Your Sorrow Shall Be Turned into Joy
Verily, verily, I say unto you, that ye shall weep and lament, but the world shall rejoice: and ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy.
John 16:20
When the Guru is no longer in embodiment, the disciples have to deal with the physical absence of the Guru, the embodied Word, the I AM THAT I AM. This is the cross that the chela bears. And the soul will cry when the Christed One is no longer there.
Yet the world will rejoice. The dweller-on-the-threshold, personal and planetary, will rejoice when that which has threatened it most is taken. They live to see the day of the destruction of that One Sent.
But, as Jesus said, “Ye now therefore have sorrow.”1 This is your identity for the moment. At a certain point you can say, “I am sorrowful.”
At a certain point I was sorrowful and extremely pained and weeping and sobbing over the loss of Mark Prophet. I refer to Mark because there haven’t been too many people close to me in this lifetime who have passed on. And, also, his leaving is an example of the departure of the Guru as well as the departure of the twin flame and of not seeing him physically. There is no question that this was the most profound sorrow I have ever experienced, that I can ever remember, except perhaps for sorrow I may have experienced in a previous lifetime at having lost Mark in some other situation.
And so, I can understand that at a certain time Jesus wants us to be able to say, “My identity is sorrow. I know sorrow. I have drunk its dregs. I understand the meaning of loss. Therefore I understand the loss of everyone else upon the planet who has ever known and grieved over the loss of a loved one.” And this is extremely important in our identification with the world consciousness of people in need.
Pain Is the Other Side of Bliss
Because God wants so much for us to expand love in our hearts, he allows us to suffer, to know pain and to reap our karma. For most of us, one of the best ways we learn our lessons is through pain. We learn by experiencing pain and sorrow whereby we have grieved, we have suffered loss, we have suffered burden in our bodies. And suddenly we have a knowing of how everyone else in the world has suffered and what other people have gone through.
Pain is the other side of bliss. When you know intense pain, you come to the place of transcending that pain. If you have a right heart, then you have gratitude to God for the experience of suffering in pain, because through it you come to the point of exaltation of God in yourself and you know his bliss in you.2
A Process of Integration
So let us experience and live through these compartments of the human consciousness. Let us explore them, if we must, to the dregs. Let us allow our feelings to be touched. Let the cords of the subconscious come out. Let the ancient grief be known. And let us see it for what it is and pour the violet flame into it. By the wisdom and teaching of God, by the nearness of God, let us enter, then, into a higher dimension by choice rather than by being like a jack-in-the-box—suddenly we’re on cloud nine (even though we haven’t gone through the process).
It’s a process of integration with God, the process of becoming the Christ because one has experienced the sorrow, dealt with it, lived through it, worked through it. And the sorrow is turned to joy by an act of free will, not by suppressing the experience and walking away from it and saying, “There’s nothing to it.” There is something to it if we’re going to acknowledge that we have feelings, we have thoughts, that we are people, we are what we are and this is our condition. If you can understand this, you will not be trapped by metaphysics.
A Metaphysical Misunderstanding
Many people who get involved in metaphysics think that it’s wrong to cry, wrong to grieve, wrong to have any kind of human feeling. And they believe that if people are having these feelings, they must not have attainment. This is not so. It’s natural to cry at your mother’s funeral. It’s natural to be sorrowful when you lose a loved one. And if you don’t allow yourself to experience the loss and the sense of loss, you can’t transmute it into joy.
The result of practicing metaphysics can be a total loss of contact with one’s being in all of its depth. I’ve seen people who were in metaphysics lose a loved one, and the minute that person dies they say, “There’s no death; it’s not real. There’s no reason to cry, no reason to get upset.” And they walk on. This is a denial of such an emphatic action that is real in the moment that the only way people can do this is to cut off the subconscious. So there is no growth, there is no experience, there is no working through the pain of the loss.
These are the kind of people who reembody and lie on the psychiatrist’s couch half their lives in therapy because they can’t understand why they have all these problems—why they can’t sleep, they can’t function, they have this or that disorder. And it’s because they have not integrated with that subconscious. Now they’re in a new life and it’s coming up, and they have to deal with it. But they can’t remember what caused the problem six embodiments ago when they refused to come to grips with what was going on around them.
The Great Feelings of an Integrated God-Free Being
A fully integrated God-free being can experience great sorrow, great joy, great pain, great loss. The greatness of the feelings of Mark were like the feelings you would imagine an archangel would have on earth. You could picture Archangel Michael being hurt at being rejected if he were physically standing here in his full ascended-master consciousness, having given ten thousand-times-ten thousand years of sacrifice for the people, and they would stone him. I don’t think that Archangel Michael would be like a god against whom you could make no impression.
At the absolute opposite end of the spectrum psychologically are people who are without feeling. They don’t experience pain. They have no remorse if they inflict pain on others. Now, sometimes I work in a chelaship relationship with such people and I am striving for the binding of their unreality and their carnal mind. I will pour my heart into a chastening love that will do everything but lie down on the ground for them to walk on top of me. But I see that these people are nonresponsive. They have no depth of appreciation of the love of God or what one can put into loving someone. And when I am talking to them, nobody is really home. And they can’t be worked with.
Sometimes you meet people and you wish they would have a little heart, you wish they would appreciate what they’re doing to you when they’re so prejudiced and hateful, and you realize that they have no feeling. And not only is it a consternation but it’s a great pain. You realize that they are the antithesis of God, who feels so much for his people that he saves us and cares for us in the most minute ways. This is the tremendous Presence of God.3
Help Others to Go through the Process
So we ourselves need to sense and to feel. We need to feel for people who come to us for help. We need to understand the depths of their grief. We need to go to them and lift them up, teach them the steps, take them up the steps. But we don’t just pick them up and deposit them on a new plane.
Did you ever try to transplant somebody? Did you ever find people who wanted your help, and they complained all day and they couldn’t stand what was the matter with them? You thought you knew exactly what the answer was. Everything would be okay, you thought, if they would do specific things—move out of that terrible house, stop eating that diet, do this, do that. You would do as much as you could for them, and you would try to change them, only to find that they had not changed a bit. They were still unhappy, and they wanted to go back to the same old ways and everything they used to do. And it was because you didn’t allow them to go through the process, by free will, of acknowledging point by point the problem and exercising the will to overcome it.
So people come to that conclusion and find out that this is not the way to save somebody. You cannot do it for someone. You have to allow them to work through their difficulties and manifest their own Christhood.
Missing the Prize through a Sense of Injustice
Some people blame and accuse God for the injustice of the painful process of getting to the joy. And they’re so caught up in the agony of the climb or the agony of the trek that when they get to the end of it, they’re so disgruntled, so irritated and so critical of either the helpers on the way or fellow chelas or the organization or whatever seemed to make the whole event unpleasant that they miss the prize. They miss the prize of the birth of the Manchild in their hearts because they are so caught up in the sense of the inconvenience and the injustice that was part of the birth process.
So this is an important lesson on the two o’clock line of the Cosmic Clock, the line of God-mastery, and the lesson is that if we are going to overcome sin, disease and death and these records in Pisces, we are going to have to overcome the consciousness of death. And this refers to death not only as the body ceasing to pump and beat the heart, but death as it occurs in a day-to-day sense—sorrow, anguish and pain, the involvement with pain and the remembrance of pain, the sustainment of it, and the holding of the experience of pain against some other part of life whom you blame for inflicting it upon you.
This is the worst part of karma bearing, never getting out of the tangled web of the eight o’clock line of a sense of injustice. If people can’t get past their sense of injustice, they stop transmuting. Boom!—right there, no transmutation. And it’s related to nonforgiveness. Forgiveness and justice are like twin qualities of the violet flame. And if people cannot forgive God and everyone else, they will then retain a sense of injustice and they will sit there—and sit and sit and sit on that eight o’clock line, not moving forward.
Your Joy Is Your Attainment
Now, “your joy no man taketh from you” is a fiat of Jesus.4 This is a trust and confidence that if you have been willing to work through your grief and pain, your joy will be attainment. And what you have by attainment no one can take from you. But if you don’t have your joy by work and by inner attainment and you just somehow had it given to you, you may lose it. You may squander what you have been given before you realize its value, and then you will have to go out and earn it for yourself.
So you experience the pain, you acknowledge it, you know that you have passed through it, you labor with it, you learn to master it, and then you go beyond it. Just as you do not jump full blown into the mantle of Christ, you do not jump full blown into joy.
“Ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy.” Turned into might as well be transmuted. This is simply the choice of words of the King James translators, who lived when transmutation was a word used far less, except by the alchemists. The sorrow, the lamentation, the mourning of the loss of the Guru is turned to joy because you have transmuted it and you are internalizing the Christ. When the Christ leaves, the Christ wants his disciples to have the ultimate joy, the most perfect union, the internalization of that Word.
So there is only one way for me to get over mourning the loss of the physical twin flame. I must become him, else I should be lost in anguish forever. What could be greater than having Lanello here with me physically? What could be greater is that I become Lanello and then I am much closer to him than merely in physical proximity.
Remember No More the Anguish
Dealing with death and the most fundamental of human emotions—mourning, separation, travail—relates to the burdens that came upon the human race in the pain of childbirth.
A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world. – John 16:21
Jesus is talking about an amazing experience and I remember once when Mark gave me a lesson on this. When I had my children, I went through the normal, and probably more than normal, share of pain in their delivery. With my first child I was astonished that there was so much pain and wondered why I should have to bear it, and Morya said, “So that you develop compassion for life in pain.” He said, “I will not stand between you and this experience, the full experience of childbirth.”
But in conversations with Mark over the years about having my children, even though each one was difficult I told him I would always be absolutely taken up in the joy of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the child. The moment the child was born, all of that travail was no more; it was as if it had never existed.
And Mark commented to me about his own mother, who never ceased all of his life to tell him what a hard delivery she had with him and how much pain she had in bringing him forth into the world. So he couldn’t believe that I could be so happy about the whole event, even in light of the fact that I had probably experienced pain that was equal to hers. This is the joy that Jesus is speaking about, Mark said, and it applies to those who go through the process of transmutation, who then rejoice. And that joy, then, is their attainment.
Every Man Is Scattered to His Own
Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own.
John 16:32
Every man is “scattered… to his own,” and that means to his own level of the internalization of the Word, the level of light in his heart and in his chakras. And no man can exceed his point of attainment. I will be going through my initiation; you will stand on your own level of attainment. What you do, you will do.
Every one of you is at a different level of attainment. You will scatter to that level and you will stand on the amount of light that you have internalized from this mission. Jesus already knew the level of the disciples’ attainment—that on their own, without his right hand holding Peter from sinking into the sea, without his support, they would not be able to stand with him in the hour of his judgment.5 They would not be able to stand against the world momentum of the Watchers, the fallen angels, the Nephilim, the entire planetary force of Antichrist.
So when the master is crucified, the disciple must prove at what level he can stand. And many disciples in the history of guru-chela relationships have not stood. And they have had immense remorse after the passing of the beloved teacher, because they feel that they could have done so much better in the hour of his greatest burden.
This is a natural way to feel. I felt this way in the passing of Mark. And I think it is known to psychologists that when people lose loved ones, they usually blame themselves and think about what they could have done to prevent that one’s passing—the sudden death, the accident, the disease. “What didn’t I do? What could I have done to help that person?”
It’s the sense that we should have done more or been more to prevent what actually was the handwriting on the wall of an individual’s lifestream.
“So ye shall be scattered, every man to his own.” Now, this is an initiation that doesn’t wait for the Guru to physically die. It happens periodically. It’s as if periodically the thresher comes through. Periodically people have to stand at their own level of attainment, so the light of support of the master or the Guru is withdrawn. And they will have to stand against world condemnation, gossip, calumny, hatred, whatever they may allow to come between themselves and their own I AM Presence, their own Christ Self, or the messenger. And they will have to grapple with it and stand or fall according to their decision. God wants us to live by free will and by our own decisions.
Today we are close together in this sanctuary in the great embrace of the Holy Ghost. But the day may come when you’re standing in China or Australia or the South Pole and you have to face some tremendous momentum. In physical distance you may be at a great distance from me and from this sanctuary. But, in truth, you are as close as the externalized attainment of your Christ consciousness in your own heart. And by that heart fire and heart flame you will cast out the dweller, you will bind the foe. By that heart flame, you will survive, you will move on, and you will be victorious.
“The Summit Lighthouse Sheds Its Radiance o’er All the World to Manifest as Pearls of Wisdom.”
This Pearl of Wisdom is a compilation of excerpts mainly from a lecture delivered by Elizabeth Clare Prophet on Friday, July 8, 1983, at Camelot, Los Angeles County, California.
1. John 16:22.
2. This section is an excerpt from a lecture by Elizabeth Clare Prophet, given May 4, 1991, “How to Develop Your Heart Chakra,” Seattle Hilton, Seattle, Washington; available at www.AscendedMasterLibrary.org. Login to the site, click the “Advanced Search” button at the bottom, enter “A91078” in the Product Code box.
3. This section is an excerpt from a lecture by Elizabeth Clare Prophet, given November 9, 1983, “My Destiny to Find the Things of God,” Camelot, Los Angeles County, California.
4. John 16:22.
5. Matt. 14:22-32.