Author: J Douglas Bottorff

Doug is minister of Independent Unity, author of 8 books, musician and photography enthusiast. He lives with his wife and cat in western Colorado.

Our Spiritual Core

Audio: Our Spiritual Core

YouTube: Friends, we had a technical issue with the video this morning, so I’m running one I did earlier: The Undamaged Soul

Today’s talk is in audio format only. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Question: “What, in your way of thinking, is the difference between the term “Soul” and Unity’s use of the “Christ within?”

Answer: “The soul is eternal, unaffected by our ever-changing beliefs, moods, and the perpetually shifting sands of daily thinking. The soul is the spiritual core that we associate with the Christ, that image and likeness of God that is already complete, no evolution required. It is that deeper essence that survives when there is no more need for a hat and boots.” Excerpt from The Complete Soul.

From this, you can see that I consider the soul and the Christ as two separate terms that refer to the same thing. The public’s general understanding of these terms is that they are different. If you Google ‘soul definition’ and ‘Christ definition’ here’s what you come up with: soul – the spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal. Christ – the title, also treated as a name, given to Jesus of Nazareth. Though Unity treats the Christ as our spiritual core, the term has such historical and religious significance many may find it a barrier rather than a help to advancing their spiritual understanding.

It is important that each person find his or her own direct experience with God. Nothing cuts quicker through the maze of terminology and dogmatic formulas than a genuine spiritual awakening. This is the beauty of Moses’ face-to-face with the Lord. “Tell them I Am sent you,” Moses was told. This is not a name but an eternal state of being, universally shared by all. It’s a confusing response only as long as we are trying to place God in time and space, or worse, inside someone’s skin.

You have a spiritual core that responds to any name you are comfortable giving it. Tennyson described it as “Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.” The location of your spiritual core is fixed. The name you choose is yours to decide.

Natural Supply

(Chapter 9 of The Complete Soul)

Our prodigal awareness, forever trolling the reef-laden shallows of the material domain, never quite forgets that our real home has no shores. We sit in the safety of the harbor with our books, our teachers and our sacred scriptures. We visit the beach, gaze in reverence and wonder into that mist-shrouded horizon that stirs in us a strange mix of mystery and primordial familiarity. With our values, our house and our affairs orderly and firmly established in harbor life, we think a certain way, the starting point always from these surrounding beaches. We contemplate and read about the sea and we seek to reconcile the fact that we are so deeply moved by this boundless vista, this restless living thing that stirs before us.

Then, at some unexpected moment, a profound revelation breaks into our awareness. Our house may indeed stand in the harbor, our ship, safely moored at the pier, but our true home is the open sea. This incessant longing that keeps bringing us back to the wonder we behold from this beach, to the feel of cool waves washing over our feet, is that completed part of us that never has and never shall leave the unconditional freedom of this eternal sea. To know this truth and to value it above all is to put our heart in the Truth that makes us free. – JDB

As we’ve seen, one of the restrictions we encounter with a body is its care and maintenance. Yet when Matthew included Jesus’ discourse on the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, he did so in a way that suggests a condition where the body is supplied by something transcending the usual sweat-of-the-brow approach to meeting our material needs. He may have been hinting at this with Nicodemus when he pointed out the need to be born anew, to dislodge focus on the body-centered self-image and move the awareness back to its rightful place … the soul. Might this have been why he also said, “And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven.”[1] Is he not calling attention to our true being as spiritual rather than biological?

Extended Dependence as Infants

Of all living creatures, we humans take the prize when it comes to extended dependence in infancy. Unless we were fortunate enough to be born to parents who did not confuse our soul with our body (this would be a cultural rarity), we have much to learn, not in the way of soul education, but in bodily disassociation. While in the womb, we took no thought of hunger, warmth, and security. The instant we emerged from this all-sustaining incubator, any absence of these accustomed comforts suddenly became a factor. We were, for the first time, introduced to the reality of lack. In addition, people took the place of the womb in providing our physical comforts and essentials.

It was during this critical phase of infancy that our life of service to the needs of the body began. The culture into which we were born inadvertently lured us into the hope that we could draw permanent sustenance and satisfaction from the material world. In the eyes of some, competition for resources began a cognitive arms race, as one evolutionary biologist describes it.[2] We experienced the nakedness of lack and decided we would do most anything to avoid it. Possession-based esteem issues were born (without this or that thing, I’m not good enough). These were our formative years, our conformative years, our fall, that transitioning period when the self-awareness shifted from the natural, inwardly oriented soul that took on a body, to a body-centered self-image that started carrying the abstract notion of having a soul.

This fundamental shift in identity, this separation of the self-awareness from the soul, becomes for us the “… way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way to [spiritual] death.”[3]

The day, the very minute that our physical body entered this worldly harbor, was marked, recorded, and certified as the beginning of our existence. Programmed to associate who and what we are at the body level, the birthday clock began ticking, and our body-centered self, exposed and beholden to the restrictions of Newtonian law, kicked in. Suddenly we had our father’s eyes or our mother’s hair, and a physical brain treated as a blank tablet to be socialized and filled with the information that would enable us to cope with our strange new reality. We became the star pupil or the dumb kid in the class, the athlete or the nerd, the homecoming queen or the plain Jane. We were evaluated, not on the order of the once-familiar eternal scale of the soul, but on a culturally calibrated scale, subject to time and space, genetics, social performance, I.Q., age, looks, rich or poor, popularity and by all else that transpires between the book ends of the birth and death of our physical body. Perhaps our parents and educators determined that our natural talents and interests had no monetary potential and discouraged their development. You and I have stepped into a world that largely ignores the warning of Emerson:

“Don’t be deceived by dimples and curls. I tell you that babe is a thousand years old.”

Our world trades in the currency of dimples and curls, and is largely asleep to the soul. The materialists tell us that God is nothing more than a primordial need, a naturally selected configuration of neurons, evolved in the brain as a genetic response to our need to invent meaning in an otherwise meaningless world. The thousand-year-old babe is thrown out with the bathwater the moment the umbilical cord is severed and we are laid to suckle at our mother’s breast.

With the intuitive portal all but closed, the self-awareness merges with the ego and takes on the unintended role as the ruling force in the tiny universe that is the self-image and its accompanying galaxy of consciousness. Consciously cut off from the soul, the self-image measures its strength, worth, and relevance by the type and quality of external positions and possessions it acquires. This false sense of identity engages the visualizing aspect of the imagination and all other faculties in a life-long quest to draw fulfillment from external sources. The cognitive arms race is game on in earnest.

Law of Attraction/Positive Thinking

Those who discover the correlation between their consciousness and their life’s conditions may be drawn to a class of teachings that shift the focus from hard labor to positive mental attitudes as a means of acquiring the things they desire. This affirmative approach based on the law of attraction advocates developing and attracting conditions of healing and prosperity through the practice of positive mental attitudes and the power of positive thinking. This approach is good as far as it goes.

From the Gospel of Matthew, we get the sense that Jesus warned against the practice of laying up earthly treasures where moth and rust consume, and where thieves break in and steal,[4] regardless of the method of acquisition employed. Jesus bluntly distinguishes between God and mammon,[5] leaving little doubt that the worship of one meant the denial of the other. And yet, as I’ve already pointed out, one of the most beautiful passages of scripture also comes from Matthew’s account, with Jesus clearly stating that a genuine understanding of our spiritual heritage naturally translates into a life free of fear and material want; a condition already enjoyed by the birds of the air and the lilies of the field.

“Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek all these things; and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well.”[6]

We may declare our main interest is in spiritual matters, but we would probably be most honest admitting our motive in seeking first the kingdom is simply a means to the greater end of having all these things. We are still shackled with the problem of the soul engaged in the human experience from within a physical body whose needs provide much of the incentive that drives our quest for spiritual understanding. We sit up and take notice when a man like Jesus suggests the triumph of spirit over matter. The quest for spiritual understanding can easily take a back seat to finding that elusive key to a restriction-free physical body and material environment.

The context of this saying clearly indicates that the “kingdom” is of far greater value than any material benefits it might generate. In addition, gaining an understanding of it does not seem to involve a patient process of consciousness building that will one day bring our evolving soul into alignment with a universe of material abundance. We are led to believe that it is our understanding and trust in the present and accessible spiritual domain, awaiting our recognition that fulfills our material requirements; a state that brings to mind that carefree harmony between soul and body that we enjoyed in the womb.

Not God or Mammon

The appeal of practical Christianity is the hope that the system Jesus taught will make us masters of our bodies and material environment. How to heal the body, generate prosperity, get a better job, or find our soul mate are the things we’re hoping to achieve through a deeper understanding of this kingdom. Though these represent practical solutions to the problems of the human experience, our focus only on what we deem practical may also keep us from asking and seeking answers to some deeper, much larger questions.

In some ways, the notion of spiritual progress becomes a set of blinders focused only on how adept we are at material demonstration. Rather than commit to actually entering this higher sphere, we often treat it as a means of drawing from a basket the goods we desire and solutions to the problems that confront us in this earthly endeavor. The point we may miss in our quest for things is that, from our soul’s point of view, it has never been a question of God or mammon. God is one presence, one power expressing at all levels. Our needs are met at each level. Are we settling for just the visible aspect of available support, or do we seek an understanding of that unseen Source that sustains the soul? I do not think Jesus is urging his listener away from fulfilling their material needs. I believe he is coaxing them toward an understanding of the fuller spectrum.

Because Jesus makes an issue of the worship of God and mammon, some have concluded that he was advocating material deprivation. The keyword here is worship. To worship is to venerate something as an idol. Whether we are idolizing a stone statue, a religious relic, or a pile of money there is a difference between seeing an object as a source of power, and seeing it as a symbol or a reminder of that deeper reality that is the source of all power. The trap many fall into with the practice of tithing, for example, is that they designate a percentage of their income as God’s. The real power of tithing kicks in when we look beyond percentages and realize that 100% of all that we receive and give is God’s.

Veneration of the symbol, seeing it as the object of fulfillment, is worshiping mammon. The symbol is an expression, an effect of the deeper reality. When our priority is to experience and understand at this level, then its material counterpart sheds its status as mammon. Who would consider a peaceful walk in the woods, with all the natural beauty that we see, hear, touch, and smell as mammon? Yet the material aspect of the natural world is the visible counterpart of an underlying, supporting reality we do not see. The issue is not the material realm as the cause of our problems, but our belief that material things can deliver what only the soul can give.

Take No Thought

Jesus’ statement that we take no thought, or refrain from being anxious concerning what we shall eat, drink, or wear[7] suggests a method of manifestation that does not require our physical blood, sweat, and tears. It does not tap our subconscious storehouse of information, or engage in the kind of extensive intellectual analysis that normally accompanies our attention to meeting the body’s needs. Given its natural means of expression, the soul projects directly from its own self-sustaining existence those ideas necessary to form the consciousness that inspires the kind of physical action that translates into the various aspects of our material environment. In other words, Jesus is suggesting a manifestation process that bypasses altogether all the wants and needs of the self-image we have created. Rather than the self-image — with its fears, inadequacies, and limitations calling the consciousness-building shots — it is from the soul that our flow of instruction comes.

The self-image has hijacked this otherwise very natural flow that we see in play everywhere in nature. Plants and animals do not have the intellectual capacity or the imagination that allows them to establish a self-image capable of interfering with the manifestation process. The soul of the simplest seed is complete. From this soul, a totally fulfilling manifestation process occurs. Why would we, of far greater creative capacity, think of ourselves as being any less equipped than even the least of these?

From this understanding, it is clear that Jesus knew exactly what he was talking about when he urged his listeners to seek first the kingdom and all else would be added. The problem that our self-image encounters with this instruction is that it has subconscious files filled with information on what it believes the “kingdom” is supposed to look like. When it gets no satisfactory results running to these files, it continues its pursuit to understand by checking the files of others. Perhaps if Jesus had not used the term “kingdom” and instead said the answers we seek are encoded in our soul, many might have been saved much grief searching for something in their own memory banks that already exists within their being.

As we begin to reopen the intuitive aspect of the imagination, our soul’s light gradually reaches the visioning aspect. New and spontaneous imagery is generated, possibly as mental pictures, but more likely as a deep and secure inner knowing that something transcending our normal thinking is beginning to emerge. This knowing will often come in flashes of insight at unexpected times throughout the day. We recognize the spiritual authenticity of this rising light as a stark contrast to any notion of spiritual illumination our self-image has conjured up thus far.

Our real adventure of contemplation, exploration and discovery on this earth truly begins with the conscious recovery of a soul-based perspective. To use another bit of wisdom attributed to Jesus, though we are missing one of our one hundred sheep, we still own them all.[8] The missing one is the understanding that our soul is now whole. This is but a perceptual problem, a forgetting that we are here in this earthly harbor by choice and we are still fully supplied and supported within the womb of God.

The practice of meditation, which we will explore in the following chapter, has but one purpose. This purpose is to open the intuitive portal of the imagination, to get a firm grasp on our true home at sea, to stir in us the courage to cast off the lines that bind us to this shore, and set sail for the open water

.

[1] Matthew 23:9

[2] Roeder, Mark. 2013. Unnatural Selection: Why The Greeks Will Inherit the Earth. HarperCollins.

[3] Proverbs 14:12

[4] Matthew 6:19

[5] Matthew 6:24

[6] Matthew 6:31-33

[7] Matthew 6:31

[8] Matthew 18:12

The Whispering Soul

YouTube: The Whispering Soul

Audio: The Whispering Soul

From a teaching point of view, it’s a lot easier to talk about the soul than instruct someone on how to actually experience it. Yet, it is the experience that transforms belief into knowing, a vital component to our spiritual understanding.

The pioneers of New Thought referred to the silence as a state of inner communion with the spiritual source of one’s being. This communion is an intuitive experience that comes through stilling the anxious busyness of the intellectual mind and bringing the attention to the original, unadulterated spring of life welling up as one’s being. I have compared this stream of incessant thought to encountering a river to be crossed. While most seem to be stopped at the bank, it is possible, and essential, that we wade into this river and cross to the other side. This is not an actual span involving distance, but a state of inner stillness that is achieved through releasing mental distractions.

Two phrases I find helpful are peace, be still and I am. Peace, be still encourages a mental and emotional letting go of distracting images. I am is a statement of alignment with pure being, the “river bank” toward which you are moving. The Old Testament refers to it as “a still small voice” (1 Kings 19:12).  In this episode, Elijah found the Lord was not in the wind, the earthquake, or the fire, but in a still small voice. Though we are forced to speak of this inner connection in metaphors, it is a homecoming that every person instantly recognizes as their natural state of being. It may at first be fleeting, but we recognize its simplicity and natural warmth as the very womb of our being.

Our experience at this level is the recovery of a familiar place we have never left. Though we have been engrossed in the winds, the earthquakes, and the fires of external religions, programs of self-improvement, and perpetual efforts to acquire that missing thing that promises to be the fulfilling element that brings our peace, our search ends only when we learn to listen to the still small voice of the whispering soul.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Are We There Yet?

Youtube: Are We There Yet?

Audio: Are We There Yet?

If you’ve had children, you’ve probably had the experience of setting out on a car trip with the child hanging on the seat asking every few minutes, “Are we there yet?” To our children’s dismay, I learned to answer truthfully, “Yes, we’re here.”

Though there was sufficient time in any of our given car trips for a lengthy philosophical debate, I didn’t want to be the bearer of bad news by saying, we will never be there, we can only be here. I assumed life would provide that lesson soon enough. This assumption was probably a miscalculation, however. There are plenty of sectors who believe the day will come when their special interests finally reach the promised land of there.

In one of my talks, I mentioned that the process of evolution is not one that is working toward some idealized goal, some perfect expression of any given species. The driving force of evolution is adaptation to the present environment. In this sense, the whole of nature exists in a perpetual state of completion. The biological component of life adapts to the environment in a way that allows for continued expression of life. When the environment changes, the biological interface changes. Life itself remains the same.

Science does not invent the laws that allow them to send a robot to Mars. Science discovers the laws. The spacecraft and controlling software they design is adapted to the preexisting laws that govern our planet, conditions beyond our planet, and conditions on Mars where the craft is sent.

Think of your spiritual essence, your soul as that body of laws that is already complete. Nothing at the spiritual level needs to change. Only the way we think about ourselves needs to change. Paul warned of the problems of conforming to the ever-changing landscape of the world. To find our true anchor, we must take our eye off that ever-adapting material interface and ground our understanding in the changeless reality that is the soul. There’s no there to reach. There is only here, and we’re in it.

 

Keeping the High Watch

Youtube: Keeping the High Watch

Audio: Keeping the High Watch

This phrase, keeping the high watch, was first presented to me through the works of Emma Curtis Hopkins. Hopkins, known as the teacher of teachers, had a major impact on a wide range of early American New Thought leaders, including Charles and Myrtle Fillmore and Emilie Cady. I was introduced to her in the late 70s by Unity minister, Dr. John Rankin.

The high watch, as Hopkins used the term, “… concerns that swift, subtle faculty possessed by us all, whereby we look whithersoever we will; to the Deity ever beholding us, or to the dust beneath, without the aid of our physical eyes.” This inner seeing is what she was referring to when she wrote, “For it is primarily what we most see, and not what we most think, that constitutes our presence, power and history.”

Keeping the high watch is holding fast to the truth that there is but one presence and one power at work in our life. With perpetual media bombardment and full immersion in our body-centered, materially-grounded culture, our inner vision is easily enticed away from the notion of a single power at work. And yet this is truly our means of finding inner peace in an ever-changing world.

Keeping the high watch is not standing on tiptoe straining to see some great good finally appearing on the distant horizon. It is closing our outer eyes, for a time, and allowing the illumination of the soul to make itself known. As Hopkins writes, “The farther toward the celestial zenith we send our limitless eye, the deeper is our assurance of our own divine origin and transcendent Selfhood. For truly the Highest is the Nearest, most distant yet most present, and we are in His image.”

You and I are perfectly placed to keep the High Watch. Nothing but the focus of our attention has to change. Holding the truth that there is but one presence and one power, God the good, at work in our life is the key to genuine accomplishment and true peace of mind.

Intelligence and Order

Advent Series, Part 4 of 4

YouTube: Intelligence and Order

Audio: Intelligence and Order

In this four-part series, we are treating Advent as an intuitive awakening. Our focus is on the meditative process. Follow the same preparations from the first week. Bring your awareness into the region of the solar plexus using the simple statement, I Am.

Open your mind to the quickening presence of intelligence. Your entire being is already permeated with intelligence. The functions of your body are all governed by it. You see and experience intelligence as order in your breathing, the beating of your heart, and all the many activities within the universe of your body of which you are not even aware. You see intelligence in the flower, in your pet, in the birds, and the clouds that sail across the sky.

As you relax and let go, get the sense of this truth that you are completely immersed in intelligence and that your life is now unfolding in perfect order. Affirm:

The very essence of my being is intelligence. My mind is clear. My thinking is orderly. I see things in their highest relation to the whole. My vision is clear. My soul is imbued with the wisdom of the universe. In all I do, I move forward in confidence and in peace.

Release all feelings of uncertainty about your life and know the intelligence of your soul is guiding your every step. Lift your spiritual eyes away from all appearances and see yourself as a conduit through which infinite intelligence is expressing as you.

Everyone and everything becomes part of your success in living. If your life seems to be pushing you to the left when you think you should go right, then know the intelligence expressing as your soul is now at work. Do not strain to work out plans or struggle to control events. Hold fast to the truth that the wisdom of your soul is directing your life, that the order and success you desire is unfolding with every new development.

Power and Strength

Advent Series, Part 3 of 4

Click for Youtube: Power and Strength

Click for Audio: Power and Strength

In this four-part series, we are treating Advent as an intuitive awakening. Our focus is on the meditative process. Follow the same preparations from the first week and bring your awareness into the region of the solar plexus using the simple statement, I Am. See and feel your soul radiating power. Power manifests in a wide range of ways, from the unfathomable power of the sun to the simple unfolding of a leaf. Power divides our cells and fuels all aspects of our being.

Power rises in your being as physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual strength. You may call on strength to hold a steady course, to take one more step when your world seems to crumble around you, or to steady your faith in the well-being of a loved one. Strength may manifest as the courage to make an apology or it may express as the power to say no to behavior you know as destructive.

With your attention focused at your center, sense the power of your soul rising from your innermost depths and radiating throughout your being. Affirm:

I am an expression of pure power. The full radiance of my soul empowers me to steadfastness in all that I am and all that I do. My strength is boundless, my power has no limits.

If you are feeling powerless to do anything about some condition in your life, release the emotional energy of helplessness as you use this affirmation. Again, do not try to make anything happen or even look for changes in your life. Simply allow the flow of power to rise in your being and know it expresses as the strength you need, as you need it. Take a series of deep breaths. With each one, breathe in power and breathe out strength. Power is the essence of your being. You are never without it.

 

 

 

 

Love and Understanding

Advent Series, Part 2 of 4

YouTube: Love and Understanding: Will publish on Monday

Audio: Love and Understanding

In this four-part series, we are treating Advent as an intuitive awakening. Our focus is on the meditative process. Follow the same preparations from the first week and bring your awareness into the region of the solar plexus using the simple statement, I Am.  See and feel your soul radiating love. This beautiful energy of love works for the highest good of all concerned, sometimes attracting and sometimes repelling or dissolving, depending on how the highest good is to manifest. Whether love attracts or dissolves is not a decision you make, but one you trust love to sort out as it flows in and through every aspect of your being and your life. Love lifts your vision in a way that imparts the understanding to see and know what needs to be done. Affirm:

I am guided by the understanding that love imparts.

Love is my essence. Love is my being.

Love is the balancing action in all my relationships and all conditions in my life.

See your body immersed in love. See every aspect of your life, especially those areas that are troubled, completely engulfed in the love that radiates as your soul. See love doing its perfect work and become willing to do your part in that work when the understanding dictates. Loving your neighbor may result in strengthening your relationship or dissolving it. This is a much better alternative than trying to force yourself to love them because you think you are supposed to. You may not always be able to muster the kind word or take that right action that will bring agreement with another. Still, you can know that invoking love will fit all the pieces together, will tie up the loose ends, and move all concerned to their best and highest good. Love reveals that this is true even when your good intentions at diplomacy fail miserably, or fear drives your own actions. The love that expresses as your soul is greater than all human frailty. Your unloving thoughts and actions or the unloving thoughts and actions of another do nothing to alter love itself. Love does not depend on how loving or unloving you are.

Let all of this go and simply see your entire being immersed in love. Experience love’s healing warmth. Let it melt away your stress and your struggle to be loved. You are more than loved. You are love itself.