Poetry Chaikhana Blog

God Speaks to Man
by Edmond Bordeaux Szekely

I speak to you.
Be still
Know
I am
God.

I speak to you
Be still
Know
I am
God.

— from The Essene Gospel of Peace: Book Two: The Unknown Books of the Essenes, by Edmond Bordeaux Szekely

/ Image by Sage Friedman /

This selection feels like a song, or a chant. It’s repeated lines — Be still know I am God — endlessly pull us back to the same spot. They become a command to the mind (which, frankly, needs all the help it can get to discover stillness).

We also have the contrast of the stillness and speaking. The only way we hear God speaking to us is through profound stillness. But it is not that the God speaks in words. God speaks to us through all of life’s experiences, and through the natural world — through the trees and the mountains, through our first sight and first thought and first love. God speaks to us through our perception and our consciousness. But when we lack stillness, we take everything at face value and don’t know what’s really happening.

The deep truth is that every experience is an experience of consciousness. When we are still enough to truly see this, then we witness an expansive presence permeating the vast panorama, we ‘hear’ a voice that speaks not in words but in the fulness of meaning. Then it’s no longer theory or theology, that’s when we recognize what “I am” — Being — really is. That’s when we know God.

Be still
Know
I am
God.

It’s a quiet morning here in Oregon. A light mist clings to the treetops, bringing the circle of the world in close and comforting.

Did you pause to acknowledge the equinox? We stand at that delicate moment of balance between light and dark, when light and life are once again ascendant.

These cardinal points of the calendar, the equinoxes and solstices, celebrated by every religion and culture the world over, remind us of the rhythms of the world, the eternal cycle of life, death, and new life. They remind us that there is a pattern in the world, and we have a place in its unfolding.

The mind can hardly conceive of so much history in the land, the countless turnings of the seasons, year upon year, life upon life, the rising and falling of all things. Even so nature never tires and always brings us once again to renewal.

When we look deeply to the natural world, we recognize it as an embodiment of the sustaining presence of spirit, just as a mother cares for her children.

A reminder to us all: when we ignore and damage the natural world, we not only imperil our physical survival, we sever our very connection to the Divine. A book and a building are not enough. The human spirit needs cathedrals of trees, towering mountains, and fields of spring wildflowers as places of prayer. Wild, living places — cherish them, fight for them; they whisper to us of our true home.

I speak to you.
Be still
Know
I am
God.

If you’re not feeling shifting rhythms of the equinox yet, go outside, remove your shoes and walk upon the earth, wrap your arms around a tree. See what happens.

Recommended Books: Edmond Bordeaux Szekely

The Essene Gospel of Peace: Book Two: The Unknown Books of the Essenes	A Book of Uncommon Prayer	The Essene Gospel of Peace: Book One	The Essene Gospel of Peace: Book Three: Lost Scrolls of the Essene Brotherhood	The Essene Gospel of Peace: Book Four: Teachings of the Elect
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Edmond Bordeaux Szekely Hungary/France/Mexico (1905 – 1979) Timeline Christian

Edmond Bordeaux Szekely is a fascinating, controversial figure who had a strong influence on modern New Age notions of Christian spirituality and on natural health.

He was born in Hungary in the early 1900s, the grandson of Sandor Szekely, a respected poet and Unitarian Bishop of Cluj. Edmond Bordeaux Szekely became a linguist and philologist, with degrees from the University of Paris, and also from Vienna and Leipzig.

As a young adult, he was friends with such well-known European thinkers as Aldous Huxley and Romain Rolland.

Szekely became an immediately controversial figure when he published The Essene Gospel of Peace in the 1920s, and a revised version in the 1930s. It purports to be a previously unknown gospel of Jesus, in which Jesus teaches vegetarianism, natural health practices, an understanding of the natural world as an expression of the feminine aspect of God, and a unique view of angels as the embodiment of divine and natural forces. Szekely claimed that he discovered this scripture while doing research in the Vatican’s “secret archives” — which the Vatican denies exist.

Szekely later established a natural health retreat in Mexico following the health practices outlined in The Essene Gospel of Peace. He also published in later years further short scriptures and psalms which he asserts were part of his original discovery, publishing them as Books 2 – 4 of The Essene Gospel of Peace.

Critics and scholars generally agree that Szekely’s Essene Gospel of Peace is not a genuine historical document, and instead reflects the natural health and back-to-nature spiritualities that became prominent in Europe following World War I, the period when the first of Szekely’s books was released. But there remain to this day various Neo-Essene groups inspired by the lifestyle and spirituality of the The Essene Gospel of Peace.

This controversy parallels several other debates over the true origins of other esoteric writings. A similar question arises, for example, with the origin of the Zohar, one of the central texts of Jewish Kabbalah, which was presented in the late 1200s by the Spanish Jewish mystic Moses de Leon as a work originating in the third century CE, but which most scholars believe to have been written by Moses de Leon himself. Attribution to a more ancient authority is a fairly common practice in sacred writings throughout history. One can find this process in the Bible itself. Though in modern times it is much less acceptable for academic reasons. That does not necessarily diminish the spiritual insight and inspiration that can be found in such works.

In the Poetry Chaikhana, I have chosen to list the poetry and psalm excerpts from The Essene Gospels as being “by” Edmond Bordeaux Szekely, rather than “translated by” him.

More poetry by Edmond Bordeaux Szekely

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