For as long as we have any records of any kind and as far as traditions of myths and stories go, the Teaching or the Work has always been around available for man.  It has generally been in the form of parallels, parables, various stories and etc. – things that anyone could read and may and may not get anything other than a little entertainment.  Or may find them incomprehensible or possibly decision number five, the one that says the whole purpose of living is to be non-disturbed by putting on a different front, by appearing to be different… may use these little ideas for putting on a different behavior, a different front.

Now, always when the Teaching is alive – when there is an active instructor somewheres around – the parallels are used.  But also specific people are given specific instructions as to what the parallels refer to.

And of course, this is called “teaching from lip to ear.”  We are using that method at this moment, even though we are using the media of recorded tapes.  It is still from speaker to a specific individual, and this specific individual is given the inner meaning of many of these little stories and parallels that are in many, many places.  One may have these parallels at one’s command that has tremendous rich meaning, one which could be a continual source of instruction to one if one understood the meaning of the little stories.

There is a little story told of a man who lived in South Africa and that he had a little farm, which he was trying to farm and produce crops on.  But the soil was so very rocky and was so unproductive that he finally decided to go to a city somewheres and seek his fortune.  He was going to find an easier way to make a living.  After a number of years, someone who knew about little rocks and various things came across this particular farm and found that the rocks, which the farmer had cursed and found of no value to him and had walked off and ignored – he’d deserted the little farm – found that all these rocks were diamonds.  And it was the beginning of the great diamond mining industry of South Africa.

Whether the story is true or not, no one knows.  The only thing, it is a very common story and it  illustrates very wonderfully the fact that we have so many things of great value to us.  And by taking them literally, as the farmer took ‘em as rocks and not seeing their inner structure, their inner meaning of these rocks, one passes over much that is of great, great value to one’s development of their inner state – the development of a Spiritual Body.  Now, outer life is really a parable of the inner state, and there is so many of these little stories that relate to simple everyday incidents, or describe something that one doesn’t see.

Now, up until a very few years ago the study of the inner state of man was taboo – has been for many, many long years, the reason being that all of the so-called spiritual writing and spiritual material came into the hands of institutions.  Institutions insisted that the meaning of all these parables was really the moral code and that it related to one’s outward behavior.  Their interest was in people behaving differently – in being, shall we say, domesticated.  That they would believe and do as they were told, would obey and would be what is called “good” compared to the ideals of the world.  And this was the intent; and so any effort at the study of the inner state of man was considered a heresy and was subject to severe penalties.

So little stories begin to be told that could still carry on the inner meaning of these.  There might be FAIRY TALES that told about miraculous creatures, about a sleeping princess, that a prince of some sort came to and when he kissed her she awakened.  Or people who had had spells cast upon ‘em and believed them to be somewhat limited – spells cast on ‘em by evil witches and etc., or sorcerers.  And that always there could be some sort of a prince come by and break the spell.  Now, we saw these as fairy tales and the children read them, and the grown-ups seldom saw any value in them.

There was a whole system of chemistry went along called ALCHEMY that was not interested in chemistry particularly, however they did make some discoveries and possibly was the forerunner of modern chemistry.  But their ideas as far as chemistry was concerned were preposterous.  But what they were really attempting to do, under the guise of making gold out of base metal and out of finding the elixir of life or forming something called the philosopher’s stone, was really to take a base, conditioned man and turn him into a fully objective, conscious man.  And they did all this under the symbols of chemistry as it was known in those ancient days.

Other groups tried to teach by using the tools and the forming of building – the tools of building and the various parts of ARCHITECTURE.  They taught under this symbol and in the meantime, they built some very beautiful and wonderful buildings, which many of ‘em are still standing.  And if one knows how to read the various symbols they put in the building, one can read the same thing of the Teaching over and over again.

It was also used in many times in AGRICULTURAL ideas – that here was the whole parallel of planting, cultivating, harvesting, getting rid of weeds and all the many other things.  Agriculture is not a great popular subject to most people.  We are more concerned with industry today and with electronics and so forth.  So obviously many of these old symbols are only seen as being the talk of an ancient pastoral people that really doesn’t relate to us today.

It was also used in commercial FISHING, of gathering many fishes and catching them – throwin’ out the evil ones, which we have remarked somewhat about of seeing that personality had everything in it, that some of it might be useful but all the trashy stuff is thrown out.  Today we can be more direct and more concise as to what they mean because psychology is a popular subject today.

And phrases that were used 2000 years ago, 4000 years ago, 1500 years ago, 1200 years ago sometime seem rather strange unless one is aware of what these people were talking about, and how they used various symbols as a parallel for the inner state of man – the conditioning state of man.  

And as we said, there was a long dark age of the study because the institutions had power.  They had a stranglehold on all information and was only givin’ out what they wanted to.  And it seemed to be really a revival of the old Scribes and Pharisees – it’s all concerned with outward behavior, with the outward form, with being “good”.  Nothing is concerned with being conscious because a conscious man is not under control.  A conscious man is a free man and of course, an institution sees a free man as a heretic, as someone practicin’ heresy.  And not all of that effort is dead until this day.  However, the institutions don’t have the power they did over only a few limited number of people – a few million, which is an awful lot when we stop to think about it.

We will read one of these little parallels today so that one can see how it is constantly being referred to.  It makes one the possibility of having continual instruction, that one cannot depend upon a Teacher or an instructor or any kind of a guide; that there is adequate material about one that one may use when one understands the inner meaning of this material.

This one we will read today is from the Book of Matthew in the New Testament.  It is in Chapter 6 and is verses 22 through 24.  It reads:  “The lamp of the body is the eye.”  E-Y-E.  Now, it is singular, it doesn’t say the “eyes”.  So,

“The Lamp of the Body is the Eye.  If thy eye be sound, thy whole body will be full of light; but if thy eye be evil, thy whole body will be full of darkness. Therefore, if the light that is in thee is darkness, how great is the darkness itself.  No man can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will stand by the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.”

Now let’s take as a reference point the Picture of Man that we drew sometime ago.  Or we can redraw it; it might even be more advantageous if we make a new one.  And we make the Picture of Man and in the center section is the Awareness.  Now, the Awareness was referred to as the “inner eye” or the third eye at one time.  It was considered to be blind in the usual conditioned man – the third eye is closed, blind, unused.  It is evil, it is contaminated, it is full of something or other.  It may have blocks of rock in it or it may have salt in it.  At any rate, the person cannot see.

So the “eye” is the Awareness Factor that sees that which is true, that which is what is and the value of what is.  Or else it sees what is and when it is contaminated, when it is conditioned, it then sees what ought to be as the ideal; and that is what has value and there is no connection between the two. There is struggle, conflict, and resistance to change what is into what one thinks what ought to be.  In this case the eye is considered to be dark or evil and the Awareness is the only Light that is in one.  The Light means that which comprehends, that which sees the relationships, that which comprehends all the situations about one.

So “If thy eye be evil, the whole body will be full of darkness.”  Now, we have the Picture of Man that is taken over by the Four Dual Basic Urges and the six means of self-improvement, three in one camp and three in another and they are at war.  And this is considered to be evil.

The word evil doesn’t mean in the usual case of “bad” and not as an opposite to “good.”  It means something in a state of contamination, something not serving the purpose for which it is designed.  So the Awareness is designed to see what is and what is valuable about what is, on a varying scale.  However here, it is not seeing, it is evil, it is dark, it is blind, it is conditioned. 

And our Picture of Man shows what it is that makes it dark.  It is what I – the capital I with a line drawn under it, the first personal pronoun – observes when it is observing self.  The light has been contaminated and turned into a “self” instead of Awareness.  It says the whole body will be full of darkness.  In other words, one is unaware of the whole nature of what goes on.  We have been talking about what happens when one has expectation, expectation that everything should fit the ideal and that it will be the ideal.  And when the actual what is – which really gives one an opportunity to evolve – comes along, one sees it as bad.  One then is disappointed, one feels hurt, one looks for blame.

And one gets the unpleasant emotions of anger, guilt, fear, insecurity and all their many subdivisions, which is a state of stress, which is being mobilized to fight or run.  The body is in a state of chemical imbalance and neuromuscular tension.  And then adaptation has to take place.  And that is in the form of unusual cellular activity, unusual sensation and unusual action of the cell; in other words a change or alteration in the tissue cell itself.  We don’t know what is going on.  We blame disease for having attacked the person.  We want to stop all of it; we never consider that it is a signal.  So darkness fills the entire body.

And it says, “If thy eye be sound, thy whole body will be full of light,” – full of understanding, seeing what is.  That is the Picture of Man when I stands in the middle of the Awareness Function.  It has a Spiritual Body and that body is full of Light.  That body is based upon experimentation with the ideas of the Teaching, with allowing various experiences to come into being – being fully aware that one cannot confess, or surrender, or repent or be baptized by some act of will.  

But that it is an experiencing that comes from observing this self, this darkness.  And I the Observer is throwing a light through all that dark area; and one is beginning to understand conflict, one is being cleansed of many conflicts.  One is seeing what is of some value and what is totally without value – sees that which is very harmful and X casts it out.  So one is being filled with Light.  The whole purpose of I observing the self is to be filled with Light.  It is to heal the blind because the Awareness Function of man was totally blind.

And then it says, “No man can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or stand by one and despise the other.”  Now, the Four Dual Basic Urges is the master when man is in a conditioned state, when he has not observed self over a long period of time.

As you have kept records, and as you continue to do, you will see that there is the constant temptation, which we have been studying for the past few weeks, of to identify or to agree or to allow mammon to agree with us.  The Four Dual Basic Urges here is referred to is mammon.  And of course, all of the means of self-improvement which are three on the “A” side and three on “B” which are ever in war with each other.  This is to be in the dark and to serve the master mammon, which is everything concerned with it is misery.  It is why you see the tremendous amount of illness, why you see so much conflict, so much violence in the world – because when one serves mammon one is serving the ideal that the whole purpose of living is to be non-disturbed.  And one practices self-improvement on self and tries to improve other selves, which resent it.  

And then comes the blaming down the way when things didn’t work right.  And when they’re blaming we always feel ready for violence because blaming goes back to that expectation that if we blame ‘em, they will apologize, straighten up, pay their accounts payable to us, and will begin to be different and do what they ought to do.  But the other person has exactly the same thing within them and so then there is fights and lawsuits and contentions.  And there may be even wars – maybe they’re little brush wars in southeast Asia or in eastern Asia, or they may be in the Near East, or they may be world wars.  But wherever it is, it is only an expression of that inner state of man that is serving mammon.

Whether it is millions on one side and millions on the other makes no difference because the Picture of Man, as we have seen, is the picture of any organization.  It can be the picture of an army; it can be the picture a nation.  It is also the picture of the whole world. The Picture of Man is the master parable of this day because it shows what is going on.

It is a parable, it is a story of telling how each came into being, how the two great nations in it were formed.  In the ancient days of the books which we are looking at now, the “A” was called the Gentile nation because they were struggling to have their way, stick up for their rights and blame.  “B” was called the Jewish nation because they were living by rules and regulations – “thou shalts and thou shalt nots.”  They were putting on behaving differently, they were trying to please people and they were believing and doing as they were told by their authorities – the Scribes and the Pharisees.

So we see this same situation goes on through the years.  And as one begins to understand this parable of the Picture of Man – which is being referred to here as the inner eye, the third eye, the aspect of inner comprehension – we are seeing that it is not only related to one person but to everyone.  And that all have it until one comes upon that a bit, to observe that self and see it.  And then one has stepped out of the world, has stepped into the world of real living beings, and out of the man-made world, which is mammon’s world – which it says that mammon has charge over that entire world.  

And that man ceases to serve mammon because he is no longer interested in the Four Dual Basic Urges – not because he is taught to do so, but because by careful experimentation of observing, he sees that every act to serve mammon results in conflict and struggle and resistance and disintegration… that mammon entices one to struggle towards an illusion, an illusion that cannot be unless one be dead.  Because one is going to experience all degrees of sensation.

The more conscious one is, the more sensations and the more vibrations in the world around one, one experiences.  Not all of ‘em would be classified as pleasant; in fact, one would be in severe danger if one only experienced the pleasant sensations.

So as one observes this, one observes the inner eye – E-Y-E – the comprehension faculty, the Awareness.  It has also been called the soul, and today we refer to it as the psyche, which is the Greek word for soul.  So we see that as we study the psyche, we then see it undergo a transformation from an area of darkness to being filled with Light.  The only way it can have that Light is that the Light of self-observation, which is like holding a flashlight.  I has a Light and throws it on all these dark areas which are from conditioning, one of which the person is unaware of, therefore is in the dark.

And as one observes serving mammon, one very easily sees that one’s purpose is to be a conscious reporter to X of what is and the value of what is.  One sees that the ideals that mammon holds out are illusions, that pursuing those illusions has one in a constant state of struggle, conflict, resistance.

Have you been through the state of trying to make a decision?  And “A” gives many reasons to do it that way, and “B” gives many reasons the other.  One calls this trying to make a decision.  But you may have experienced that at least in some areas by now that when you see something, you see it so completely there is no choice.  There is only the what is and the value of what is and X acts upon it.  There is no struggle with choice.  

There is no going through all the agony of trying to come to a conclusion and convince one that one has free agency or free choice.  Of course, the whole idea of free choice implies that one is already in a conflict.  However, we find that the idea of free choice is rather an illusion – that finally we never come to a conclusion.  But circumstances push a button and there is a reaction and we said, “Oh yes, I decided to do it that way.”  And then if it doesn’t turn out to be non-disturbing, one says, “I don’t see why I ever did that.  I don’t know what come over me to make me do that.”

So you see, mammon says to deny responsibility.  And the only responsibility one truly has, is to be aware of what is and see the value of it.  X does all the work.

One cannot do anything.  One cannot open this eye, but by being aware, one throws a Light in it, and that whole Spiritual Body called Awareness in the Picture of Man begins to be strong and clear and filled with Light.  And when the Spiritual Body is filled with Light, Light meaning conscious observation, conscious Awareness – not reaction, not conditioning – then one sees that there is no choice to be made.  One sees so clearly and so completely as to what is and its relative value, that action is spontaneous.  X immediately acts upon it.  And this is called spontaneous living.  It is a joyful state of existence.

So may we recommend that you take these words, which we just read here, verses 22 through 24, the sixth chapter of Matthew.  You write them down and put the Picture of Man by the side of it and refer to it a number of times through the week so that one knows what the inner eye really is – E-Y-E, the comprehension, the seeing.  And one can begin to see whether one still has dirt in one’s eye, or whether one’s eye is clean.  If it is clean the whole body is filled full of Light; if it is injured, malfunctioning due to dirt of conditioning in it, it of course cannot function adequately.  So write the words and to the side of it put the Picture of Man with all the conditioning in it on one side.  And on the other side put the one with the conditioning having been observed and rendered inoperative – removed by X.

One sees there is entirely different, and one sees whether one is serving mammon or attempted to serve mammon; or whether one is serving X, Spirit, Life.