Tag: god

The Map Is Not The Territory

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Think of a religious symbol as part of a map used to help you navigate through life.

A few weeks ago, I told of how Myrtle Fillmore imagined Jesus in an empty chair offering her guidance through her healing journey. It did not matter that this Jesus was imaginary. To her, he represented a focal point for healing energy that proved to be helpful to her.

Any critical thinker would recognize this Jesus as a figment of her imagination. To simply pass it off as an irrelevant fantasy, however, would be to ignore the millions of people who found inspiration and guidance in Myrtle’s visualizing technique and healing.

Google Maps has opened a new understanding of this realization by providing us with a two-dimensional map and an accompanying three-dimensional street view. We can zoom in and instantly see the difference between the map and the territory.  

What has become clear to me is that it was not my study of the teachings of Jesus that led to a mystical experience. Like most people, I began with the map of Christian doctrine that I was taught was synonymous with the territory. It was an actual mystical experience that led to my understanding of Jesus as a mystic. The experience, not the symbolism, is the territory.

In my own spiritual quest, I have utilized five different maps. The first is 1) mainstream Christianity, the second is 2) metaphysical Christianity, the third is 3) Christian mysticism, the fourth is 4) critical scholarship, the fifth is 5) near-death research. I put them in present tense because they all continue to play a role in my study.

I have drawn important insights from each of these “maps” knowing that beneath each one is the “territory” of experience that is most meaningful. In our continued quest for spiritual understanding, we’ll each have our different maps, but we should always keep in mind, the map is not the territory.

The Jesus Question

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Most of us in this country have a Christian background, which prompts us to look to the sayings of Jesus for guidance on spiritual matters. How we think of Jesus makes all the difference on what we hope to find. The mainstream Christian thinks of Jesus as the Savior who offered the only way to eternal salvation. The American New Thought movement, which flourished in the nineteenth century, saw Jesus as the Wayshower, one who understood and expressed fully his Christhood, and invited all people to do the same.

Charles Fillmore, an American mystic that became Unity’s co-founder, adopted this view as the cornerstone of his teachings. Assuming Jesus attained immortality in the body, he believed that anyone who aligned with his Jesus Christ standard could also lift this fleshly clothing to such a high vibratory level that we would no longer age or experience physical death. His model placed the soul in a state of evolution, traveling through multiple incarnations with the goal of reaching the ultimate prize of immortality. In his book, The Spiritual Journey of Charles Fillmore, Neal Vahle includes this quote:

“This question is often asked by Unity readers. Some of them seem to think that I am either a fanatic or a joker if I take myself seriously in the hope that I shall with Jesus attain eternal life in the body. But the fact is that I am very serious about the matter.”

As I point out in my book, The Complete Soul, I find this interpretation of Jesus places him impossibly out of our reach. The basic premise of the mystic is that God, as omnipresent Spirit, is centered as the soul of every person. As such, the soul is complete. What evolves is our understanding of who and what we are as spiritual beings. Our objective is not to overcome the death of the body, but to understand that the soul is already immortal. The spiritual journey is all about moving from the body-based self-image most of us operate from, to the understanding that we are spiritual beings going through this human experience. The condition of the body is not the barometer of the soul.

The truth that comes through our current near-death research is, I believe, closer to the ideal that Jesus taught. This research reveals the immortal nature of the soul, not at the end of a very long evolutionary process, but now, at this very moment. Getting a true glimpse of our divine Self is the truth that sets us free.

The Defining Factor

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Now as they went on their way, he entered a village; and a woman named Martha received him into her house. And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving; and she went to him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.” But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things; one thing is needful. Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her.” Luke 10:38-42

While the Bible often gives God a distinct and commanding voice, sometimes through a heavenly messenger, I think our best conceptualization is the still small voice given to Elijah.

But what is a still small voice? It’s not really a voice at all. We should think of it more as an impulse than a voice speaking words. It is the impulse to be free. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus opens his ministry by quoting from the book of Isaiah. When we go back to the Hebrew scripture, here’s what we find:

“Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?” (Isaiah 58:6).

By this account, it is clear that the focus of his ministry is to “let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke.” He also says that those who have learned from the Father will come to him. In other words, those who have learned to listen to the still small voice of God will understand what he is talking about.

Why do we crave freedom? Because the soul is already free. At the spiritual level, there are no restrictions. We encounter restrictions at the physical and material levels. Jesus is teaching people how to work with these seeming contradictory conditions. While most were waiting for a messiah to appear and set them free, Jesus was teaching that freedom begins as a perceptual shift. If you seek first the kingdom of God, that is, if you learn to heed the quiet voice of God, it will help clarify your vision and make straight your path.

Though we may not have thought of the inner impulse to be free as the voice of God, doing so will help us realize that we desire freedom because our soul is free already. We are being prompted at all times to claim our inherent freedom.

The Voice of God

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When we think of God’s voice, we might imagine a booming sound echoing across the universe, one that would coincide with the muscular figure depicted in so many classical paintings. In Unity, we are most familiar with Elijah’s still small voice that comes after the mighty winds and earthquakes.

While the Bible often gives God a distinct and commanding voice, sometimes through a heavenly messenger, I think our best conceptualization is the still small voice given to Elijah.

But what is a still small voice? It’s not really a voice at all. We should think of it more as an impulse than a voice speaking words. It is the impulse to be free. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus opens his ministry by quoting from the book of Isaiah. When we go back to the Hebrew scripture, here’s what we find:

“Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?” (Isaiah 58:6).

By this account, it is clear that the focus of his ministry is to “let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke.” He also says that those who have learned from the Father will come to him. In other words, those who have learned to listen to the still small voice of God will understand what he is talking about.

Why do we crave freedom? Because the soul is already free. At the spiritual level, there are no restrictions. We encounter restrictions at the physical and material levels. Jesus is teaching people how to work with these seeming contradictory conditions. While most were waiting for a messiah to appear and set them free, Jesus was teaching that freedom begins as a perceptual shift. If you seek first the kingdom of God, that is, if you learn to heed the quiet voice of God, it will help clarify your vision and make straight your path.

Though we may not have thought of the inner impulse to be free as the voice of God, doing so will help us realize that we desire freedom because our soul is free already. We are being prompted at all times to claim our inherent freedom.

Soul Searching

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“Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 5:20

While this seems like a personal warning to the modern reader, it will help to get some context. The scribes and Pharisees were religious professionals whose positions gave them special recognition. Seeking such positions often meant that it was the position itself, and not the spiritual quest, that drew their interest. If we think of Jesus referring to the kingdom of heaven as the spiritual dimension rather than a place you go when you die, then this makes sense.

To be productive, the spiritual quest must be pure, based on an honest desire to know God. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” (Matt. 5:8). If we are seeking God simply as a means of solving a problem, then our spiritual quest will only take us as far as the end of the problem. Meister Eckhart addressed this issue with this famous quote:

“Some people want to see God with their eyes as they see a cow, and to love Him as they love a cow – for the milk and cheese and profit it brings them. This is how it is with people who love God for the sake of outward wealth or inward comfort. They do not rightly love God, when they love Him for their own advantage.”

Soul searching, at its best, is really about understanding our spiritual motive. Are we seeking an understanding of the bigger picture, and how we fit in, or are we simply looking for a little milk and cheese? If we actually want to enter the kingdom of heaven, that is, if we want to experience genuine spiritual revelations, then we need to become pure in heart, to seek God for the sake of knowing God. This is why Jesus put this at the top of the list, to seek first the kingdom and all other things would be added.

We all appreciate people who want to get to know us, not for what they can get from us, but because they value us as people. These are the relationships that are most meaningful and most reciprocal.

Let There Be Light

Watch YouTube Presentation: Let There Be Light

When our space program took us to the moon, we were enthralled when we saw for the first time our gorgeous gem of a planet rising through the black backdrop of space to a place just above the horizon of the moon. We’d never seen an earthrise. Taken by the beauty and wonder of this image, we may not have quickly gleaned all the implications that it so clearly demonstrated.

We see the earth in this photo because it reflects the sun’s light. What this tells us is that the sun’s light is just as present in the apparent blackness as it is on earth’s surface. In this sense, sunlight is omnipresent, but it is only apparent to us when an object capable of reflecting light is present.

In the Genesis account of creation, God says, “Let there be light.” This first step can be accomplished and still appear only as the black of space. Place an object in this stream of light, however, and you see that the light was present before the introduction of the object.

The Big Bang theory contradicted this order of creation, suggesting that matter came first and then life (thanks to something like a perfect combination of chemicals and an extraordinarily lucky lightning strike). This would be a little like saying that the earth in our photo produces the light that enables us to see it.

I can more easily grasp the idea that the energy we know as life, the light of every living creature, permeated the otherwise formless universe. The biological objects that were capable of reflecting or expressing this life then came along. All that makes up the life, love, power and intelligence that we know as God was present long before the biological reflecting agents appeared. God does not evolve; the biological reflecting agents do, but probably not in the way we imagine.

When we refer to ourselves as spiritual beings, we are, by analogy, referring to an aspect of ourselves that is equivalent to the primordial light. The light that we are does not evolve. It is already complete. Nor does our ability to reflect this light evolve. As with any object placed in the path of sunlight, our ability to reflect this divine field of energy is inherent in our makeup. The light actually made us for this single purpose of reflecting itself. It did not start with an inferior product that it would eventually perfect. It started with that perfection.

That we are capable of believing God is absent or in any way separate from us is like the earth saying, “I’m surrounded by blackness. When will the light dawn?” The whole time the light is present, powering all the many systems of earth, asking nothing more from the earth in terms of its awareness or deserving. Nor does the sun ever say to the earth, “You owe me big time for giving you all this free light.”

Although we are capable of capturing and reflecting the unseen light, our senses-based, intellectual orientation has prompted us to invent the illusion that something more must happen prior to our immersion in the light. Many have accepted the false belief that if enough of the race evolves, the rest will be carried in on its coattails. This superstition stands like a great shield blocking the ever-present light. We abide in the shadows of ignorance, passing on from one generation to the next that this shadow is a thing with which we must contend, that there is more than one presence and one power in the universe, and that in some near or distant future we will all know only the one. The metaphysician, in this regard, is as prone to superstition as the Christian fundamentalist awaiting the second coming.

The groping in darkness we see currently in our world perpetuates the myth of spiritual evolution. The presence of strife, however, is no measure of the presence of Truth.

Emerson observed, “We sell the thrones of angels for a short and turbulent pleasure.” Those who strive only for the short and turbulent pleasure provided by the shiny objects of material gain overlook the deeper, all-sustaining truth of that divine, infinite sea of light forever shining in the darkness, a light without which nothing else would exist.

The God Perspective

In the New Testament letter of James, we find this reference to God as the, “Father of lights with whom there is no shadow or variation due to change” (James 1:17). Presenting God as changeless is a significant departure from the traditional view of a Deity bearing human emotions of likes and dislikes, moods and changing attitudes. We so routinely and casually ask for God’s special blessings or favors that we may not stop to realize we are indeed addressing a perception of a Creator whose attitudes and behavior are quite subject to change. Could James’ changeless Father of lights bless and not bless, or pass out serpents and stones when we really need fish and bread?

It is certainly easiest to think of God in terms of our human relationships. There are times when we feel close to those around us, and times when others or we seem more distant, depending on prevailing moods. For some we would grant favors without question. For others, our favors would come with conditions.

Many think of their relationship to God in much the same way we might think of our relationship to the sun. We have full sunny days and we have cloudy days. We have daytime when the sun is out and nighttime when the sun is not. We experience the sunrise and the sunset, the skin-burning summer sun and an icy cold winter sun. The sun, we might conclude, has many moods.

All of these variations, however, have less to do with the nature of the sun and more to do with our relationship to it. When you think from the perspective of the sun itself, you see a very different picture. How many days has the sun seen, for example? We say this closest star is something in the neighborhood of fifteen billion years old. How do we measure a year? That would be 365 sunrises and sunsets. Multiply that by fifteen billion and you have more days than most of us can wrap our minds around.

The sun itself has seen but a single day, and that day has stretched throughout the duration of its life. The sun has never risen, never set, never known the cold of winter or the dark of night. It has never seen a shadow or experienced the dark corner of a cellar. If the sun peers into the corner of a cellar, it sees its own light. Nor can the sun see the long shadows cast over the evening landscape. There is no variation due to change.

Like the sun, we cannot understand God from the ever-changing human perspective. Impossible as it may seem, we have to think of God from God’s perspective. From the sun’s perspective we can understand how it can never see a shadow, how there is only one condition and that condition is light. It is only as we think of God from God’s perspective that we can begin to grasp the truth that there is only one Presence and one Power. There is not good and evil, not light and shadows, but absolute good, as in absolute light.

Using this familiar example of the sun, the abstraction of a changeless God of absolute good does not seem so abstract. And the abstraction lessens even more when we consider that eternally shining light at the center of our being. We sift through our ever-changing moods, our senses-based definitions of God to find that true core where there is no shadow or variation due to change. As the sun sees only light, so we see only light when we view our lives from our own radiating center of light.

It is a comfort to me in my darker moments to think of God from God’s perspective. There are no darkened moments in God. Why should I succumb to shadows I see only because I have lowered my vision to the spinning earth and the affairs of the human condition and turned my back on the life that is the “… light of men”, the light that “shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (Jn. 1:4-5).

The light that you and I seek is here now, has always been here, and will always be here. As we commit to opening our minds and hearts to the God perspective, every shadow dissolves into the nothingness from which it came.

What Is Truth?

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In Unity, we refer to our teachings as Truth. What is interesting is that another religious organization might look at us and question this. They have their own version of Truth. Of course, we’ve all heard people refer to my truth and your truth. So, I raised this question some months ago: With approximately 7.9 billion people on this planet, are there also 7.9 billion truths?

Referring to our teachings, we arrive at our understanding of Truth using three points. How we view the nature of God, how we view the nature of the individual, and how we view the nature of the relationship between God and the individual. The sum of how we address these three areas is Truth, as we understand it. Because other religious organizations will address them differently, they will have a different understanding of Truth.

Our foundation statement simplified is this: There is but one presence and one power in the universe; God, the good, omnipotent. This covers our understanding of God. Each individual is an expression of this one presence and one power, the image and likeness of God. As such, the relationship between God and the individual is oneness.

Over the last several weeks, we’ve been exploring the truth about prayer, that prayer doesn’t change God, it changes us. The reasoning behind this is reflected in our understanding of God as the one presence and one power in the universe. Changeless. Prayer, therefore, becomes an inside/out proposition. We make an adjustment in our thinking and feeling. When we pray for healing, for example, we affirm that we are already whole, that the one presence and one power is now expressing this wholeness through us. That we are in a relationship of oneness with this presence of wholeness allows us to accept we have already received what we ask for in prayer. Asking, in this sense, is affirming wholeness is ours already.

What we call Truth teachings are all based on this trinity of ideas. If we get this firmly in our mind, we have the Truth that will set us free.

Be Ye Transformed

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Myrtle Fillmore’s Healing Journey

The Unity Movement was founded on prayer. Myrtle Fillmore, one of our co-founders, was a frail child who suffered from tuberculosis and was not expected to live a long life. She grew up hearing that her disease was inherited and there was nothing she could do about it. As an adult, she attended a lecture by Dr. E. B. Weeks, who was a student of Emma Curtis Hopkins, a noteworthy name in early New Thought. Dr. Weeks made a statement that changed Myrtle’s life. He said, “You are a child of God and you cannot inherit sickness.” This captured Myrtle’s attention. She spent the next several years in designated prayer time speaking affirmative healing statements to her body. She kept an empty chair in front of her and imagined Jesus sitting in it, offering healing guidance.

Her healing was not instant. She devoted herself to changing her mind. Imagining healing energy directed by her own words was a powerful change of thinking. Envisioning Jesus as a great healing presence became a strong aid in her healing process.

It is also worth noting that prior to her spiritual approach, she tried every medication available, but to no avail. Her healing journey supports our basic understanding that prayer changes us, not God. Her change of mind, her healing affirmations, and her powerful visualizations brought her complete healing and the ability to live a very full life to age 86. At the end, she told her fellow workers at Unity that she felt it was time for her to move on, that she could be more effective working from the other side.

Myrtle has been an inspiration to millions of people. She was very down to earth, very practical, and totally committed to the spiritual truth taught through Unity. In terms of her writings, I’ve always considered her more accessible than Charles, who did most of the writing. Before Unity became a movement, she conducted healing services from her home, we’re told, with marvelous results.

Paul said, “Be ye transformed by the renewal of your mind.” Myrtle Fillmore truly exemplified this principle.   

The Prayer Principle

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Someone has said, and I believe rightfully, that prayer does not change God, it changes us. This seems to agree with the statement of James, who referred to God as the “ … Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17). If we accept this, then we want to know how we are to change if our prayer is to be effective.

In Matthew 5:37, Jesus emphasized the importance of simplicity in our words by saying, “Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’.” This principle holds true with prayer. Saying “yes” affirms a truth, while saying “no” denotes denial. In our prayer, we acknowledge the truth and release any negative energy we may have attached to a certain situation. Fear, as the most prevalent form of negative energy, often requires our attention and release during prayer.

The way we perceive things and think about them affects how we engage with the creative life force that we refer to as God. When we seek healing through prayer, for instance, we begin by acknowledging that deep down, our soul is already complete. We embrace our inherent wholeness and reject any conflicting appearances. Rejecting these appearances does not imply that we deny or disregard them. Rather, it signifies that we let go of any uncertainty surrounding our healing, and instead, we fully trust that it is already manifesting. There are no barriers or hindrances. Just like a river, God’s energy flows in a single direction: from within ourselves outward. This same principle applies to any other need we may have.

Whenever we notice any sign of lack, we take it as a reminder to embrace the power of prayer. As we live in a physical form, our prayer practice might also require us to make adjustments in areas such as our diet or overall lifestyle. I noticed my car was leaking oil, for example. My prayer for healing involved taking it to a mechanic. As much as I would like such an issue to self-heal, such things usually involve participation at the physical level.

If we think of the prayer principle as the act of putting everything in motion, beginning with our state of mind, then we are open to the perfect outworking of our need at all levels.