Spiritual Consciousness

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CHARLES FILLMORE ----- March 23, 1923.

In the 14th Chapter of I Corinthians Paul says, “I pray with the Spirit and with the understanding.”

By the way, nearly all of that 14th Chapter of I Corinthians is given over to the understanding as opposed to the gift of tongues. It seems that the Church in Corinth had that experience which we find in certain churches today of speaking in tongues. They were so enthused by the Spirit that they talked in what we would call gibberish. They didn’t know what they were talking about and nobody else knew. So Paul gave over that whole chapter to telling them how foolish it was, how little profit there was in talking to people who couldn’t understand, if you didn’t know what you were saying yourself and they didn’t know. He said, I would rather say five words with understanding than have all of your gift of tongues, and this emphasizes the understanding in all spiritual work.

Now we understand that Spirit quickens the whole man. Every faculty in your consciousness is quickened by the descent of the Spirit. The Spirit is a mighty mind power. And if you have ever taken hold of a galvanic battery, you know what a shock you get, and the same shock, to a degree, enters into one who enters into spiritual consciousness. Now if you have naturally much language, you like to talk, why when you are quickened by the Spirit your language will be quickened, and you will talk so fast that people won’t understand what you are saying. You will talk in some language doubtless that you learned when you were in a former incarnation. As Emerson says, in one of his essays, “You talk so much that people don’t understand what you are saying, you talk so volubly that you don’t put understanding in what you say.”

Now as I say, the real understanding of the character of man and how the faculties are grouped in consciousness and what this Spirit means, what it pours in upon you, will all be revealed to you. We get that quickening frequently, and all of our emotions, often our passions are quickened, but we have understanding and we know how to control those things. We don’t give way to our feelings. We just quietly put a safety valve on and control all that and turn it into constructive channels. That up builds the man.

Now we find that in the development of our powers we have many conditions to deal with, mental conditions, physical conditions, and all physical conditions are founded upon mental conditions. But the old Satan, the carnal mind has to be handled. Now when we enter into this spiritual consciousness and feel what we call the higher vibrations, and illuminations, sometimes the old Satan is quickened in us. Now if we gave voice or expression to that Satan, it wouldn’t show forth very much spiritual understanding or spiritual faith, but we know how to handle Satan. Quietly deny that any mortal thought can move us to do anything but good, and we affirm the power of the Spirit, the power of love. I have said in my silence sometimes, in the early part especially of my development, I would get into the consciousness of the Spiritual life and before I would know it in my mind I would be fighting, and I would be bringing my fists down on the head of somebody that I had had a scrap with years ago and forgotten all about it, but it came right up, for what?

Why to be redeemed. Through what? Well, I understand that that was part of my carnal consciousness, that it was down there in the subconscious and it came up and that is the dead people coming out of the tomb that Jesus tells about, and when they come out of the tombs they have to be handled. He healed those lepers that came out of the tomb. You will find those come out of your own subconscious and they have to be healed. You will do that by understanding these principles. That is why it takes a long time to get a good foundation and people backslide because they haven’t a good foundation.

Mrs. Fillmore was reading to me the testimonial or you might say the confession of a lady, a very prominent worker in a certain evangelical work, and she tells there of her early experience that she fell down stairs and broke her ankle and mashed her foot, and the doctors said four of the tendons in her foot were broken and that she never would be well, she would always have a stiff ankle. They put her in a plaster cast and put her on crutches, and she was in constant pain, but she heard of a healer, in fact she was a teacher I think at that time in a way. She wasn’t what I would call a Unity woman, but she had faith in the Lord Jesus Christ as her healer and she went to this healing mission. I think it was along the line of holiness, faith healing, and she was healed in five minutes she said by prayer and laying on of hands and she felt that this plaster cast should come off and she took it right off and put on her shoe and walked within five minutes of the time she went in there on crutches. She said she couldn’t touch her toe to the floor before. One would think that demonstration would make a foundation in that woman’s mind that she would never go back on, but you know inside of two years she said she went back into, well the worldly way, and the worldly life, and was down with appendicitis and had an operation at the hospital and afterwards she had an operation for a tumor, and she was reduced to death’s door, and then again she remembered the Lord and was healed and now she is preaching the gospel and demonstrating, but I don’t believe right now that that one has an understanding that will save her if she should be overcome by this carnal mind, because she hasn’t handled it, she believes in the devil and talks about how big he is and how he is walking up and down the earth like a roaring lion, and just as long as you believe in the devil he will catch you sooner or later.

So I say this understanding which we have kills the devil. The first lesson I got was that there was no reality in evil or the devil and the only devil or evil there was in the whole universe was in man, and that man made the devil and it was in me because I made a home for him. And if you get a right understanding you will begin to kill the devil. You will kill him in yourself. You will deny any power of evil, in any of its forms. Now you may have oceans of faith. It is a good thing, but our faith must be unified with our understanding; you must understand the law sooner or later; you must understand the principle upon which your doctrine is founded. Paul was right when he said, I pray in the spirit, I pray in the faith, but I pray in the understanding. I pray knowing what I am praying to and the kind of a man I am and the relation between me and this mind omnipresent. And then if you back slide, then if you fall down, you will be caught up a lot quicker than if you were simply going along with blind faith trusting to some outside power that Jesus or God or the Holy Spirit was going to help you do these things. You have to help yourself. The Lord helps him who helps himself. That is true, always was and always will be true. And so we say to all of our people, now you may seem to be getting along rather slowly, you are not progressing as fast as you would like, you want instantaneous work, but if you have it and it didn’t straighten out your ideas it would be detrimental.

People say to me, “Why don’t you heal yourself? You know so much about that law.” If I healed myself too quickly, I wouldn’t know as much as I am going to. I want to know every step of the way, and I am not only going to heal myself, but I am going to redeem this body from all the ills, all tendency to old age and death. That is the reason I am going slow. I am not in a hurry because I know I will get there. How? Because I have proven so far as I have gone and laid a good foundation a sure foundation. I am just as sure of it as you are that two and two are four. I know exactly what I am doing. I am going on in what you call the slow way.

It isn’t a matter really of time, but a matter of effort, a matter of energy you put into the thing. People say, it will take about so many years. I don’t know how many, but it will take just as much time as I put energy into the proposition or put effort into it. In other words, how true are you to your principle, and how much attention do you give? How much attention are you giving to this discipline that will quicken your understanding, that will bring you into this right relation with the principle. Now we spend a great deal of time in disciplining our thoughts, and saying to this thought go, and this thought come. That is fundamentally the “yes” and “no” of mind. The “no” is the denial. Deny those things that you don’t want and affirm those things that you do want, and through your faith in this inexhaustible power of Spirit you see you keep building. And Faith, Paul says, is the substance of things that we have hoped, or looked into the ideal for. Ideals always become substantial. You can walk right up to heaven on an ideal if you keep putting it right under your feet. What do you put under your feet? You say we put errors under our feet. No, we put the substance of truth, the rock foundation, Christ. You have to walk right up on Christ. You say when Christ walked on the waters he walked on his own understanding. He had that understanding in himself and in his word and he had a real substance. This rock substance under our feet is the result of understanding, the substance of things, and rising superior to that substance.

Now we must every one of us rise superior to our material understanding, and we do that by denying that there is any power in materiality, that there is any power in this so-called material world to hold us in bondage. We are constantly trying to get away from the limitation of matter.

Now we have flying machines. That is the mortal man’s idea of getting away from the limitation, the bondage of material things. But that is only mortal man’s idea. Spiritual man’s idea is that he don’t need a machine to fly, he can fly in his own spiritual consciousness when the body is raised to the right activity. When you put in the amount of energy to make it fly, you will fly, and man will never be satisfied until he attains that capability, and it is within us. If you have ever dreamed of flying, that means the Spirit is showing you that you can fly. Go right to work then and begin in your mind to fly. I suppose everyone here has dreamed that they have been flying at some time. That is the Spirit holding that idea before your mind, and if you take it as a reality and say, “I believe now I can fly, I am going to fly, in my mind,” why soon you get the understanding of how the mind lays hold in its ideals of a universal substance and builds it into consciousness and sets up an activity of the cells of the organism and they no longer believe in gravitation and we will be able to fly. Flying with the body will be taught as part of the Christian religion. Jesus Christ demonstrated it and some of his followers demonstrated it. Phillip flew down to Gaza and baptized the Eunuch. Flying will become common and we will be able to fly right through the air with our bodies. Not exactly these bodies, but the same substance, the same cells will be in the body, but they will be under a different combination. They won’t be under that dense, hard, concrete condition that we have today, but they will be filled with an energy and we will just go right through the walls anywhere we want to, just by the power of our own thought, just as you dream you fly.

That is possible to every one of us. Don’t think it may be possible to some people but you can’t. You can. All you have to do is stick to your proposition. I give you that as a scientific fact that we will all sometime learn, and we will learn the law lying back of that science. So I know in everything we do there is a science back of it. The day of miracles, the church says, is passed. So it has. There never were any miracles, if they mean a law superior to what we may exercise today, and the law which was practiced in the past is for every one of us. Now the simple proposition is arrived at through what we call the healing. Healing is based upon the law and if you apply that law in its simplest forms, you can go on to higher and freer and greater applications.

So we must begin right where we are, believing and healing first, and then get the understanding why we believe, and then we go on to a more scientific application of the law, and after a while we get so well grounded in that we can’t be swerved. We can’t be changed. We would say we understand the Truth. We know what Jesus said when he said, you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. Free from what? Why your ills, all of those wrong conditions that you have set up in your mind and body, and it is possible for us every one to be free from those.

Wouldn’t that be a glorious day if we could be free all at once?

I don’t know that we will ever have that day, because it is an individual development. You must apply the law yourself, and when you begin to apply the law, you will get results. People say, I don’t want to be hypnotized by auto-suggestion, by just saying words over and over. But that is an easy way to begin, isn’t it, and you will be surprised at the results you sometimes get through just repeating some words and forms of words. Lord Curzon and his wife had been all over Europe to be healed, and along came that little old druggist, Coué, and said to them, now you just say, “Every day in every way, I am getting better and better,” and they were simple minded enough to do it and lo and behold they have been healed and now that coming through royalty as it did has been taken up and the whole world are counting their beads and going over and over the little formula.

That will get you a little ways, but it won’t give you the understanding that Paul talked about nor the Truth that Jesus promised. You have to get that through a little deeper research. Get down at the foundation, but begin where you are and count your beads and say your words and after a while you will get a little farther along and you will inquire what is the law back of this — the power of the word. Jesus Christ taught; the power of the word. The church could be doing everything that Coué did if they would study up on the power of the word. You shall be held accountable for the lightest word you speak. If you would say every day, “I am Spirit, and I am perfectly whole and well,“ you know that every cell in your organism would take that thought, that word. You could demonstrate health by just saying those simple words. Or that probably for the multitude would be a little too religious. We would say, as Coué says, “Every day in every way I am getting better and better.” Everybody could accept that, and that works, but it wouldn’t work to any great depth in consciousness because the cause of all our troubles lies deeper than that. That is the spoken word, or as Jesus said, the loud voice. You know when Jesus spoke to Lazarus he spoke with a loud voice. That means the spoken word, and that outer vibration, the body activity catches it, but a still small voice is the thought. When you speak out, that is the loud voice, so if we would read the scripture understandingly with this key of the mind, we would get every one of those formulas that we are using today. All the attitudes of mind are fully set forth there, especially in the New Testament.

We are here tonight to tell one another about our success. Sometimes we tell of our failures but not often. Tell of your successes because the mind is very easily worked upon. If you go up and down the country telling people how terribly sick you are, they will put you in the hospital right away, and it would be a good thing because that is contagious. The power of the spoken word is tremendous in sowing seed of sickness, so be careful how you tell anybody how bad you feel. As Emerson says, “Don’t go to the breakfast table groaning about what a bad night you had.” Tell people what a good night you had, that you had such a good night that you stayed awake all night to praise the Lord.

TESTIMONIALS.

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine was very ill. The doctors were to decide the next day whether an operation was necessary. When I called up they said she was going to have an operation and I said, “Aunt Mary you know you don’t need an operation. We are going to call Silent Unity for you,” and they said, “Wait until morning,” and in the morning they called up and said she went to sleep and slept all night, and she was decidedly better. It was a case of almost instantaneous healing. There was no operation.

(2) A few days before I came here I had my faith put to a severe test. I proclaimed God as my protection. There was a very disastrous fire and it seemed there was no possibility of saving my home and property, but I stayed in my room and communed with God and declared the truth as best I understood it, and when it got very severe and a big explosion in an adjoining building occurred, they told me they thought I better get out, that everybody else was going out, and one lady said, “If you have any papers that you want to save, you better get them.” I said, “I think not. I think the God in whom I have trusted will not forsake me.” I attempted to get in communication with Silent Unity. It was about eleven o’clock at night, and an hour later I asked them whether they had delivered the message and they said no, we haven’t had time to send it out yet. I said, “The danger is over, and you needn’t send the message at all.” We were not touched with scarcely a spark. One man that was on the roof with our own fire protection said he was throwing the water and the sparks would fly over him and sail back and fall on the ground. They didn’t even fall on our roof. I felt very thankful for the understanding that I have and the faith that was not betrayed.

MRS. PALMER:

At this time we will take our offering in our hands and following the example of Jesus Christ, lifting our eyes to heaven, or raising our consciousness and realizing our oneness with the Father and becoming open and receptive to the Spirit, allow this omnipresent spirit to flow in and through us. When we realize this presence and our power as the sons of God we speak the word and the law brings forth according to our faith. It may be that someone is proving this law for the first time. If so, take your offering in your hand and having faith in God, faith in this law that never fails, speak the word and your offering will be multiplied even as the loaves and fishes. we will speak the word we are accustomed to use, which is, “Divine love through me multiplies you.” Realizing that our words are living words of mighty power, let us sing “Showers of Blessings”, and receive and pass on this inexhaustible substance of Spirit, of which the offering is a symbol.

MR. FILLMORE:

The new class thought which is held the world over began on the 20th, and this is the first meeting in which we have this healing thought. Now this healing thought is based upon the resurrection.

April 1st is Easter, and this thought is in a way a commemoration of the resurrection. It is applied to the quickening, resurrecting life that is here with us at all times. Paul said, “That same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead will quicken your mortal bodies.” He believed that and we know that it is a scientific fact that there is a quickening life. It is a well of living life within every one of us, but we do not recognize it. We have this formulated thought that we may recognize and lay hold of that inner life. The whole organism will respond. Now this is the word that we have formulated. “The resurrecting Christ life within is now restoring, renewing, and rebuilding my body temple.” Now this is just a form of words, but you realize that by repeating them audibly and then letting them sink back into your consciousness they will repeat themselves very readily. We will take that thought, each for himself. (Repeated).

Now we will speak it altogether (Repeated). Remember there is really only one body. That is the Christ body. Now we all have a certain consciousness of that so let us speak it again. (Repeated). Now we can reach people everywhere by speaking this word to them, so speak the names. (Repeated). Now let us broadcast that. We have taken hold of the one infinite mind in the ether. We will say to all the people who need this new life (Repeated). Hold that steady and say it in the spirit. Now we will take in the whole world with that thought. (Repeated). Now let us quietly give thanks that our words have not gone amiss. They are doing their perfect work. We thank thee Father that thou hast heard and we know that thou hearest us always.

God is our resource. There is a great universal substance and life and if we call upon it, it will be quickened into newness of life and prosperity. New avenues will be opened to us when we believe in this power, in this substance and activity. You know the whole substance that enters into our material world is first an idea of substance. If you get that substance idea going in your mind, it acts upon all the substance that you touch with your consciousness. You can see then that every thought and every word about your money, your houses, and your lands and your affairs effects the substance back of that. Therefore you should always speak with that conviction of faith in the power. So we have a word here: “New avenues of prosperity are constantly opening to me through the power of the Spirit within.” Now let us affirm that for ourselves first: (Repeated) Let us say it altogether: (Repeated) Now we will speak that for others (Repeated). Now mention the names of any you want to help. Mention them silently or aloud. The Lord is Spirit and hears the Spirit. Let us say it together (Repeated) Let us thank the Father, the Lord Jesus Christ for this fuller faith, and better understanding of the law of mind and the law of Spirit, for our power to use all this wonderful substance and life.