Sometime in 1977, the ascended master El Morya came to his messenger Elizabeth Clare Prophet and said, “Stump!”
She looked at him and said, “Stump?”
And he said, “Yes, stump, as if you’re running for election. Go out and tell the people about the Coming Revolution.”
She thought about that for a minute and her next question was, “Well, why me? Why do I have to do it?” And Morya said, “Because there’s no one else to do the job.”
And so, early in 1978, Mrs. Prophet hit the road in her gold bus, which her late husband Mark L. Prophet had converted from a large Greyhound bus. She started out stumping for the Coming Revolution in Higher Consciousness, accompanied by twenty-five to thirty staff members. Their caravan also included a converted white tour bus in which the staff had placed a small kitchen; a semitruck that carried the equipment and bookstore items; and a small RV that the team referred to as the chapel of the open road.
With this team, Elizabeth Clare Prophet conducted three whirlwind tours in 1978, totaling more than sixty-seven stump lectures and other presentations, held in twenty-six states in the U.S. and five Canadian provinces.
As soon as the staff that accompanied her arrived in a city, they spent the next eight hours setting up for the evening Stump. Some went out and handbilled on college campuses and surrounding areas on the very day of the lecture. Bhajan singers went out and sang bhajans while they handed out flyers to get people into the lecture that night.
Each lecture started promptly at 7:00 p.m. and usually lasted at least five and a half hours.
Elizabeth Clare Prophet always began her lectures with a period of bhajans, which are Indian devotional songs to the Divine Mother. Sometimes, she would step onto the platform and find only a handful of people in attendance. She would immediately sit down and go into meditation, visualizing the empty seats filled with people. And when the bhajans had finished playing she would open her eyes and the room would be filled with all whom the ascended masters desired to have present that evening.
I remember one particular Stump in ’78. It was in Baltimore and because of some protest against us at the last minute we were not allowed to meet in the designated hall where all the posters had indicated. And so we moved into another hall.
The hall was empty at ten of seven and I had left some staff members to direct people from the previous hall to this place. I didn’t know what was going to happen and whether there was going to be a single person in the room. So the bhajan that I selected that night was the Hare Krishna mantra, and I simply closed my eyes to the sense of emptiness in the room. I prayed to Lord Krishna and I visualized Lord Krishna coming through the door as everyone who would be coming through the door. And I visualized Lord Krishna sitting in every seat in the hall.
I held that matrix. I never opened my eyes until it was time to begin. I opened them and the hall was full. It was a very thrilling moment….
It was a very wonderful proof of the manifestation of nonduality. I knew in my heart that God is one and not a multiplicity of manifestations. We only appear to be separate as individuals but in reality there is only God and one manifestation. And by the law of that geometry of the one, which I held powerfully, I could see the one in many manifestations.
Following the stump message, which went past midnight almost every night, the staff would spend three hours breaking down, then travel to the next city, sleeping on the way because the travel time between the cities was often great; they’d arrive the next morning and would start all over again for that day.
Mrs. Prophet packed her days with all the radio and TV interviews that she could fit in before her stump lectures in the evenings. She met with group leaders in the various cities and did counseling. And in between, she also prepared the Pearls of Wisdom, the published dictations of the ascended masters, that went out every week.
A follow-up team of three people came along in another van to help each of the areas get organized in their outreach programs. They started many of the groups that The Summit Lighthouse currently has in cities around the U.S. and Canada, and nurtured the new contacts that had been made.
The stump tours covered the following cities:
First Tour (February/March 1978): San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Denver, Kansas City, Saint Louis, Oklahoma City, Dallas, Houston, Austin, Corpus Christi, New Orleans, Atlanta, Raleigh, Virginia Beach, Jacksonville, Orlando, Saint Petersburg and Miami.
Second Tour (April/May 1978): Baltimore; Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; New York; Cranston, Rhode Island; Boston; Montreal; Toronto; Buffalo; Pittsburgh; Cincinnati; Toledo; Detroit; East Lansing; Chicago; Indianapolis; Urbana, Illinois; and Minneapolis.
Third Tour (October/November 1978): Miami; Gainesville, Florida; Atlanta; Charlotte, North Carolina; Virginia Beach; Baltimore; New York; Washington, D.C.; Arlington, Virginia; Philadelphia; Boston; Amherst, Massachusetts; Morrison, New Jersey; Pittsburgh; Dayton; Detroit; Chicago; Madison, Wisconsin; Minneapolis; Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; Calgary; Edmonton; Vancouver; Seattle; Portland; Eugene; Sacramento.
The last city was Berkeley, California, where they had at least a thousand people. People were sitting in the aisles and even on the platform—a magnificent culmination of the 1978 Stump.
After this herculean task was accomplished, Mrs. Prophet directed one of her trusted editors, Rev. Annice Booth, to take the transcripts of all these more than sixty-seven stump lectures and other presentations and put them together in one book. Annice worked her way through the thousands of pages and decided which segments of the stump message were the best in each transcript.
The stump book never was printed but Annice’s compilation of the best selections from the lectures was released as a 3-cassette audio album, I’m Stumping for the Coming Revolution in Higher Consciousness! A fiery soul-penetrating message by Elizabeth Clare Prophet.
In 2010, the stump album was re-released as an MP3 album by the same name. It’s an amazing delivery of passion and truth that belongs in every seeker’s library. Listen to it over and over again and let yourself be infused with light by these Spirit-filled words of one of the greatest spiritual teachers of the twentieth century.
The passages you are reading here, from the ebook, contains the transcript of this inspiring five-hour message. It has been broken up into topical sections and supplemented with study questions that will help you pause and reflect deeply on what you are reading.
It was Elizabeth Clare Prophet’s fondest hope that her students would not just hear her message; she wanted them to listen to it, feel the fire in her words, assimilate that fire, and turn around and share this critical message with all those who could understand her vision for the Coming Revolution in Higher Consciousness.
May these pages inspire you to do the same!
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Elizabeth Clare Prophet
I’m Stumping for the Coming Revolution in Higher Consciousness
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