Seeds Already In the Soil

Seeds Already In the Soil

by Norman Elliott

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

Heavenly Father, we thank You for this day and for how our lives have been intertwined over so many years that’s so far back that I can’t remember them all. But thank You, and just bless or bring to mind whatever it is that will be beneficial to all of us. Amen. All of you people that have never heard me before, your luck has just run out. But… that’s honest to it. And you heard there what my grandnephew, an emphasized grandnephew is there. And it goes to show you that God is still in the mutation business and that out of nothing at all comes some people that are really good looking. He is one. He didn’t get it from me, I can tell you.

You know, we’re all getting older and all that we got to do is to look around at each other and you can tell that. And it isn’t only the same here, but it is the same in Minnesota. And you begin to wonder why. Well, I don’t know that I would want to go back to any other time in my life than rather to be where I am now. But I’ve been thinking about CFO and about how it all began and where the camps are now and all that stuff. And why aren’t they as vibrant and reaching out as they used to be and so on and so forth. And I think that the answer to that is that they have become a way too religious. That may seem like a strange thing to say. But you see, when they began, Glenn was of the idea that how you could live life and get the most out of it or release all the hidden possibilities that are resident within you. And he wrote that little thing called… what was it called anyway? About the acorn and the oak tree. How that the… how that the oak… The divine plant. How that the oak tree is resident in the acorn. And when we were over in Japan some years back, we were with this family and this Japanese man, he loves those little bonsai trees.

And he would show us some tree that was about that high. And he said, “That tree is 75 years old.” Or 100 years old. Or whatever else it was. And you look at it. And the way that he could keep it stunted was that every so often he would dig it up and he would trim the roots. Kept trimming the roots. Kept trimming the roots so that it wouldn’t grow any farther. Now, if he forgot to trim the roots or if it were put outside where it could grow on its own, it would grow up to… I don’t know what. It could grow bigger and bigger. But it would never grow to the same height that it might have come to. Maybe if it stayed out there long enough, it would do that. But anyway, and I wonder about people, about me and about you and everything else. What has been trimming our roots in order to prevent us from becoming all that we ought to be, all that we are, all that is resident and embedded within us? Jesus, you know, said, and I’m glad He said it to what was considered the bad guys, the Pharisees, who were not bad guys. Actually, they were very, very good. But they sort of opposed Him.

They were the orthodox people and orthodoxy. It doesn’t matter whether it’s orthodoxy in medicine or mathematics or orthodoxy in anything at all. Now, try to step outside the orthodoxy of the group that you’re in, and man, you’re going to get into trouble. It’s true. I can remember when I came up through college a long time ago, there was one professor of math. And he had been passed over for bigger positions, time after time after time, because he came up with some theory about math. It wasn’t orthodox. Everybody considered it nuts, crazy. “He’s just a little bit off. I mean, we can’t really trust him because he’s not actually giving the party line.” And it turned out that after 40 to 50 years or whatever it was, that what he had said turned out to be true. But because he had stepped out of the orthodoxy of his time, the orthodoxy of his time passed him over. A pioneer of the spirit more than anything else. And Glenn’s… And Jesus said about the scribes, when He was in a discussion with the scribes and Pharisees, He said, “The kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven is within you.” Within you. He didn’t say, “The kingdom of heaven is within the people of my party.” And He did not say to the Roman centurion, “The people of the kingdom of God is within Jews only.”

Jesus, you know, if you really begin to… I am… I’m rather… I don’t even like to use the word Christian now. I would rather use the word Jesus person. Christianity is an accumulation of almost 2,000 years of rules and rituals and laws and theologies, which has come up. And they have become a substitute for the man. I mean, if you have the right theology and if you can say the right things at the right way and if you can genuflect or whatever it is that you do, you’re one of us. But otherwise, you’re like a kind of, well, a pagan or something or other. You’re an outlander. And Jesus was an outlander. Can you imagine that? I love that thing where He said, where after He talked that the scribes and the Pharisees rent their garments, you know, and tear their garments off. “This guy is so far out that you can’t trust Him. Don’t have anything to do with Him. He’s a leper.” They rent their garments. But He says, the kingdom of God, in other words, the very nature which is God, or the very spirit or whatever, or the reality which is God, is within you. You don’t have to go out and pay some money to have somebody do some kind of incantations in order to put something in you.

No, if you would pay money at all, you would do something to somebody that could release what is already within you. And education, the word education, educare, means to draw out. A real education is to draw the possibilities out of you that are already there. That’s what education is. And that is what Glenn started the camps for, was to draw something out of you that was already there. How you could live life, release all the possibilities within you, and come into community with reality, so that He said you could sing a better song, you could write a better book, you could run a better race, you could do all of these things better. You could release it. Marion and I went over to Europe and the British Isles in 1950. And at that time, not too long after the war, you know, big areas of London where the German bombers had come over and just leveled all kinds of areas there. There were big open areas that they were transferring into parking lots. What if I got in my pocket? Oh, I see. Oh, okay. Anyway, there was these parking lots. And we were there in April.

And there were little yellow flowers that had sprung up in these parking lots. It was just beautiful. Big little yellow flowers all over these parking lots. And they told us then that those flowers had not been seen in London since the Great Fire. I don’t know how many hundred years back. And they said the seeds had been planted. I mean, the seeds were there, but London had grown. Buildings had been built. Roadways had been either cemented over or asphalted over. And it had covered up the soil. And it took the German bombers, took them over there. Blast all those things out so as to expose the soil to the air and the rain. And those little seeds which had been lying there, which nobody knew or nobody even thought of them, I suppose, had been there. The rain and the wind came and flowers were going all over. I have told this before, but it has been so meaningful to me is that…

What is it? You get old and the first thing that happens is you forget. And I forget the other two. Whatever it is, anyway. About this scientist said a long time ago that the British Isles is a veritable tropical paradise. And the guy said, “You’re nuts. What do you mean a tropical paradise?” He said, “No.” He says, “All it is waiting for is the right climate.” And he said, “If the climate ever changes, there’s every tropical seed buried in the soil of the British Isles now,” because over thousands, if not millions of years, the wind and the rain and birds have been flying over and they have planted in the soil of England every tropical seed that anybody can imagine. It’s already there. He said, “If the climate ever changes,” and through the history of the millions of years of earth, climate has changed. “But if it ever changes in our lifetime, you won’t have to import any seeds. It’s already there.” And I think that’s what Jesus meant when He said the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven or the very nature of God or reality, whatever word you want to use, is already within us. And the thing is releasing it. And I think that I can remember back in, oh, 1948 or whenever it was there, that people were so excited over Camps Farthest Out that they were giving all kinds of scholarships to ministers, clergy, of all kinds to come.

Oh, we’ve got to get this wonderful thing into the churches. Well, that’s like a mouse trying to convert an elephant. Because the church took over. Literally, that’s what happened. And I can remember the first controversies that happened when that was over communion. They started to bring in some of the rituals of the church. Church and communion. You say, well, what was so divisive about that? Very, very simple. Some people said it had to be wine. And other people say, well, it could be wine or maybe not actually wine. But at least it had to be blessed by a priest. Some people said, no, a minister would not do. It had to be a priest. It had to be an Episcopal priest or it had to be a Roman Catholic priest. And pretty soon you get all this churchianity begins to pile in, pile in, pile in. And you get to have theologies. And people are looking at each other and who is in and who’s out and who’s pitching or whatever else it is. And you begin to lose the very vitality, the very vitality of things that gave the thing meaning and work.

People want to know how to live. And that’s what it was all about. I hear where over the past few years it’s been about, what is it called? New age, new age. Everybody looking down there knows it. New age, new age, new age. You know, it came to me that the most wonderful thing that anybody could have, I mean, wonderful in one kind of way, is to have an enemy. It’s great to have an enemy. Then you don’t have to take responsibility for your own actions. “The devil made me do it.” “I didn’t do it. The devil made me do it.” Or “He made me do it.” Or “She made me angry.” Nobody made you angry. You made yourself angry. You chose to relate to whatever the situation is with anger. And so often when we’re in psychological counseling, we would say, “All right, now you re… In that particular situation, you reacted with anger. Name me some of the other ways in which you could have reacted to it.” Because the choice is mine. And when I say, “You made me angry,” you say, “No way. I chose to react with anger.” I have learned over the years to cope with life in certain ways. And the ways that I have learned to cope in life is where I get my way.

You learn to fight back in many, many ways. I can remember this girl that I was in a group with. And she said she learned to fight… She was in an apartment, I guess it was, with other girls. I mean, they lived together. And so she would… I said, “I’m going to boil an egg.” Get a hard-boiled egg, you know. And that was her egg. And she would put it in the refrigerator. And lo and behold, one of the other girls would come. And they would take her egg and eat it. Well, she wouldn’t say anything. But she would walk around and drop a few tears. And pretty soon, everybody, all the other girls were gathering around. “Oh, what’s wrong? Did you have bad news from home? Oh, tell us, we want to help you.” She loved it. She had won. She had made them all gather around her. Now, you can fight back with tears or with great silence. “Why don’t you talk to me?” “I’m all right.” “No, no, no, no. There’s got to be something wrong. What’s going on inside? Maybe I can help.” “No, no. No. I’m just fine.” The big silent man or the big silent woman or whatever it is. Or every time you approach the person, they turn around and they walk the other way.

Well, did I do something wrong? Or maybe you’re the kind that goes, “Man, when somebody does something, I’m going to blast you right through that window. I’m going to yell and scream,” or whatever else it is. Nobody makes us do anything. We choose to do it. Through a lifetime or maybe many, many thousands or tens of thousands of times, we have honed and sharpened the way we relate to life. Well, when theology takes over, that becomes a substitute for being. It’s been said that people in the West, but I think it’s true all over the world, we substitute words for being. I love you, but I can say it with my mouth, but don’t make me act it out. I don’t want to become love. I will substitute that by telling you, “I love you, dirty rat.”

Or they say, “I love you for the Christ that is in you.” Which is just the same as saying, “I don’t like you, but I’ll put up with you until someday you change.” But I am being very patient with you until you turn into the kind of an image that I want you to become. Then we can be one. But you see, we substitute. He said, be my… Jesus at the end said, be my witness. And we have substituted witness or we have identified witness as being words. I’m spotting a lot of theology. I’ve often wondered, who would your friends be if you couldn’t talk or write?

Supposing you couldn’t say Presbyterian, Baptist, Christian, Hindu, or whatever else it is. Who would your friends… Who would you be drawn to? You would be drawn to the kind of people that were kind. That were giving themselves to others in some kind of service. People that could laugh. In some Christian circles, the way to be an outsider is to laugh. They figure that if you laugh, you can’t be a Christian. Well, when you begin to consider all the different kinds of people that Jesus appealed to, He must have been a lot of fun. I mean, really. He really must have been a lot of fun. He appealed to the good people, but to the bad people also. To the scribes, well, not them, but to the prostitutes and everything else. I mean, people were drawn to Him. Well, you’re not going to be drawn to somebody that has a face like thunder.

There’s got to be something about there. There’s got to be a charismatic something or other that you want to hang around. And what is the purpose of it all? The purpose of it all is to learn to live. To learn to become all that is waiting, buried within the very fibers of your being. You want to be happy. You want to be able to achieve. You want to be able to get the job that is meant for you. What would you do if you had all the money in the world?

If you had everything, what would you do? That’s not so funny either. I’m not going to mention any of the names, but I had a friend and she could go into a store and more a car agency and just say, “I’ll take that, I’ll take that.” And never even look at the price tag. And I said, “Gee, I wish I could do that.” And she said, “It’s boring.”

You know, some people get the idea that heaven is sitting up on some cloud and strumming a harp. I can’t think of anything more boring than I can… If that’s heaven, I would prefer to go to the other place where my friends are.

No, heaven has to be someplace where there’s something to grow. If you lose your dreams, if you lose your desires and your wants and your yearning, if there isn’t something to reach for, you’re dead, but you just haven’t rolled over yet.

So for whatever heaven is, whatever it is, man, there’s got to be something there where I can… where I can grow, where I’ll find new things that I never even dreamed of. That will be my kind of heaven anyway.

So when you begin to look, I don’t know how I get into this, but it’s wonderful to just go by a stream of consciousness and just spill out whatever. And one of the wonderful things about getting old is that you can do it. And they say, “Well, he’s just old. I mean, he’s just rambling.” All right, let him. Let him ramble.

I’m going to talk this afternoon on prayer, but I’m not going to do that. Now, I want to go to the sixth chapter, or is it the sixth chapter? And it’s, I bet… Yeah, this is… “For where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also. No man can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. He cannot serve God and money.” Now, it says serve. It doesn’t say that you won’t need money, because you are going to need money. It says serve it. When money becomes your God, that is a different thing. That’s a different thing. “Therefore I say unto you, take no thought for your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor yet for your body, what you shall put on. Is not the life more than the meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the earth.” You know, I love this thing about Jesus. I mean, He didn’t go into some kind of a trance and come out with something or other. What He learned about God, He learned from nature and from human relationships. He saw God in the baking of bread, in the sewing of patches on clothes, on the building of a tower, on going to war, on catching fish, on sowing seed, or whatever it is.

I mean, people say, “Oh, I would love to… I would love to hear God.” He said, it’s all around you, speaking to you. He let His ears to hear here. Open your eyes. It’s wherever you are, there is God. If you have eyes to see and ears to hear and a heart to understand with. He found God in people and He found God in sparrows, the lilies of the field, or the fowls of the air, as it says here. “For they sow not, neither do they reap nor gather in barns, yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are you not much better than they? Which of you, by taking thought, can add to his height? And why take thought for clothing or raiment,” they say. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not, neither do they spin. And yet I say to you that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall He not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? Therefore, take no thought.” And other people say, take no anxious thought. “Well, what shall we eat or what shall we drink or wherewith shall we be clothed?”

And do we ever think of anything else? Not very much, actually. That is the very focus of our energy. So often, that’s the focus of our energies. You know, I have this, there is that ad for some stockbroker thing, you know, and this guy comes up and he looks about 50 and says, “You have been putting your money into this. Now you can take early retirement and you can go, oh, now that you have all this money, what are you going to?” And he says, “I’m going to France and I’m going to learn to cook. I’ve always wanted to be a chef.”

Well, take no anxious thought about these things. We have to take thought about it. You have to get a job because we got used to eating and drinking and putting clothes on. He says, “For after all these things the Gentiles seek,” and I suppose that means pagans, those who do not know God, seek. And this is about it. “Your heavenly Father knows that you have need of all these things.” He has, if He provides for the birds of the air and all this stuff. What’s the matter with you, dummy? Don’t you think He has provided for you too? Are you somehow or other extracted out of the totality of life and God got so old that He forgot about you? But He didn’t forget about the sparrows and the fowls of the air and the grass of the field. No. Oh, you poor orphan. God wants a lot. You know what? But seek first the kingdom. That’s what He says. Jesus said, the kingdom of God is within you. And in other words, develop, meditate, or however you want to put it, whatever makes sense to you. Get in touch with… Some people say, get in touch with your inner child. It’s still there.

I like this idea of getting in touch with myself. I like it better now where I am. I say to people, I’m in my second childhood now, and I like it, because so much of my life has been drive, drive, write, travel, travel, talk. And I love… I still like to talk, as if you didn’t know.

But it doesn’t mean that much to me, and I think I’m about through with it. What shall we do? “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness,” which other people say, and the right things. “And all these things shall be added to you.” They’ll come to you as a natural result of your simply by being. You will meet the right people. You will meet in life those that are meant for you. And you will be drawn to those that you are drawn to and those… This will be the relationship, but to come to this thing. You know, that’s a wonderful thing to get to know. Take no anxious thought what you shall eat. And then you go to the seventh chapter of Matthew 7. 7. I love these things. “Ask and it shall be given you. Seek and you shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened. For everyone asketh, receiveth, he that seeketh, findeth, him that knocketh, it shall be opened.” And here it comes. You know, He’s so practical about things. He isn’t airy-fairy flying off to something or other. He says, “For what man is there of you, if a son asks bread, will give him a stone?

“Or if he asks a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, being evil or being limited or being whatever you are, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father, which is in heaven, give good things to them that ask Him? Therefore, all things whatsoever you men do do to them.” You know, that thing, ask, I used to have a hard time remembering the three things. And then I… All that you got to remember is ask. A, ask. S, seek. K, knock. Ask. But you know, it’s a… In Greek, and I had a year of it, this is present tense. He said, ask. Or you can say, I am asking. This idea that you ask and then roll over and, Lord, bring it all to me, that doesn’t work in life. But if you have something that you want so badly that you’re going to keep, keep, keep asking. How do you keep asking? What time is it anyway?

Well, there are ways. I can remember a guy that I knew called Kenny Carnes, and he lived in North Carolina, or was it South Carolina? North, I think it was. Anyway, he was in the textile. He worked for a big textile outfit. And he said, “How do I keep doing it?” And I said, “Have you ever made a treasure map?” He said, “What’s that?” I said, “Well, you get a sheet of paper book and you put in there, you cut out pictures of magazine. What, in your mind, would resemble what you want to be? As for example, you say, how much money do you want to make this next year? Or whatever else it is, you know. And you put that down there and you look at it, whatever it is. And then,” I said, “now, the next thing, under that put, how are you going to spend it? Show me this thing. How are you going to spend it? How much are you going to put in the bank? How much, are you going to buy a car? Are you, how much are you going to give to those that are not as well off as you are? I mean, fill it all in and look at it.”

And if you have some pictures and magazines or cartoons even that represent or that bring to your mind all that you’re dreaming into. Dream into this thing called a treasure. Dream into it and do it. Well, he did and it ended up where he was the second in command of this company. And he claimed that this was the thing that did it. Where he would dream into it every day. He saw it and he ended up in charge of all their operations over in Scotland. But he says, that was it. So how do I dream? Have I got a dream? Have I got a worst? Have I got a yearning that lasts? Does it last? Or am I skipping from thing to thing and to the other thing? Well, maybe in the beginning you have to skip from thing to thing to the other thing. Until you find out within yourself what is satisfying to you. Do. But do it. And it’s not enough to…

It’s not enough to know that you should do that. The thing is not in the doing. Do it. Jesus said, “Why do you call me Lord, Lord? And do not do the things that I do.” Do not. Figure that out. Why do you call me Lord? Why have you substituted theology for doing the things that I do? For thinking the way that I think. For having the kind of goals and values that I have. Why do you run off at the mouth? Why don’t you internalize it and become what I’m talking about? Why don’t you do the things that I do? How many people have you ever put your hands on to pray for or to heal? It’s all right to know it all on your head. It doesn’t mean anything unless you do it. Glenn Clark was also a coach. And he used to say, you could read all the books about running. He was a track coach. And some other things also. But mainly a track coach. He said, “You can read all the books about running that you want. And you can become an expert on running and not be able to run. Because you never went out on the track. But you sat in your… You sat on your easy chair or you were, what do you call it?

“A couch potato. And you read all the books that you could possibly do about running. And you’re a fake. A fake. That’s what you are.” So he said, if you want to do these things, do it. And if you know how to be good to your kids… Listen, God is your Father. The reality of life. The very something. You know…

The ancient Hebrews had a word for God. And they said that you could not name God. They had four letters and they were all consonants. You couldn’t name God. They were right. You can’t name… God is in and through every particle of space where we… Where we are. If you could extract God out of anything, it would simply cease to exist. We are living in the very fabric of God’s life right this minute.

Dream. As I said, I… I oftentimes think about… So many people who have said… I remember hearing this… Reporter a long time ago on the radio. And he had been going all over the world for something like 40 years. And they asked him, “What is the… What is the worst thing that you have come across in all your years of reporting?” And he said, “Religion.” Religion.

Because he said, people will do things in the name of religion that they wouldn’t think of doing in the name of humanity. “God gave me this land. God told me to. God told me to wipe you out. God told me.” And they’ll do things that… Under human terms, they wouldn’t even think of. And he said, you know… He said, what? Ever the problems that I have been…

Which I’ve seen… Which I’ve sat in all these years… In governments, you get a group of people around a table. And he said, they have different ideas and opinions. But he said, they can talk it out. They will come to some rational resolution of it. I mean them. But he said, in religion, there’s no resolution. Because each group thinks that if they… That if they give in some, that they’re being disobedient to God. He said, “Religion’s the worst thing that ever happened.”

Think of that. Jesus was what I… And this would be a word which would send some people into orbit. But Jesus was a universal period. And I would rather be called a Jesus man than a Christian. Because when the Roman army officers came in and had come and healed my servant… And the Jews said, “Yes, he’s been good to us. He has helped us to build a synagogue. I mean, help him out. Yeah. Do something nice. Nice for him.” And Jesus looked at him and said, “Yes. I will come with you.” And the Roman army officer said, “No, no, no. You don’t have to come to me. I perceive that you’re a man of authority. I am a man of authority. And if I say to one guy, go, he goes. If I say, come, he comes. I recognize You as a man of authority. Simply say the word and my servant shall be well.” Jesus, isn’t this wonderful? I think Jesus grew then. His life expanded. He said, “Wow. I haven’t seen this kind of faith, not even in Israel, amongst the kind of people that are supposed to have faith. I haven’t seen this. And I say unto you, they shall come from the east and from the west and sit at table with Abraham.”

Faith will recognize faith. Faith will respond to faith. Love will respond to love. He didn’t say all of these things would be true if you were a Jew. That’s what the scribes and the Pharisees said, if you’re one of us. Or if you become converted and become one of us. Then all these rules will work for you. He said, Jesus said, no. Come from the east and the west. Didn’t matter whether you’re white or black. And I don’t think it matters whether you were Hindu or whatever. Love will recognize love. Love will recognize love. Peace will recognize peace.

Yeah. So, I think if we ever get… If the camps for the side ever get back to what they were in the beginning, and people come in burdened and anxious and afraid and leave with their head higher and with more confidence that they can go out into life and find the person that is meant for them and that they can want and know who they are.

And I remember this guy saying, “Have you an inferiority complex?” And he looked around the room. “If you do,” he said, “you sure as hell had to work for it.” And what he meant was, there’s one ovum, one egg in the woman.

And in the man, in the act of copulation, there’s an exchange of something like 500 million. Get this. 500 million sperm. And it is not the first sperm that gets to the ovum or to the egg that results in conception. 100 million or whatever. Some sort of a selection takes place there. And that selection was you. So he said, you started life on an average of being one out of 500 million. He said, if you could take all the population of Canada, the United States, Mexico, and I don’t know, into South America, and there was a road race, you won. If there was a lottery of 500 million, you know what? You got the right ticket. You won. So he said, if you have a sense of inferiority, you had to work for it. Because when you started life, you were number one. And somehow or other, that was what happened in the camps in the beginning. People came in burdened and afraid and not thinking they were worth much, and they left with their shoulders straight. Able to face themselves and like themselves better than they ever thought they could. And go out with an expectancy of life to live it more fully than they ever dreamed of. And this was the life of God.

I’m done. Thank you very much.