If you were walking down the street, and you fell down, would you just lie there? Or would you get up? You’d get up. The same way with everything else. No matter how many times you make a mistake, you get up and do it one more time.– John-Roger

This article was first published in the the New Day Herald, March 1995. J-R gave a seminar in Bogota, Colombia, on October 30, 1994, and we thought it contained much good “basic information” for everyone about MSIA. So, here are highlights. Enjoy!

In the United States, we are the Church of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness. We call it by its initials: M-S-I-A.

In the United States, the Church has three members: the president (Paul Kaye), vice-president (Vincent Dupont), and secretary-treasurer (Mark Lurie). It has a spiritual guide, which we call the Mystical Traveler, and that’s John Morton. I was the Traveler from the end of 1963 until 1988. Then in June and December 1988, I passed the spiritual keys to the Traveler to John, and I retired. (Now, a Traveler doesn’t really retire; you stop cleaning out the chicken coop and start cleaning out the horse stables. So you just go from chickens to horses, but you’re always doing something.)

When we say we’re in the “movement of spiritual inner awareness,” we’re saying it’s inside of you. The capitalized one (MSIA) is a church, a nonprofit (501[c]3) organization registered with the Internal Revenue Service in the United States. The other one—”msia”—is registered in your heart. That’s where we do the work. (We don’t do it with the Internal Revenue Service, but we do follow their rules.)

Some people still say that John-Roger is the Mystical Traveler, but that’s not accurate. Here on the earth, John Morton has the mantle I used to carry, and new people who are coming into MSIA will become his initiates. Just because I gave up the mantle of the Mystical Traveler doesn’t mean I went stupid. I still know how to do it because all these years, I was reading my own discourses, listening to my own audiotapes, and watching my own videotapes. And I practiced it, so I learned to do it.

The part that was giving the information in the discourses and tapes was a spiritual part. Everyone in this room has that. So if we were to say, “Who is the Mystical Traveler?” we would have to say, “Who is breathing?” We would answer, “Every body on the planet,” and that’s who the Traveler is— everybody on the planet. But who has the mantle to conduct the spiritual ordinances? John Morton. He’s my Traveler here on this level. John says I’m his Traveler, and that’s so spiritually. I’m the Traveler spiritually for all the people I initiated. I’m not their Traveler physically; John is. He’s your Traveler physically, so when you want something, you should go to him.

When somebody says, “I’ve been a member of this Church for fifteen years,” or “I’ve been in the inner circle of the Church,” they would have to have been like Paul Kaye, Vincent Dupont, Mark Lurie, or John (since John was president of the Church for a while, as I was). When we turn over the presidency to somebody else, we’ve “left” the Church in a way, because, legally, the only “members” of the Church are the president, vice-president, and secretary-treasurer. But we don’t stop participating in it.

So who are the participants? The ones who read the Soul Awareness Discourses, listen to the Soul Awareness tapes, read the MSIA books, and come to the PTS workshops. We are, in a sense, the participating membership of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness. But we cannot be “members” because of the way the laws of California and the United States are written. It’s a legal definition.

You don’t have to believe that John Morton is the Mystical Traveler. It’s not required. It wasn’t required that anyone believe that I was a Mystical Traveler. It isn’t required that you believe what’s in the discourses. It isn’t even required that you do spiritual exercises; the Spirit, the Traveler, does them for you in the Spirit world. This is a church with absolutely no requirements to believe. It does have suggestions, principles, and tenets, but it’s not required to believe them in order to participate in MSIA.

These are our tenets, which we use to help us get through this world: Out of God come all things. God loves all of its creation. Not one soul will be lost.

Then we have guidelines: Don’t hurt yourself, and don’t hurt others. Take care of yourself, so you can help take care of others. Use everything for your advancement, upliftment, and growth. Those are guidelines, but if you break them, nobody kills you. Nobody throws you out of the Church. We know it’s hard, and so we just say, “Forgive each other.”

Then we have nine ideas that we use in relationship to other people and ourselves: Health, wealth, happiness, prosperity, abundance, riches, loving, caring, and sharing. There is also a tenth one: touching out and sharing all that with others. You’re not required to do that or to believe that. They are ideas of how we want to live together.

We’re the only organization on the face of the planet that has all of these things as our guiding Light. We are in a fantastic group of people, going in a great way, and we’re ready to help each other. I’ve been in other groups, and as soon as somebody does something real nice, somebody says, “Oh, they’re not so good. I could do that.” But they never do it; they just want to condemn and to judge. Well, we say that dishonesty forfeits divine aid.

We see a lot of people in the world being dishonest, and they seem to have a lot of material things, so let’s look at where the divine aid is forfeited.  We say that the kingdom of heaven is within. We say that the way we go into the spiritual world is to go into the “tenth door” (the spiritual center, or chakra, at the top of the head) and the top of the “third eye” (the spiritual center in the middle of the forehead). That’s where we meet up with the Lord. So, if dishonesty forfeits divine aid, where must you be dishonest in order to forfeit the divine aid? Inside of yourself, with your thinking. That’s where you lose the divine aid.

Why would we teach to go inside to find God? Well, my boss, Jesus Christ, told all of us that the kingdom of heaven is within. Is that true or not? If it’s true, why bother pursuing this further? If it’s true, there’s a direction for us. But how do we go within? Jesus said that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. He also said that God knows what you want before you ask. That’s amazing, isn’t it? He can’t be “out there,” because I rarely got anything out there before I asked. Inside, though, I always get it before I ask.

Sometimes I like to think that what I do is my idea, but that would be a lie, that would be dishonest, that would forfeit divine aid. I will not do that. I give credit to the Spirit and tell people, “It is the Spirit that does this.” I’ve learned to move my personality aside. I can’t get rid of it, or my body would fall, but I keep it out of the way. And when it gets in the way, I tell you, “My ego did that,” so you know. I would not want you to think that it was divine aid coming out, when it was just the ego acting divine.

We will be criticized and condemned because we follow these principles. If you can’t follow them when you’re criticized, you’ll probably leave the organization of MSIA, but you can’t leave the movement of spiritual inner awareness inside of you, because it’s always there. Before I ever told you, before we ever saw each other, it was there.

We tell people to go inside. Go back into where the Soul is, get hold of the golden thread of Spirit, and ride on that up into the great Spirit worlds. Not into the clouds over this city, but into the invisible. In the Bible it says that Jesus rose into heaven on a cloud. Do you know that when you go inside, you can find that same “cloud” and go up on it? It’s a transport system. And in the Bible it also says that as you saw him go, you will see him come. So, many people are outside, looking up into the sky, and all they get is a sore neck. Others go inside of themselves, and they say, “Listen! Come to me, Lord Jesus Christ!” Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t. If he comes every time you say to, guess who’s the boss. You are, and he’s the “dog” that you call. He doesn’t come every time we call. He wants us to come up, so that we lift up into the invisible “clouds” and meet the Lord in the Spirit.

Paul in the Bible said a very interesting thing, and some of us think he was talking about himself. He made a statement something like this: “I knew a man that was out of his body, and when he was out of his body, he was with the Lord.” Now, how would he know that unless he had been out of his body with the Lord? It’s a good question. So, now do we follow Paul? No, he’s not the Lord Jesus Christ. We listen to what Paul says. Paul is like a dictionary. When we want to know how to spell a word, we look it up in the dictionary, see what the definition is, and see if that fits. If it does, we use it. That’s how we use Paul’s teachings. He’s a very good teacher, but he is not the Lord. That’s the difference.

When things start to go bad in our life, we have to look in the mirror and ask ourselves a few questions. Have I seen the Lord lately? Have I run into the Traveler lately? The Traveler and the Lord work hand in hand. The Traveler is a mechanism that takes the Soul into transcendence, and after getting there, the Traveler hands the Soul to the Lord Jesus Christ.

God’s not dumb. He’s got a lot of ways to get people. And “the loyal forces of the opposition” are not dumb, either. They have figured out a lot of ways to get us, also. And so we have to be strengthened to overcome temptation. When you are not by an ice cream store, it’s easy to say, “I don’t want ice cream.” But when you’re in the ice cream store, you’re not thinking, “I’m not going to have ice cream.” You’ve already been tempted; you’re just going to end up eating the ice cream. It’s the same way with losing weight. We go on a diet and “starve,” and then we can’t stand it. So we break our diet, eat what we want, and then we feel real bad. So then we just keep eating everything we want. That’s when we’re dumb. It’s okay to break a diet once in a while. We’re going to do that. What’s important is going back on the diet. As many times as you go off, that’s as many times as you go back on.

If you were walking down the street, and you fell down, would you just lie there? Or would you get up? You’d get up. The same way with everything else. No matter how many times you make a mistake, you get up and do it one more time. You don’t have to worry about one thousand times, just the next time. You don’t have to be concerned about how many times you’re going to break your diet. How many times are you going to go back on it? One more time than you break it.

Each time, we come back to our own reality. No one should tell you your own reality. They can point to where it might be found, as someone can point to where the bathroom is; but nobody should tell you what to do when you get there because that’s your business. The same thing holds for Soul transcendence. We tell you how to go inside. When you get in there, that’s your business. You’re free.

MSIA is natural knowing. Once you get in there, you know. You just know. Nothing can change it, except as you learn to know higher things. And you start to hang out with people who are in the natural knowing. Sometimes you fall out and need a support group, so we have MSIA home seminars. You go to a seminar, and the people start putting the energy of God back. You take it in, feel it inside, and once again you naturally know. It is an effortless path.

If we were doing yoga, this would be called sahaja yoga, the natural way. But we do more than just sit and be natural. We follow the Sound of God’s voice and the Light of his countenance. That is called surat shabda yoga: listening to God’s voice, or the Sound Current. So we naturally go back inside and hear God. At that point, this world will change for you. You will not be as happy here, but you’ll be happier inside, and then you learn to bring it out. If we get this whole room bringing it out, we get happiness and joy, and we start to look forward to seeing people.

Remember this: before you connected with God, you were like other people out there who were not connected. Thank God somebody connected you. Now, turn around and touch to somebody else. That touching is what opens the Spirit. When somebody gets angry and is going to be mean, just reach over and touch their hand or their back, and pretty soon their Spirit starts to open. Then you talk kind words to their Spirit. You don’t bawl them out for what they did; they already feel bad. Yours is to make them feel God, and God is good.

Now that we know which way we’re going, each of us must walk it himself or herself. Everyone must do that, but we can all walk in a way that others can recognize and follow along if they want. You could have been studying in MSIA for twenty years, and somebody who comes in tonight for the first time may be equally as advanced as you. So there’s no such thing in MSIA as an “elder” or an “old-timer” (unless you’re referring to old age). Therefore, we don’t judge. We leave that to God, because he said that “judgment shall be mine.” So we just love because Jesus said to love your neighbor as yourself and to love God with your body, mind, and Soul.

Baruch Bashan,

John-Roger