This is Part 2 of 5 of a sermon on Mark 12:28-34 by the Messenger Elizabeth Clare Prophet delivered on Palm Sunday, April 15, 1984, at Camelot. It is published in Pearls of Wisdom Vol. 27 No. 23 – May 28, 1984.

And one of the scribes came and, having heard them reasoning together and perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him, Which is the first commandment of all?

And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord! And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. This is the first commandment.

And the second is like, namely this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.

And the scribe said unto him, Well, Master, thou hast said the truth, for there is one God and there is none other but he. And to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the soul, and with all the strength, and to love his neighbor as himself is more than all whole burnt-offerings and sacrifices.

And when Jesus saw that he answered discreetly, he said unto him, Thou art not far from the kingdom of God. And no man after that durst ask him any question.

Mark 12:28-34

Love God with All Thy Soul

This is the great mystery of the Great Commandment, but it does not stop: not only with all thy heart but with all thy soul. How do we love God with all our soul?

We understand that the soul is anchored in the seat-of-the-soul chakra. This chakra is below the heart and below the solar plexus. It is the very seat of life on earth. Between that soul chakra and the heart, which is the seat of the Christ consciousness, are all of the records of one’s karma, the debris of the world, the momentums of the desire body.

Therefore, the soul must determine what it will do, must set a course and a mark and fulfill it, recognizing that it is an obstacle course. One must learn to dodge one’s personal and planetary karma with the violet flame, with the sacred fire, in order to get back to the very center of the Christ consciousness. The soul must will its own self-discipline, its own discipleship, because this is the test of self-mastery. God does not continually reinforce his will in us: He wants independent, God-free beings to come home to him who have determined to be free—to love him with all thy soul.

The soul is the ‘solar’ awareness, and therefore you begin to think of the sun—Sol. The sun of the soul is the light of God. The soul is a part of the whole loaf, a fragment of the bread of Life which is the immortal Spirit.

This Great Spirit is with you in your I AM Presence. The soul is a portion thereof that has descended into time and space, having demanded and received the gift of free will. It is gone forth in the outer universes to prove that divine identity. Therefore, it has the supreme choice and the supreme challenge of making right choices.

Now, this separation out of the white fire core of being was not the will of God in the beginning, but it became the will of man. Thus, discipleship became the pathway of the soul’s journey back to the very heart of God.

If suddenly you landed in the most dense jungle of Africa and you wanted to get back to civilization, the first thing you would have to do is take out your machete and carve a pathway through the jungle, or you could not move. Because the soul has demanded the route of free will and of the descent into the Matter universe, it now must carve the pathway back to the I AM Presence.

In the mercy of the great I AM THAT I AM, God sent forth his only begotten Son, that through him we might be saved and we might have eternal life. This is because the soul could not find its way out of the Matter spheres. It could not find its way back to the Godhead without the principal Mediator, the living Son of God. Therefore, the Christ Self went forth as the very presence of the love of the Father to rescue souls gone astray from their original Reality.

Your Christ Self is your I AM Presence personified. Your Christ Self is the Great Mediator who talks with you while you are yet in the imperfect karmic state and who talks with God who is in the pure state of perfection. The Divine Mediator, therefore, is the go-between, the one who intercedes in behalf of the soul and leads you back to God.

In order to love God with all your soul, you need to establish the tie to the Christ Self so that the soul has the power, the ability, and the contact wherewith to love. The soul’s capacity to love takes into account the very mature and realistic assessment of what is the here and now, what is the present condition of my life, my karma.

There’s one thing certain: not one of us can escape our past. It is written in the record that is sealed in the subconscious. In order to get back to God, we must deal with the past that is become our present and that will be our future. We deal with it by the principle of love.

Having the love-tie in the soul to the Mighty I AM Presence, we are able—because we love God and his oneness, his light and purity, which is his honor—to face that karma, that past, that collection of influences called environmental or hereditary, and all other conditions of consciousness which we ought to expect to be thrown in our pathway as obstacles.

We should expect, when we decide to return to God, to have to pick up the pieces of the past and cast them into the violet flame. We should have the perspective of knowing that each time a new illusion, a new pattern of the astral, a new facet of karma comes up, it will not be a matter of questioning, of reexamining to decide all over again if we are going to love God with all our heart and with all our soul, if we are going to walk straight back to God or if we are going to take a few centuries and indulge this or that habit pattern or old momentum.

To make up your mind to enter the heart of God is the best decision you can ever make. Understanding what are the consequences of this decision is a sign of your wisdom, the wisdom to know and realize—as you have studied the life of Jesus and Paul, the apostles, the avatars, Gautama—that all who have ever said, “I will go straight home to God,” have had everything under the sun, “everything under the heart chakra,” thrown in their way as the deterrent to that oneness.

Therefore, the best conclusion is to predecide: “I will let nothing stop me, I will so love God, and I will walk in his light!”

So I am showing to you that it is almost more difficult for the “soul” to love the I AM Presence one hundred percent than for the “heart.” Let me explain:  whereas the heart is the point of your realized Christhood, the soul is the facet of identity that has exercised free will and made certain cycles of karma and is therefore bound by the personality that its own karma has molded.

Your personality and the way you behave—whether you are lethargic, whether you are energetic, whether you are tardy or on time—and all components of being have to do with karma, causes you have set in motion that become binding laws until you break those iron bands. So the soul must become a knight of the quest or a lady of the flame, moving in the quest of the Holy Grail, or tending its light, finding that pure chalice of the Christ Self within the heart, then bearing the holy of holies to humanity—one day to merge with it when one’s service to life is done.

Continued in Part 3 With all thy mind…