Download video of lecture one (435 megabytes)
Read:
This is a statement I’m going to read from Atom Smashing Power. These few words changed my whole life, my whole career in the Unity Movement. He wrote: “You can have a well-body.” You all understand those few words? Will you take them seriously? Will you? Will you take them personally, to heart, and make it your belief system?
Don’t distrust it because it’s so simple and so direct and doesn’t cost anything; those are the best things in life. These words are pure gold: “You can have a well-body.”
“Oh! But Mr. Fillmore, you don’t understand my case history. My doctor said, and my mother always, and my father never.” You see? Excuse, excuse, excuse. Drop the excuses, accept the truth, pure and simple: You can have a well-body.
“But Mr. Fillmore, I’ve had my left arm amputated.” You can have a well amputated body. You hear me? I’ve had a, what do they call a removal of the breast? Mastectomy. “I’ve had a mastectomy, I’ve had an appendectomy, I’ve had a miscarriage,” you understand? I’ve lost my hair and most of my teeth, so what? I can have a what? Well-body.
It isn’t the anatomy inventory that counts, it’s: are you well or are you unwell? Not, what have you got on your anatomy chart? You can have a well-body. Well that got me started, and then after that I really, really understood Charles Fillmore, and every time I go back to one of his books, any of his books, I get a whole new level of meaning out of it. Things I read before but didn’t really read before, do you know what I’m saying?
The Bible is like that. You can have read the Bible ten times, and the eleventh time you read it, you’re going to read things you haven’t read—well, you read it but you haven’t seen it before, and that’s the way the truth literature is; it’s beautiful.
Alright. In the Forward to the book, Mr. Fillmore says, “We are all in mind, related to a great, creative Spirit, that infuses its very life into our mind and body when we turn our attention to it. We have mentally wandered away from this creative Spirit, or Father Mind, and lost contact with its life-giving currents. Jesus made the connection for us.”
Now this is not to say friends, Mr. Fillmore did not mean this, although many persons thought he did mean this, [that] Jesus and Jesus only made such a connection—Mr. Fillmore did not mean that; he only meant that Jesus did make that connection. See the difference, between “Jesus” and “Jesus only” made that connection? Which is not true, or we don’t know whether that’s true or not, but that Jesus did make the connection, we know that’s true. Am I getting across or not?
See, it doesn’t say, “Only Jesus made this connection,” he says, “Only Jesus did make the connection,” right? Now, if one member of our human family can do something, he can do it only because it can be done. And if it can be done, then we can do it, but somebody has got to do it first. You can’t start with number three; you start with the first, and Jesus is the first that we have knowledge of, in recorded history.
And so this is what we mean, that Jesus did make that connection. And then He taught—Jesus taught, or He claimed, that by joining our life-wave … He kept saying, “I was sent, I was sent, I was sent,” He never says, “I was born into.” I was what? “Sent.” He says, “I am in this world but I am not of it. I was sent. I will return to My Father’s house, from where I was sent. Where I go, you cannot follow me, yet.” Got me? “You cannot follow Me, yet, but I go to prepare a place for you, so that where I am, there you may be also.”
So Jesus is ahead of us in our life-wave evolution, but He is a part of our evolutionary life-wave. Alright, okay. He said “He became an actual part of our life-wave, and anyone who makes a conscious connection with Spirit or the Father Mind, is a connection also, for the whole race.” When you connect with the Father Mind or Spirit, you are helping to connect not just yourself, but who else? Everybody else, everybody else.
Paul, for instance, said, “Let the same mind be in you that is in Christ Jesus” (Cf. Phil 2:5), that is the Father Mind, the Superconscious level of Mind. Mr. Fillmore goes on to say, let’s see, he says, “[The] ability to pick up the life current and through it, to perpetually vitalize our body, is based on the right relation of ideas, thoughts, and words.” How many items are there? Three—the trinity, the trinity.
The Law of Trinity runs all through human existence folks: Mind, Idea, Expression; spirit, soul, body; superconscious, conscious, subconscious; thesis, antithesis, synthesis; first force, second force, third force—the Law of Trinity. And here it is in regard to health: the right relation of ideas—the idea of health, the thought of health, and the what? Affirmations of health, words of health.
“These mental impulses start currents of energy that form and also stimulate molecules and cells, already formed, producing life, strength, and animation, where inertia and impotence was the dominant appearance. This was and is the healing method of Jesus.” Okay.
Truth thinking and speaking will form new molecules and cells, as well as vitalizing and healing already formed molecules and cells. Did you get that? Thinking the truth, speaking the truth, based upon the Divine idea of life and health, will produce new molecules and cells in your what? Body. Also will do what to the cells already there that have gone haywire? Renew and revitalize them; both aspects occur when you are working with Spirit.
Now, in the last paragraph in the Foreword Mr. Fillmore says this, he was just beginning at this period in his career to really become interested in Metaphysical Bible interpretation—symbolism. He caught the vision of the highest levels of meaning in those parts of our Bible called “Scripture.” Did you notice what I said? Not “the Bible,” but what? Those parts of the Bible, which are metaphysical.
All of the Bible is not symbolic, a lot of it is hard-core literal. You will always know those parts because they are so darn boring, but the other parts of the Bible are called by Jesus, “Scripture,” and these are the story parts of the Bible, the parts of the Bible with characters, dialogue, narrative, action—these are called ‘Scripture.’ And all of these, no matter how literal they may be, are also all of them what? Symbolic, metaphysical, and they can be interpreted. I won’t go into that anymore, I’ll save that for when I get you in a Bible class.
So Mr. Fillmore says this: “No book, not even the Bible, covers all phases of human thought, therefore, the mental panacea for every ill is beyond the description of words, but Jesus Christ epitomized, in His own consciousness, all the thought processes necessary to man’s complete restoration.” Okay, here’s my comments on this: there are always students and seekers who search for a system of teachings which gives all the answers; Unity is full of them—seeking a system of teaching which has the answers to all questions, and Charles Fillmore says, “There is no such system.”
“But,” he said, “there is the living consciousness of Jesus Christ available to any, any, who turn to it and are willing to accept it and participate in it. The Mind of Jesus shows the way, but the person himself or herself must work to follow that way.” Jesus only shows the way; He doesn’t do the way for us, we have to do the doing.
Now, Mr. Fillmore said, he said this to Silent Unity in a workers’ meeting, not in a class, but in a regular workers’ meeting. At this time in the history of Unity, North America was going through an alarming number of serious epidemics. People were dying like flies all over the country and children were getting polio all over the place. Come on folks, diphtheria, polio, pneumonia, blood poisoning—all this stuff was going on at an alarming rate; we were going through a cycle, you see.
And I often tell classes, I remember this: when I was a little kid, a very little kid in Pittsburgh, we used to take walks through our neighborhoods, and no matter what street you went down, if families lived there, you saw “QUARANTINE” signs nailed on front doors. Different colors for different diseases, Pittsburg was one big rainbow.
Now—and that was normal, that was par for the course—now, if you and I were to walk down any street in Pittsburg and we’d see even one “QUARANTINE” sign, we’d be scandalized. You would probably have a heart attack. See? What’s happened? Well, we what? Consciousness is raised.
And so Mr. Fillmore knew that many of the workers in Silent Unity, as is natural, were going through a period of discouragement because of all, you know, all this illness and fatality we are hearing about, and yet we’re sitting in our ivory tower over here, and we’re talking about, “poi-fect health, poi-fect health, poi-fect this, poi-fect that,” and everything is crap out there. And Mr. Fillmore knew that this caused a tension in the minds of us Silent Unity workers, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it cause you…?
Right now, AIDS, child abuse? See? And so he told the workers, he said, “Look, one thing I have learned and you’ve got to learn it too, especially since you have chosen this career for your life: prayer consciousness will always be far above and ahead of existing conditions and technology.” You hearing me? The existing technology may be at a certain level, limited, right? But prayer consciousness is always greater, and higher, and ahead of existing technology.
He said, “So our job is not to give into discouragement, because existing technology isn’t doing a good enough job. But we keep our prayer consciousness alive and well and working, and eventually what will happen to technology? It’ll catch up, right. And as it catches up, prayer consciousness goes further. And now you cure people of pneumonia, you don’t bury them, unless they’ve got AIDS.
Leprosy used to be an unpredictable, untreatable, fatal disease, [but] now, leprosy can be detected easily, before it even becomes leprosy, and eliminate it from the body, and no harm done. People were praying, people were praying when leprosy was still called what? Incurable.
Nothing is incurable, everything is curable, but prayer consciousness has to lead the way. And so Mr. Fillmore said this—I just read that there is no system of teaching that has all the answers and solutions—but he said, “The fact that, as yet, certain forms of illness have not been overcome by purely spiritual methods, should not deter us from continuing and believing in spiritual healing.”
And so Mr. Fillmore was able to keep Silent Unity out of that despondency and discouragement, and work harder and harder to keep the prayer consciousness ahead of the existing time, which they did, and they’re still doing it. And so miracle healings are still occurring and they will continue. How are we doing here? Okay.
Now we will go into the book itself. Now remember, I’m going to have to skip large sections of this book, which breaks my heart, but I’m being paid for it. So if I don’t choose the excerpt which you wish I had, make a note and someday we will get together again.
Mr. Fillmore says, “Physiology teaches that our body is alive to the degree that the cells are alive, that we are carrying around many dead cells. Jesus knew how to quicken with new life the cells of His organism, and He promised that all who follow Him would do likewise.”
Now, in the Unity healing ministry, both here at Unity School and in our Unity Churches, healing is a very, very much emphasized part of our ministry. I think every minister, every ordained minister in our Movement would agree with me on this, and licensed teachers and students, would agree that healing takes a very large part in the Unity Ministry as a whole.
I want to pause for a moment and digress, just for a moment, [this] just came to me. A few years ago I was asked to speak at one of the first Unity Conventions that we held. We didn’t use to call them “conventions,” I don’t care for that word myself; we used to call them “Ministers’ Conferences.” Now they call them conventions because they are for more than just ministers; laypeople are now able to [attend].
Well I was asked to speak in one of the first of these conventions and they asked me to speak on Spiritual Healing—Spiritual Healing and the Bible, yes, that was it. So I said, yes I would, and I got out my Bible and I got out my notebook and my pen. I started going through the Old Testament … where’s my … page, after page, after page, after page. I’m reading an awful lot about crime, and punishment, and negativity, and strange sex, and this and that. And where is this certain word [that] I’m not finding here? Healing.
I’m going on, and on, and on, finally, after a couple of hundred pages, ah! Eureka! It says, “Healing.” Friends, don’t look at me like that. I’ve read the Bible many times. If I say something about the Bible it is because I know it, or I wouldn’t say it, are you hearing me? If you don’t believe me, get your Bible, which I know you have with you all the time, and start turning the pages of that Old Testament, and you’re going to have to spend a long time of page-turning before you’re going to find that word ‘healing,’ or ‘health.’
Alright, found it, once. Oh, good, good. So I made a note of it. Here we go again kids. Well, finally get through those thousands and thousands of pages, [and] I got the word ‘healing’ as sparse as ‘hen’s teeth.’ But oh boy, crime and punishment, curses, plagues, wow! Lying, wars, killing, wow! Come on folks.
Alright, so I’m just about worn out, and I’m just about ready to toss that Bible into the ash can and the Father said, “Oh Ed, turn another page,” and I did. And that page was the page between Old Testament and New Testament. Now I’m in the Gospel, and right off the bat, guess what I’m seeing over, and over, and over, and over again? Sometimes a dozen times on one page! Come on—healing, healing, healing! Healing all over the place. Not crime and punishment; forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness! Captain karma is no longer riding the range; Christ is on the job, you see? And oh, I was so happy, so encouraged.
So I based my whole presentation on the Gospels and healing. And when they gave me that assignment it was for a three-hour seminar, workshop. My biggest worry was: what am I going to have to say for three hours? You hearing me? I’ll have to go into a tap-dance or something to cover [the time]. After I finished my research in the Gospel, then my problem changed, it was: how can I fit it into that short period of time? And those three hours went by like that. I just thought I’d tell you that.
Alright. Now in our Unity dealing with the ministry of healing, we have three different areas that we pay much attention to and that we base our teachings and our treatments on, and those three areas are:
1. Number one: the curing of specific illness and disorders in the body. You know what I mean? A diagnosed case of this or that, we work in Unity to get it healed, get the body well again.
2. Number two: revitalizing of stagnant energy centers in the body—resurrection of the what? Dead! The Bible talks about ‘resurrection of the dead;’ it does not mean making corpses come out of coffins. Revitalizing of stagnant energy centers in the body. That’s “the dead” in our organism, they can be what? Resurrected, raised. Raise the dead, so that’s number two.
3. And the third and most important is: the maintenance of permanent, stabilized, good health, leading into regeneration.
These are the three areas of healing given serious attention by the Unity Movement:
- Number one: the curing of specific illness and disorders in the body,
- Number two: the revitalizing of stagnant energy centers in the body—resurrection of the dead. And last,
- Maintenance of permanent, stabilized, good health.
Alright. I’m going to read Mr. Fillmore’s words again, and I want you to reexamine the three areas I’ve just given you, and you tell me which of those three area is Mr. Fillmore writing about exclusively in this paragraph—that’s a little game I’m playing with you.
“Physiology teaches that our body is alive to the degree that the cells are alive, that we are carrying around many dead cells. Jesus knew how to quicken with new life the cells of His organism, and He promised that all who follow Him will do likewise.” That’s right, good. Number two is what he is zeroing in on here, but in other places in the book, he deals with the other two areas also.
I’ll throw another little quiz at you: which of the three do you think is the most frequently dealt with at the present time, in our healing ministry? Right, number one—curing of illnesses and disorders, but that’s going to change. See, we want to get that body well before we make it eternal.
Okay. Now here is an example of what I did not understand in Mr. Fillmore’s writings until I had that breakthrough that I told you about. I think you’ll see what I mean here. He says, “In order to create as God creates, man must have undoubting faith in God Mind, and the obedience of the creative electrons hidden in the atoms of all substance.” He lost me there, years ago, because years ago, nobody knew anything about “creative electrons in the atoms of substance,” except a few physicists—Einstein, this one, that one. They knew, and Mr. Fillmore knew, but Ed Rabel didn’t, and I’m sure most people didn’t.
Nowadays, I’m sure you can read that sentence and, no problem. We know what electrons are, we know: electron, proton neutron, we know about molecular connections, don’t we? And so Mr. Fillmore was simply way, way ahead of his time with a lot of things that he wrote. He would write about things for which at that time did not exist the terminology. It didn’t. He may not have used the terminology, but he was referring to it. He was talking about the atomic bomb long before the Atomic Bomb Project was even conceived of! And Mr. Fillmore was often asked about this.
You see friends, by modern standards, Mr. Fillmore—Charles Fillmore, was a very sparsely educated man. He had only a rudimentary education, academically speaking. He was not a widely-read person. He limited his reading mostly to the Bible, Emerson’s Essays, and the Works of Shakespeare, but yet he had all of this insight, and knowledge, and understanding, and prophecy, and he’d get this down on paper as fast as he could, and speak it in lectures and classes.
And people would just wonder, “Where did you get that? How? Who are you?” And he would say, “I can’t explain how I learned this, I can only share what I know. I can’t explain how I know it. I just know what I know, and I’m willing to share what I know, and those who are interested can take it, or…” leave it! And so he never apologized for his own genius, the way I always have to do.
Now, what Mr. Fillmore is saying here is what many metaphysicians are now realizing and [what is] being backed up by a new science called Quantum Physics. Quantum Physics is a science which is now confirming so much of what was metaphysical prophesy, just a few years ago. Mind over? It’s taken for granted now: meditation improves the power of consciousness! And so quantum physics is now verifying what Charles Fillmore wrote before anybody knew what he was talking about, that man’s mind, the power of the human mind and the creative power in man’s spoken word, work primarily upon, quote, “creative electrons in the atoms of all substance, not directly upon finished forms.” Hearing me?
If I pray a prayer of healing for you, and I’m giving you all the power of my consciousness, and all my faith is in my words, and I’m praying for a healing of a part of your body, MY WORDS DO NOT WORK ON THAT PART OF YOUR BODY! They work on, come on, you use the term: the creative electrons in the atoms of your body! And if you do not interfere, then that will work itself out into the flesh.
Okay. So the reason I’m saying this to you so obnoxiously, is to impress it on you, because don’t get discouraged when you’re giving healing treatments and you don’t suddenly have your patient win a beauty contest. Know that your words, your thoughts, your feelings, are working on the deep interior of that patient’s organism, the inner energies of that organism, the creative what? Electrons in the atoms, and that if there is no short-circuiting of that then what? It will …
When Jesus could say to a man who was immobilized for 38 years at a Pool of Bethesda, “Wilt thou be made whole?” (John 5:6) Are you willing to be made whole? And the man’s heart, not his lips, but his heart said (nodding), and so Jesus said, take up your what and what? “your bed and walk” (Cf. John 5:8), and the man could do it, could do it.
And the only reason Jesus would say a thing like that to the man would be because Jesus knew he could do it. If Jesus didn’t know he could do it, would Jesus have said that to him? What do you think? Would Jesus tell somebody to do something and He didn’t know if they could do it or not? He was no jerk, folks! He was a fourth-dimension being! He could read souls! He could read past, present, and future with no problem at all. And so when He would tell a person to do something, He would only tell them to do it because He knew what? They could, they could, and so His words were fulfilled.
Now we can do the same, not in the same degree that Jesus did, not yet, but we’re working at it, we’re practicing it. And you know what happens when enough practice is done? Makes perfect. So we stick to it.
Now one more point before we dismiss, and this is a rather touchy thing, and Mr. Fillmore very seldom touches this, and Jesus also hardly brings ever this up, He just alludes to it indirectly. But a lot of people, even in Unity, wish that we would zero-in on it full blast: the cause of illness. What caused this? We want to know. We think that’s all-important, and it’s not. What’s all-important is healing, not pathology but healing, you see?
But Jesus did refer, indirectly, to the generic cause of most human illnesses and He had one, short, three-letter word, and that’s all. Begins with ‘s,’ ends with ‘n,’ and there’s a vowel in the middle. Sin! And sin means? No, ‘missing the mark’ doesn’t mean anything. Sin is ‘something wrong’—error thinking, erroneous thinking.
Erroneous thinking is any kind of thinking which seeks to negate any Divine idea. I’ll say that again: Erroneous thinking is what sin is. Erroneous thinking is any kind of thinking which is an attempt to negate what? Any Divine idea, there it is.
So Jesus two or three times says to people, “Go, and sin no more” (Cf. John 5:14, John 8:11) and then Mr. Fillmore quotes another one in this chapter where he has Jesus say, “Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing befall thee” (Cf. John 5:14). So it is sin, wrong thinking, which leads to wrong actions, which leads to wrong results, and which can damage the body and the mind, and the life of the person.
So don’t you agree with me, and you better, when I say, the best advice ever given to a human being was given by Jesus, “Go, and sin no more?” Can you give me some better advice than that? That’s the best advice that can be given to a human being: Go, and sin no more! “Oh, but Mr. Rabel, you don’t understand, I never have sinned.” Good, good, that’s fine. Now go, and don’t get started.
Mr. Fillmore says, “Here Jesus again emphasizes sin as the cause of infirmity. All the ills of humanity are the effect of broken law, of sin, and that word, ‘sin,’ covers more ground than we have usually granted it.” Then he goes on to categorize the sins of commission and the sins of omission.
Now at one time in your life, most of your sins were sins of commission; you were very naughty, whether you like to hear me say it or not! You were an expert at being wicked. But now, if I were to say to you, “In order to pass this course, you’ve got to get up and do something wicked for me,” you wouldn’t know what to do, you’re out of practice, you see?
But still, we’re sinning, where most of our sins today are sins of omission: we are forgetting, we are ignoring, you see? Our big danger today is the sin of [omission]. And most of the sin which is still causing illness today are two types of failures—sins of omission: failure to believe, and even more important, failure to forgive.
Charles Fillmore said this in one of his classes—and psychosomatic medicine is verifying what he said back then, before the word ‘psychosomatic medicine’ was even invented—he said, “Much illness today is simply unforgiveness made manifest,” that’s the negative side, then he gave the positive side: “Most healing today is forgiveness made manifest.”
Now when many students hear this for the first time [they] believe it, they can accept it, but they get all worried about, “Well what is it that I have to forgive?” Get it? They want its name, its birthdate, and its address.” No, he didn’t say that; just be for-giving. Are you hearing me? Yes, you be a walking forgiver, not a census-taker, but a what? A walking [forgiver].You don’t have to know the name of what you forgive, you are just a forgiving person.
Friends, you don’t have to go around forgiving yourself because you weren’t properly toilet trained at the tender age of three, you just have to be walking around a willing forgiver of anything that needs to be forgiven! And so you have cleared out of your soul all the congested or hidden pockets of unforgiveness, and you will not have any psychosomatic illnesses because you are walking forgiveness!
Let me repeat what Mr. Fillmore said then I’ll let you go. He said in class,” Much or most illness today is unforgiveness made manifest. Most or much healing today is simply forgiveness made manifest.”
God bless you, I forgive you. See you tomorrow.
{Responding to student comment Ed says, “Not yet, not yet, we have to break the ice first.”}
Transcribed by Mary Salama on September 12, 2018.
