The Presence of the Teachers

God’s greatest providence to humanity is the power and presence of Knowledge that has been given to each individual. For the God of the entire universe cannot be preoccupied with human affairs, or with the affairs of any one individual. Yet God speaks to each person and has created a deeper conscience within each person. And God’s Will can flow through Knowledge within each person. It is a miracle beyond human comprehension. It is beyond the grasp of the intellect.

Yet there are other forces in life who support God’s Purpose. There are Spiritual Powers in the universe who support God’s Will and Purpose. For you not only have Knowledge within yourself to guide you, to protect you and to prepare you for living a greater life in the world, but you also have Teachers, who are part of the Angelic Host who watch over your progress and who, at certain times, will give you insights and send ideas into your mind to assist you and to encourage you to follow your conscience—the deeper conscience that God has placed within you.

Your Teachers will not reveal themselves to you. That only happens under very rare circumstances. For you cannot become preoccupied with your Teachers. You cannot become obsessed with them because if you do you lose sight of what you must accomplish here in the world and your own responsibilities. It is more important to keep your eyes focused outward, but with the power and the presence of Knowledge moving you.

The fact that you have Teachers watching over you and others is very significant. However, do not think that you yourself have your own set of Teachers, as if you have your own personal guiding angels, because that is not the case at all. What is true here is that those who are your Teachers, who are members of your Spiritual Family who have been assigned to watch over you, also watch over many others.

It is as if they are gardeners, and you are but one of the plants that they are cultivating and watching. They are not with you at every moment. They are not standing by your side. They are not available every time you call. They are like traveling doctors in the countryside who must travel over long distances to see their patients. But if you call for them, or if you call for guidance, or if you ask for the truth to be revealed and you ask this with great sincerity, then they will respond.

How they respond will be determined by your nature and your level of development. Perhaps an idea will come into your mind. Perhaps you will have a feeling or see an image. Perhaps you will have a strong sense that something must be done or that something must be avoided. In many cases, this is your Teacher speaking to you. But, of course, at the level of your own awareness, this could be very difficult to discern, for you have many motivations in your mind.

Do not think that any deep feeling comes from Knowledge. Do not think that any creative thought comes from your Teachers. Until you can gain a higher position on the mountain of life and see the panorama more clearly, then it will be difficult, and even impossible, to really tell the difference. But there is a difference.

What Knowledge indicates for you has a consistency to it. It is not dependent upon your moods or feelings or emotions or the circumstances of your life, particularly. If you have known you need to do something and you have not done it, the feeling will continue every time you re-experience it.

It does not vacillate. It does not change, whereas your desires are always shifting. They are moving from one thing to another. Even if you are obsessed with a person or a situation, it is still very temporary. It is the calmness and the consistency of Knowledge that is one of its hallmarks, that distinguishes it from all the other forces and ambitions and persuasions in your mind.

People often associate conscience with guilt. They have experienced having a guilty conscience. Because of this association, people may want to avoid the whole area of conscience altogether, because of this association, because they do not want to feel guilty. They do not want to suffer.

While it is true if you do something that violates your nature or that goes against Knowledge, yes, you will feel guilty, but really here it is a sign that you are moving in the wrong direction. It is a flag that comes up to tell you that you are about to make a serious mistake. It is a protection for you.

And, of course, when you are doing something that really is right for you, and that resonates with Knowledge deep within you, then you will feel good, you will feel lighthearted, you will feel strong, and you will experience your own integrity. These are all referring to a deeper conscience within you, the conscience of Knowledge.

This is very different from the kind of conscience that your own social conditioning has created. If you do not follow the mannerisms of your culture, you feel guilty. Well, that is a conscience that is created by your culture and has nothing to do with Knowledge within you, or the deeper conscience of Knowledge that God has placed within you to be your guide and beacon. If you do not follow the social customs of your tribe or nation, and you feel awkward and uncomfortable and guilty, this is not about Knowledge.

But if you do something harmful to yourself or to others, or if you do something that violates your deeper nature and you feel discomfort and guilt, that does have to do with Knowledge. That is Knowledge telling you: “Do not do this. This is not right for you or for others.” This goes far beyond whatever your social conditioning has dictated to you over time. It is an entirely different experience.

Those Teachers who are assigned to you are part of the Angelic Host, but they have great responsibilities. They are watching over hundreds of individuals. They are not your personal attendants. You cannot abide with them whenever you want. They do not sit on your shoulder all day long and whisper into your ear.

There are many fanciful notions about angels—thinking that angels are lovely little women, who float around shooting arrows of love into the hearts of people, that angels are ethereal and gentle and feminine and sweet.

This is a fantasy, completely. Your angels are both male and female—are powerful, are strong, are forceful. They can be very confronting to you. They are not always gentle; they do not always seem to be kind and reassuring. If you want a babysitter, well, then you will have to use your imagination, but the reality of your Teachers is something else entirely.

You will not experience them directly, except under very rare circumstances and facing very rare situations. You may never have any experience directly of who they are because they cannot become your focus. If you fall in love with your Teachers, you will not be able to function in the world; you will not attend to your duties and responsibilities here adequately. And your imagination will begin to conjure up conversations with your Teachers, images and messages from your Teachers—and before you know it, you are creating a whole reality for yourself that has nothing to do with the reality of life.

Yet at this moment, it is important to know that you have powerful support, but this support will not encourage you to do things that go against Knowledge within yourself. Your Teachers are not here to give you what you want, to fulfill your desires and ambitions, to cushion you against all of life’s difficulties, to spare you from the consequences of your errors.

You may want wealth and beauty, comfort and reassurance, but your Teachers are not here to give you these things. What they provide is what is essential for your mission and your journey in life.

Their reassurance is for this purpose. Their counsel is for this purpose. They are here to support you in recognizing and experiencing and expressing your greater purpose for coming into the world. That is their only focus.

If you want them to give you other things, then you will be disappointed. And if you think they are giving you other things, then you can be sure that it is your imagination you are following, and not the reality of your Teachers.

It is important to see the Angelic Host, whom you will encounter and experience, as Teachers and not simply as comforters or those who will create miracles for you. When people rely on miracles, something is missing. Either their situation has become hopeless, or they are not really taking responsibility for the actions that they must take. And so they have given up, and now must rely upon miracles. Very poor people rely on miracles because they have no social power, because they cannot effect any significant change in their environment.

The real miracle is the power and the presence of Knowledge within you. Your Teachers are here to encourage and promote your developing a connection and a relationship with Knowledge as the foundation of your life, as the source of your certainty and direction.

Your Teachers are not here to take the place of this, and that is why you cannot become so reliant upon them, thinking to yourself, “Oh, my Teachers told me this,” and “My Teachers told me that,” and “My Teachers are guiding me here,” and “My Teachers are guiding me there.” If you begin to think like this, then you are really missing the point.

It is Knowledge within you that must become strong. And you must become strong and competent, and wise and discerning, to receive the power and the presence of Knowledge, and to carry it successfully in the world, in a world where Knowledge is unknown and is not respected.

That is why your Teachers cannot be the emphasis. You cannot bypass your fundamental responsibility and become reliant upon a spiritual force to guide you and to counsel you and to protect you.

Do not think you have a guardian angel that is always with you, watching over you, as if you were a little child and it was like your mother or your father. For your real Teachers have many responsibilities and many individuals to watch over.

It is as if you were all babies in a vast nursery, and they were watching over all of you to see how you were doing and coming along, and giving individuals encouragement when that is needed. But never think that your Teachers will replace Knowledge as a source of power and guidance in your life, for that will only be confusing and will mislead you.

There are many forces beyond your visible range. There are presences that you cannot touch, but who you can feel. You can feel the presence of your Teachers, and that is one of the indications that they are near you. But they will not come too close to you because if they do, their presence would overwhelm you, and that could frighten you and even terrify you. They will remain at a distance because they are powerful, far more powerful than you are at this moment.

You cannot have a love affair with them. You cannot project onto them everything you really need from other people, or you will not recognize your real responsibilities here.

Your Teachers are mentoring you but at a distance, careful not to come too close or to exert too great an influence over you. It is true they may speak directly into your mind at times of great crisis or decision, but these are rare occurrences. You have an intrinsic connection with your Teachers. Even if they are far away and not in your proximity, it is as if you have a line of communication to them always.

And yet, as in so many other things, people have much confusion and misunderstanding regarding the Angelic Presence. People claim that their Teachers or their angels have told them this or guided them to do that, but you would really have to use a deeper discernment to tell the truth from the falsity in these claims.

That is why it is better not to tell other people about your experiences of your Teachers. It is extremely personal and is meant for you, perhaps only your spouse or partner, or someone who has been a longstanding student of Knowledge with whom you are closely aligned—only then would it be appropriate to talk about your experiences. This should never be part of a casual conversation, and you should never reveal these experiences to a stranger.

When you do this, you lose part of the power and the potency of your initial experience. Do not use this as a way of connecting with other people, or impressing other people, or even trying to help other people. Because in truth, whatever experiences you have had with the presence of the Teachers still remain mysterious and beyond definition. If you treat it in a casual way, it loses mystery and power for you, and you lose reverence for it.

Therefore, be discreet. Do not share your deeper experiences casually with anyone. Save that for people with whom you have a deep and longstanding bond, people who can really appreciate the nature of this deeper experience and contact.

Complicating this situation even further is the extraterrestrial presence in the world today, which is trying to speak into people’s minds—trying to disguise itself as spiritual agents, as enlightened beings, as redeemers for humanity.

If they have access to your mind, they will project thoughts and images into your mind because that represents power in the mental environment. That is their power, the power of persuasion. They do not have military power; they cannot use force in the world, and so they rely upon influence. And for individuals that they have captured, whom they have turned to their purpose, they will have immense influence.

This is why the New Message from God emphasizes the power and presence of Knowledge because Knowledge is the only part of you that cannot be deceived, that cannot be manipulated, and that cannot be controlled by any force—be it worldly or from beyond the world.

You do not yet realize the importance of Knowledge. It is not merely a source of wise counsel for you. It is not merely a part of yourself that is reliable and that can see clearly. It represents your safety and your security in the face of opposing forces that have immense power of influence over the minds of so many people in the world today.

Living in physical reality is living in an environment of opposing forces. Therefore, it is necessary to gain maturity in being able to discern these forces and to distinguish them effectively. If you follow everything that comes into your mind, you will be a slave to other forces, and your life will be one calamity after another.

It is discerning what you will think about, it is carefully choosing what you will do and who you will be with, and what forms of action and what activities you will involve yourself in. Here you must bring great clarity and objectivity to your own experience, which is something that very few people have done. Your Teachers will support you in this, for this is fundamental.

Do not then clamor for miracles or tell yourself that you are being guided in all things, for that is a fool’s assumption. In fact, operating in life at this time is functioning in an environment with many hazards and many difficult choices. There are many influences, both human and otherwise, that could easily lead you astray, encouraging activities and associations that would be very harmful to you and that would distance you from your own power and your own discernment from Knowledge within yourself.

It is not that you should be fearful in entering the world, but cautious and discerning, watchful and as objective as you can be. This is what the animals do because they realize that their environment has hazards, both hazards and opportunities. The same is true for individuals, for people everywhere. Rich or poor, there are hazards. The poor have many hazards that are much closer at hand, that are part of their daily experience. But the wealthy have other kinds of hazards, which are more difficult to discern and more subtle in nature.

Governments try to influence you, religions try to influence you, commercial interests try to influence you, your family tries to influence you, even the Intervention from races from beyond the world may well focus upon you and try to influence you.

How can you possibly think clearly in such an environment of influence? How could you make a wise decision when there so many forces pulling you to make other decisions?

These are important questions, and they come back to the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is that you are not yet connected to Knowledge, and so you are therefore subject to the whole range of influences in your environment, and to the power and persuasion of the social conditioning that has been drilled into your mind since the day you were born.

You will be a slave to these forces, and are already, until you can gain access to Knowledge and secure your liberation, for Knowledge is not bound by any of these things. And Knowledge is immune from even the most powerful persuasions in the universe.

It is part of God within you. But it does not think like your mind thinks. It does not compare and contrast. It does not judge and evaluate. It does not criticize and condemn. Knowledge within you moves towards certain things and away from others, without condemnation.

Your Teachers are here to help you build a bridge from your worldly mind to the deeper Mind that God has placed within you. That is the purpose of your Teachers. Whatever counsel they may give you over time, however often you may experience their presence in your life, it is for this purpose: to counteract the negative forces and influences of the world around you and to support you building a deeper connection. Or, said in other words, to help you get up the mountain of life so that you can see the truth, beyond the tops of the trees. Beyond the obstruction of the landscape, you can rise high enough up to see clearly.

This is Providence, to have Knowledge within you and to have the presence of the Teachers is providential. But, like all things in this world, it must be clarified. For anything sacred and profound becomes adulterated in the world. It becomes associated with other things. It becomes corrupted by people’s ambitions, people’s desires, people’s fear and aggravations. That is why there must be a constant clarification.

It is like cleaning your clothes. You have to keep doing it, or they become dirty and unfit for you to wear. That is why your spiritual understanding has to go through constant cleaning, or it accumulates the dirt of the world, the corruption of people’s perceptions, the corruption of your own misunderstanding.

You have to keep cleaning the mirror, or you will not be able to see yourself. You have to keep cleaning your windows, or you will not be able to see out of them with any degree of accuracy. You have to keep clarifying and purifying your spiritual awareness and understanding because of the corruptive powers of the world, and now even the corruptive influences of those races from the universe who are here to take advantage of a weak and divided humanity.

You are living in a world of opposing forces. That is what distinguishes physical life from your Ancient Home, from which you have come and to which you will return. That is a reality where there are no opposing forces. But here in the world, there are opposing forces, and you must discern them correctly. Here it is important not to study evil, for evil is seductive and loves to be studied.

Knowledge within you will indicate what is valuable and what is not, what is safe and what is not, who to go with and who not to go with, what to invest yourself in and what not to invest yourself in.

Without Knowledge, you would be attracted by certain things. You would be intrigued by certain things. You would be drawn to other things. You would become attached to people and to places and to possessions that do not represent your real destiny and purpose in the world. And you could spend a lifetime trying to fulfill yourself through these people, these places or these things, without any chance of success. Such is the tragedy of human experience.

The pathway is difficult because there are so many other attractions, and there are so many other compelling forces appealing to your desires and to your fears—attracting you with charm, beauty and wealth, or terrifying you with violence and evil intent.

Only Knowledge can keep you focused on the pathway you must follow, and your Teachers are here to help guide you to do this, and to provide extra assurance and to provide the reality that you are not alone in your greater mission in life.

Even if there is no one else with you in this, even if you have not found yet your real allies in life, those who will share a greater purpose and mission with you, you have your Teachers because you are not alone. God would not send you into such a difficult environment without great assistance. You have this great assistance.

To experience the presence of your Teachers, you must learn to become still and observant. You must quiet your mind and learn how to focus your mind. Become sensitive to your environment, and to the presences that fill that environment, whether these presences have a physical form or not. You must develop a greater sensitivity and a greater discernment.

The New Message from God has provided the training in Steps to Knowledge to enable you to build this sensitivity and awareness. It is very important. Without this, you will be driven by your fears and desires and pulled along by the intentions of others, swept along in the tide of human obsession and human compulsion.

You are not alone in your greater journey. You have powerful Spiritual Forces to assist you, but they can only assist you if you are moving in the right direction. They can only give you what they are sent here to give you, not to give you what you want or what you may desire of them.

They represent a greater set of relationships, both within and beyond this world, that represents your Spiritual Family, your working group. Your Teachers are senior members of your Spiritual Family. They have already completed their work in manifest reality. Now they must dedicate themselves to assisting those who remain behind. They have climbed the mountain that you must climb. Now they must come down and help the others up.

Once you have achieved greatness, you must contribute your greatness to others. Once you have fulfilled your mission in physical reality, you must assist others who are trying to find theirs. This is part of God’s Plan. It is a Plan that affects life throughout the universe, in all dimensions, in all realities.

Therefore, it is not like you become enlightened, and you go to God, and you live in God for eternity in a state of ecstasy. No. Once you develop the appropriate skills and awareness and have graduated from a life of conflict and opposing forces, then you must serve others who remain behind.

It will not be something that is adverse to your nature to do this. It will be entirely natural. In fact, Knowledge within you will indicate this because this is part of your responsibility to Creation itself.

Your Teachers know what being in manifest life is like. They know the difficulties and the trials. They recognize the opposing forces. They understand your own tendencies that could lead you to acquiesce to these opposing forces. They understand your nature and your temperament, your strengths and your weaknesses.

They amplify for you the power and presence of Knowledge because fundamentally Knowledge is what unites you in relationships. And though you may not yet be aware of it, you are already united with your Teachers. You do not have to build a relationship with them. You only have to build an awareness of the relationship that already exists.

This relationship will not be about hobbies and interests and the distinctions of personalities. It will not be about all the trivial things upon which people build their sense of themselves and their associations with others.

This bond is deep and intrinsic. It has purpose, meaning and direction and therefore serves as a template for how you must establish your deeper relations with others in the world—with other people and with the world itself. In this, your Teachers serve as a demonstration of what true relationship really is—a relationship that is built upon purpose and power and accomplishment in life.

Here the affinity is deep, the recognition is complete. It is deep and complete for your Teachers but not yet for you. For you have not gained the skill and the desire for the truth and the discernment and awareness yet to realize that you are not alone in the world, and that you have come here for a greater purpose.

Your Teachers will remain mysterious. Do not think that you can describe them. Do not give them names and describe their personality and their features because this is your imagination. Even if they gave you their names, they would remain mysterious because if they are mysterious, they can have greater influence, and provide greater assistance to you.

They are not part of your circle of friends. You do not have a casual relationship with them. You do not have a superficial relationship with them. They are very serious in their intent. They take their relationship with you very seriously. They are committed to it. They are clear about its purpose and function and its value. It is their intention that over time that you will regard this relationship in the same way, and that you will build relationships with other people that have these fundamental qualities, and that your life will not be a trivial pursuit, but a deep and meaningful engagement.

In reality, there are no chosen people. God does not favor one group over another. God does not bless one and deprive another. Many people pray for things that would deprive other people. They pray for these things without realizing this. “God, give me these things that I want. Give me wealth and comfort.” But they have no awareness that their prayer might actually deprive other people or create great difficulty elsewhere, beyond their awareness; that they want from life things that could upset the balance of life and cause great distress elsewhere for others.

Certainly, if your life is in danger, you call out for help. Certainly, if you are facing real deprivation, you ask for assistance and for support. Certainly, if a loved one is in danger, you ask for protection and for renewal for that person. If your nation is facing threat of aggression, you pray for peace and for restraint. These are all genuine requests, and they are served by the Angelic Presence.

Service to humanity and to all other races in the universe is carried out by the Angelic Presence that is assigned to their respective worlds. That is why your notion of angels, and even of Heaven, is so ridiculously limited to a human reality that you cannot really conceive of it accurately.

Heaven is full of foreigners. Would that still be Heaven for you if it was filled with other beings who did not even look like you? Or would that make you feel uncomfortable, arousing suspicion and judgment and prejudice within you? It is not like every race gets to have its own unique Heaven, where there is a Heaven for human beings, and then there is a Heaven for all these other races, millions and millions of Heavens.

That is why the journey before you is great and long. Even beyond this life, it continues. It is building the capacity for ever-greater dimensions of relationship, for what is Heaven but the ultimate dimension of relationship? If you can barely have a relationship with yourself, if you struggle to have a relationship with anyone else, well, clearly you do not have the capacity yet to be in your Ancient Home fully.

God is not going to wave a wand over you and dissolve your limitations because God did not create your limitations. It is you who must outgrow them over time—through many circumstances, through great service, and through the accumulation of real wisdom.

The journey is great. Many people think if you are a good boy or a good girl you go to Heaven. If you are bad, you go to Hell, and that is it. But this is completely ignorant. You have no idea what returning to your Ancient Home really means and what it would require of you.

If you still desire to live in Separation, if you still want to be a distinct and separate individual, God is not going to come and destroy that. Even though it ultimately is the path of suffering and disassociation, God is not going to destroy that. And so until you can reclaim relationship into yourself and take the long and many-faceted journey this will require, then you will outgrow this need to be separate and apart. And that will prepare you for your Ancient Home. It is a great journey of return. Certainly, it does not end with this life. This life is only a chapter in a much greater story.

Humanity’s understanding of religion and God is necessarily very limited. Humanity knows nothing of the Greater Community of life in which you have always lived. It thinks of God in terms of human values, human images, human behavior and human qualities. Certainly, that is limited within the greater context of life in the universe.

If God is the Author of all life in the universe, then clearly you are dealing with a God that is not limited to human qualities and human values. And if Heaven includes all of Creation, and if the separated includes everyone living in manifest life in the universe, then it is a much bigger picture, you see. It is no longer a child’s story.

To cross over the threshold from being simply living in one world—with one God, one Heaven, one Hell—to emerging into a Greater Community awareness is an immense threshold of understanding. It is entering an entirely new paradigm of experience, a paradigm of experience you cannot exhaust. It is like growing from being a child to being an adult.

The journey before you is great and long, with many stages and many chapters. Each is necessary and significant. But this should not concern you now, for your mission is to establish a foundation in this world—a stable foundation built upon the Pillar of Relationships, the Pillar of Work, the Pillar of Health, and the Pillar of Spiritual Development—the Four Pillars of your life. The New Message from God reveals what these Four Pillars mean and how they can be cultivated.

You are here for a greater purpose. It is this purpose you must begin to discern and to discover, to experience and to express. And that will require many stages and many changes in your life. This will require relationships of a higher nature, relationships that represent your higher purpose. It will require you developing a deep and profound connection with Knowledge and to be able to receive the counsel of your Teachers so that you may make progress, and so that you may not be pulled away or obstructed by the opposing forces in this world.

Providence is in you and with you and all around you—waiting to be experienced, waiting to be followed, waiting for you.