"In 1988, I had come to the place where I just didn't know what I believed. When I got up to minister, I would minister more out of my head, out of the intellect part of myself, because I had learned how to preach after all those years, but I wasn't coming for the unction. I wasn't inspired. I was literally dying inside. But, I told no one.
At one point, that year, I was in Memphis, Tennessee, ministering at a meeting, and nothing was happening. To add to my distress, the people sponsoring the meeting had put me in a motel in one of the most horrible parts of Memphis. There was even a sign inside the motel that said, "We suggest that you not leave your room, unless you really need to". And I thought, "This is not good! This is not good!"
At the Saturday morning meeting, a friend on mine showed up, whom I had met at one of the Bill Britton conventions. I had not seen this lady since, until that morning, when she handed me a tape. She told me that a while back she had been led by the Spirit to a book store where she had bought this tape. And she had taken the tape home and listened to it, and she had gotten absolutely nothing out of it, thought it was boring. In fact, she threw it away! But before the meeting, the Spirit impressed her to go buy that tape again and give it me. That was nothing new for me, because people are always bringing me books and tapes of all kinds. So, I took the tape and thanked her.
That afternoon, I went back to this awful motel, and to pile one more thing on to my misery, the TV would not work. I was afraid to go out of the room. So, there I was, stuck on a Saturday afternoon, in Memphis , with absolutely nothing to do.
THE ILLUMINATION
Then I remembered that I had brought a little tape recorder with me with earphones. So I began to listen to that tape, and I wasn't impressed at first with it either. The man spoke with a foreign accent. It wasn't preaching; it wasn't the tone that I was used to, and I was getting bored with it myself. In fact, I was about to turn it off. But then the man said something very, very, simple. He said that what we call New Science, not the old Newtonian Science, but New Science, has found that what we once thought to be empty space in the cell is not empty space at all, but it is a subtle intention of reality. The conclusion was that THERE IS NO EMPTY SPACE; ALL SPACE IS FILLED, whether we can see it or not.
That is a simple statement, but that wasn't what was important to me. It is what followed. When I heard that "empty space was actually filled with a subtle intention of reality', something happened in every cell of my body. From the top of my head all the way down to my feet, something began to vibrate in the cells of my body! A cellular awakening took place!
BECOMING REAL
I knew I had to rethink some things; I had to become completely honest with myself. I had to get real. That is the only way we can start our journey of awakening is to become real. The real Israel people is the IS- REAL people. I - is - real!
And when we get real with God, we are the true Israel people. The more real we get, the closer we come to taking our power back.
This illumination helped me understand what I had been experiencing for the past six months of my life. Every time I had gotten up to minister, I would look out, and it seemed that I was looking into a dark abyss, an emptiness, a vast nothingness. And my ego mind, my carnal mind, interpreted this as, "This is the end of your ministry".
That left me feeling angry! I was angry with God! I was angry at the thought of any God who would have called me to preach and minister, at barely sixteen years of age, who interrupted my normal teenage life. I left home at that young age to minister because I thought the world was going to go to hell, and Jesus was going to return, and the rapture was going to take place. I was pasturing my first church at the young age of nineteen. And, now, this is it? This is the end? I was angry at a God who would require that of me, "if there was a God."
This is how severe it had become for me. I'm just being honest. And, as I got honest with myself, I had to admit that I just didn't know what I believed, if I believed anything. I had believed what I believed, because I was afraid not to believe. But once the anxiety of going to hell and burning forever was taken away, and all of the fearful things my old religious beliefs had taught me were gone, I was able to get more real with myself. And, when I got real, I thought, "What do I believe that I have experienced? What do I believe that I really can say I know? I want to know Him!"
Paul said, "I want to know Him". (Phil. 3:10) And that word "know" carries one of the most intimate meanings that you could possibly believe. It is similar to the word that Adam "knew" Eve. It is that intimate. It is literally an intercourse of consciousness: The Father is in me, and I am in the Father. It is the closest that one can get in that deep knowing. But I did not have that kind of knowledge of the God that I had been preaching all those years, and I needed to know what God was.
THE MAN-CREATED GOD
I had worshipped the god that I had preached! I had poured my energy into that God. I had plugged my spirit into that God. But I began to realize the God was just an idea inside my head. I had made it real, because I had given it my reality. By believing in it and focusing on it, I had transferred my own life and spirit into something that really had no life.
Psalm 115 has always been one of my most favourite parts of scripture, because it speaks about the images that men have made:
5. They have mouths, but they speak not: eyes have they, but they see not;
6. They have ears, but they hear not: noses have they, but they smell not;
7. They have hands, but they handle not: feet have they, but they walk not: neither speak they through their throat.
8. They that make them are like unto them.
We have made images of God and of other subjects that are nothing but dead psychological pictures. They have no real life. But because we worshipped them, we have given then life. Worship is focusing psychologically upon something. And when we psychologically focus on something, we are directing our energy to it and into it. I began to understand that as I gave my life and energy to images that have eyes that could not see and throats that could not speak, I was worshipping these dead ideas inside myself.
THE DEATH OF GOD
Up to this point, I thought I was always hearing the Voice of God; I was always hearing "something". But all of a sudden, I wasn't hearing what I thought I was hearing. Coming to this realization began to bring about a death! God was "dying"! But, understand, it wasn't really God that was dying, it was my perception of God that was dying. It was an idea of God that had been put in my mind from the outside world that was dying. There came a time that I felt I was left with nothing.
THE EDGE OF NOTHINGNESS
I did not understand this edge of emptiness on which I stood, looking with my Western mind. Nothing was nothing! Paul said it in Corinthians, "I want to know nothing. I want to be conscious of nothing". It is a powerful portion of scripture where Paul is crying out for nothing, because he understood what nothing really was.
During that time I came across part of an old 15th century poem that came to me from a church in Denver, where I spoke in meetings. It went something like this:
"Come to the cliff!"
Again the voice said,
"Come to the cliff!"
But nobody came.
And the voice said, again,
"Come to the cliff!"
And finally one said,
"But we are afraid!"
Then, one last time,
With all that the voice could muster,
"Come to the cliff!"
We went!
He did push us!
And we did fly!!
That spoke to me, because I thought that when I jumped off the cliff into this nothingness, I would fall to my utter ruin. I thought it was over.
DIVE IINTO THE DARKNESS
But, I did jump! And when I dove off into my own darkness, by own nothingness, that is when the change really happened for me!
There is nothing wrong with saying, "Go to the Light, go for the Light." But, God said to me, "You are the light!" Why do I have to go to the light, if I am the Light. Carl Jung said that "darkness in unconscious light". And that statement gave me an understanding of Psa. 139, where David say, "Oh, God, make me like You, Who sees darkness and light as the same." There is really no darkness! There are just some things that have not been brought up to consciousness yet. That doesn't mean they are not there. I found a scripture that says, "There are treasures in the darkness" (Isa, 45:3) And I found where David said, "God has made darkness His secret place, His pavilion. (Psa. 18:11)
We need to go into our darkness, into our unknown! We shouldn't fear it! There are no demons and devils in there! Religion told us that to keep us from being empowered, because if they could keep us out of our potential and make us think that we would get it in another life somewhere, then they could keep control over the masses of people. But a new day has risen, and we are finding that we are the point of power, not some religion out there, not some ministry out there, not some group out there, but we are the points of power. And we need ministries that will empower us and help us and remind us to learn how to get in touch with our own deep inner processes.
ROOM IN THE INN
When I had that experience, I realized that I hadn't wanted Science to find what the church had not found. I didn't want this to come from Science. I wanted to hear it in a Holy Ghost filled meeting somewhere. I wanted some religion to find it. But because religion had become so frozen, unchangeable and un-progressive, the Spirit has had to enter where there was room for it to come through. There are branches of certain systems that have become progressive and willing, so that when there is room in the inn, Christ or Christ consciousness is birthed there.
BEYOND THE BOUNDARIES
Realizing this, I had to begin to look beyond the boundaries of my own comfort zone. I had to learn to walk into a whole new world. But, I felt awkward; I felt strange. I didn't understand the ways of these people at all, but I had to go and find out what it was that was happening inside of me.
Somebody had to tell me: somebody had to be more discerning that to just look at my flesh. Somebody had to look beyond the reputation; somebody had to look beyond the facts of anything that was standing as an obstacle to the process that was taking place in the inner parts of my Being. I had to find out what was going on.
DISCOVERY OF THE MYSTICAL
What I believe that science discovered, that fills all empty space, was what we have called spirit.
Spirit is a very mystical word. Spirit is something we could not explain or define completely. We talked about in the Pentecostal way or the Charismatic manner as something that made chills go up our backs, or something that would hit us, and we danced, and that caused us to speak in tongues. I am not speaking against those things, but I am saying that those things still didn't tell us WHAT spirit was. Those were effects. I have wanted to know, What is the spirit?
I believe that what I tapped into in the nothingness was the unused part of myself. Is it is true that we are using somewhere between two to twelve percent of our intelligence, and approximately eighty to ninety percent of our intelligence is untapped, it would look to the used part of our intelligence, the surface of our conscious mind, as "nothing." There would be no data to give it an interpretation or perception.
Think about it! Ninety percent of ourselves is virgin, uncharted territory! It is almost as if God has done the reverse, and He has given us the tithe and said,
"I'll give you ten percent of your mind, and you can do anything you want. You can believe anything! And I know that you will start all kinds of religious systems, and you will literally try to build you way to heaven. And the whole bunch of you will end up totally confused. You won't know what to believe! And I'm going to close the womb of consciousness to the other ninety percent."
In other words, ninety percent cannot be penetrated by outside conditioning. Culture, society, religion, education, not even our own genetic information can penetrate this ninety percent of untapped , unused, pure potential.
When the answer to the question, what is spirit, came to me, I realized that what we call the SPIRIT IS TRULY OUR OWN UNTAPPED POTENTIAL. Other religions and other people have called it many things. They have called it THE VOID; they have called it PURE AWARENESS or PURE POTENTIAL; but in Christian terminology and in the scripture, we have called it the SPIRIT. Or we might even call it God"
Next - The Process
Namaste