|
Narrators Notes: Freedom Barry was a friend of Neville Goddards and was chosen to carry on his work after he passed. He wrote 3 books, 2 of which we have on the site, “Seven Salient Subjects” and “I DO” which was considered his most important book. Very little else is know about Mr. Barry but we will update if we can find any more information.
TO NEVILLE
who sent me to do this work
“He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon
a rock, and established my goings.”
Psalm 40:2
THE TAPROOT
Be thou my strong habitation whereunto I may continually resort….
Psalm 71:3
Have you ever felt yourself adrift in a sea of bewilderment, buffeted from all sides by the
nagging pressures of decisions that require your immediate action? Take heart, for there is
a way out of that dilemma. Ask yourself where your sense of Self is focused.
Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Psalm 90:1
What is “Lord” to you?
Your Consciousness of Being is fundamental to your existence and is the one immovable,
immutable taproot on which you can and inevitably do depend.
Webster defines taproot as the “primary root which grows vertically downward, giving off
small lateral roots.”
There is nothing so basic to you, so free from any external information, as your conviction
of actually being. Regardless of how you may define this being, it remains to you the one
unshakable fact of life: you know that you are! This conviction deepens, “grows vertically
downward,” supporting all the definitions, “small lateral roots,” that you make of your Self.
Definitions are changeable; the Definer remains constant.
I am the vine; ye are the branches…. John 15:5
The speaker here, the “I,” is Jesus, the central figure of the Gospels, from Iesous, the Greek
equivalent of Je-hosh-ua (Jehovah saves); the “ye” is anyone or anything that appears, or is
identified as objective, to the Viewer.
Once you accept the premise that the scriptural Jesus is the Taproot — your own I AM — the
practical import of the Gospel narrative is immediate, for it is not the past history of
persons, but it is the Divine (actual) pattern of how to deal with the knotty problems of
daily experience.
Even though you may regard problems as material conditions, you surely must
acknowledge that they are not external to your perception of them; if they were, you would
not and could not know about them. This admission brings them within your purview
and makes them subject to your mentation. How do you regard them? What states do
they dramatize?
All of mortal existence is made up of the dramatized states of thought, drawn from the
alphabet of conceivabilities, appearing to the Interpreter in the universal language of
persons-in-places-doing-things. The more realistic the performance, the more likely we are
to accept it at face value, as actual situations or conditions; and consequently, the less likely
we are to see through that “performance” and, in our own thought, reduce it to the
conceivable state or states it dramatizes.
If a man [one's sense of Self] abide not in me [as I, Consciousness],
he is cast forth as a branch [as ye] and is withered; and men gather
them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned. John 15:6
Consider the consequences of identifying yourself as one of the “ye” being addressed by a
personal leader; if there were the slightest possibility that what you are could be destroyed
in a fire, what would be your chances of immortality, or even survival? On the other hand,
the “ye,” the definitions we make, are constantly being burned up in the fires of experience
and exchanged for more acceptable ones.
Always identify your Self as the I and not a ye or we. The name of Being Is I AM, not we
are.
Hear, O Israel [mind of man]: The Lord our God i s one Lord [one Essence].
Deuteronomy 6:4
The whole purpose of human experience is to deepen one’s sense of Self until the Source is
found, always “growing vertically downward” or ever deeper, through the identification and
perpetual re-identification or definition of Self, which definitions spin off laterally as threedimensional
experiences. These experiences may be good, bad or indifferent, all having no
more reality than the Definer’s acceptance of them as conditions, rather than as
dramatized states of thought.
Your recognition that you are never dealing with anything outside of thought should bring
you a momentous sigh of relief akin to Jacob’s elation upon awakening from the vision of a
ladder (the vertical root) on which he saw the “angels of God [features of Consciousness]
ascending and descending…and the Lord [Consciousness ItSelf] stood above it, and said, I
AM the Lord God….” Genesis 28:12, 13, 16
|
