All the miracles, all the satisfaction, all the fulfillment of worldly and Heavenly desires come from the Kingdom of God, from the inner realization of our eternal harmony, of our eternal wisdom, and of our Almighty Power. If we do not get this, we never find satisfaction in this world. Doesn’t matter how much money we have, what kind of position we hold, or how many things this world has offered at our feet. That’s why, again, in the Bible it is said, “What good does a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul,” or the Kingdom of God.
Because the soul is connected with the Kingdom of God, the soul can only feel happy in the Kingdom of God. And the Kingdom of God is within us, is at hand. So, we don’t really need to go to the Himalayas to search for it, and we do not even need to go to church to look for it. We might go to church to pray if that is helpful to us and makes us find a little bit of comfort for our daily stress. But that is not the Kingdom of God. It’s only a very small portion, too small to even mention.
Once we find the Kingdom of God, we never lose it again, and everything else is at our command. Therefore, Buddha had forsaken the Kingdom of the Earth; therefore, (Lord) Jesus refused to be the King of the Jews – I mean officially. His disciples and His followers wanted so much to make Him the King of the Jews. But He refused. He said, “My Kingdom is not on Earth. My Kingdom is with my Father in Heaven.” And He even recommended everyone to, “Lay your treasure upon Heaven and not on Earth. Because here, things will get damaged and destroyed.” What He meant is we should give all our attention, our love, to realizing God, to God. Love your God with all your soul, all your mind, all your strength.
But it’s difficult to understand all these sayings in the Bible. Therefore, the Bible says, “Seeing you’ll see, but not perceive; hearing you’ll hear, but not understand.” Why is that? Most of us, when we read the Bible, we only read the vocabulary, and we don’t even understand the true impact of the Bible. And also, the Bible sometimes has paradoxical statements and confuses people. But I do not believe that the Bible is paradoxical.
I do believe in the misinterpretation of the later generations, of the ego of the interpreters who want to interpret it the way they think, and the way they understand it, without further deep study into the subject and meditating on the true meaning of the Bible. For example, in the first chapter of the Old Testament, God said, “I made all the herbs in the fields and all the beautiful fruit trees; these shall be your ‘meat.’” So, meat in that sense means meals, only food. It doesn’t mean meat as in what we eat nowadays, like (animal-people) beef steaks, or (animal-people) pork chops and whatnot. Is that not so? (Yes.) Yes.
But then, in other interpretations, they think, “Well, ‘meat’ means (animal-people) meat.” And also, someone who never cared about the true meaning of it would interpret it as (animal-people) meat. But actually, in the original text, it means meal. Meat at that time meant anything for food; it didn’t mean meat like how we mean it today.
Also, for example in India, they have a kind of sweet – very sweet, small, very sweet. They call it sweetmeat. Those of you who went to India will have eaten them and know what I mean. Sweetmeat. And now if we translate it into our language, it becomes sweetmeat – it means “meat (food) which is sweet.” And if we don’t know that, and if we have never been to India, or if we do not care to truly understand what that means, then we put it as meat. And all the Masters in India would eat “meat” by now – sweetmeat. Understand what I mean? (Yes.) And now, if somebody interprets it and thinks, “Ah, nonsense. How can meat be sweet? Probably, the author wrote it wrong; probably, he means ‘lean meat.’” Yeah.
Or probably, the interpreter has double eyeglasses and he read it wrong. Because sometimes people write it by hand, and sometimes you can see it in the wrong light. And if you study in college, sometimes the teacher makes a test, like he whispers into your ear one word and then tells you to whisper to the next, and the next person to the next. And when it turns to the 15th or 50th person, it’s changed the whole thing, the whole meaning, the whole word. Is that not so? Do you have that test? (Yes.) Yeah! Then you know what I mean.
So now, two thousand years ago, you know what it means. When it changed, when one word changed from the first to the fifteenth or fiftieth person in the same room at the same time, within a few minutes, how do you think many thousands of words would preserve their purity and originality after two thousand years?
So, it’s very pitiful for us to grovel in this kind of darkness trying to find out the exact meaning of God interpreted by men. So, the only thing is we have to pick out what is logical – try to. Use all our might and sincerity to pray for enlightenment – at least, to pray for the right meaning and the right text from the Bible. And pray to God that we pick out only the right one.
Well, I did pray very hard when I was younger. I mean, I’m still young. But when I was younger, I prayed to God every day. I slept with the Bible every day. I felt better that way. When I was in Âu Lạc (Vietnam), I prayed with the Buddhist Bible, and when I was in Europe, I had no Buddhist Bible, so I prayed with the Catholic Bible. And I read every day, one chapter at least. And when I went to church, I prayed for nothing else except, “God, if You exist, show me.” That’s all. “Let me know You. Show Yourself to me.” I never prayed for anything else. I prayed the same to Buddha: “If You really exist, please show me where You are.” That’s all. So, probably because of this prayer and sincerity, I have known God, I have known Buddha. Anyhow, we are good friends now. No big deal.
God is there all the time, has always been there, and always will be. It’s just that we ignore God, not God ignores us. And it’s so simple that we live in God every day, every second, every fleeting moment of our life. But we just don’t know. And because we are ignorant of the fact that God takes care of everything, we really do not believe that even if one hair falls down, it’s also the decision of the Lord. Is this not so? It says so in the Bible. It is truly so. And we only know that and believe that after we truly experience God. I mean God-consciousness; I mean truly know the Kingdom of God, truly surrender. And then we have no more sin whatsoever, because we truly understand that we are helpless, that God is the One who runs the Universe.
And, “So what happens with the free will?” you would ask me. The free will is for you to believe that you are the one who does things; you’re free to believe that. Nobody stops you. But you also have the free will to believe that God is the One who runs the Universe. And in order to have this confidence to believe that God is the One who runs the Universe, we must contemplate on God in the right way. Otherwise, our free will just runs free, runs wild; we’ll believe in all kinds of things that are brain-washed into our knowledge. We believe what our teacher says, we believe what the priest says, even though he knows nothing. We believe in the society’s customs and “dos” and “don’ts,” and “to be” and “not to be,” and “to do” and “not to do.” And we do not believe in God.
Most people who go to church, or belong to any kind of religious order, they would think they believe in God, but they don’t. They believe in Maya, meaning the opposite, the negative power. The negative power teaches us that we have sins, that we are terrible, that we are originally born in sin and die in sin; that except (Lord) Jesus, we have no one else as savior. That we are always sinners anyhow, and we could never become like (Lord) Jesus, or we could never have any worth as human beings.
But why? In the Bible, it says, “God made man in His own Image.” That means at least we are very similar to God. Why should we be sinful if we are in the Image of God? When somebody is made in the image of someone, they are very much alike. Is that not so? Is that not the meaning in English? (Yes.) OK. So now, if we are very much like God, then we are nothing else, except we are God.
And didn’t (Lord) Jesus say that everything He does, we can do, and that, “We are all the children of God.” If you are the children of Rockefeller, what do you think you are? You are Rockefellers, no? And you have all that the father has. Or not? (Yes.) Ask them, ask the Rockefeller children what they have. They have all the prestige of the father. They have all the possessions that the father left for them, or even when he was alive. Is that not so? (Yes.)
