So I’d like to begin at the beginning because I think I am someone just like you. I’d like to begin at the beginning of my experience and tell you about my understanding and how it has flowed and how I have discovered answers that I think are viable for you. I am not asking you to believe me because I am saying these things. I am asking you to say, “Here is someone who has been willing to experiment, to go beyond the narrow confines of ordinary consciousness and who has the courage to be the Real Self.”
You can pursue your own individual fulfillment, but I think we all need guidelines. And I think the guidelines that I bring you, free for the asking and for the taking, are the very ones that you can experiment with because many others have and have found them to be efficient.
I’d like to start in my recollections early in childhood because I think they weave a very important factor and identity. I grew up in New Jersey in a very small town on the coast where my father was a boatbuilder. And in his hobby time he would build rock gardens and fishponds and a little sandbox and a playhouse. And there I spent many idyllic hours of my childhood. They were idyllic, I came to understand, because I didn’t have any sense of beginning or ending. I had a sense of always being in God and I had a sense of presences, of being, of life—angelic hosts, brothers and sisters who were still in other planes where I had come from waiting to take embodiment, masterful beings who were teachers of light.
This, to me, was a very common understanding of a universe that was based on a hierarchy—a principle of hierarchy where energy came forth from a central core of being and was stepped down again and again by those evolutions of God at physical, material planes and spiritual planes of being. I didn’t have it all worked out in this terminology. I was simply at home in a universe of love, and the stars in the heavens symbolized to me that there were vast evolutions that were a part of this cosmos.
At a very early age—I couldn’t have been more than three—I found myself going from that little sandbox to another sand. It was the sand of the River Nile in Egypt and there I was a little girl playing. And there I was experiencing growing up, and it was as concrete as I am standing here, an experience I cannot deny because it is a part of my innermost self, significant, I feel, because the Holy Spirit revealed it to me for a purpose. After some extended time in that place I felt myself floating back to the body that was in the sandbox in New Jersey. And there I was again, back to my home in this life.
And I sprang up from that sandbox and I ran to my mother and I said, “Mother, what happened to me?” And I described the experience. And she said very calmly, “You have remembered a past life.” And in the simplest terms that a child could understand she told me of the thoughts that she had had during her life—about a just God who could create people unequally, people who would come into embodiment, some blind, some not living to maturity, others with wealth and seemingly everything they needed.
And she said she could never understand a just God except in the terms of what Christ taught, “As a man soweth, that shall he also reap”—in terms of karma, in terms of having lived before and sowing energy and reaping that energy in the present life. I was very comfortable with that understanding because I had never had the sense of beginning or ending. Just a moving stream, a part of God’s consciousness.
And so, as a little child, I pursued that God and I came to the place where I demanded to be taken to church, and I was. And I heard the preacher preach, and I found that in that moment of great expectation of the revelation of the living God I was hearing only the repetition of words, of something that someone else had said. I wasn’t meeting someone who had experienced God face to face, as God was revealing himself inside of me. It was not enough. My soul was starving for the truth. And so I said, “Take me somewhere else.” And I went from place to place till we covered the whole town, then the Protestant church, then the synagogue.
And finally, there was nowhere to go except to God himself. And so I retreated to my room in meditation with the King James Version of the Bible. And in that sweet presence, especially in springtime when I could smell the lilacs and the birds would be chirping and the sun would come into my room in the morning as a great presence of life, I would feel on many occasions the Holy Spirit coming into my being.
And I would look upon those pages and the letters would be illumined in living fire. And the most tender, compassionate presence would draw to me a bursting of consciousness, an understanding of a passage in scripture that could not have been a part of my own reason or my own understanding. At one moment I was in darkness, not understanding the living Word. And in another moment I had the full illumination as if I had known it for a thousand years. It was clear to me always that God was the great giver of that gift and that of my own self I had no capacity to penetrate that book without this living presence that I came to know as my dearest friend.
I went on through the years of preparation sensing that I had a mission, that I didn’t know what it was, but I had to get ready for that calling. And I remember one of the final experiences I had when I was a teenager. I was waterskiing down a river in New Jersey out to the ocean. It was a long session way out into the sea. And as I was on those skis—as many of you have probably experienced, you do feel like you’re transcending planes—and I went right out of my body into another plane and experience. And there they were, the masterful beings of light, presences of God, great illumined ones that I had known as a child, and I had felt their compassion. And there was the mystery again, ready to be deciphered if only I could discover the key.
So one day as I was going to leave for college on the morrow, I stood in my mother’s library and I offered this prayer. I said: “Dear God, thank you for my parents, my home, my schooling and all that you have given me. If there is anything that you have placed here for me, for my benefit, of which I have not availed myself, please tell me because I’m leaving and I’m not coming back.”
And so as soon as I offered that prayer the voice of God was in my temple, in my very bosom, and it was speaking to me and giving me a direct order: “Go to that bookcase, pick up that book and read it.” So I went to the bookcase, I picked up a book that I had seen since childhood. In fact, it was given to my mother with the Bible and other books when I was born. It was waiting for me. But it was always too much for me. I couldn’t understand the title. As I looked back on it, it was such a powerful book that I felt that when I would touch it, it would change my life and as a matter of fact I wouldn’t understand it anyway.
And so I said to myself, “Now you’re in for it! You’ve asked, you’ve been told, you can’t disobey, so go and get that book.” So I went and got that book, almost fearfully, and I went back to an old leather chair and I sank deep into it and I put my legs over the arm. And I opened the book—and I had the most startling experience of my first eighteen years of this life.
I looked into the face of the ascended master Saint Germain. And this was a painting that I saw just as it is here. I looked into his face and into his eyes and there passed into mine a current of energy, an intensity of being. It was like an electric shock. It made me leap out of that deep position in that chair. I ran to find my mother.
I said, “Mother, look!” The name was written under the picture, “Saint Germain.” I’d never heard it pronounced. I had been six months in Europe studying. I didn’t know how else to say it but in the French and there it was. I said, “Mother, Saint Germain! I know him. I’ve got to find him. I’ve got a work to do for him. Do you know him?”
She said to me, “Yes, I know him.”
And I said, “Mother, why didn’t you ever tell me about him?”
She said, “I wanted you to discover him for yourself.”
“Well,” I thought to myself, “eighteen years of wasted life. Here it is, I finally found him. I wonder if she was going to wait till I was eighty-five to tell me about Saint Germain.” And so I said, “Well, I’ve got to go out and find him.”
Previous post: What is the Coming Revolution in Higher Consciousness?
Next post: An Experience Before this Life
Elizabeth Clare Prophet
I’m Stumping for the Coming Revolution in Higher Consciousness
Copyright © 2020 Summit Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.