The Temple

What is a Temple but a place where you come to unite with your Source, to give over your thoughts and your ambitions, your preconceived notions and your adamant beliefs?

You set them aside, at least temporarily, when you come to the real Temple. It is not a place to ask for favors. It is not a place to petition. It is not a place to seek to have your views strengthened or validated in any way.

It is a place where you come to offer yourself and to ask to be redeemed and restored and given a greater purpose and meaning in life. That is the prayer, you see. In whatever words you use, that is the essence of the true prayer to be spoken in the true Temple.

You know about temples and mosques and churches. Perhaps you have visited these yourself. Perhaps you grew up in one. Perhaps you grew up in a culture dominated by one of the great traditions.

People come to these holy sites for different reasons—for economic reasons, political reasons, health reasons, or perhaps to escape a discordant family and seek reprieve, or to deal with an internal problem. This is all fine, but We are speaking of something more potent that can reach all the way to Heaven, you see.

For you must come for the engagement, if the engagement is to be true and efficacious. The engagement is where you offer to share your mind with God and to ask to be redeemed and restored and given a greater purpose and destiny. You will unlikely hear an answer in the moment, but if you can sustain this appeal—if it is true enough, urgent enough, felt deeply enough—then the response will come in one form or another.

Before you can be guided, you must see certain things. You must recognize what is folly. You must recognize what is deception. You must separate the truth from cleverness or ingenuity or the ways that people use religion to substantiate their beliefs and ambitions. You must begin to question the reality of things that you accept, even things you want.

These things must take place, in time, or you will not be ready for the engagement. And even if you pronounce the prayer correctly, it will not reach Heaven because your heart will not be in it. It will be an exercise, perhaps a spiritual practice, [but] it will not have the potency of your own soul to drive it across the great threshold. It will be weak. It will be fallible. It will not have a commitment behind it.

Therefore, you must see certain things. You must face how you have lived your life so far—your errors, your compromises, your missed opportunities, your foolish endeavors, your weakness, your desire to be guided or led by others.

You must take this reckoning, you see, and life can bring you to this through grave disappointment, frustration, or merely shock itself. But you need not wait to learn these lessons in such a harsh and difficult manner.

The Temple is for this purpose. It is to initiate the engagement and to sustain it over time. Though you will not be completely committed to your request and your offering of yourself, it must be stronger than your fears and ambivalence overall. If you are just turning the great corner in life and beginning the return, it must be strong enough to carry you forward, step by step.

The Temple, then, is not a place, necessarily. It is not a holy site, necessarily. It is not a great mosque or cathedral or temple, necessarily. It is where you come to make a great appeal.

This may happen in your bedroom, or by the sea, or in a forest, or in a chapel, or in any ordinary site where the pain of Separation becomes too much to bear, and you begin to see that even your best-laid plans are not going to be enough. Even all the things you think you want for yourself and others is not really going to meet the need that you have come to recognize, which is the real need within you.

Therefore, do not think you have to travel to some distant place, some famous location, some grandiose scene from history, for that will not aid your appeal if it is not strong enough within you.

Heaven is not interested in these things, you see—the things that fascinate and draw people, the things that are born of invention, imagination and speculation and great stories. Heaven is not moved by these things.

You cannot come from guilt or shame to the Temple. Though you may feel ashamed, though you may feel guilty, you have to think you are worthy of the engagement. Do not lose sight of this because if Heaven were to respond to you and you were filled with shame, you would diminish in the light of what was requested. Your shame would deepen. Your self-doubt would deepen. Your conflict would grow greater because underneath you do not feel you are worthy to make the engagement.

Then one must prepare for this. One prepares by being really honest and more objective about your life. Consider your past, what has brought you to this place today. Consider the decisions you have made and where they have taken you—the promises that were unfulfilled, the dreams that turned to ashes, the great hope for happiness that only yielded a little pleasure and much difficulty.

Your life so far has already given you much evidence. But you must do a deep reckoning here, a deep evaluation of everything that has brought you to where you are today. And you must do this without self-denial, without harming yourself. For without Knowledge, you could only make mistakes, and do what other people prescribed, and follow the crowd on its endless pursuit of fulfillment and all the disappointments that follow.

You will feel pain and regret, yes, but you must see it is all because you were not engaged with the deeper Knowledge that God has given you to guide you, to protect you from giving your life away and from meaningless engagements with others; Knowledge, which is here to prepare you for a greater life of service and meaning in the world.

You prepare yourself by reckoning the voices and forces within yourself that compel you to do things not in your own interest. This self-examination cannot be done in a day or a week. It is ongoing. But it can be very powerful if you are objective, truly, for this will reveal your deeper need, the need that has been with you all along, the need that you have misinterpreted and tried to fulfill through other means—through romance; through wealth; through power; through your hobbies, your interests and your indulgences perhaps. Now it becomes really evident that it is for something greater and cannot be satisfied by little things.

You are not yet ready for the Temple, but if you proceed in this manner, you will prepare yourself, and Heaven will assist you. Here your life cannot be circumscribed inappropriately to the extent that it is a painful tribute to you and to everyone around you. Here you must be willing to follow what is given you to do, to correct what is given you to correct, to undo what is inappropriate and to strengthen what must remain.

If you will do this and continue, Heaven will assist you. Now you are moving in the right direction. You still have plenty of mistakes to face. You still are prone to error and persuasion by others. You are still drawn off course by many things, but something has awoken within you—something you cannot forget, something you will always return to in your times of disappointment and confusion.

It is because the Temple is calling you, you see, this mysterious place within yourself—this moment of true engagement; this great turning point of your life; this place you will return to once you have visited it, again and again, for strength, for clarity, for reassurance, if necessary, and for direction.

All that you have done that has been inappropriate and misguided will stand in the way because all of it eroded your primary and natural self-confidence, your natural connection to Knowledge, your natural inclinations, your natural curiosity about life.

That has all been buried by resignation, by doing what is convenient and expedient, by following others who promise you rewards, by failing to see that you must build a real foundation in the world and a real connection to Heaven if you are to serve in a greater capacity.

A great task, most certainly, but the only one worthy, really, of your life. For here all great things can come forth for you and to others through you. Here your mind and your heart and your soul are in harmony. This gives you power, strength and greater immunity from the corrupted world around you.

God has put the Temple inside you, you see. You cannot tear it down. You cannot get rid of it. You cannot bury it in the soil or put it at the bottom of the great sea. You cannot blow it up with dynamite. You may cover it with many other things, believing that is the temple—the temple of your desires, the temple of your attachments, the temple of your political views, the temple of your romantic inclinations.

But underneath all this is the real Temple, you see, undefiled because it cannot be corrupted, only avoided, only covered up with other things—avoided until you come to your senses in life and start telling the truth to yourself and others about your real experience and the great yearning that exists within you.

You do not come to the Temple for miracles, for dispensations, to have Heaven reward you for what you want or for what you think are your good deeds. You do not go to the Temple to have spells cast in your favor or ceremonies carried out to fulfill a social agenda or a religious philosophy.

Heaven is not interested in these things. Heaven is interested in the engagement, and your becoming prepared for the engagement, and your making the engagement, and your learning and living in the engagement as you proceed.

The moment you are ready and make your appeal, Heaven will respond, and the Great Rays will shine upon you, maybe not in the moment, but as a consequence because you have turned a corner, you see. A place where you cannot turn back to your old life, but a place where you are not fully ready to proceed into your new life—an uncomfortable, frustrating, confusing place, but one that you must pass through, for this is where you gain your strength and your confidence.

This is where your engagement grows. This is where you return to Heaven, not by leaving the world, but by seeking to find out why you came into the world.

Here your dreams and goals are set aside, paving the way for a greater revelation for you, which may only appear in increments in time as you prepare and prove yourself to be reliable and trustworthy.

Here you do not give your life to God, for you must lead your life in the world. But you will need the assistance of Heaven to do this. You will need to be united with Heaven to do this, to bring about the greater results that you seek.

Here you cannot make a deal. Here you cannot bargain. Here you cannot give a little to get a little. Here there is no commerce. There is no trading. There is no equal exchange. You give as much as you can give, and Heaven gives you what you are able to carry. As you are able to carry more, Heaven gives you more. It all happens in the Temple.

A place of holiness cannot be only one place. Yet the world is very defiled and very corrupt, and degradation and poverty are almost everywhere. But you must carry holiness within you. That is why the Temple is there. You must take holiness where it does not exist. You must have in mind the Source of your life around others who have not a clue. You must carry this like a flame that the world cannot extinguish, and that you will not extinguish.

That is why the holy place is not a place. It is the engagement. People may travel from all over the world to some holy site, believing it will give them good luck and good fortune, or heal their wounds or their ills. But the Temple We speak of is something much more important. It is your engagement with Heaven, you see.

Here you will not be able to fraternize with the Angels, or ask mundane foolish questions, or write beautiful poetry, thinking it comes from them.

This is a place of great mystery—a place you cannot understand; a place you cannot even talk about, it is so confounding and mysterious; a place you should never talk about with others, for it must be held in great silence and secrecy within you, only to be shared with someone who is sharing your greater journey in life, your most trusted and beloved companion.

Look about and see how people degrade what is profound. Look at how they talk about sacred things in a casual manner. It is conversation or casual engagements. You cannot do this. What is most sacred and profound you must keep within yourself so that it can grow. You may share the fact you are on a greater journey with others, but the Temple is sacred, you see. You must have this discretion and this discernment, and that is part of what you build over time to become a worthy recipient of what Heaven wishes to bestow.

There can be no ambition here. You cannot use this to heighten your beliefs, or fulfill your theology, or confirm your idea about Heaven and the universe. If that is your intention, then you will not be able to approach the Temple. Heaven will know you are not ready, and you are not getting ready.

This is of the greatest significance. There is nothing in the world that can give you what this can provide. There is nothing that can satisfy your heart and soul beyond what this can provide. Try as you may, seek endlessly, go from place to place, go from relationship to relationship, go from endeavor to endeavor. In the end, you will not find the Temple unless something changes inside of you—a deeper emergence, a deeper reckoning, a moment of profound truth and recognition.

Prepare, then, for the Temple. Understand it is waiting for you. It is built into you. Knowledge within you carries it for you. You cannot get rid of it. You cannot lose it. You can degrade yourself to such a point that you may never find it in this life, but it is still there.

For, truly, you need God to do what you really came to do. And while God will not interfere in your more prosaic activities, your daily functions, this matter is of greater significance and requires a greater approach and a greater intention on your part.

But your approach must be true. There can be no secret agenda, no secret planning, or Heaven will not hear you. Your voice will not reach them.

Then you will give yourself answers, or other voices will speak to you, voices in the mental environment, telling you to do this or that or giving you other information. And you will think you have made contact and the engagement has begun, but you have fallen now into deception, for your approach is not yet clear.

Those who seek advantage are easily deceived by forces you can see and forces you cannot see. But Heaven is waiting and watching, waiting for your approach to the Temple.