... and actually Unity Village not only was to be a vegetarian restaurant, it was actually purchased to become an intentional city where they were going to build housing here and they're going to house thousands of people as an intentional city that was to be self-sustained by the property with their own water, their own cows for milk, their own gas, solar, the whole thing. So this was supposed to be a model for the rest of the world to live as an ethical city, not just a village, an ethical city was their plan. Then the Great Depression hit, their funding disappeared, and that kind of brought that it's never come back to constant anyone.
I can tell my story, but I think there's lots of stories out there. If you want to hear my story, I can share it with you sometime, but with the time I have, I want to talk about Unity as a movement. I was born and raised in Unity. I've been looking at Unity for 45 years from every perspective of being in the youth program to now leading the ministries.
Unity has two different organizations From real quick, the grounds that you're sitting on are actually on a Unity World Headquarters, which is our sister organization, they cover all the publishing, the grounds, the retreats on site, and the real estate holdings of Unity. Unity Worldwide Ministries, which I sit on top of. We cover the ministries and the education and supporting the actual outreach in the field, if you will, of the human beings doing the work in the field. We do have about six to seven hundred ministries around the world, depending on how you count it on any given day.
We actually have a much bigger problem than what has been presented here today, and that is the complete and entirely removing of the Fillmores from the movement altogether.
So it started with the vegetarianism and their thoughts on sex, which was the second statement of faith that was removed along with the one about vegetarianism. So we don't talk about their thoughts on sex, we don't talk about their thoughts on the ethical treatment of animals. Both of those were taken out shortly after Charles' death actually, we think within a year or two they were taken out and there was ministers that wrote to the home office and said, what are you doing? This is our foundation. How can you do that? They were not responding to and we took off.
But the primary problem we have is that spiritual authenticity passed away with our founders. I talk about spiritual authenticity. I talk about it in every phase of the spiritual path and every phase of the physical life that we live. All of us in this room today in some facet of our life are spiritual hypocrites. I'm one does anyone else one?
We're spiritual hypocrites. And instead of trying to address that, we try to find Unity, verbiage and tools to dodge that. And unfortunately, Unity has become one of those most powerful organizations for giving you all the verbiage and tools you need to dodge doing spiritual work required to live to the standard that our founders set. So if you need some tools to get around doing the spiritual work, I've got 'em all for you. Let go, let God, all sorts of stuff, just so you don't have to do a darn thing. You're all okay as you are, and no one should have to grow.
That's not how Fillmores talk. And you can see that the way they spoke, they called people out directly. They did not let things just slip by. They have a lot of things to say about health and wellbeing and how your mind is responsible for the picturing of what's happening in your body and your mind is responsible for the out-picturing of happening in the world around you.
We also are distancing ourselves from that today, especially in light of the pandemic. Granted, we have to recognize the reality of the virus that's happening around us and the safety precautions we have to take around that. But we're also not looking that back to our founders who went through the pandemic of 1918 and still spoke about the power of the mind that that is what's creating the pandemics that we are experiencing.
So the last two months I tour ministries. I talked to ministers, I talked to students and talk to Congress, all the United States. Hopefully I start heading out in the world and I've come to this sad realization that we don't actually believe in what the Fillmores taught down to even their most basic concepts that they were teaching. I think ethical veganism, their thoughts on sex, the power of mind. These are very high spiritual lessons to reach towards, which take a very huge shift in your lifestyle, which require a ton of willpower, which is one of our 12 powers in Unity. It requires a huge energetic charge of willpower to face the pressures of our society to not live a spiritual life. It takes a lot of willpower to move through that.
And we by and large have given up not just in Unity and a lot of spiritual movements across the globe. We've given up and we've decided to just meet people where they are and just kind of say, you're okay. We talk a little bit about growing, but we don't talk about the ideal of where you could be. So Myrtle Fillmore healed herself of tuberculosis. That's a pretty big act to accomplish. Charles grew his leg that was shortened through an accident. We had our host last night healed herself of cancer. These are all things that are supposed to be commonplace in our society. And they were at the time of the Fillmores were doing this work.
They trained people how to actually heal themselves with their consciousness and they trained other people how to heal each other with consciousness. And we talk about it today. But what I've found we've done is we have fictionalized the Fillmores like we fictionalized Jesus. So we talk about what happened in Christianity became the religion about Jesus and not the religion of Jesus. It stopped practicing what Jesus was actually doing and just started talking about what Jesus did. I believe we've done the same thing in Unity. We now talk about the Fillmores. We no longer try to live what the Fillmores live.
And it's a daunting realization for me because that is a huge issue to try to address because it might've been able to be addressed in the 1950s when it really started veering off course. We're now half a century later, if you put a bunch of stray cats in a room 50 years later, they're going to be all over the place, right? They've had a lot of time to go wherever they're going to go. And now people look and say, alright, headquarters and worldwide ministries, what are you guys going to do about it? We got to get some centralized effort. We got to get some focus back moving, got to get back to our principles. And they go, well, we have 700 ministries with hundreds of thousands of people that all disagree. Now what Unity is even here on property amongst each other, because we were all raised in a different Unity.
I was raised in a very different Unity than most people. I was raised with these principles. My parents, I have found, and I don't want to put 'em on a pedestal, probably the closest living to these principles that I've seen in Unity. But we were kids growing up. We had fever so high like we were going to die. My mom would throw us in a cold shower. She would wrap us in cold sheets. She would throw us in a bed, put 15 comforters on top of us until we sweat it out. She had willpower and belief and faith beyond what I can even comprehend as a parent myself when I raised my daughter the same way.
So the concept of Unity and the original foundation of Unity is something we absolutely have to get back to. And I believe it's very clear that's why Unity is dwindling in the world today. It's why all religion is dwindling the world today, because they've all lost that foundational root of truth where they began and it became about an organization and concepts and less about application and actually living and expressing and realizing the truth of which where we began.
So I saw you tear up a little bit last night. You're talking about the fillmores, and I do that all the time. Recently, as I talked to churches sharing this insight I had, I was actually on stage at Unity of Sun City just a week ago, two weeks ago. I was up there talking about Myrtle and I just had this Myrtle moment where she was staying with me. Now I'm going to tear up. And I said, there she was. So she spent about two years working on healing herself with tuberculosis. All people think like, gosh, it's some methation. After a couple months it was gone. She put herself in isolation for two years. No one else around her was on board what she was doing. Charles was not on board at this point. This was before the concept of union existed. He was just a guy that she was married to. She had kids. She had to separate herself from the consciousness that believed she couldn't do this. She went into a room with a chair next to her where she saw the presence of the Christ Jesus. And she worked her affirmations in the presence of the Christ for two years, and she healed herself with tuberculosis. And I imagine her sitting in that chair doing this work, she was having a realization that something powerful was happening and that something was going to unfold into a movement of hundreds of thousands of people that would spawn from this moment in time.
She, as I am concerned, is one of the greatest spiritual masters that ever walked this planet. I include the Jesus Christ and Buddha. She knew when she was going to die. She left the body when she chose. She was a healer. So I would think at that moment she had an impulse and knew that something was about to spawn forth from that moment. And she was thinking, oh my goodness. If I could create a movement of people that would move forward from where I've gotten today, that they would take what I just experienced and move it forward in a hundred years from now, they'd be light beings walking into a room and healing everyone around them like that. That would be the vision she had. She just realized I did it all by myself. No help to anybody else. And fact, everyone's telling me I could not do this and I was able to heal my entire body tuberculosis in this time. What if there was a group of people that all believed the same thing, had the same concept, the same healing power, we could have probably healed each other instantaneously. I'd have to believe she had that thought. And then for her to look forward in time and look down on us today, 120 years later, and we're bickering and battering about this, that and this illness, we showed up. We talk about our hip and we talk about our this and that. I popping these pills for this. I'm doing that. Oh my goodness, that's just so saddening to me.
When she looked at the potential of where we probably should have been, if we stuck to what she had figured out in that moment, your mind can change anything in your experience that just rips my heart out. And she'd see that the world is still doing the animals worse than what they were doing at that time. And she would've thought the ripple of power coming out from that moment would've healed all these things at a time.
But we fictionalized them and we put their pictures up on a mantle just like we put a picture up of Jesus and like, oh yeah, Jesus walked out of water. Jesus raised the food, but we don't actually believe it. We fictionalize it so we can distance ourselves from it. And so what we have done, we've looked at this high spiritual potential that the Fillmores set this high bar. And instead of raising ourselves up to it, raising each other up to it, we grab it and hold it down to where we are so we can feel spiritual. And to push that bar back up, the hard part is all those people that now thought they were spiritual would've a harsh awakening that they're not, including myself. s I'm still reaching for that bar, but at least I still see it. I still see where it is, and I still strive for it every single day. And I have the most powerful, amazing, miraculous experiences in my life. Conversations with Fillmore. They drop things into my head and I go, this is what I'm supposed to do today for this movement. And I go to work on it. The staff, this is what we're working on, but we are working against a tidal wave of power that disagrees because they don't want to see that bar go back up. Because the harsh reality is I'm out of alignment. And no one wants to feel out of alignment, especially when they've been told they spent decades of their life being told and concluding they're in alignment.
So I'll end with this. One of the most terrifying words, or least some of the most terrifying words I hear when someone comes up to me is "Shad, I've been in Unity for 20 years," or Shad, I've been Unity for 30 years," or "Shad, I've been Unity for 40 years" cause they are about to either tell me the most close-minded, judgmental thing I've ever heard in my life or one of the most racist comment I've ever heard in my life.
And one of our great Unity speakers, Jim Roseberg, I was going to speak with him. He said, Unity has a problem. We have a big problem we haven't addressed. And for me that problem is we have not spiritually evolved much of anyone. We've just told 'em they are. We've told 'em they're God, and we have not taught 'em how to become godlike. Okay, everyone feel good about that? Here we go.
