that? You think “I don’t even know why I said that. It came right out.” That type of spontaneous truth comes from Soul. And when that baby’s sleeping and you’re in another part of the house, that Soul can move from the body and travel around and see what’s going on in the room, or in the house.
When we’re older we go to school and when the teacher is talking we miss something and come back to what they’re saying. At that moment we know we’ve been gone. But sometimes we don’t know where we’ve been. Sometimes we daydream and while we’re daydreaming we know we’re doing it. We’re with the daydream but we’re also listening, and when we come back the teacher doesn’t know we were doing that. We can look the teacher straight in the eyes while they’re lecturing and our mind is miles away.
Every once in a while I’d be lecturing students in schools or colleges and I’d say, “If anybody raises their hand right now I’ll give them a dollar because that means you’re paying attention.” And I’d keep right on lecturing. I never lost any money. I figured if this whole class were to raise their hands, I’d be broke. But I’d chance it and go right on. Then later on I would say, “Did anybody hear me say that if you raised your hand, I would give you a dollar?” One or two people said, “I heard you say that but I didn’t think you meant that.”
They were hearing what I said and twisting it around to think what they thought it meant, and then attributing that meaning to me. That means they were not going to take me at what I said. Most of us do not take people at what they say. We listen to what they say and then we swirl it around in our mind and our experiences and our emotions. Then we throw it out to see whether it’s true or false according to our experience or our education, or what we thought or fantasized.
We have a lot of reference points going on inside of us to bring forward what we think is valid or authentic or true. It’s difficult to define “truth.” Truth has to have independent, empirical evidence. The only truth I’ve seen that really works is taking something and dropping it. It’s never gone back up and stayed in the air. That’s true every time. Gravity, to me, is the truth that I’ll bear witness to. The other things that I witness to will be beliefs about the truth that I know.
That’s quite different than saying, “This is the truth,” and trying to sucker you into that. I wouldn’t do that to myself, I wouldn’t want you to do it to me, and I won’t do it to you. But I would say that all these things that we’re talking about can be checked out. If I say, “I’m driving a Rolls Royce parked right out in front,” somebody could get up, leave the room and go see if a Rolls Royce is parked out in front. If it’s there, they can say, “What color?” And if I can tell them the color, they can say, “Right.” They may go on to say, “What’s the license plate number?” If I mess up on the license plate number, they may say, “That’s okay, I don’t know my license plate number either.” And they may give it to me. I wouldn’t do that. If I forget my license plate number they might say, “Can I have the keys to your Rolls Royce to see whether they fit?”
People will tell you a truth, a truth, a truth, and then they’ll lie. Then you buy it as the truth, and you’re not going to take time checking out all the truths because they sort of fit your own truth. They fit your possibility scheme, or your probabilities. They fit your “what if’s.” This is where we get conned.
When I talk to you, be careful, check it out, but don’t throw away what can be truthful and useful for you. Don’t let me put my prejudice on something and ruin it for you. Maybe I hate to have needles stuck in me, so I say, “Acupuncture is a terrible rotten thing to have.” There are people in here that would tell you that’s a lie. I can just say, “I don’t like to have needles stuck in me; therefore, I don’t know if acupuncture works or not.” And I might say, “It works for me and I still don’t like needles stuck in me. But when I have problems I get the acupuncture because it works for me even though it hurts.”
I don’t know why women have babies. They say it is one of the most painful things to deliver a child. Then they have another one. You don’t see men having them. They say, “I saw it and how painful it was, so no more.” Then later on the woman says, “This baby is so sweet and so cute,” and the man says, “Yeah it is and it’s mine.” She says, “Let’s have another one,” and he says, “I like making babies.” Most men do. They may have some concern about it, but it’s nothing like a woman’s concern.
And even though men can project their concepts onto it, we’re in effect circling the idea of having a baby with our lie of what we think it is. We can say, “That’s a lie. I don’t know how you feel. I don’t know how you think. I don’t know how it is, and nevertheless, here’s what I’m putting onto it, honey, and I hope you can accept it, even though it’s a lie.” And she hears it and she says, “That’s fine.” She knows he missed but she says, “You get an A for the effort of attempting to understand.”
The Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness and Soul Transcendence are much like that. When you start to make the movement away from the body in a full consciousness for the first time, it might just scare you because that’s what dying is like also, and the far memory of death stays with us. We come back into the body and our heart is beating very fast, and we think, “Oh, my God! I thought I was dying.”
Actually, it’s a rehearsal. And just like women after childbirth, you say, “I’m not going to do that again. I’ll die.” Well, you didn’t die this time. But saying you’re going to die is writing a circle of lies around your truth. You have to say, “Wait a minute. I had the fear. I thought I was going to die but I didn’t. And those are the empirical things that I want to work with.”
How do I have that experience again and not feel like I’m going to die? Go into it a little slower. Go into it with somebody who can watch you do it. Associate with people who are good at Soul Transcendence. You may start to do your spiritual exercises and all of a sudden you drop off and go to sleep. A little bit later you open your eyes and you go, “Wow! I had a very strange experience but I don’t remember what that was. Later on, you think, “I’m just having some recall about what happened. I was in some other place” and you start to realize, “Oh my God! I was out of the body.”
Nobody knows that but you. Then you come to a seminar and I start to describe it. You say, “Somebody else knew that because he’s up there describing what I was going through. How does he know to describe that? It wasn’t exactly the same but it parallels so closely what happened to me. He knew. He knows.”
Folks, I do know. There’s no question. That may hurt a lot of people’s feelings because they might say, “No he doesn’t know.” They can say all the lies that they want to about me, and circle my truth and call it all lies, and guess what? I still do it. That is the hardest thing for people who are opposed to Soul Transcendence. They can’t disprove it so it’s the work of the devil.
Why on earth would the devil want you to get out away from the body so you could see the total reality and see where the devil and the negativity fit? Then you’d say, “I know what that is.” When you come back in the body you stand up and say, “The negative power sets up these types of issues to trap you.” We’re not going to believe that person because we think they’re crazy until it happens to us. Then something inside says, “I remember this person talking about this experience and it happened to them this way. And let’s see who were they? Oh yeah, they were with that MSIA group. I’m going to call them and talk to somebody.” And they get hold of a minister who starts to explain things to them and they think, “You know, you have just saved my life.”
We haven’t saved your life. We’ve just relieved you of a little bit of anxiety. The “saved my life” is a lie, and they’re going to try to circle the truth with that type of lie. We don’t even let them do that. We say, “No, it just relieved you of some anxiety. The anxiety is the lies inside.”
The more that you can practice going in and out of your body in the level of your Soul, the easier it is to start to do it consciously. Once you start to do it consciously there are different levels that you go through. Some people will start out from the physical body and they’ll go into the astral, and in the middle of the astral level there’s a place called “Summerland,” which is absolutely beautiful. Many people worship it as their heaven, and the god of that realm is worshipped as the Lord of Lords. That’s like driving to a larger city nearby and thinking you’ve found heaven.
It’s a minor level of creation. I tell you this not so you’ll believe it, but so that when you go there you don’t get stuck there. Whenever you’re traveling in the spirit world and you say, “This is it, I am it, I have arrived, there is nothing else but me,” you’d better say “et cetera” because you might be trapping yourself with your worst lie, believing that what you think in your mind is the truth.
Sometimes I tell the people who I work with, “Just because you thought that, don’t put that on me because I don’t think that and I didn’t do that and I’m not going to do that. You assumed I was going to do something else and you started directing me in a way I’m not going. If you want to know what I’m doing, sit, watch, listen. And then I’ll tell you something. When I need your help I’ll turn to you and say, ‘Can you help me with this?’ And if you want to find out how dumb I am, just sit and watch me because I’ll demonstrate my levels of dumbness as I learn new things. Or I’ll demonstrate my levels of smartness if I go beyond you.”
Soul Transcendence has many pitfalls. People talk to me about doing it who can’t. People read information about it and they go out trying to talk about it as though they can do it, when all they can do is vocabulary. But there’s a way to correct that: When you do it, the Spirit acknowledges it for you. It’s not that you just feel good inside because I could probably make all of you feel really good inside if I said the right thing to you.
The truth of our existence is that we are divine. The illusion of our existence is that we’re the mind, the emotions, and the body. These teachings are not John-Roger’s. They come through from Spirit. Sometimes Spirit calls itself John. It also says Jesus Christ. It also says the Holy Spirit and the Holy Ghost.
I would like to tell you with all humility that these are all my teachings and that I did it all out of my mind. I know I can’t do it because I can’t remember the seminars I gave in other cities. I entered early senility over twenty years ago. I have to listen to the information myself. I read discourses. I read my own books. and when I read them I laugh and think, “That’s so true.” People ask, “Didn’t you write that?” And I say yes, but I forgot about it.
There is a danger in those books. The truth is that they are good books. The danger is that because it’s in the book you’re going to think it’s true. That’s where you’d better start watching out so that you don’t get misled by the opinions of other people who think that because it’s written down it’s true. Liars can write or talk or be on television. Nevertheless, you can read a book and extract the truth, which is whatever applies to you in that moment. If there is a part that you don’t know about, lean into it and see how true it is for you. Our unwillingness to risk the emotions, the mind, the personality, and the reputation is what defeats us in having the fullness of life.
My father asked my mother to explain something to him once a long time ago. I had come back from college, where I was studying psychology, so I knew a lot. (I hadn’t experienced a lot; I just knew a lot. I didn’t know much truth; I just had a lot of book learning.) After my mother explained, my father turned to her and said, “Will you just give me one good reason why that’s true?” And she turned around and walked away from him saying, “You can talk to the back of my head.” And she walked out of the room. My dad looked at me and said,
“Can you believe a woman like that?”
I said, “Yeah, she walked out of the room.”
“That’s why I married her.”
“For what?”
“Did you notice her after she walked out?”
“Yeah, Dad, I did.”
He said, “So did I, son,” and he got up and he followed her. I never pursued that but my mind did. There was something sweet about telling someone to go to hell in our household. They looked forward to the trip. And if they smiled, you wanted to go with them, because no one was being malicious or attempting to hurt or to get even at the expense of hurting someone else.
Our revenge was getting even, like when you’d hit your finger and it hurt, and someone would say, “Hit your finger? Hurt, didn’t it?” And pretty soon they’d hit their finger and you’d go, “Oh you hit your finger and it hurt, didn’t it?” Now we were even. No one was higher than the other. We all did it.
We’d wait for somebody else to hit their finger so we could all jump on them. Human nature is like that, but the jumping on them always had a loving support. Families jump on each other. We’re all going to do that but nevertheless there is loving support coming through, underneath all of that. That’s the Soul Transcendence part taking place physically. We move in with our Spirit and start to support the person.
As soon as we move in with our emotions we start to harangue the person. We get irritable with them and as we move in with our mind we start to criticize and judge the person. At that point the Soul has moved back. Then we start to use negativity’s power against the one that we love and adore and worship and care about. That’s when the negativity has gotten into us and we start to represent karmic law instead of Soul Transcendence. We’re going to deliver their punishment to them because they “deserve it.” It seems obvious to us because we think, “Why would I punish anyone in this world unless I knew they deserved it?”
People wonder why someone is punishing them when they just met them a few minutes ago. When that happens to me, I get up and walk out of the room. I won’t take sides and I won’t judge. But I always know this: The one that’s casting someone down is casting himself down. Every time I’ve heard people talk negatively about someone else I knew there was a negativity inside of them that talks from that same place. And it didn’t take too long until the one that was doing all the name-calling was also starting to call me bad names after I walked out. People think that when someone is sitting with them doing what they want that’s the truth, and then when they leave they tell the lie.
The Bible says something like, “He wins who endures until the end.” We must be vigilant all the time, and vigilance is the freedom. Whose freedom are we after, ultimately? Our own. I cannot give you something unless I have it to give to you. But wouldn’t it be terrible if I started telling you how bad it was to wear glasses and it would just ruin your eyesight and make it worse, and then turn around and put the glasses on to see what I want to see? That’s hypocrisy reigning supreme, masquerading as though you wouldn’t know the difference. People aren’t dumb. People are excitable, they are emotional, and they get hurt, but underneath all that we want to get well. We want to have a balance in our lives. We want to look at our families and say, “It’s a good family.” And we want to look at our job and say, “That’s a good job and the work that I do is good and the products of it are good.” And we want to look at our friends and say, “These are really good friends. I would spend the rest of my life with them.”
We set up a code for people to follow and as soon as they fall out of that code, we don’t go and put them back on the right track. Instead we pick them up and dash their head into it. We berate them. When you fall down in the mud you don’t need somebody to push your head further in it. You need somebody to help you get up and clean it off.
In the Bible, Cain asked, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” God didn’t answer. But there is an answer, which is that you are your brother’s keeper. Who answered it? Jesus Christ. The answer was to love God with your body, mind, and Soul, and Spirit, and to love your neighbor as your self. That makes you your brother’s keeper. It doesn’t make you your brother’s prisoner or warden. It doesn’t give you the right to go interfere. When you see two people quarreling you don’t go up there and say, “Now listen, you two are quarreling. She’s right” because she may turn around and slug you. Or he may floor you. You could walk over there and say, is there anything I can do to help the situation move along? You could venture that far.
Instead, most of us look into ourselves and say, “I have no authority in this matter.” But they need some help from an authority. We’ve all agreed that the police have the authority, so we call the policeman and the he walks over there and says, “Now, break it up and back off.” And they break it up and back off. He says to them, “Cool it down for a minute. You shut up. I’m going to talk to this one.” And that one shuts up. Why doesn’t he shut up when ordinary people talk, since we all have the same voice? It’s because we recognize the authority that we have given to the policeman. Not only do we recognize it, but we respect it.
God has given us the authority and responsibilities for Soul Transcendence. And Jesus Christ said, “This that I do you too shall do and even greater and because I’m going to the Father. I’m going to see that you do it.” He overcame himself and the world. As he sat in the Garden of Gethsemane he said, “God, if you can take this from me, I wish you would.” He was ready to throw in the towel, but he said, “Lord God, your will be done, not mine.” And he overcame himself. Not too many people are going to carry their own cross to be crucified. They say, “If somebody is going to crucify me, they should carry the cross. I’m not going to carry it. When you get there you may be too tired to put me on it.”
Jesus said, “These things that I do you too shall do and even greater.” He didn’t just mean the miracles. He meant the resurrection and the ascendance, which is Soul Transcendence. And all of that gift is given. We have to keep looking to that, not to John-Roger. That’s looking to a physical form. The form delivers the message. The essence conveys the information and the Spirit does the healing and the upliftment. It does it for me while it does it for you. It will do it in me.
It trained me for years. Every time I stepped out of line it was like two bricks hitting me in the head. If I leaned one way it would push me back again. If I decided I didn’t want to do it, the truck ran over me. It said, “You’re not going to have any say-so in this because you already agreed before you were born that you would do this. You’re trying to get out of your commitment. and you’re not going to be able to.”
But when the Lord asks you to do something, many of you go, “No, not me.” You see Him and you say, “Wow! Anything. Anything.” Then we come down here to the earth and we say, “Was that it? I wouldn’t have agreed to that. Of course not. I’m not that dumb.” Oh yes, we are all that dumb and we’re all here because we’re all that dumb.
A woman once asked me to give a message to Jesus. I said, “Give it to him yourself.” She said, “Well, he doesn’t listen to me.” I said, “I don’t blame him.” She said, “What do you mean?” I said, “If you’re going to talk to him like you talk to me, I don’t know why he would put up with it.” She said, “You put up with it.” I said, “I was told I had to do that.” She said, “Really? Do you have to listen to me?” I said, “I have to listen to you. I have to put up with you.” She said, “Do you mind that?” And I said, “Yeah I mind putting up with you.” She said, “Am I that bad?” I said, “Yeah, yeah.” She said, “You sure tell the truth, don’t you?” I said, “You keep asking the darnedest questions. If you’d just quit asking those questions, I could get us out of here gracefully.” She said, “No, I have one more question. Do you love me?” I said, “I still love you.” She said, “And?” I said, “And I don’t like to be around you. If I had my choice I’d rather you’d just keep right on walking.” She said, “Okay,” and she walked away and sat down.
I talked to her after the seminar. She said, “When I see Jesus I’m going to say you did a good job.” I said, “You don’t have to.” She said, “Why?” I said, “Who do you think stands here and watches all this? Who do you think gives me the information? Do you think I have this ability? Good God, I wish I did. I wish I could say, ‘Yeah, I’m Jesus,’ and that would be true. But Christ is in all of us, as it was in Jesus, and we’re forgetting that. My job is to keep telling you that the darkness of negativity will come against you to strain you and pervert you from the truth of your own Christ.”
Do you think the negativity doesn’t come at me? It does, morning, noon, and night. When it comes in the room I just light a candle and let it curse the darkness. When it sees the light it realizes what it’s been doing. When it comes against you all you have to do is light up with your own love inside.
We want love in our communication, and we can put the humor of light and love in our life, no matter what. I don’t take life seriously. I’m sincere about life but not serious, because it’s very funny to see how and why we do things and they turn out okay anyway. I’ve said to friends, “I don’t know how I’m going to get through this.” We think we’re never going to get through it, and we get to the other side of it and say, “You know, I never thought I could get through it that way.” We all laugh because we know we can’t get through it, that we’re at the breaking point, that we can’t go any further, and yet we’re here. We do a whole lot of truths, we circle them with a lie, and then we believe the lie.
Take advantage of the opportunities that you have. Learn to love God, God in you, God in others and you’ve learned one of the most miraculous things on this planet. The illusions of the mind and the emotions and the body disappear, and the reality of your Soul and your Spirit connection to God come forward in you. That’s the moment Jesus Christ spoke of when he said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”
Baruch Bashan
