Remembering your Ancient Home

The New Message speaks about remembering your Ancient Home; it seems like such a difficult and mysterious thing. It’s not a place. It doesn’t have the attributes of a place. We have no idea of what it looks like, or even if it looks like anything. It’s incomprehensible to our intellect and to our imagination.

But we came from a place that’s beyond time and space—eternal beings, living a temporary life in a temporary world, here for a purpose given to us, placed deep within us, where nothing in the world, no person or force could take it from us, and also beyond our reach, until we were mature enough and ready for it to emerge on its own.

So one of the ways that you can begin to experience this ineffable existence is by reading these Secrets. When you read them, you do not try to understand them. That’s not the correct approach. You might say, “Oh, yes, I think they’re talking about some metaphysical notion you might have,” or, “I think they’re talking about being open.” Stop.

You don’t approach these to understand them. They’re meant to evoke a deeper experience within you. You can’t take them apart and see how is it applying to my life and how am I going to use it to deal with the problems at hand? Or, how does this fit into my spiritual understanding of what I’ve read before? What does it mean?

So you let all these questions go. This is an experience. Not every Secret will evoke a deep experience, but there’s a lot of Secrets here and some of them will.

And you will realize in that moment, if you are struck in this way, if you’re free enough and open enough to be struck in this way, you will see that your memory goes much further back than just your earlier life or your childhood; that you carry a deeper level of memory, of experience, not of places and events, but of associations, relationships. This book is given to aid you in having these deeper experiences. So in that light, I think it’s quite important.

When you read a Step from Steps to Knowledge, it’s more aimed at directing your thinking mind and addressing how you are in life and how you are with yourself and how you are with others, how you see yourself, how you understand yourself to bring your mind into a greater alignment with the mysterious Mind of Knowledge.

But the Secrets are to evoke a deeper experience, and that is their purpose. Some of them are kind of confusing and shocking, as if they’re to jar you out of one dimension of thinking or one way of looking at something or habitual way of evaluation.

And Steps To Knowledge provides some of these—I call them gates—provides some of these gates. And certainly, many writings in the New Message are meant to take you into the Mystery where understanding is not going to happen and it’s not even really what’s important. You can’t understand it and use it. It’s meant to evoke a deeper well of memory.

And this brings us to the question that is posed by the Step, Today I will listen to my experience, which is very different than, Today I will listen to my mind, which is what we habitually do. Or, Today I will listen to my evaluations, or someone else’s evaluations. It colors our perception of everything and how we see ourselves and other people.

For example, when you see people and you evaluate them immediately, or you have a judgement about them—you like what they look like or how they are or you don’t, or they remind you of people you like or don’t, or they remind you of people that represent something to you, categorically, by race or gender or age or culture—you know, you’re not really seeing them. You’re only seeing your ideas about them. So with this frame of reference, you really aren’t seeing anything very clearly. And what you see is yourself.

All you see yourself, which means you don’t really know how to be with yourself. You don’t know how to really be with someone. You don’t really know how to be intimate with someone, how to be with the presence. I mean, what could be more intimate than that? You’re locked into a mental approach to life that can’t really feel or know beyond its own thinking and ideas.

So Steps to Knowledge, then, becomes a way to escape that. And you know, we all have experiences of seeing and Knowing. And we all have mysterious experiences, things we can’t really understand or make sense of.

So we’re not in this mental state all the time. But Steps to Knowledge is here to take us below that level, the surface of the mind, into a deeper realm than ourselves where you really have to be a beginner. You don’t know what’s down there. And when you begin to pass through the levels of the mind—of course, you have your surface mind, which is acting and reacting to present and recent events, sometimes earlier events—you go into wells of memory, judgment, confusion. You begin to remember things you wouldn’t remember otherwise.

It’s like going from one room to another. And some rooms hold memories and some rooms hold pain and some rooms hold pleasurable things. And you begin to see that you’re carrying a tremendous burden of information that is no longer helpful, or never was to begin with, transiting across the field of the mind until you find a very quiet place, which is not about understanding; it’s about experience.

This is like being introduced, the beginning Steps of being introduced, to who you are. But to go there, you have to be able to build a channel, a pathway down through those layers. And here stillness becomes one of the critical practices to enable that to happen, being present with nothing going on. And you begin to see things as they are.

We’re better at seeing things as they are with objects than we are with people. I can see a camera as a camera. I’m looking at a camera right now. But to see the person as the person they really are, that’s harder; to see you as you really are, not just in terms of behavior or appearance, but deeper, deeper. And when you can do that, they can begin to communicate to you at a deeper level.

I learned about this when I used to work with people individually, long ago, that I would listen for them…they would tell me why they came to see me and what their problem or issue was. But I was listening for them to tell me what they really needed, which in most cases was very different than the problem that they were presenting to me. So I didn’t try to solve the problem they were presenting to me. I was listening for them to tell me, at this deeper level, what they needed. And when I would address that, it would change the whole conversation. From problem, assessment, plan, resolution, something else would happen.

So this ability to connect to people at a deeper level—and don’t try this with everybody, by the way; it’s not a good idea to do that—comes from listening, really listening. And we practice inner listening to learn how to listen, not to get information or insights or answers or any of that, just how to listen. Stillness—how to be still. Being present—how to be present.

So when you read a Secret, for example, if you could, just be present and read it and see what might happen on the inside of you. That’s the key thing. Those doors have to be opened by something, and you cannot really open them yourself.

So each Step in Steps to Knowledge is planting seeds and working on opening the door, internally. However, they’re communicating things that need to be understood and practiced and applied. But then they’re also reaching in to you, more deeply. That is why when you do Steps to Knowledge a second or third time, it’s like doing it the first time. You see things and hear things because your eyes and ears have been opened enough to have a whole new experience. But you have to really slow down to do this.

Many people have told me, over the time, that they read one line in the New Message and it did something to them where they knew this was it. Or, they read one verse or they read one chapter or they did two Steps and it had such a profound effect upon them. It’s like it just bypassed the mind and just went…bypassed the layers of the mind and went straight into the center of them. And they had an experience that was unique. And then, of course, they go back to trying to understand.

So my point here is some things are meant to be understood and need to be understood, but the deeper things have to be experienced. And to open yourself to experience means that you are present for something without trying to evaluate or understand it, or look good doing it.

Once in a while Knowledge has a real message for you, but it’s kind of been the same message for a long time. That’s why the New Message says, Knowledge always as a message for you. Well, it’s probably the same message; you’re just not getting it sufficiently, or at all.

But everything that you need is going to come from the Mystery. Beyond basic needs of life, the really important things will come from the Mystery. Steps to Knowledge is a Mystery. It represents your relationship with God. This is how God is speaking to you, through the Angelic Assembly.

Don’t change the words. Don’t personalize it. This is God speaking to you, personally—well, God’s not a person, but in you, being a person. God is working on your mind, your soul, your heart, everything. It’s happening at different levels, simultaneously.

So that’s the Mystery and the blessing of this great gift. I know because I was the first one to do Steps. There were several people, some of whom are here, who did it soon after me. And it was like nothing I’d ever seen or heard or read. But it was…I knew this didn’t come from me; there’s no way.

And I knew that I had to take care of this gift for the rest of my life, maybe beyond. That’s how big a gift it is.

Nasi Novare Coram