Excerpt from Monterey Seminar - Tapes 1, 2, 3

by William Samuel

...Now, I want to tell you about a seed.  Jesus—everybody that I know has used an illustration with a seed in it and so I will too.  Imagine yourself a seed, and suddenly you are sown in fertile ground, you’re in the sperm where tangibility is—that’s what we mean by this world, the arena of tangibility where the intellect is quite necessary.  The intellect is that part of awareness that weighs and measures and knows how to go up and down steps and read books, and knows what book to take from the shelf and whom to listen to and whom not to listen, what strikes a chord and what doesn’t, all that’s part of the intellect, pertaining to tangibility, the delineation of tangibility, heaven.

 

All right, so imagine yourself a seed and there’s a divine discontent within, a something that knows that there is a greater state of being and that greater state of being is already included within the seed.  They tell me that if you look inside an acorn you can see the whole tree, complete with limbs and leaves and roots and everything, just the way it’s going to grow and I’ve been told that and read it in so many different things that apparently, it’s so, inside the seed is the plant, it’s there in minute form, an embryonic thing, but it’s there, limb for limb, just like it’s going to grow.

 

All right, now here you are a seed, the Divine discontent—you’re searching, about the business of just being, what’s the first thing the seed does?  It gives, it doesn’t get from anything anywhere, it gives, and what does it give?  It reaches in to that minute little bit of tangible substance it has within its shell.  It doesn’t give platitudes, it doesn’t say to the world, read Emerson or—it gives part of its own tangible being, it gives its dollars enclosed within that case out to tangibility, out to what seems to be meaningful in its experience, like Bill’s church is meaningful in a lot of experiences and is the ground in which many seeds are taking root.  And the seed reaches in and it doesn’t give somebody else its substance either, and it doesn’t give just service—service, wash the windows and erase all the graffiti out of it, it gives tangibly.  But what happens when it does?  Think of the miracle—now I’m being simple, all of you have done this and you’ve all walked through the woods, what happens?  The earth, not just a little pot of ground, the earth gives back to that little hair root, be it twenty-five cents, a dollar…