Pearls of Wisdom

Vol. 48 No. 23 - Mark L. Prophet - June 5, 2005

The Purpose of Life
Is to Be an Overcomer

Part 1

The purpose of life is to be an overcomer in the temple of God but it is also to overcome here below. In Peter we read, “[And] if the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?”1

When men are enrolled as students in a college for physicians, a certain percentage of them fail to graduate and to become good physicians. These are returned to the world matrix, to another occupation, and failure is written across their record.

The kingdom of God is a matter of choices, our choice. Saint Germain, in a dictation given some time ago, made the statement that he won his victory and freedom because he, Saint Germain, made over one million right choices. This would show to us that the token privilege of our sacred free will when rightly used will afford us the manifestation of deity with all that deity implies.

People want the power to command nature, but more than the desire to command outer nature is the desire to command the inward nature. All of us are conscious inwardly, subtly, of certain imperfections and shortcomings from the glory of God. We lament that we possess qualities that are less than perfection. We wish to be rid of these conditions, whether it be of consciousness or of manifestation. And therefore, we move forward on the path that we might obtain our freedom and that not without price. Anything that is worth having is worth sacrificing for, is worth its price, is worth more than its weight in gold in the case of spiritual gifts.

Therefore, I want to speak very frankly to you tonight, because we are not running a school for namby-pamby people who are halfhearted in their intents and purposes. We are running a school for ascended master chelas so that those who come here will not be failures but will be successes, regardless of what they are when they come.

You have heard of the gentle Jesus, the sweet, almost innocuous master, as some have portrayed him—long hair hanging down to the shoulders, a sweet angelic smile, a beautiful golden tongue, with his arms stretched out saying, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I [shall] give you rest.”2

Most people all over the world have this image of the gentle Jesus. They very soon forget, if they ever remember or have ever read the words of Jesus, the fiery nature of Jesus and how he instructed his disciples in secret, which is not necessarily recorded in the scriptures. They do not see the master Jesus as he really was. However, there are remnants in the scriptures of what he really was and I would remind you of them tonight.

The scriptures clearly say, concerning this great master, that “he taught them as one having authority.”3 Where did he get this authority? Did he get it from some puny mold of human decomposition? Was it something that came from rotting flesh? No. He got it from the Spirit that makes the flesh to stand up and animates it. It was the anima mía, the I AM! It was light, it was God, that gave him the authority. And it was the authority of Spirit over matter. Men who are chelas on the Path are ever matter until they become Spirit, and they are matter in varying states of manifestation. And the Christ wants to teach that matter, that form, to obey God and conform to the matrices of the Spirit.

The Spirit is clear-cut and crisp! Its delineations are not only subtle at times but they are also forthright, sharply etched, and there is no compromise with them.

“You generation of vipers. You are of your father, the devil. He was a liar from the beginning.” Those were the words of the Master. “Go to now.” Where was he telling them to go? “Go to now,” he said, “you men that say that tomorrow we will go to a certain city and we will buy and we will sell and we will pull down our barns, will build greater barns.”

“Do you think that those men upon whom the tower of Siloam fell were sinners above all the other sinners that dwell in Jerusalem? I tell you nay. For except you repent you shall likewise perish.” You’re going to die. That’s what he told them. “You’re going to die the same way as these other people did. They’re not any worse than you are.” The gentle Jesus. “You are of your father the devil.” He didn’t pull any punches. “Friend, why comest thou hither?” These were also his words.

And this is the side of Jesus that is sometimes sadly neglected. Because the sinister force, the negative power of the world, wants to be able to be in a position to tell you that if anyone raises their voice or takes a stand for right, that this is not the voice of God. Because Jesus is too sweet and gentle and he would never do anything that way to hurt anyone.

Well, who in God’s name do you suppose that Jesus wanted to hurt when he called them a generation of vipers?

He wanted to hurt nothing of the Spirit but he wanted to cut them free with the sword of truth from the dense lies of the carnal mind.

The carnal mind we have always with us because the carnal mind is the mind of the separatist and the separatist can never face the truth, that is, comfortably. And the separatist has to always finally face up to it. And when he does, he no longer is a separatist; he is a unifying person. He is able to surrender the density of his changing human creation. And he is able to recognize that if you’re going to go someplace, you have to be ready to go when the vessel departs, if you’re going with someone or you’re going on a public conveyance. You cannot expect an airplane at the airport to sit there while you powder your nose. You’ve got to be ready to get on. And when the pilot starts the motors and clears with the tower and takes off, if you’re not in that plane and in your seat, you’re left out like the children that were in the days of the ark of Noah that were left outside. And the rains came and the floods came and swept them all away.

I’ll tell you something. One of the reasons why there is very little progress today in Christendom is because there are no ministers today that will stand up and tell the people the truth! They want to tickle their ears and say, “Oh, we can’t offend them. They might not come back.” Well, God pity them! Better that they should not come back than that they should come back and be coddled or rocked to sleep so that they can’t stand up and realize that the enemy that they have is within their own gates.

The enemy they have lives in their own body. The enemy they have lives in their own mind. The enemy they have lives in their memory. It’s the elephant that won’t let them forget and forgive the sins that other people have committed against them. And therefore, this memory, this elephant that lives within themselves, deprives them of the kingdom of heaven and the fruits of the Spirit. And this is the truth. This is the reality. And this is what is intolerable to the ascended masters.

It is not that the ascended masters could not take all of the people of the world and put them together into a basket and say, “Oh, we love you so much. We love you so much and we don’t care what condition you’re in. We love you just the same [in] your poor, sinful, carnal nature that wants to indulge itself in everything but the kingdom of God. We love you. And it’s perfectly all right. Our love is going to take you through.”

But that isn’t true. Because God’s love is greater than the ascended masters’ love, and God’s love won’t take you through unless you yourself see to it that you identify with God’s love by cutting that carnal nature down to size. That’s the little boy that lives in you that wants the candy, the little boy that wants to have his own way. And in the case of the little girls, it’s the same thing, the little girl that wants her own way. It’s the human side of all of us, and it is the side that must be controlled by the Spirit. And if we do not do it, we are no different than the world.

Because today there are in the world robes! Robes! Robes—thousands, millions of robes that are worn by the self-righteous. You’ll see them in every church. They have a look of sanctimony on their face. They look down on those that come not with them to their same services. They have no spirit of unity with the world at large. They condemn the world that comes not as they do to worship as they do. They are the self-righteous, those who have little tolerance of others, you see.

This is something you have to face today in the world—the robes of the self-righteous. We cannot be that. We dare not ourselves be hypocritical. We must be absolutely, strikingly honest with ourselves. And that is why in this activity there is no compromise with the human of anyone including myself. Again and again I can stand up here before you and honestly tell you that I have talked to myself and I have told myself when I was in the wrong and where I was in the wrong. And I have not been afraid to honestly acknowledge it. And because I have acknowledged that which is in myself that is wrong, I am not afraid in God’s name to stand up and tell you when something is wrong, because it is not a personal thing. It is an impersonal thing that must be dealt with personally by every person.

We have to recognize that if we expect to obtain victory, we’re going to have to live according to a victory pattern. If we don’t want our victory, we want to just have a good time, we can sing songs together, we can sing hymns together, we can hold hands, we can dump baskets of fruits into each other’s laps. We can do all kinds of sweet little things, which we probably do some of anyway, and it’s perfectly all right. But we’re not going to be doing the things that are the most important. And that is to find out just what it is that is eating our inheritance.

Why is it today that you cannot command fire to come down from heaven? Why is it that you cannot control your own emotions? Why is it that you cannot say to yourself—and not, mind you, as an activity of your human but as an activity of your Divine Self—“I will do this,” and do it?

Why is it that you falter at times and stand back? It’s because, what? It’s because you have not yet attained to the unity of your Divine Presence with your human self.

And why is it so? Why is that human still living? It’s a parasite creation. It lives off of the energies of your Presence. And it consumes your reality and eventually takes your life from your physical body. And that’s exactly the truth. It’s a parasite creation, yet we nourish it and we starve our souls. And we will not, sometimes, own up to a thing, although we know deeply within ourselves that it is true.

Now, the masters have a policy, and it is true in all of their retreats, that they will treat honestly of every situation. And you never have to worry that the masters will compromise an issue. They will not. Oh, they have a great deal of finesse. If situations are wrong for it, they can be, not hypocritical, but they can be very, very precise and concealed when necessary. But they also, conversely, can reveal when necessary because the fruit of the Spirit is what we want. And we are not going to get it by pampering ourselves. We’ll never get it.

You take the case of the lady who comes to me with the lament that every time she starts to pray her mind becomes filled with thoughts of chicken dinners, or she gets so tired that she wants to go to sleep and lay down right away and she just can’t keep her eyes open. She said, “I can read ‘True Stories,’ I can listen to television, I can listen to movies, I can go to the movies, I can go out to dinner, I can go places with my husband, for a ride in the country, and nothing seems to bother me. But the minute I pick up some of the ascended master dictations or my Bible or the minute I start to pray or I really get down to earnestness with God, I get sleepy and I just can’t keep awake. And I’m so tired and I just get dragged out. And so I never really get much done in the line of meditation.”

What are you going to tell her? If she comes to you, what are you going to tell her? She’s told you. What are you going to answer? This is a very common complaint, and the glaring and honest truth is that she is not interested in the ascended masters or God like she is in the world and in her human self. The honest truth is that people have not developed enough love for God and enough love for the masters and enough understanding of their purposes to actually form themselves into a spiritual matrix. That’s the glaring God’s-honest truth. They are so immature, so unperceptive, so lacking in dedication that all one can do is avoid telling them in some cases, “Dear heart, you are not really sincere with God. You just like to toy with the idea. You want to play being a flower. You want to say that you love beauty, but you don’t really love it as much as you love yourself.”

And what is your self ? Your self is a conglomerate mass, a mess of memories saturated with self-pity. You remember when you were a little girl and your father beat you. You remember when somebody didn’t give you an ice cream cone and you cried for an hour because you couldn’t have it.

You remember when the schoolteacher disciplined you and sent you into the hall. You remember when the neighbor woman was not kind to you. You remember when you were hungry and didn’t have enough to eat or when you were overly tired or you were made to work when you were sick. You remember all the negative things that ever happened to you in your world. You nourish and you nurse all of your calumny and you hold it to yourself as though it were real. And you live in that consciousness and you reek it. It pours out of your pores of your body and you bring that to the altar of God.

God wants to consume that because it’s an uncomfortable state. And it should not be in your memory! And there’s only one way to get it out of your memory and that is to bring it to God and lay it down there. [Mark pounds his fist.] Bring thy burden to God, to the altar of God and leave it there. Don’t pick it up again!

This is the trouble with almost 99 percent of the chelas today that are trying to follow the ascended masters. They bring a burden to God and carry it back home with them again. They never really let go of a bad memory. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s their bad memory or whether it’s a bad memory about somebody else. They carry that memory and they nurse it. They nurse a serpent in their own bosom. And this is true, dear hearts, and it is 100 percent true; it’s not just a fraction.

And that’s the difference between the ascended masters and between the people out here who will tickle your ears and tell you if you will only accept their particular doctrine that you are going straight to heaven. We are not going to tell you that you are going straight to hell if you don’t accept ours; you’re already in that. The world is hell, literally, to people because they do not enjoy the bounties of heaven that they could enjoy. This is a case of deprivation in darkness. People are deprived and living in darkness and know it not. And the only way they’re ever going to find their freedom is to come to the light. And in order to come to the light, they’ve got to come to a place where they stop compromising with themselves!

And this is exactly what we’re doing.

And the master told me tonight when I came down here—before I knew outwardly what I would find, which he used as a spur in order to wake me up myself—to realize what is the great basic need. Why do we have density in our worlds? It’s because we lack love. We lack enough love. And you may say, “Well, are you going to beat love into us as Moses did with a rod when he pounded the rock?” Well, the question is, “Are we rocks?” If we’re rocks, then in God’s name let us no longer be rocks except in Christ, you see. You can be a rock for Christ but you can’t be a hard-hearted pharaoh. You see, there’s a difference. There’s a heart of flesh and there’s being builded on a sound foundation and all of that. But you can’t be hard-hearted toward the Deity. You’ve got to be open-minded toward God.

And you can’t compromise issues the way we people do. We’re all guilty to some degree or other of compromising our spirituality, the tangible manifestations of the glory of God. We want healing. You want healing vibrations. You want it flowing through your hands! Well, I’ve had it flow through my hands many times. You want the power to read someone’s mind. Well, start in reading your own mind. Start in figuring out what it is that makes you tick. Find out why it is that when you’re given the greatest teaching this side of heaven that you’re not perfected by it. Well, I’m going to tell you why.

First of all, we were talking about it tonight. We expect too much of the students. We expect because they have been exposed to the teachings that they’re going to manifest it all. And it is true that just to expose people to truth does not necessarily expose them to change, because the change must be initiated inside of the man. I can tell you the truth but I can’t make you partake of the communion cup of the truth. I can put it before you but you have to drink it. And when you drink that cup it will be as John said, sweet in your mouth, but it will be bitter in your belly. It’s always bitter to live until the human has been brought under your feet.

The human is willy-nilly. The human has no comprehension of the Divine, whatever. It only understands its own wants and aims. It wants worldly security, and there is no security in this world. The millionaire as well as the pauper can find himself penniless or deprived of the bare necessities of life overnight. Anyone can be thrown out of their home. They can lose everything they have. Just like the twinkling of an eye; you just never know. Is that any reason for us all being neurotics? Do you want to be a neurotic? Do you want to be a nervous person, nervous in the service of the masters? Nervous in the service of the masters! [Mark chuckles.]

Well, this is what it amounts to. I mean, here we are, supposed to have a consciousness of abundance. We’re supposed to believe in the power of the I AM that appeared to Moses in the burning bush to meet our needs today. Yet people are more concerned over daily bread than they are over spiritual manna. You tell them that they’re going to get a ten-dollar increase in their Social Security and it means more to most people than to tell them that one of the great masters is going to give them an axiom of truth that’s going to take them a hundred yards ahead of where they are today. All they have to do is apply it.

Nine chances out of ten, people not only will not apply it but they will not even ferret it out of a sloka,4 of a paragraph. They have it in their hands in print and they’ll turn around and read right over it, skim over it.

People say to me sometimes, “I read the Pearl of Wisdom this week. It was very good.” And then they’ll say, “You know, I read a Pearl that I got six months ago and that Pearl—I never knew what was in it when I read it the first time. It had an awful lot in it. I just got so much good out of it, reviewing some of my old Pearls.”

Pearls of great price. We have the teachings, ladies and gentlemen. We have the teachings that the world needs and wants. But unless we can produce in our immature state, in our time while we live, significant changes that will show the world that we are not made of the same particular vein of thought that they are, we are going to be no different than they are. They’ll come in here, they’ll expect to see reality, and they’ll see human nonsense.

Continued in Part 2, published in Pearls of Wisdom, vol. 48 no. 24.


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

This lecture, “The Purpose of Life Is to Be an Overcomer,” by the messenger Mark L. Prophet was delivered on Sunday, August 20, 1967, at La Tourelle, Colorado Springs, Colorado. Parts 2 and 3 are printed in Pearls of Wisdom, vol. 48, nos. 24 and 25.

1. I Pet. 4:18.

2. Matt. 11:28.

3. Matt. 7:29.

4. A Sanskrit word for ‘sound,’ ‘song of praise,’ ‘praise,’ or ‘stanza’; a sloka is a couplet of Sanskrit verse.


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