You may recall that early in our study of the Sermon on the Mount, we mentioned some classes that Joel gave in 1954 on the Sermon on the Mount, saying:
The classes we will hear in our study sessions are from Joel’s work in 1956 and 1957. In some of those classes, Joel remarks that his revelations on the Sermon on the Mount came in a startling and unexpected way during a class in 1956, and that before that time, he did not speak about the Sermon because he did not understand it.
However, there are three classes from the 1954 Honolulu Closed Class in which Joel focuses on the Sermon on the Mount. We do not know why he doesn’t mention these. Perhaps he did not consider them to be sufficiently deep revelations, or maybe they simply did not remain in his awareness. All we know is that these earlier classes are in the library of recordings, and they provide some helpful lessons.
Just by chance, last week we found a recording (161A, 1956 Chicago Closed Class, “The Christ—Prayer—Inner Communion”), in which Joel explains why he did not mention these classes later in his ministry. Here is the relevant excerpt from that recording:
“A class experience is never one week. A class experience is usually several years because that which comes to light in the class resolves itself within us and does something to us about which we have no knowledge for a long time.
“I can illustrate that. For more than twenty years, I have thought about and read the Sermon on the Mount, and for all of that time, I have been in complete ignorance of what it meant, and for that reason you do not find very much of it in my writings. And there is only, I believe, one or two tapes that have that subject, and the reason is that I’ve never been able to fathom the meaning of it. I’ve never known why it was part of the Master’s teaching. I never knew what he saw in it, or what he got from it.
“And it was two or three years ago during the Honolulu Series [1954] that I had an unfoldment on part of it. I saw definitely that such things as ‘as ye sow, so shall ye reap,’ and all the rest of that line of thought, was not a spiritual teaching, not of God; that it was cosmic consciousness, that which applies to us on the human plane. Everything that has to do with cause and effect has no relationship to God at all, because there is neither cause nor effect in God. Whenever you come across anything that deals with cause and effect, remember that you’re not dealing with anything spiritual, you’re dealing with cosmic law. ‘As ye sow so shall ye reap,’ meaning as you, as a human being, sow, so will you, as a human being, reap. If you sow to the flesh—now you see a spiritual idea couldn’t do that; the Son of God couldn’t do that—you will reap corruption. If you sow to the Spirit, you’ll reap life everlasting.
“Now, in the same way, in the Ten Commandments, you are warned not to do this, and not to do that, and what the penalties are. That’s all human. That isn’t any different law than our legal law. If you go ninety miles an hour, you will get arrested if you don’t kill yourself. But something will happen to you if you go ninety miles an hour, and that’s sure, and it’s something unpleasant, because again, as you violate the legal law, as you violate the physical laws, something has to give, and it’s apt to be a piece of machinery.
Now all this is human. None of that is divine. All of that is human, and so I saw that through the Sermon on the Mount we have a great deal of cosmic law, and I thought, really, I had solved the Sermon on the Mount. But I hadn’t. It only took a few days after that class was over to see that all I had solved, or come into the realization of, was one tiny part, and that was the negative part—what happens to us as humans if we disobey the law. We come up against cosmic law and it always grips us.
“So I have not touched on the Sermon on the Mount at any time since then until last night. And last night while I was sitting here, the Voice said to me, ‘Fifth chapter of Matthew, bottom of the page.’ And I answered back, ‘No use. I know what’s there. It’s the Sermon on the Mount, and I don’t know that.’ So I just ignored the Voice. But it came a second time, and this time I opened the Bible at that point and all of a sudden, the Sermon on the Mount was illumined, and I saw there just what the Master saw. I saw his whole vision of ‘Take no thought for your life.’ I saw the whole vision of take no human footsteps; do nothing; be a beholder and watch it all come to pass. And of course, it took me back to the book, The Infinite Way, in which it says, ‘Be a beholder,’ and all the way through it reminds us that we must not be a do-er or a be-er. We must be a beholder, watching over the shoulder to see God work.
“And so last night in going through that Sermon on the Mount, I saw that. I saw clearly that he was revealing to us another kingdom, another realm of consciousness, that in which we live when we’re not trying to get back at somebody that hurt us, or when we’re not trying to collect debts that are owed to us, or when we are able to forsake our human rights and dues and live according to the little pamphlet Love and Gratitude, watching love unfold from God and not expecting it through man.
“Now of course, you can understand that all of this will come through in these next weeks, months, or years, and be another book on the Sermon on the Mount—another one to add to the world’s literature of explanations of the Sermon on the Mount. But we hope this time that if it does come through as a book, that it will contain also the vision of how to attain that consciousness and abide in it, so that it can be made practical. (Note: It did come through as the book The Thunder of Silence.)
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