1975-August-15

Muhammad Speaks

The Plane Of The Prophets

W.D. Muhammad

In the Name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful; Peace and Blessings upon His Servant and His Messenger, Muhammad, forever. Amen.

As-Salaam -Alaikum

My Dear Brothers and Sisters,

The Nation of Islam, the (Body Christ) is very happy today to keep moving in the path of progress that means salvation for the most rejected people among the rejected of the world. That people is the Black people of America.
We always have "news" to give you. In ancient days, the religious message was called "news." The gospel of Jesus was called "the good news." If a man stands up in your midst in this day and time as I am doing and says that he has a message from Almighty God to give the people, It should be news.

You should not expect to hear a man who says he has a message from God saying the same thing that you have been hearing all your life.  If he does, he is not really giving you any news and he cannot really be a messenger or a man from God.

We, as a people, have been as much in need of fresh news from Almighty God as any people in the history of the world. Our mothers and fathers during slavery were in need of hearing God speak to them to answer questions that only God can answer: What happened to me that caused me to be separated from loving, caring mothers and fathers? What has happened in my history to put me in America under slave-masters who despise my very being and who treat me as though I have committed some great sin or some great evil against them? What have I done to put me under the power of a people who hate my very presence and who treat my black skin as though it is a curse?

God Must Answer The Black America

No people in human history needed an answer from heaven as much as our mothers and fathers during the bitter days of enslavement in the South. If the Jews claim to have a personal saviour and be justified to be called a people that God, Himself, answered, our claim is better and stronger.

No other people in history were robbed of their identity and made to accept themselves as less than human beings. They hated themselves and rejected themselves as equal beings with others so much until they made efforts to erase their physical identity with hair processes, hot straightening combs, bleaching creams, and distorted speech.
If cruelty, mistreatment, heartaches, and suffering warrant a response from heaven, God must answer the black American. If God does not answer the black American, we are then justified to say that there is no God.

No other people in the history of humanity were cut off completely from all traditional knowledge. There was no way for us to get back in touch with our traditional knowledge because we had been physically separated from our land and from our ancestors. We had been raised as children to believe and to accept everything that the slave-master gave us.
The white man told us who we were, where we came from, what that land was like, and what the people were like. We were the only people that had been so thoroughly separated from our past and our people that there was no hope of getting anything of our own unless it came through those who had conquered us.

Strength Of People Is Knowledge

The real strength of a people is in their knowledge. As long as a people can hold on to their knowledge, they have a saving force or a saving power. Once they are separated from their knowledge, they have nothing to save them at all. People are made and destroyed by knowledge.
The divine wisdom that we bring to you today from Almighty Allah will remake you with God-knowledge from a being that has almost been totally destroyed by Satan-knowledge. We take you into the depths of the scripture to unlock and to reveal the symbolic wisdom of time that has been locked up for thousands and thousands of years by divine dictate.

The Bible and the Holy Quran are religious books that contain great knowledge that is of vital importance to the survival of people as people. This knowledge is preserved in scripture for critical times in the history of people.
Whenever the community or the world is faced with dangers that may mean the destruction of that people, they are wise to go back and search the old knowledge of scripture for the answers to their problems. In that knowledge they can find where their civilization has gone wrong. Even in their end (destruction) is also the answers or the solution to bring them back on the right track again.

Ancient Knowledge Is Advanced Knowledge

You may think that the knowledge of the ancient people is limited because it is ancient. If so, you are wrong. The scripture contains ancient knowledge, but it does not contain primitive knowledge in the sense that the word primitive is generally understood. Primitive means "from early times," but in the common language of today it means inferior, weaker, or not developed.
Bible and Holy Quran are not knowledge of primitive people, but they are the knowledge of advanced people. The men who gave the scriptural knowledge were men who had already become learned in physical knowledge and science before they came into scriptural knowledge.

You have misunderstood religion completely and you have never rightly understood what a man of God is. You have thought that a man of God is somebody who leaves the world and runs away from money, actual facts, and scientific proofs and who closes his ears to all the sounds of the real world. You have called these space-dreamers "prophets," but they are fools.
People like that have never done anything to help the real world. When you want to go somewhere for guidance and leadership, don't go to dreamers. Go to people who have stopped dreaming because they have discovered something real to work with.

Knowledge Is The Key To Kingdoms

These are the types of people who became giants in religion. The true history of Moses is not the history of a spooky magician but the history of a practical man. God chose Moses because he had experience in nation building. He chose him to become a leader for people who didn't have experience in nation building and who had been cut off, even though they were right in the midst of a nation.

Physically the Jews were as much a nation as the Egyptians were, but mentally they were outside of the nation of Egypt. The Egyptians would not share their knowledge with the slaves because they knew that sharing their knowledge would eventually mean sharing the kingdom with the slaves. They knew that knowledge is the key to the door of kingdoms.

If Almighty God was able to reach Moses—a general in Pharaoh's army and a builder in Pharaoh's kingdom—He must have had something to say to wise, industrious men of that day that today's God of Judaism and Christianity just does not have on his tongue.
We don't see anything in the message of religion as it flows from the mouths of the rabbis and the priests today that has an attraction in it to capture the attention of bankers, industrialists, city builders, army generals, and other men who are wise in the knowledge of this world. They go to the churches only to satisfy their supporters and they sit there like outsiders. This tells us that somebody has gotten out of touch with the original voice of God.

Listening To God Causes Man’s Advancement

We find that the people of religion hear God in their weakness, and as they hear Him they grow in strength. When God first speaks to them, they are in rags. As they begin to listen we find them growing into silk garments and golden slippers. They grow from sleeping on the sand to sleeping in a palace.
This is the kind of movement that we see in the Bible, but the modern day "houses of God" preach the people away from advancing civilization into dreams so that they will be satisfied without having the comforts of civilization. The Nation of Islam takes you out of a world of dreams and puts you firmly on the earth so "that you can dig out of the earth all that you need\ to make a heaven on top of the earth.

We have been told that the old world that we have known is a doomed world that would soon be destroyed and that a new world would emerge. Many of us did not understand what we were being told. We had been trained, as little children are trained, to think that everything that people talk about can be picked up with the hand and seen with the physical eye.
When "the end of the world" was preached to us, we thought that God was going to burn up the physical ground. We did not know that the world of men was not a world that you pick up with your hand. The world of human beings is a world that you pick up with your ears.

It enters through your ears into your mind and it forms a mind over your own mind. That mind then becomes your mind. Since you live in your mind's world, you become a dweller in that world. If that world is a grafted, artificial world. Almighty God will intervene and destroy it. That is the world that the Bible calls a doomed world.

Earth Will Not Be Destroyed The World Of Men’s Mind Will Be Destroyed

The Honorable Master Elijah Muhammad (may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) also taught against that world and said that it had to be destroyed. In the physical world we see fire as something that is powerful to destroy things. Nothing brings about a more thorough and complete destruction of physical things in the physical world than fire. The wise men of religion only used fire in scripture to tell you how thorough and complete the destruction of this grafted world would be when it came.

The soil, the oceans, the trees, nor the animals of the earth have ever rebelled against God, so why should God destroy the earth? It is the minds of men that have acted against truth, justice, and righteousness and have brought the world to a state of hell, confusion, and ignorance.

To right this, someone has to come and renew the minds of men. The minds of the people must be renewed (given new life) and given new soil for their knowledge to grow in. They must be given a new sun to feed the growth of that knowledge. Once that new world is brought about in the minds of the people, a new growth will start in the earth.
Some denominations of the Church preach to their people that something is going to happen to change the physical earth. They say that the earth will become new, the water will become pure, the air will become pure and that we will stop aging, take on a new physical growth, and be youthful forever. I want the people who are in kindergarten knowledge of the Church to know that we, in the Nation of Islam, are doing that right now.

The renewing of the land is the renewing of the idea that you have of the physical land. When that idea is renewed and given to you in proper words, you then have right knowledge and your vision of the physical world is made new. Nothing is changed in the earth until something is changed in your mind.
We are here to make the world new and to build it all over again. We are here to make you eternally youthful. When the Bible talks about youth and production, it is talking about industrial youth and production.

This world has come out of early development and has grown from agricultural life to the knowledge of city builders. It has now fallen back down because of the loss of contact with true knowledge. The people have ceased to be real city builders and have even ceased to be farmers anymore. They need God to speak to them and to wake them up out of the dead ground to start them being farmers again. They need to be raised up again from an agricultural people to city builders.

The light of Divine Mind has now come to them from a true source to turn the wheels of their intelligence over and to put them in operation again. When the wheels of your mind stop turning over, you begin to die. The effects of that death first begin on the physical level.

Physical Things, Only Signs Of Higher Knowledge

Physical things, brothers and sisters, are only signs of a higher knowledge. The scripture tells us that everything in the physical world is a sign. What is a word from a man's mouth or a woman's mouth to my ears? They are signs from the Originator, the God Who created the universe.

From your mouth I hear a word and that word signals some meaning to me. From God's mighty power of creation I see words: sun, moon, stars, wind, water, earth. These things are, in themselves, words from Almighty God.
You speak to me with breath. The breath of God is the objects that hang in space (words from the Creator) and they tell you much more than any word coming from the mouth of a physical flesh and blood individual. This was the way the first knowledge came to the people.

The scientist now feeds upon that knowledge. He says that he establishes his knowledge upon the physical creation and that he doesn't speak guess work, but actual facts. He says that this world speaks to him. He is told something by the soil, a piece of iron, a bit of mercury, a bit of sulphur, the light-rays, heat, magnetism, or a little amoeba.
This is the scientist whose knowledge we see in the colleges, in industry, and in the building of cities. We don't have to guess at this knowledge we see it every day. The scientist says that he got his knowledge by studying what God put out in His creation. The Holy Quran says that God reveals to everything, not just to holy men. Anybody that comes into any knowledge has knowledge that originated from God.

You do not have to leave the physical world to get to the spiritual world. The first contact you have with God is a physical contact. You wake up from the womb of your mother and the first thing that hits your vision is something physical. You become interested in the physical world and it activates your mind causing it to grow. Later on in life along the uphill road to mental development you take on a kind of spiritual development; but the physical, material development is first.

If God made the physical world for you, why should you think that you have to turn away from it in order to become associated with some kind of communication with Him? If God provided the physical world for you and gave that to you at birth, that should tell you that it is important to you. You should seek your own self-development through the study of the physical creation because you, yourself, are a physical being.

Road To God Is A Physical Road

You are related to the physical world without. If God has made that physical world and has made you into a physical body, that alone is enough to convince you that He wants you to be in touch with the physical world. He has also established certain laws that force you to stay in touch with the physical world.

Your body, being physically alive, needs that which is outside of it in creation to continue its life. God, by nature, has forced you to stay in contact with the physical creation. So what has happened to your mind to make you think that the physical creation is sinful and unholy and that you have to break your connection with it to get in touch with God?
The road to God is a physical road. You find Him first by following the physical. Then you come to something that is a higher form of the physical (a body of knowledge) that reveals to you the nature and the inner workings of the physical. Even without coming in contact with any religious person, this higher knowledge will make you see that there is still yet another higher knowledge.

There is an explanation for this systematic, complex creation. By this knowledge bringing you into the knowledge of the Creator, you come face to face with a Unique Being Who has, from Himself, made all these other things. Then you come to that high plane we call "the plane of the prophets" (the plane of revealed knowledge).
You cannot reach the plane of the prophets by jumping off of the earth. You reach it by digging down into the earth. Study what you have first. You must start with a foundation or a firmament.

The object of religion today is to knock the firmament out from under you and to disassociate you from first things. First things should come first. In doing that, they separated you from reality and they held you in a world of superstitions, dreams, vain imaginations, and child's play.

Something that is designed to hold you down and limit your travel is the strongest prison cell you can find. Nothing can be designed to do a better job of making a man a slave and containing him than ideas that are foreign to reality. If you take on ideas that are foreign to reality, you can live on the earth and never touch the ground. You will be no more than a walking shell, no more than a physical dummy that has been programmed to give out what was put into it but with no ability to examine what was put into it and map out its own future movements.

Brothers and sisters, knowledge is to open up the way of freedom to you. The more knowledge you come into, the more freedom you should have within your grasp. If a man becomes wise in knowledge, he should be able to do those things for himself that other wise men do for themselves.

In our past history we have been a people that have come into the same knowledge as others who have ruled the world, but we have not been able to do anything for ourselves other than to put ourselves at the feet of those who ruled the world, to serve them against the welfare of our own community. We did this because we had not really learned anything, we had just rehearsed things. We would take something in and give it out just as we received it.

Today you are blessed by Almighty God to be able to learn the wisdom of Divine Mind which will take you to the plane of the prophets. Nobody else has this great news but us. If you want to argue with this news, just help yourself. We don't have any time for arguments and we know that we don't have anybody to argue with. We are the only ones with the news!

Thank you for honoring us with your time to read these few words.

Your Brother,
W. D. Muhammad