When Charles Fillmore changed his mind
Hi Friends -
Two weeks ago I provided the 1912 edition of Emilie Cady’s God a Present Help, a book that challenged Charles Fillmore’s assertions on reincarnation and immortality and I offered to send anyone with a US postal mailing address a printed copy. The printer tells me the books will be ready tomorrow so they should begin hitting the mail this week.
This week we have Charles Fillmore giving his side of the story, not only in his own words, but in his own voice.
In October 1946 Charles spoke in Oklahoma City, an event hosted by Alice Cronley, minister of the Unity Center there. In an astonishing statement made in his 92nd year, Charles says,
I don’t know anything about the after death proposition, and it shouldn’t either to you. Nobody else knows. It’s that country from which no stranger goes and from which no stranger returns according to Genesis. So let’s drop out of our Christianity this after-death proposition because you’re alive.
His talk was recorded and made available on a 33 LP record. When I saw it in the Unity Archives in 2017 I went to BestBuy in Lees Summit, bought a digital turntable, and converted the LP album into an audio file. I’m sure the LP is still there and likely the turntable as well. So ask for Unity Archives Collection 1131, Box 1. But you can listen to his entire talk and read the transcript by scrolling further down.
The talk offers much more than an admission that Mr. Fillmore no longer asserted immortality or reincarnation. He talks about the virtue of living a simple life (Get out of my sunshine), and he says that those who leave everything to God are less than honest (Is your God tricky?). He says we are free and unlimited, that all of us are capable of shaping substance by our thoughts, that prosperity comes with big ideas and to be healthy we must press upon “invisible buttons until the bell rings.”
He finishes his talk by asserting that God is a presence, who provides all things to those who will talk to God and affirm that God is listening and interested in our "little affairs",
God had given us a consciousness of His presence when you become acquainted with it, when you become into a place where you can feel the God mind. Just feel after God. That’s wonderful to sit down in silence and go within, and close the door to these outer things, and say, “I’m going to talk to God.” [Listen closely and note that Charles slams his hand on the podium]
Can we talk to God? Certainly, you can talk to God. Will God talk and become interested in your little affairs? Certainly, just the minutest part of your life is part of God, and God is waiting for every one of us to acknowledge Him, to get into God’s house, to take advantage of these wonderful possibilities. All is yours. Everything that you want is right here waiting for you to grasp it with your mind.
Mr. Fillmore concludes, “God bless you, everyone, with this consciousness of your innate spiritual ability.”
Sunday, January 22, 2023
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Text of Health and Prosperity by Charles Fillmore
01 Main theme of this talk
[inaudible] we’ve reached our unity people in this great Oklahoma City. We have about 2,000 subscribers to our periodicals and I think probably one-fourth of them are here this morning. We should be very glad if they come for real things they’re looking for and that is, practical religion. Our hearts will open doors to health and prosperity. It’s something that the whole world needs. You would no doubt agree with me that never in the history of this world was there such a need for a religion that will demonstrate. Demonstrate what? Prosperity, health and everything else.
02 Are we sure we're teaching what Jesus Christ taught?
There’s no doubt that when God gave his message to the people of the earth he gave it as a blanket proposition. A check we’ll say he signed to be filled out by the recipients. Are we filling out the check? Are we taking advantage of our religion? You say, “Of course, we’re Christians. We’re teaching what Jesus Christ taught.” Are you sure you’re teaching what Jesus Christ taught? Yeah, but I think three or four hundred different sects in the United States to claim to be teaching what Jesus Christ taught and yet, right there is great diversity. In fact, some say that baptism consists in sprinkling and another says you’ve got to be plunged. They separate on this proposition.
I read once that the early sects split on the subject on whether the priest’s coat should be buttoned or hooked. Well, those little points now are of minor importance, but when you come to the right interpretation of your doctrine, those are the points found. Because if you know how to find them, if you know where they belong. Now, that’s what [inaudible 00:03:16] are telling you in Christianity. That he hasn’t been tested, he hasn’t been tried out, and real Christianity hasn’t been tried out and it hasn’t carried out our ideals. It doesn’t demonstrate as it should. That’s true, but why? Then people haven’t really understood it. They haven’t understood that there was a scientific side to Christianity, it’s been taught as a religion. Something that you’re going to get that won’t benefit until after you’re dead.
03 Jesus taught more abundant life
Jesus Christ didn’t teach that at all. He said, “Let the dead bury their dead. Follow me. I’m alive.” That’s what Christianity teaches, that Jesus is alive to people. He don’t teach them what they’re going to have after death. I don’t know anything about the after death proposition, and it shouldn’t either to you. Nobody else knows. It’s that country from which no stranger goes and from which no stranger returns according to Genesis. So let’s drop out of our Christianity this after-death proposition because you’re alive. Will Christianity make you alive? Jesus Christ said, “I come that you might have life and more abundant life.”
More abundant life, that’s what we all need is a larger consciousness of omnipresent life. Where is it? Everywhere. In presenting this subject at the door, we had to start with the proposition that life is everywhere present and everyone of us has within our consciousness a door. What is that door? Why it’s myself. I am. That’s the door. If you open the door, open your I am, you’ll find that you can have all the life you want, all you can use, and you can have it continuously. You don’t have to give it up. It’s right here all the time. It’s like the sunshine. Now, we’ve always had sunshine. Yes. It was always here, but did we always take advantage of it?
04 Get out of my sunshine
Now, we are told that science has discovered a wonderful energy, atomic energy, and that when they get it into action, it will transform the world. Everything will be changed just through this energy that’s been here all the time. How do you know it’s been here all the time? Why because we’ve had it through the sunshine. Yeah, sunshine and atomic energy, according to science, are virtually the same thing. Been here all the time, but we didn’t just know how to use it. We didn’t. It’s only recently that we are beginning to see that, well, sunshine... Some of the girls say that sunshine is a wonderful thing to tan them, and they sit out in the sunshine, and they get tanned every place, except where they ought to be, and that’s in sunshine. Now, the fact is that this sunshine has within it all the elements of life. Yes. Do you remember old Socrates? Not Socrates, but the man who lived in the tub, Diogenes. All he wanted was sunshine. He was a great example of simple life. He sat in the sunshine from morning until night.
The story is that Alexander the Great after he had conquered the world heard about old Diogenes, and he decided to visit him, and he did, and he appeared before Diogenes, and he said, “I am Alexander the Great. I have conquered the world. Can I do anything for Diogenes?” Diogenes says, “Get out of my sunshine.” Well, that was a great example of the simple life, and that sunshine, as I say, has been here all the time. This fundamental life, this spiritual life has been here all the time. We have looked beyond. We’ve looked away from it instead of looking right into it.
05 The secret of demonstrating success
Now, when God created man, as you read in the scripture, he made him just like himself. God is spirit, and that spirit would express itself in itself. It put into its expression all that it had. That’s what God did for every one of us. Have we found out now? This spiritual man was to find out or become aware. Psychology tells us that we must become aware of these conditions. We must become aware of anything that we want to be conscious of. So we have this awareness as the fundamental door, I would say. It’s that idea in us that is constantly seeking and searching for something, and it don’t know where to find it because it looks too much without.
So Jesus Christ instructing his followers said, “When thou prayest, thou prayer is one of the avenue through which we find ourselves and find our God,” but he said, “When you pray, enter into your closet and close the door.” What does that mean? Does it mean that we are to go into the house and have a little closet there, and close the door? No. The man said to close the door of your identity, your wondering mind. Close the door to these outer things, this outer world in which we have taken so much interest, and forgotten this inner world. Talk or pray to the Father in secret, in this inner realm, and that Father that heareth in secret, shall reward you openly.
Now, there’s the secret of the whole success of man in demonstrating himself and his God, and his religion. If we would follow that simple instruction by Jesus to his followers in the Lord’s prayer, we’d find a new world opening up to us. You’d find that we had been given ability, thankfulness, powers — to lay hold of this inner spiritual life. Our minds have been in outer things. We’ve thought that there was salvation, drugs, in drugs of some kind, in pills, and powders, or external things.
If, for example, you think there’s a virtue in, well, that wonderful sunshine in its outer application, you don’t get very far, but if you know how to absorb the sunshine into that sunshine that exists in every cell of your body, then you have the key now. You made the contact, but the primal source of that contract is in your attention, your mind. If you start right today concentrating your attention upon God as an omnipresent spiritual principle, and that you have within you the key, you have the light. As Jesus said, “You are the light of the world. Let your light shine.”
06 Do you have an honest God or is your God tricky?
What did he mean? Did he mean like old Diogenes again? Take a lantern and walk up and down the streets of Athens looking for a wise man? The modern interpretation of that is that Diogenes met a G.I. boy just returned from the war. He was a fine, upstanding looking fellow, and Diogenes said, “Why, you were in the Army.” He said, “Certainly I was.” He said, “I judge from your appearance that you were an officer, even a general.” “No,” said the boy,” I was a private for four-and-a-half years.” Diogenes put out his lamp and went home. He found his honest man.
So many in this day are searching in outer ways for the honest man. Where will you find him? Why, he’s in yourself. You won’t find him in anybody else, and you won’t always find him in yourself, but if you go deep enough, there is within every one of us an honest man, a man that really wants to love his neighbor as himself. Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you we are told is the key to the transformation of the whole world; that if we’d only think about our neighbor first, and then of ourselves, we would transform our affairs, transform all conditions, transform ourself, and we’d find that a really new set up would take place in the whole world. Eventually, I think that we’ll have to arrive at that status, that inner communion between the commercial world, and the individual, and between ourselves and our God.
Now, if you really intend to be really honest with God, think about God as a spirit. Bob Ingersoll once said that an honest God was the noblest work of man. Now there is a great deal of truth there. Have you got an honest God? Or is your God tricky? Do you think that he changes his mind? Did he just will for you to be poor, for example? Or if you’re not so healthy, you say, “Well, I suppose it’s God’s will.” If you pass out, where you’re at, if it was God’s will that very many of my friends had to die. We leave nearly everything to God. You have nothing unless God. No. You’re not making an honest God idea in your mind, and I assure you that God will be to you whatever you idealize him to be.
07 We are free, we are unlimited
Everything starts in the ideal that you carry in your mind. We should begin our analysis of our religion by the idea, “Now, what kind of a God have I got at the head of my religion?” God has given me the ability to think of him as I will. I’m absolutely free; that’s one of the points we should all take into consideration, that we’re absolutely free, every one of us. God hasn’t any strings on us. We can think whatever we want. You can go north, and south, east or west, you are absolutely free. “Oh,” but you say, “I am under an environment. I am limited.” Who made the limitation? You did. We all got together and said, “Why, yes, of course. There are certain earthly limitations, and we are subject to them.” That’s evident. We all got together and agreed to these propositions, and it come to pass.
Let’s suppose that we’d all get together and say, “Well, I’m going to have a new God, and new interpretation of the teaching of Jesus Christ.” But we’re teaching Jesus Christ as a man who is free from any bondage of sense consciousness. To begin with, he had to demonstrate out of that bondage. He was born into this raised consciousness in which the people believed in certain limitations, born of a virgin, Mary; brought up as any other child, until he began to find himself. At about the age of 30, he began to see that he was something more than the son of Joseph and Mary. He was the Son of God. What did he do? Did he sit down in a corner and think it over? No. He began to walk about and tell people. He told them the truth, and he told them with such an intensity, with such a power of Spirit and belief and it was based on this belief that he demonstrated in all of his healing, and he healed, according to the Bible in 27 different times, and yet the Church that claims to teach him today ignores the healing part.
08 We bottle up substance through our thoughts
He said that, “Ask whatsoever you will in my name, and it shall be done unto you.” Do you believe that? Ask whatsoever you will. If you want prosperity, ask the Lord Jesus Christ to show you how to demonstrate prosperity. Every one of you have the innate ability to lay hold of this invisible substance.
Now the scientific world tells us that we just live in a sea of substance. Sir James Dean, the imminent British scientist said, “The only two things in existence is stabilized substance and substance in waves.” Now, you called destabilized or the bottled-up substance matter, but the three substance you call heat, light, and all these invisible forces. Just the two things. What constitutes me to say the invisible substance? It’s what the scientific world calls atomic energy, electrons and protons, and there’s a sea of it here. And that is being bottled up by man. We bottle it up through our thoughts. This substance is accessible to every one of you, and all you have to do is to put your mind upon it, and you begin to just concentrate it. It attracts to the center of your I am identity, and then you put your word into it. That’s a simple process. You’re accumulating it. Sometimes you accumulate it through food, but it’s the same thing, the vitamins, and the electrons, and protons. They all work for the same thing in different states of consciousness or different attitudes or modes.
So all we have to do if we want to be prosperous is to begin to think about substance, and the substance is here that God has given us the ability to lay hold of it. Then you say the bankers and the rich people have got ahold of the substance. How’d they get ahold of it? Through thought. They made up their minds in the beginning, “Well, I’m going to be rich. I’m going to have money. I’ll have everything that gives me power, and I get power through money.” They have concentrated their minds upon that until that substance in its universal intelligence leads them to do things that lead to prosperity.
09 Give with a big idea
Well, now, that could be done by anybody. You can do it. God has given you the intelligence. Jesus Christ commended the man who used his talent. That talent that leads to prosperity is your mind. Yes. Well, that’s a thought of a simple avenue through which you can become prosperous, but you say, “Too many conditions, too many environments.” Every condition can be broken down if you lay hold of that substance idea. Make it yours. Say, “Here, now. I am going to have prosperity. God gave me prosperity in the beginning, and that prosperity is now waiting for me to manifest it, and I’m going to manifest it.” Begin to talk about prosperity, think about prosperity. If you look at your pocket book and don’t find money there, say, “That’s a mistake.” There’s plenty of substance there, that invisible substance fills your pocket book.
That’s why we in our work we don’t take up collections. We never say to you, “Give up your need.” That is go with the thought that this is about all I’ve got, and this is all I can afford to give. Give with a big idea. Yes. The only difference about the amount you gave. Don’t you remember Jesus Christ sat at the entrance to the Temple, and the different people came, and dropped their offerings into the little box at the entrance? He watched them, and he said to his disciples, you see these people, these rich people giving? Now, they’re giving out of their superfluity. It don’t mean much to them, but there’s that woman. She only gave two mites, and that was all of her living. She gave more than all of them. Why? She put her mind into it, and said, “Well, this is really something. This is blessed.” It seems to be small, but I put a big thought back of it. I give it to the Lord.” That’s the way to give. If you give with that idea, you will receive a hundredfold. We teach our people that if we give and do this work, if they’ll give with big ideas, give with not out of their lack, but out of their abundance, they will receive. You see?
10 Press the button until the bell rings
So in health, you want more health. Well, health is right here. It’s made up of this invisible, vital energy, and all you have to do is to find a way to lay hold of it. The scientific world says that they’re going to invent a radio receiving sets, and you will have a lot of buttons on this receiving set, and you want heat in the house, and touch a button, and the heat will begin to roll in. Or if you want [inaudible], all you have to do is touch a button, and it’ll all be taken care of.
That receiving set to God’s abundance and God’s invisible is your own mind, and God says, “Well, just touch the button, now. If you want health, if you want more life, if you want vitality, touch the button.” But you say you don’t always get it. Well, you haven’t touched the button strong enough. Press the button. Sometimes when getting into a house, you have to press against the button a long time before you’ll hear the bell ring. So you want to press upon these invisible buttons until the bell rings.
11 Can we talk to God? Certainly, you can talk to God.
How will I know if the bells rings? Well, I’ll know it by an inner feeling. Yes. God had given us a consciousness of His presence when you become acquainted with it, when you become into a place where you can feel the God mind. Just feel after God. That’s wonderful to sit down in silence and go within, and close the door to these outer things, and say, “I’m going to talk to God.” [Listen closely and note that Charles slams his hand on the podium]
Can we talk to God? Certainly, you can talk to God. Will God talk and become interested in your little affairs? Certainly, just the minutest part of your life is part of God, and God is waiting for every one of us to acknowledge Him, to get into God’s house, to take advantage of these wonderful possibilities. All is yours. Everything that you want is right here waiting for you to grasp it with your mind.
God bless you, everyone, with this consciousness of your innate spiritual ability.
12 Closing remarks.
Now, Dr. Cronley told you that there wouldn’t be any Unity meeting at the Center tonight. Well, do you know that in all of these meetings, we leave a certain presence, a certain spiritual quality, and it came to me that we’d like to have a little gathering of the faithful tonight at the Unity headquarters. So all of you or any of you who would like to have a meeting, come around about 8:00 then we will get together and talk things over. I don’t know. We haven’t any program. We’d like to meet you, talk with you about these wonderful possibilities.
Now, you know, as I know, that we’ve got something that the world must sooner or later understand and use, God. Let’s talk about it. Let’s get together and see if we can’t devise means for a larger appreciation here in Oklahoma City of the Unity message. All these good people need is a little more space, a little more elbow room to express this wonderful truth, and it might be that some of you could suggest just how to get a nice, little church somewhere or build something. Do something to enlarge your capacity of God in expression. If you’ll do that then make it possible for a message to be broadcast. So come. I don’t know whether this center how many it’ll hold, but there’s always room for one more, so come and bring your good thoughts.
[Alice Cronley]1 Thank you, Charles Fillmore and Cora Fillmore. There is indeed an outpouring of the Spirit and indeed a most unexpected pleasure to be opening our home at 318 Midwest to you tonight, and as Mr. Fillmore said, and when he says it, he means it, there’s always room for one more. If you feel that you can find the opportunity to gather with us, and talk with us, Mr. Fillmore extends his invitation. Our doors are open to you. Come one, come all. It isn’t as large as this room, but if you come, it’s because there’s a place for you, and Mr. Fillmore’s invitation is our invitation, and Mr. And Mrs. Fillmore will be there. So let us apply this...
Notes:
- The 1946 Unity Annual Conference Yearbook lists the following for Oklahoma City: Cronley, Alice A., Oklahoma City Unity Center, 318 Midwest Bldg. Open daily. Tel. 2-7912. Sun., 9:45 and 11 a.m. and 8 p.m.
