Vol. 48 No. 24 - Mark L. Prophet - June 12, 2005
The Purpose of Life
Is to Be an Overcomer
Part 2
Some people wonder why The Summit Lighthouse is so strict. It is strict because if we are not strict at headquarters, there will be no strictness of the Spirit that goes out through the whole world. And if there is no strictness of the Spirit that goes out throughout the whole world, we are going to have a wishy-washy activity. Order is heaven’s first law, and order must be in the domain of the individual.
Sean1 said to his mother the other night after a very strict reading lesson (during which she practically climbed down his throat, so to speak, and she laid the law down to him), after he mastered the whole page and was able to read it without flaw, he turned to her and he said, “Mother, I love you.” It was his way of saying, “Mother, I love your discipline.” Because it is that discipline that she gave him that very definitely will make him a better master of the English language, sooner than it would be so otherwise.
The thing that you have to recognize, all of you, is that we are a people having great need. But our need is not so much for the teaching as it is for an understanding of the teaching.
I have recently made a deep analysis of our entire staff. In case some of you are yet so carnal-minded as to think we excluded ourselves, we have not. In this analysis, I also extended it to all of the people in the community who come here. And I have very definite conclusions about all of the staff and all of the community and all of us. And it is that we have the teaching, but that we are not putting it to practice as we could.
And so tonight, I make a plea to all of you, not for my sake. I could let down; it would be very easy. I want you to know that it takes more courage on my part to speak out than it does not to speak out. It would be very easy for me to draw the radiation of the angels because this is one of the things that I can do, by God’s grace. [Intonation by Mark.]
It would be very easy to just lift you up so that you could be smashed down, because every time that you are exalted spiritually you are in danger. And the devil took Jesus up into a high mountain. What do you think the high mountain signifies? It signifies a state of spiritual exaltation. And from that lofty position, that parapet, he surveyed the whole world. And the devil said, “These are the kingdoms of the world and I will give them all unto thee if you will fall down and worship me. Just worship the potential of the human in a state of individuality with no universality or no tie to his neighbor or to the universe. Just live in the consciousness of yourself. Just think of yourself and draw power and use power and I can give you the mastery of the world.” This is what he told him.
“It is written [again], Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.”2 Jesus didn’t say, “Thou shalt not tempt me,” but he turned to the larger image, the image of God, and he identified with it. He said, “I and my Father are one. You can’t tempt us. You shall not tempt the Lord thy God.” He gravitated to the higher image.
And this shows us that every time we’re spiritually lifted up, we dwell on thin air! We have no foundation beneath us to hold us there. And we either come down in an elevator of merciful consciousness or some kind of a parachute—or we crash down with a bang! And we find ourselves in ruins. And we say, “I thought I had gone somewhere. I thought that I had passed this milestone of progress. I thought I had overcome anger. I thought I had overcome self-pity. I thought I had overcome fear. I thought I was a master of invocation. I thought I knew the ascended masters well enough to be able to have more protection than that. I thought this and I thought that!” But not so of the man or woman who has the spiritual foundation beneath himself to support the state of exaltation and consciousness in which he dwells. This is the whole thing. Build a solid foundation underneath yourself and you will not fall down. Build it by law and by love. Build it by devotion to principles and build it by fortitude.
Do you suppose that the ascended masters made their ascension on some puny state of consciousness where somebody said, “God loves you”?
“By thy love,” Morya says. “By thy love.” There is more meaning to this than you know. It is the building of consciousness increment by increment until it has some supporting maturity. And I find that there is a manifestation here of babes in Christ. Immature sops! A lot of you are not able to hardly bear the strong meat yet. As Saint Paul said, you must be fed with milk, because you are babes in Christ.3 But if you are to grow, you’d better drink your milk, because strong meat will be given. And if you don’t drink that milk, your stomach will not be able to bear the strong meat nor will you grow as God wants you to and as you want to.
Actually, you have asked for this. I do not think there are any people here that have not actually asked for it. I think everyone that is an adult person in this group has asked that they might receive of the kingdom of God. I think that without question you want it! But if you’re going to get it, you’re going to have to change your attitude of mind toward yourself, toward your fellow man. Again and again I am reminded, as I look at different people in the group, of the statement that was made of the great man of God, Job.4 When Job the patriarch was being discussed by the devil and God, God boasted of Job and he said, “Have you seen my servant Job? He is perfect and beautiful in all his ways.”
And the devil said, “Yes! But you builded a hedge around him. You’ve put a hedge around him. You’ve given him land and you’ve given him wives and you’ve given him barns and you’ve given him grain and you’ve given him good health and he has everything to praise you for. Take it away from him and he’ll curse you and die.” God said, “Very well. So be it!”
The lightning struck the barns and burned them down. In one day, Job’s daughters were killed and his sons were killed and runners came from different directions reporting to him that everything that he owned, practically, was destroyed. The devil came again before God and God said again, “Have you seen my servant Job? Job has had the loss of everything and he still praises me. He is truly my servant!”
And the devil said, “Touch his own skin and he’ll curse you. You still put a hedge around his skin.” And God said, “So be it. Do to him as you will.”
So Job broke out in boils and sores all over till he couldn’t even sit down on his buttocks. He couldn’t stand. He was a man of such misery as none of you can even imagine. It is no joke.
And his friends came to him in this terrible hour of torment, and this is what they said, “Job, it is obvious that your karma is very serious and grievous. God has taken from you everything because you deserve it. The heavy hand of God is upon you. Why don’t you curse him and die?”
But Job said, “Blessed be the name of God. For the Lord is mighty and he ruleth all things and doeth all things well. Blessed be his name.”
And so God won his point and he restored to Job all things and he was given great riches and honor, which proves that it is the hand of God, in reality, that has all goodness. But the testing was very severe.
The hedge that we have built around ourselves, when it is removed, exposes us to the naked testing, the raw and naked testing that determines whether or not we are going through. Some people look to God to take them through with the protection that was around Job. We had a woman in California who sent for the Pearls of Wisdom. After she got the Pearls her whole fortune changed. Money began flowing in from every direction, her health improved, everything was roses. And you know what happened? After a few months, and during which she was sending five dollars in every week with a letter of gratitude for all of the good that had come to her during the period of the Pearls of Wisdom, came the testing.
And this was swept away and that was swept away and so she discontinued the Pearls.
The Pearls or the masters neither gave her her riches nor took them away. She, by her state of consciousness, by her messianic concept that was looking for someone to save her or perform for her the services she should perform for herself, robbed herself not only of the reality of life here on earth but of the realities of the world to come. Because somewhere, sometime that woman will have to face the lost opportunity to have the masters’ instruction, which she placed on an economic basis.
The divine “econium” is something that has to be reckoned with, not in terms of earthly bread but in terms of spiritual progress. We have to determine what comes first to us!
El Morya has told me that it was the attitude of the absolutist, who compromises not with himself in the sense of the absolute, that will win. A man will not win with a vacillating sense. And I’m going to tell you, one and all, that the message of the master tonight is grow up! Grow up! Grow up! Quit commiserating with yourself every time something doesn’t go right, every time you have an ache or a pain or you’re tested.
I can tell you in God’s name that none of us in this epoch of life have been tested one iota compared to what the great teachers of the past have been tested. Do you know what used to take place in Luxor? You go over and talk to Hammed Bey. He’s still living out in California. He’s a physical man. He’s got a wife out there. Hammed will tell you—same thing Serapis Bey would tell you—that when people came to Luxor years ago, they were put through a series of mystical tests. You know how this was done? The body was made to sleep and the consciousness was taken out of the body. And then a series of circumstances were actually mythically created. And the person didn’t even know that their body was laying on a couch. They stood there in a sort of a naked spiritual form. They had clothing on. I don’t mean physically naked, but they were naked in the sense that they were out of the body and disconnected from that phase of consciousness.
Then they were brought in the great pyramids to places where precipices, so steep that you cannot even imagine, were right alongside of them. And they were given a torch, and they were told, “Now you walk from this point to that point.” And they started out and the ground would slide off right up ahead of them. Sometimes showers of rocks would come. And they’d look below and there was an awful, inky blackness there. And the charge was brought to them by a hollow, mocking voice, “Do you want to go on?”
“Yes!” And they went. And they were thrown into rivers—cold, icy rivers—and they had to swim across, clinging to pieces of floating ice. They were tortured by flame. They had to walk on hot coals. All kinds of terrible tests to actually cause the mind to reel were given to them.
Initiations in those days were psychophysical. They were psycho in the sense that they were taken out of the body because the tests could not be actually performed upon the physical body with impunity. To preserve the body, they took the soul out of the body. They put it through these tests. And the great masters themselves used their mental power of creation to create in consciousness these episodes and dramas that are similar to some of the rituals of the ancient Masonic Lodge. These are not the glory dramas of the Masonic Lodge but they’re the very hard experiences that might have a counterpart in some of the happenings to Hiram Abeth.
But the thing that I’m trying to point out here is that these tests have been more or less abolished, and now our tests are given to us in the world. They are given to us from the butcher and the baker and the candlestick maker, from the schoolteacher and the policeman, from the man in traffic who nearly bumps us off the street. They’re given to us by our wives who may poke us in the ribs, or we poke them in the ribs with an elbow in the middle of the night. Or lop a hand or something across somebody’s face. Or any number of other things that people can do. Or they’re done by hillbillies, children out here in the streets at two o’clock at night that come every night and scream underneath your window. Even we have that here. They scream up and down the street here at all hours of the night.
In Washington, D.C., the little children there took roller skates and roller-skated at two and three o’clock in the morning beneath our windows. Their parents didn’t even bother them. They had coaster wagons without rubber tires. I’m speaking the truth. I went through it. I know what it means night after night to be robbed of sleep.
Continued in Part 3, published in Pearls of Wisdom, vol. 48 no. 25.
“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 1 and 3 are printed in Pearls of Wisdom, vol. 48, nos. 23 and 25.
1. Sean is the oldest child of the messengers Mark L. Prophet and Elizabeth Clare Prophet.
2. Matt. 4:7; Luke 4:12.
3. I Cor. 3:1-2.
4. This is in reference to the Book of Job.
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