Pearls of Wisdom

Vol. 43  No. 29 - Elizabeth Clare Prophet - July 16, 2000

 

Mother Teaches Summit University
Meeting Your Inner Master
Part 1

 

We are going to take a look at the lecture “Meeting Your Inner Master” that Mark delivered on December 31, 1971. Please consider it in the context of the times. Consider what New Year’s Eve was like in 1971 and if you don’t know, familiarize yourselves so that you will understand that here is a man of his time, speaking on New Year’s Eve in the early seventies.

      It is very important that you do not just sit back and drink in this lecture and enjoy it. It’s important that you take notes and, according to what you’ve learned about delivering a sermon, write down your impressions, write down your analysis.

Try to figure out what Mark is doing--how he does it, why he does it. He himself may not know, but he is doing something; and if you don’t start listening for it, you are not going to receive the key that locks into his mind, his aspect of the Universal Mind that will help you.

Listen carefully to the man speaking. Think of his profile in terms of who he was, how he grew up in humble circumstances during the Depression and how he worked tremendously hard to be able to deliver the Word against all the odds of his karma.

Recognize that he has a psychology, a presence, an attainment. He is the sum total of all that he ever was in previous lifetimes that could get through the educational process in this life. We are not the sum total of all that we have ever been in this octave unless we draw it forth. So what has come together to form the Mark Prophet who is speaking here?

It seems almost sacrilegious to dissect our beloved leader but we have to do it. We have to understand him to the very depth of his humanness, to the very height of his divinity. Then, somehow, at the end of this course, we come to the point of being able to compute, if we can and if we dare, who is the man, what is his message and how did he deliver it?

[Playback of the lecture, “Meeting Your Inner Master” by Mark L. Prophet. <1>]

I hope you caught the last point. I guess it was fairly obvious at the end, but if you are the slave of your appetites or of the five poisons, they are your inner master and they are the first inner master you meet. Of course, they are the antithesis of the real inner Master and you will have to slay the dweller-on-the-threshold that is the false-hierarchy impostor of your master.

Mark took an entire lecture to bring you to the realization that if you want to meet the true inner Master, you first have to meet the false master and recognize that false master for who he is. There are many, many profound points to be made regarding this lecture and each turn of the lecture and how he seems to be digressing. He makes you think that he’s digressing, but he’s actually weaving a net of light around you.

We become the prey of God. God is the hound of heaven chasing us. It is as if we’re swimming in the ocean, and if a group of sharks happen to find us, they will start circling us, as they circle their prey. Each time they circle, they come closer and closer and closer until they are right there to devour us.

So Mark is circling you from every angle. He comes in from an oblique angle and he gives you a teaching and you say to yourself, “How could this possibly relate to my finding the inner Master?” Yet he is building an antahkarana, a web of light, around you and by the time he has finished he has transmitted to you deep spiritual reality.

You know this from the joy you feel, the sense of pushing back from the table after a wonderful meal. You don’t quite know how you’re going to digest it but you feel good and you have come away with an awareness you did not have before.   This is true mysticism. It’s the true mystical spirit of the Great White Brotherhood.

I would like to pick up on this theme as we reconvene for our next lecture. What you will learn from this phase of our study is how to receive the Body and Blood of Christ and assimilate it through Mark’s sermons, because that is exactly what is happening. He is administering to you the Holy Communion of the consciousness of Alpha and Omega.

Many, many people have listened to Mark’s lectures. Some have left in disgust because they decided the lectures were not academically organized and never made their point. Others have never left off drinking from the fount because they know that in the end of the cycle of their tutelage under Mark Prophet, they will be prepared for the Temple of Luxor.

So I’d like you to meditate on these concepts. Think about them, savor them. Ask yourself the question, “Why did he make the point about this and why did he make the point about that and how does that all contribute to my direct knowledge of my inner Master?”

Mark Was an Eastern Master

Mark Prophet would never tell you this but he was a master. He was a master in embodiment. People conceive of masters as perfectly poised people who do and say everything correctly. Somehow if we advance the concept of a person becoming a master, suddenly we see him without any human traits or characteristics or even any semblance to ourselves.

So the world has succeeded in distancing us from our beloved brother and Master, Jesus. And this aura of sanctity has made it impossible for any of us to walk in the footsteps of the Master and finally to disappear into the outline of the Master to become the Master ourself.

Some people on earth today have an intense dislike for Mark Prophet. They remember him. They were around him. They may even have been disciplined by him and if he spoke sharply to them, they surely received the intensity of the Eastern Gurus. Mark was an Eastern Guru in the truest sense of the word.

Then, if we define a Western master as an Eastern Guru who puts on Western garb and Western traits to make us feel at home and familiar, then Mark was a Western master. He was certainly able to be frightened, to be annoyed, to become angry, to become joyous, to become sad--to have every possible mode of expression.

How do you define a master if he has all of these human conditions and conditionings?

I will tell you how I came to know the master. It was the heart of Mark Prophet, the fire of Mark Prophet--the heart, the fire and the compassion of the man. Even though we live in levels of mortality and the bodies that we wear are subject to frailty and illness (and, by the way, I never knew Mark Prophet when he did not have serious infirmities of the flesh), we still have the requirement to be in tune with very high spheres of light.

And if that master is a Messenger, the requirement is to be in tune with very high octaves of light yet to have one’s finger on the pulse of the doings of Death and Hell, the activities and the ploys of the denizens of Darkness--how they are moving and plotting against the Son of God.

Jesus himself said he was always aware of what the sinister force was doing and where they were even as he performed his mission. When you think about it, this produces a great deal of stress. He who is the Messenger has to instantaneously be able to be at the thirty-third level of hell or at the thirty-third level of the etheric plane. In one sense of the word, the Messenger (and that’s another word for apostle) becomes the watchman on the wall of the Lord.

He has to be aware of oncoming Light and oncoming Darkness. It’s like being a weather vane or a lightning rod. That awareness stretches the human potential, stretches the human vessel and the human chakras. And so the divisiveness that comes along to split the delivery of the Word can result in a tremendous amount of stress for the one who must balance all these things within the body.

Learn to Balance Light and Darkness

When you are in second level and you seek to be a minister representing Church Universal and Triumphant, you receive some measure of the training of the Messengers --training to help you to balance Light and Darkness, deal with your own untransmuted karma and with the highest levels of God himself.

So God gives us this training little by little. Day by day the increase comes and day by day the adjustment must come and it is often a very great adjustment. Above all, you must have patience with yourself and recognize that this is Olympic training. The time comes when the body we wear is no longer fit and is not capable of carrying all that light and all that darkness. We can increase its potential by spiritual exercise, by strict diet, by knowing how to remove ourselves from stress.   

Jesus would go out on the Sea of Galilee or into the mountains, come apart or be at home at Bethany. He was always on the move, in what was a very scientific part of his life, because there is always the problem of being in the crosshairs of the fallen ones. They get their fix on you and if you stay in one place too long, they will zero in on you. Moving a few feet in this or that direction or a few miles or a few hundred miles is often very wise.

Mark would often leave La Tourelle or Beacon’s Head, when we were in Virginia, and drive to visit chelas. His goal would always be to minister, to take care of his flock wherever they were. Sometimes he would take one of the children and a staff member or several of the children and leave me to run the center and to keep the publications going out on time.

I recognized that he moved because of the opposition he was under and after his ascension I realized it even more. I realized how it extended his life and how necessary it was for him.

Mastery Comes in Many Guises

So mastery is not ironclad control over one’s human behavior or a sterile discipline. It is rather a love and compassion that shines through all that you do. It is contact with God and the Brotherhood. It is also a mantle. No two masters alike have walked this earth or any planet. Each new master redefines the office of master, for mastery comes in many different ways.

What we have to realize is that Mark Prophet was an ever-flowing spring of water. We tend to think that dictations come from the high altar, but the Word of God is ever flowing. And the most amazing thing about that Word is if you decide to say, “Well, the Messenger was depressed at that time or the Messenger was saddened so that was really his human conversation”--if you think that, at that very moment you lose the lesson.

Mark’s Opening Remarks

I would like to discuss the beginning of the lecture “Meeting Your Inner Master.”  Earlier I left out this portion, but Mark made some remarks to the audience before the formal lecture began.

I think, and I say this without being a Ph.D. in psychology, but I think that if I could define Mark, I would say that he was the perfect synthesis of the inner child and the adult. Knowing Mark very well, I see that he is keenly disappointed as he speaks here. He is as disappointed as a child who has been rejected.

He has come prepared with a feast of light and a profound lecture and those who were absent were often the people who knew Mark the best and had been in the activity a long time. Yet they failed to truly apprehend--he used those words, “failed to apprehend”--for they would not come.

They decided that the time to come was for the dictations because that was when you would get the real teaching and the real Word of God. Anything else Mark Prophet said, you could take with a grain of salt. It’s as though they were saying, “We’ve been on the Path a long time. Even though we are now in this activity, we’ve been in other activities before this and we don’t need the basic teaching. We’ve heard it again and again.”

But the larger truth he starts with (and to me it is such a subtlety) is the concept of absenteeism. How are you going to find the inner Master if you are absent? Not just absent from Mark’s lecture but absent from the retreat of the Master, the outer retreat, which La Tourelle was at that time. Absent from a place where you can commune with the inner Master.

Even if you knew every word that fell out of Mark Prophet’s mouth, did you assimilate the compassion of your own inner Master--the wisdom, the love of God and the power?  Could you not just be there and be still--just be there because the Chief of the Darjeeling Council had called you? 

El Morya wrote the program. He chose the title of this lecture and put it on the program. It was sent out in the mail. You knew that you would be coming and that this lecture would be given. It wasn’t suddenly announced before the lunch break.

 Those who think that they do not need to hear the Messenger deliver a lecture, do they think they know it all? Those who consider that in his outer mind the Messenger is less educated than they are, that he really hasn’t had much more experience on the Path than they have, wonder whether it will benefit them to be there.

Well, as I said before, Mark was a master. But Mark was a person who obeyed the law of the Great White Brotherhood. He would never tell anyone of his level of attainment, not even me. I observed it, however, even when he tried to hide it from me. He did not need to tell me because, above all, the  master is the masterful presence.

So the great truth, pure and simple, that Mark is delivering here is that all the worlds have had their Sunset Strips, their Nevada Avenues, with casinos and all the other places you can go to. You’ve been on planet after planet. You’ve indulged yourself in entertainment. You’ve been distracted here and there and that is why you neither have inner mastery nor have you met the inner Master.

Right then and there was a dividing of the way--those present, those absent. So we have to think about our absenteeism from our own inner Self and understand that he is directing us toward the inner Master.

The Ashram Notes

El Morya gave us a tremendous means of contacting our inner Master, as well as the inner Master of every lightbearer in cosmos, when he gave us the Ashram Notes and the Ashram Rituals. When I prepared these Ashram Notes and Rituals, I was jumping up and down like a four-year-old.

I was so excited. I said, “Here are meditations that are going to give our entire Community such an intense contact with all of cosmos!”

Yet I feel, in the case of some, and I couldn’t give you a percentage, but some people look at these rituals and do not realize what a tremendous transfer of power they contain. The person in charge of conducting services here in the Court asked me, “Well, shall we do the Great Central Sun Ritual every such-and-such a day or every day at such-and-such a time?” 

I said, “The staff should get together and decide when they want to give the ritual, because if we make it an institutionalized thing, that is exactly what it will be. So let them decide. Let them take a vote. Let them have their say so that they won’t feel that they are being pulled around by the nose--‘Now we have to do this, now we have to do that, and the sessions get longer.’ They will choose spontaneously.”

I haven’t heard what came of it, so all I know is that I don’t hear the rituals being given in the Court. I would like to say that that is in line with what our beloved Mark said in his lecture: “It really doesn’t do us a bit of good to meet a master. There’s not a thing a master can do for us because we have to do it for ourselves.”

There are a lot of truths here that seem like simple little truths, and you say to yourself, “Okay, I could pick out about twelve points in this lecture and that would be it. I could list them off to you in about twelve minutes and that would be the sum of the message without all the embroidery.”

So what is this embroidery?  It is the inner Master of Mark Prophet. It is the light of his heart. Mark is wrapping his flame around us and we receive it because we have known other masters in other times and he is awakening us to the inner Master. He is actually, with the great love of the Divine Mother, wrapping a swaddling garment around us just like the one Mother Mary wrapped around Jesus--that great comforting garment.

The swaddling garment is put around a newborn child to make the child feel secure and tight. It defines his limits, defines his space. He has just come out of a very small space that has gotten smaller over the nine months and, in this swaddling garment that the Holy Mother wraps around him charged with light, he feels the bounds of his habitation. It is his first definition of time and space and the warmth of her love.

An Experience in Cosmos

It is a very frightening thing to be alone in cosmos. I remember a great experience and revelation that came to me when I found myself outside of the cosmos, suspended in eternity, the only one in eternity. I was completely alone in the entire cosmos, yet because this came to me at a certain time in my life, I was not alone at all because I felt the great Allness of God.

I could have been terrified by the experience, yet my soul had been prepared for it. I remember placing myself intellectually in a position of aloneness when I went to Antioch College. About 99 percent of the people I met there told me there was no God, and so I thought to myself, “I shall attempt to artificially create a universe without God.” 

So I went out alone into the night with just the stars and the heavens and I created the sense around me that there was no God. This was the first time I had ever done this because for as long as I can remember I have known of the presence of God. But I changed the dial of my consciousness and imagined this condition.

There I was, suspended alone in an infinite cosmos that extended as far as the eye could see, to the stars and beyond, without God. I walked about in that mind-set for a while until I saw the absurdity of it. Then I turned the dial again and was back where I had always been—in the infinite past and the infinite future, centered in the omnipresence of God.

to be continued

 


The Summit Lighthouse Sheds Its Radiance o’er All the World to Manifest as Pearls of Wisdom.”

 This is part 1 of Mother’s teaching on Mark L. Prophet’s lecture,”Meeting Your Inner Master,” given to Summit University Winter Quarter 1992 on January 30 and February 7, 1992, at the Royal Teton Ranch, Corwin Springs, Montana.

1. Mark Prophet’s lecture is published as numbers 27 and 28 of this year’s Pearls of Wisdom.