HERB FITCH 1969 THE INFINITE WAY BOOK STUDY 7. PRAYER
Herb: Good afternoon again. If we may assume that to pray aright is to know God aright, then we may further conclude that to pray aright is to know Life eternal. For, to know God aright is Life eternal. And so the ability to pray aright becomes the very core of your work as a student of God, a student of Spirit, a student of the Infinite Way. To know God aright is the purpose of what we may call our demonstration and the way to knowing God aright is through prayer. Looking about us we see that the world does not know God aright and we further conclude in that direction that the world prays amiss. Praying aright and praying amiss, either one, will determine the direction in which our lives are lived.
Now, if we may take a woman whose son has gone to war, she prays that her son may come home. According to the latest reports forty thousand such mothers have failed in their reports about their sons in Vietnam. They have not come home nor will they come home. And their mother’s prayers have been amiss. But there have been other wars and other mothers for whenever a son goes off to war there is a mother behind who prays and a father who prays. And because billions throughout the countless generations of this earth have not come home, we know that billions and billions of prayers by mothers and fathers have remained unanswered.
And we know that at this very moment all over the world people must be in many postures of prayer beseeching God to bring their children home, to safeguard them, to protect them, to bring them financial aid, to bring them health, to bring them those things which they feel they are lacking. And these prayers unfortunately will not find the ears of the God who can answer them. The world continues to pray amiss.
Now, I would like you to take the definition of the word atheism into mind for a moment and amend it. Our normal definition might read: an atheist is one who does not believe in God. Let’s add to that and let’s say an atheist is one who believes in the absence of God. And now let’s go back to this mother who is praying for her son to come back from the war. In her heart she is saying, dear God please protect Johnny, don’t let him be hurt and send him home. But when billions of mothers have said the very same and have failed, is it not an act of mercy to examine that prayer more closely? For that’s the very nature of all human prayer. It is based on an assumption that is very unique.
In contrast to that woman, take a child who is hungry and we can clearly see how unusual the woman’s prayer is and why it must fail. This hungry child has had a stomach with no food for days and suddenly in bursts his father, the door opens wide and there is daddy with his arms full of food. Bread, cheese, butter, milk and the child sees his father with his arms full of food. Does he now get on his knees and pray and say, Father feed me? Does he shout, Father I need some food or does he quietly assume now that my Father is here my hunger is at an end? In the presence of his Father, not a word need be spoken. He knows that his Father knows his needs and is there to provide for them.
And this mother reaching out to God to bring her son home is doing so because she has not accepted that God is where she stands. If she knew this to be so, would she send a telegram up to the sky? Would she reach out to a heaven that she cannot find? If she could accept that God is the place whereon thou standest, would she not be like the child who though hungry did not have to pray to his Father for the food. Would she not accept that in the presence of the Father is safety, protection, and life without opposite.
And so, the first major false premise of human prayer is that God is not here but there. And although this world believes in God, it also believes that God is not here but there. And if you accept the first definition we discussed that the absence of God, the belief in the absence of God is atheism, then you have mankind in atheism. You have the religions of the world in atheism in the belief that God is not here. And in this belief that God is not here, mankind is committing suicide and has been doing so ever since he began to walk upright on the earth. God is here and in the realization that God is here, human prayer must change. Instead of a denial of God’s presence, instead of a shouting up as if God was deaf and couldn’t hear unless we shouted, there comes a turnabout, a recognition, an acknowledgement. In thy presence is the fulfillment of Joy. In thy presence my son is safe. In thy presence I need not beseech for safety for this is the arm of the Father that stands right here now. And so we are learning that the basic premise behind false human prayer – the absence of God; when understood and changed, releases us from the assumption that we have to reach out beyond ourselves to find this God we so urgently seek.
Now, besides believing God is somewhere else and not here, it is necessary to see how we too fall into the other traps of false prayer, ineffectual prayer. prayer that is totally based upon all the wrong assumptions about God. Now even we, in our deepest studies fall into these traps. Even we deny the presence of God. Now when you seek God to make some form of remedy to correct your bad health or your bad condition of some kind, your prayer then is based upon another false premise mainly that God did not create a perfect universe and does not have the power to maintain a perfect universe. You are seeing imperfection. In other words, you are claiming that God does not know how to run a perfect universe and in this claim you are destined again to fail in your prayer.
There is a certain human ego, which feels that in some way it can advise the Father about things that are happening on the earth. And so first we decide I must tell God what is wrong. I must enlighten God. I, the creature, will tell the creator about the condition on earth of which he is unaware. I am stating that God is ignorant of my condition. And now I am stating that I can enlighten God about that condition and influence God to do something about it.
So that lay or clerical prayer both proceed on the same false assumption that we of earth can acquaint God with the conditions that are wrong on earth and influence him to make the necessary remedies. And here and there is one who thinks, oh, if only I could get God to run things my way. Now again, these attitudes though not consciously uttered, are the attitudes which motivate the prayers that we send to the hole in the sky. And when we wonder about the conditions we want to remedy, we are told they are the punishments that we receive for our miss deeds, our miss thoughts, punishment includes murder and war, and so we have to pick up the devil and let him get into the act so that the real bad punishments do not come from God. God only slaps our wrists. It is the devil who brings in the real serious punishments like murder and rape.
And now we have expressed the belief that God is impotent, God is cruel, God is lethargic, God is indifferent, God is ignorant, and very much absence from the human scene while Mr. Devil has free reign. Although this sounds ridiculous to us it happens to be what is taught to the world and practiced by the world in human prayer today. As absurd as it sounds and as unfruitful as it is, it is still the major method of human prayer: To ask God to do something that God would not have done unless we had sent up this prayer. We further accuse God of withholding from us those things that we need.
Now, I call this atheism. It is perhaps a worst form of atheism than the pure atheism, which says there is no god. At least that is one kind of ignorance. This kind of atheism is ignorance compounded with an inability to ever find that from which we are turning away. When we are praying amiss and repeating that prayer amiss in spite of the fact that it is unfruitful, we are at the same time turning away from that kind of prayer which is praying aright. And so until man, until religions are willing to face the fact that their modes of prayer are not only ineffectual but an insult to God and a form of atheism, a form of mass suicide, a form of total denial of that which is taught by scripture, then man will continue in his false mode of prayer and the methods outlined by the Master to remove the illusion of error from earth will be delayed.
And so we first, now, accept that any time we express a claim of any kind we are denying our individual identity. If you have a claim of sickness or lack or limitation, you are denying your spiritual identity. Certainly, you would never claim that Spirit is imperfect, lacking, ill, dying, aging. But, if you are these things you are then inversely saying that you are not Spirit. And in that claim, although you do not make it directly, you have accepted non-spirit as your Being and so it is with you. You have sentenced yourself.
Now, there was a way taught to us to pray aright. And when Joel brought us the Infinite Way, he revealed once more on this earth that there is an invisible Power. That it can be contacted, that meditation and contemplation were the way. And that the more you were able to meditate correctly and contemplate correctly and acknowledge the Presence within your Self, eventually would come that moment when the presence would reveal Itself and you would find that you and the Presence that invisible power were united, in a Oneness. A Oneness which when realized becomes praying aright. A Oneness, which can rest back in the knowledge that the invisible power is the Grace which is my sufficiency in all things. And then after announcing this truth, Joel, spent the next years showing us how to attain the realization of that Oneness through prayer, but not the prayer of the woman who asks God to send her son home but the prayer of the Christ, which acknowledges Sonship with God, One-ship with God.
That I and my Father are one and this invisible Power of the Infinite is the power that is in the midst of me. This I in the midst of me is the invisible power and the only Power. And as I touch it, I touch infinity and do not have to pray to Infinity. Do no have to beseech Infinity to send my son home but recognize that in the reality of the kingdom of God on earth, the only law, the only Power is the Power of Spirit and in recognizing my Identity as Spirit and the Identity of my son as Spirit, I have cast the mantle of spiritual law upon His shoulders. My prayer then is not one of beseeching but of the recognition of the Allness of Spirit released there by the recognition of it everywhere, including here. I have found that God is not there alone. We have discovered that the church when it banished God from the earth removed mankind from the possibility of living in the kingdom of God on earth and we in our own consciousness remove that error. God is not banished from the earth, God is the Substance of our Being, of our spiritual form, of our minds, of our bodies, of our activities, of our lives.
And now if forty thousand women praying for their sons could be taught the truth, their sons would be home. If forty thousand women bearing those children before they went to war had been taught the truth, their enlightened consciousness on this earth would have made it possible for hundred of thousands of other mothers and mothers to be, not to be faced with the problem of war. If the church could be taught to remove the banishment of God from the earth, to lift their minds and open them to the realization that the kingdom of God is within us and God is in that kingdom on earth, we would discover the praying aright which was taught by the Master, and by the Infinite Way. When we were told to be perfect as our Father which is in heaven and then told that the kingdom of God is within you, we were told to be as perfect as the kingdom of God within you. And finally, Where the Spirit of the Lord is there, there is liberty. But you are the Spirit of the Lord and if you do not have liberty, it is the lack of the realization that you are that Spirit.
Now you have a claim, do you see the paradox instantly? What are you really claiming? Can you possibly have a claim if you are the Spirit of the Lord? And if you do have a claim are you not denying yourself to be the Spirit of the Lord? Why go any further? That’s the problem – the inability to identify as Spirit, the inability to live in the conscious realization of spiritual identity, the inability to acknowledge the spiritual identity of our neighbors and there we have the denial of God, the banishment of God, the rejection of God in the very same moment that we are making a claim and asking for God’s help.
In the moment of crisis, of pain, of suffering, in the fear of frantic despair, we lose the capacity to see clearly and so we reach out. We have no time at that moment for God, as Spirit, as Identity. We even feel that somehow God has failed us, to permit us to be in this pain. But prayer is the ability to see through the hypnosis of that frantic despair. Prayer is the de-hypnosis from the appearances of the human mind. There is no one who has not been given the ability to contact the Spirit of God within himself. Each of us has this God endowed right and within each of us has been embodied the fullness of all that God Is.
Isaiah said, The spirit of the Lord is upon me and I am anointed to heal the sick. Jesus sent his disciples out without purse or script. That should have been a revelation to many. Of course, we assumed that he thought they could go begging and people would help them. But that isn’t what they were learning. They were learning that there is an I in the midst of me that goes before me and prepares a table for me. There is an I in the midst of me which knoweth my need. There is an I in the midst of me which governs all that I Am and knows no other power. There is a I in the midst of me which is self-revealing, self-sustaining, self-fulfilling unto eternity and it is my purse, it is my script, it is my food, it is my wine and my water. And so the way to pray aright is I, I in the midst of thee am mighty, I Am the way. Unless there is a conscious recognition of I in the midst of you, you will pray outside of yourself instead of in the inner sanctuary. Instead of the prayer in the recognition of I, it will be a false human prayer, which is a denial of the presence of I.
And so we have the way completed for us, demonstrated for us, gloriously told in words that will live forever, that I and the Father, I in the midst of you and the Father, I in the midst of you and the Spirit are One, and the Spirit of the Father and I in the midst of you are One Infinite being, One Infinite Power, One Infinite Substance, One Infinite Mind, One Infinite Law, and One Infinite Activity. And when you are standing in that I resting there confident, trusting, knowing, I in the midst of thee am The Christ of God. And I will live your Life. I will pour forth all that the human self had been seeking and more. I will prepare mansions for thee. I am the bread of life. I will nourish you. I am life itself without death. I will live you. I Am supply. I Am all that man has been seeking and I am on the earth. The earth is mine in the fullness there of. I Am the Substance of even those who deny me. I Am the Substance of the boy who went to war. I Am the Substance of the boy he will oppose. And in your recognition of the I that I Am in you, as the Infinite I of the Father, you are released from the false human concept of material selfhood. And you will not ask for a material self to return from war or a material self to have more food, or a material self to have more money. You will accept that I am All. That I Am the Infinite without opposite, without a second self, and you will deny thy material self.
We are coming to the core then of prayer. That our conscious union with God is the recognition of God’s presence as the very I of our own Being. This is so different than a request, than a petition, than an asking for help. It is rather an acceptance of the finished kingdom of God dwelling in the midst of my own Being ever ready to flow, to express, to reveal, to illumine, to display that perfection which is our birthright from the very foundation of the world.
Now, it isn’t a simple matter to drop your cares, to turn to I, and to relax in the face of the difficulties of this world. But, suppose once you know the Truth and recognize the difficulty of maintaining that conscious awareness, that you establish a specific program to enable you to maintain the awareness of identity, of One Self, of One Power, of Spirit being All, of no material universe, of no material conditions, of no apartness from anyone on the face of the earth or from the Father. Suppose you establish such a program.
Now, from the students that I speak with, even though many are dedicated, even though they strive valiantly oft-times there is the belief that if it doesn’t come within the first ten or twenty minutes that if I stay in this thing for another half hour or an hour, it ought to come. But you must remember that you have before you millions of years of conditioning to undo. Even in some who feel their deep sincerity one told me the other day that she felt that she was still praying to a man with a white beard. And I am quite sure that in the back of our mind somehow we are personalizing God in some way. We are still thinking of a separate God. Some kind of a person who is hearing what we say, who will respond. And there isn’t any such God. The only God there is, is the Infinite Self. And it is perfect and it is functioning and there is nothing that you can say to it that is going to make it any better. It can’t be improved. Nothing can be added to God. Nothing can be taken away from God. Nothing can be added to Spirit or taken away. But you are Spirit. Nothing can ever be added to you or taken away.
You are a completed product, and as your consciousness expands to discover more and more and more about your Infinite Self, it becomes clearer that our problem is not to get, to acquire, to reach out for more but to have an expanded realization of the Infinite nature of our own Being. All that the Father hath is the nature of your own being. Your prayer is not words then. Your prayer is not the sound of your voice. Your prayer is not your thought. With words, with thoughts, with sounds we do not reach God at all, that’s the human concept. But we release the power of God in our own Being and it flows forth undirected, un-channelled, un-manipulated and brings into expression those higher degrees of Self that were beyond the reach of the human mind and we find that we are already self-endowed.
The spirit of the Lord is upon us. And just as the disciples were then empowered to heal the sick so are we. And the first sick who are healed are our own Being, our own false sense of self is healed by the flowing of that which we are. We know at that moment that Reality is all there is, that there are no opposites in Reality. That every time we had even thought for a moment of life and death, we were in opposites of youth and old age we were in opposites, of good health and bad health, of saint and sinner. All this was human concept. My Spirit, the Spirit of God cannot age. When was it born, when shall it die? The Spirit of God, it is diseased? It has a broken arm? You see how ridiculous this becomes, when the Spirit is upon you and you are resting in the knowledge that this is the Infinite Substance, the Infinite Being, the Only and you are released from the false concepts, the claim, the debts, the beliefs, the conditions. I don’t have to reach out any more to a God to say, Help me. I reach in and say, Thank you for being here. And then the imprisoned splendour appears.
Now, this is not a way of getting anything. This is a way of living so that if any one of us were to pass on today, the rest of us could accompany him in Spirit, knowing we are all exactly as we were yesterday. The Spirit itself is never going to change. Spirit has an Infinite way of expressing and I am prepared for every way in which it expresses in my expanded consciousness. I am never going anywhere, I will always be what I am this moment and ever have been, One with the Spirit of God, One Spirit. From this we lose our fears and our concerns and we dwell instead in an invisible universe which becomes more tangible, as more and more of the impurities of human thought are dissolved.
As we lose this fear and that uncertainty and this claim and that concept, as we become more and more aware that I am not a material being, that there is no material being, the shreds of thoughts are pushed aside. And the Light, the light which has ever been present, waiting for the density of your thought to be removed shines forth and you are called, Pure at Heart. One minded instead of double-minded. And you are now the Light Itself realized, but you are standing there in the same, appearing physical form you haven’t gone anywhere you are merely enlightened, you know the truth. You are a living state of prayer, a living state of prayer, which Knows thou seest me, thou seest the Father, thou seest me, thou seest Spirit. That’s my Name. That has ever been my name. That is my Identity. And because you know how difficult it is to maintain this awareness, you must prod yourself consciously, frequently. Not prod God, prod the false human consciousness which doesn’t know God is its Substance. And so you are living in a permanent state of dwelling in the knowledge of your identity. And this is prayer; the recognition of Self as the Spirit of God is prayer. And it does lead to conscious union, it does lead to absolute prayer, communion, in which the individual soul and the universal Soul are communing as one Soul and the Infinite is gracing the individual life. All of the clutter, all of the claims, all of the belief in a life apart from Spirit diminishes into zero, the arm of flesh is gone. I Am the Spirit of God.
We are praying but we haven’t asked God for a single thing. We haven’t told God to help us. We haven’t told God what we lack or what we need. We have accepted the Word of God, the I of God as the I of my Being and we know that I being all-intelligence, all-power, all-presence needs no direction from any human consciousness. Why is it so hard to reach? It has to be. If it could be reached easily man would control it, man would direct it, man would mutilate it, man would pervert it. It must be beyond the reach of a human consciousness and you will only find it when you step out of that human consciousness. Then in that self-surrender, from the human consciousness, all fall under the perfect spiritual law of Infinity. It must be out of reach to draw us unto Itself.
So, we have a fairly good start on the subject of prayer. We know some of the mistakes the world has made. Some of the methods whereby it has turned away from that which it had sought. Some of the methods whereby it has turned away from the Christ teaching of the New Testament and has lived in the Ten Commandments of old Judaism thinking it was living in modern Christianity. I Am, which is the Christ of God, is Christianity and it is above all lines of sectarianism. It has nothing to do with one nation over another or one religion over another and it is the world religion, the recognition of the Infinite invisible power as the invisible Identity of all men. Whoever embraces this finds the power of it and the release from this world while walking ostensibly in this world.
Let’s hold our Silence a moment before we have a rest.
———— End of Side One ————–
Ever-present Eternal Life experienced only in Christ Consciousness is the most priceless pearl of all. Reveal your immortal spiritual kingdom to me. Reveal your will to this mortal creature. Increase my spiritual understanding day by day. Erase my beliefs in human karma as I accept my divine substance and divine substance of all. Open my inner eye to truth, dehypnotize me from false beliefs of the mind for there is naught but your infinite spiritual Being, your infinite spiritual Power, your infinite spiritual Life eternally. It isn’t recognizable perhaps as The Lord’s prayer but as we look at The Lord’s prayer we begin to see why this paraphrasing was made up. You know, it is a funny thing about The Lord’s prayer although we have all studied it and heard it and spoken about it, it always reveals greater depths to us. It never ceases to show how Infinite Truth Is.
When the disciples said, Master how shall we pray, He didn’t teach them The Lord’s prayer first. He first took them out of false prayer. We ought to look at that in the Sermon, Thou when thou prayest … I am skipping some purposely … thou when thou prayest enter into thy closet. Now, it should be clear that if we are going to seek God, we are not going to find God in a closet. And so we know the kind of closet he is speaking about should have opened the consciousness of the world. He was revealing there is something in the midst of you unnoticed. And thy closet then, is beginning to reveal itself as the “secret place” where you locate the Most High. Enter into thy closet and when thou has shut the door and again we see that shutting the door then must indicate we must shut the door on something. And we find we must shut the door to world thought. To enter into the secret place and then shut the door to world thought was the preparation for The Lord’s prayer. And when thou has shut the door, pray to thy Father which is in secret.
Now, this isn’t a woman crying out to heaven to God to send her son home. And if she were following The Lord’s prayer she would have entered her closet, the sanctuary of her own Being; she would have shut the door to the belief of the world in mortality, materiality, a life apart from the Spirit, apart from Reality, a life that can be terminated. And with this door shut she would be now ready to pray to her Father which is in secret. In secret means within, in the midst of you.
But the Father is Spirit. How do you pray to Spirit? You see the recognition of Spirit within as her Substance constitutes the prayer. Oh, I Am Spirit, yes, God is Spirit, yes. Are there two spirits? No, there is One. Then God is my Spirit, yes and what am I praying about? And that is the very next line. My Father which seest in secret shall reward thee openly. The minute you recognize God’s Spirit as your Spirit, you have your reward openly because Spirit can never be less than Itself. Right where you are is the protection you had sought five million miles away and the God you had sought five million miles away.
You see how strange it is that religion has been teaching us to do a thing that cannot be done. Now, suppose you wanted to tune in your radio and the little knob you wanted to turn was five million miles away and your arm is just two or three feet, how do you reach it, how do you tune in to that knob five million miles away? You would never get your radio to work and we haven’t been able to get God to work for the same reason. The control isn’t out there it’s in our closet when we have shut out world beliefs, when we recognize spiritual identity that Spirit we recognize reveals I Am the Power and this is how we are rewarded. That Spirit of our own Being recognized becomes our Spiritual power realized.
How does that cover your needs? God is perfect; Spirit is all there is. Spirit doesn’t have any mistakes. Spirit provides. Spirit can never be unlike Itself and so the next line says, When you pray, use not vain repetitions. It’s taking us out of words, out of thought, out of the belief that we have to speak to someone to get something into the recognition that we are that which we are speaking too. We are those qualities we are seeking to find. You are that One that you have been praying to. But by praying to another you have denied that you are that One. I Am all that I seek. And then to end forever the belief that man has the power and the right or the ability to enlighten God; here comes a line that every church prayer contradicts and every human prayer, totally in contradiction of this simple line, which is here to enlighten us. For they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking, be ye therefore not like unto them for your Father that is the Spirit of your being knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask Him. Just think of the billions of prayers that have contradicted this Word of God revealed. All believing that we can tell God who is ignorant of these conditions all about them. World leaders praying to God for peace telling him there is a war on this earth and we need His help to bring peace.
It makes you sick when you realize that the world leaders have not acknowledged the Spirit of God of their own Being, present, at peace, perfect, maintaining a perfect universe. And then you look around at poverty, the unawareness of the presence of God; starvation the unawareness of the presence of God; sickness the unawareness of the presence of God. Lack, limitation, every form of human catastrophe comes down to the same thing, unaware that the place whereon thou standest is holy ground and the mind which insists on denying that fact because it sees and therefore it knows more than God.
Once we have done this we are ready for the prayer. Not our prayer, The Lord’s prayer. The prayer of the Spirit within us; not of our mouth to the Spirit; not of our mind directed to the Spirit to advise it of what we need, but that prayer in which we receive from the Spirit we acknowledge as our Substance. The prayer in which we are meek unto the Spirit accepting its presence, its fullness, its glory listening to the prayer of the Father within us and that’s The Lord’s prayer. It is righteousness revealing Itself.
Now, when I read you this little piece at the beginning it was to start a discussion. For instance we used the line ever-present Eternal Life. We are not trying to improve The Lord’s prayer we are trying to clarify it. Our Father is Spirit. Spirit is Eternal Life; Spirit is ever present. Our present Eternal Life is our acknowledgement that Eternal Life is present and it is mine and it is yours and it is his and it is hers. It is our Spirit. It is a universal Substance, a universal Being. And so now we can no longer say, our Catholic Father, our Protestant Father, our Hebrew Father, our white father or black father. We cannot call one a saint and one a sinner. Our Spirit cannot be broken down into colors, or creeds, or religions, or nationalities. There is only One Spirit it is our Spirit. This is where Joel discovered infinity, the Infinite Spirit, the One Infinite Self acknowledged at the beginning of The Lord’s prayer. And you are acknowledging it within the sanctuary of your own Being. My Spirit is thy Spirit and thy Spirit is my Spirit. We are One Spirit and that is the revelation of our Father. Now we are One with each other consciously, infinitely and to deny it for one is to deny it for ourselves. How can we know this, that the Infinite Spirit is our Being? Well, Our Father which art in heaven. And the only way we will know it is to be in heaven and heaven is here revealed as the 4th dimension of Consciousness. Our ever-present Eternal Life is revealed in the 4th dimension of Consciousness, in Christ Consciousness, in spiritual awareness we discover we are the One Infinite Spirit.
The Lord’s prayer starts out then to enlighten the world that there is One Infinite Spirit which you can experience when you are in Spiritual Consciousness, Our Father which art in heaven. Eternal Life can be realized only in Christ Consciousness. And so we must keep this knowledge as our ever-present light. This must be our perpetual conscious awareness. It is in this Realization that we dwell, That I Am the Infinite Spirit of the Father and thou art and as I dwell in that awareness I am accepting the One Infinite Self to be my name, my Being, thy Being. I am not dividing it. I am not denying it for one and accepting it for another. It is the only Self, the One, it is hallowed, and it is uppermost. I am accepting the Infinite selfhood as the only Being on the earth and in this Consciousness we are living in my Name, my name being Spirit. And now we have already completed The Lord’s prayer if we don’t go another step because if you live in that Consciousness everything else must follow. In that Consciousness you don’t have to ask for daily bread because the daily bread is that Spirit Itself. It can only give of Itself and if you are living in the awareness of it, it is flowing to you. And that daily bread Joel wrote a whole book about it, he called it – Consciousness Unfolding, daily bread, spiritual understanding.
And in Luke it is said a different way. Give us day by day our bread. In other words each day increase our Spiritual understanding. Each day increase our consciousness to know more and more of Reality. And the rest follows automatically that you will be in a permanent state of forgiveness because you already accepted Infinite Spirit as the name of the other fellow and therefore there can be nothing there to be condemned. You have seen the fact that human consciousness is not there only Infinite Spirit is there and you have forgiven your debtor. You have forgiven him his false concepts. Why? Because you have recognized his Spirit and your Spirit as One Spirit and in the recognition of that you too are forgiven. You too are wiped clean of material belief. Now you have no karmic debt.
Now you don’t have to worry about all the mistakes of the past – they are wiped clean. Your debts were your false concepts. Your debts were the degree to which you had departed from the knowledge of Self as Spirit and the further away from Spiritual Identity you had walked the greater your debts. But you are keeping my name of Spirit hallowed. You are dwelling in that Consciousness and therefore Karma is erased. Yes the Karma of past lives, the Karma of this one, even the belief that there were separate individual lives all is revealed as the continuous spiritual Self. All of the parentheses are erased. You stand revealed as the living Spirit which you are acknowledging to Be, your Self to Be.
Now where is temptation? Only, in this remnant of a human mind. It isn’t the things of the world that are the tempter they are the effects. It’s this human mind which projects the belief in these things. Now they can be wonderful things from a human standpoint. But there was a mighty revelation in Joel’s work about the fact that life and death are one and the same, good and evil are one and the same, saint and sinner are one and the same, bad health and good health are one and the same. One and the same illusion. There is no good matter and there is no evil matter. There is no saintly matter and no sinning matter, there is no good health in matter and bad health in matter there just is the illusion of matter. The temptation is to believe in matter and the temptation to accept the evidence of the mind that matter is here and it hurts or it doesn’t hurt, it is swollen or it isn’t swollen.
This is the temptation but when you are living in the knowledge of Spirit as identity, it prevents the acceptance of the temptation to believe in matter as reality, life, presence, and substance. And so you find that your claim of an unhealthy segment of matter is the yielding to the temptation, which should reveal to you the degree to which you have departed from your spiritual integrity. For Spirit prevents you from being lead into temptation, into the belief in material reality, whether it be good or bad matter. It delivers you from all forms of material beliefs; the reason is you acknowledge that there is only one Substance that exists that Substance is the Spiritual kingdom of God. Here Jesus revealed the Spiritual kingdom as the only, For thine is the kingdom. This is total acceptance, there is no matter to tempt me into the belief of good or bad matter. There is no physical wealth, there is no physical lack, and there is no physicality.
And while the human mind vacillates between the two, the Master teaches us the total acceptance of spiritual identity as The Lord’s prayer. Our prayer is the acknowledgement of the ever-present Spiritual Identity of God as the only Life that can ever exist, the only Power that can ever exist and that any other form of glory than Spiritual glory is living in unreality. He is revealing the absolute Truth that God alone Is. This is his statement about the Allness of Spirit. Our acceptance of the allness of Spirit is The Lord’s prayer. And we who do not accept the Lord’s prayer as the Allness of Spirit are not praying aright. We know that to find one person on the earth who prays aright would be a miracle. We all know that even Paul could not pray aright. That each of us finds many reasons why we cannot pray aright. But when we learn our mistakes we make the correction and when we falter we make the second correction and as often as we falter we make that correction again. For ultimately, we will come to the place where, hallowed be thy name is within the precinct of our ability to follow. When we can truthfully say, Thine is the kingdom, thine is the power, thine is the glory and because I and thee are One, the Spirit of my Being is the kingdom and the power and the glory of God now and here and I can rest in this with peace and confidence. That in spite of every appearance the Truth can never change and it will be the appearance when I am able to relinquish the false powers of the mind which try to persuade me that there is another kingdom, another power, another glory, another presence, another life, another Substance, another condition other than pure Spiritual Reality.
If I am impure at heart so be it. If I am Pure at Heart this is what manifests. Now, it is no crime, nothing to feel guilty about when you realize that the human race is impure at heart. There wasn’t a disciple of Jesus who was pure at heart when he took them on and they weren’t much purer when he left them. It took quite awhile and much deep inner dedication.
Now, one of the strange things that you can discover for yourself is that instead of expecting the Spirit of the Father to anoint you because you are meditating three times a day. Realize that the momentum of every day and every century is still moving within your consciousness and this momentum permeating all of your humanhood has created a force like gravity so strong that you don’t even recognize it’s effect upon you. Three meditations a day are not going to offset it and so prayer must become your conscious way of living, so that there is no place or time when you are not in a state of prayer. We call prayer that way meditation with your eyes open.
Now, I want to suggest to you that you set aside one day, your day, call it The Lord’s Day if you will. Make it a day in which you know you are free, that you won’t be disturbed, you don’t have a job that must be done, you don’t have to report anywhere. Make it your own individual retreat day and for that day devote your time to living in the acknowledgement of Spirit as the only Being. To that day give your Self completely to The Lord’s prayer. I mean no social events, no friends, a complete day of solitude with The Lord’s prayer. And I don’t care who you are or where you are in consciousness, you will discover the power that is inherent in The Lord’s prayer to anyone who will take the time to expose themselves to it.
Now, your day of prayer would go something like this: In the morning you will just take the first line. Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name and that would be your mornings work. Now, in that morning you would take that into contemplation and then into silence and then you would go about the day’s chores at home which might consist of preparing dinner for the family, fixing the garden but remembering that throughout that morning no matter what you are doing physically you are living in the understanding that our Father is the Spiritual Identity of everything you are touching. It may look like an egg, it may look like a flower, he may look like a man, she may look like a little child, but our Father which art in heaven hallowed be thy name. The recognition of Spirit as the Invisible Identity of everything that appears as matter becomes the morning chore behind all that your hands are doing and your eyes are seeing. This is a conscious practice that morning and in the course of that morning you would have one or two meditations. But in between those meditations would be this constant awareness of the invisible Spirit as the only Present Life.
Then you take a little more of it in your afternoon. Go about your business as usual always remembering that the words you are holding in consciousness are more than words, they are Truth which must now become acknowledged by you, all around you, in the things you see and do. And so this afternoon you are the Spirit of forgiveness. You have no complexes about the fact that you have any human debts of any kind, that you have any old problems to iron out, that there are still some unsolved conditions. You are facing spiritual Truth and releasing yourself from the bondage of the false yesterday, consciously this afternoon. You are receiving the Word within, the Divine plan in you is unfolding as your daily bread. You are making that your specific afternoon to listen to Be meek unto the Spirit.
And by evening in your contemplation you are recognizing that thine is the kingdom only this, only Spirit is here. Only Spirit has ever been here. There has never been the tree of good and evil. There has never been an evil on the earth. There has never been a birth. There has never been a death. There has never been a sickness or a disease. Thine is the kingdom. This evening I am recognizing that only Spirit has been, Is, and ever will be. There is no other power to be here but the power of Spirit. Of course as you go through a day of this kind, nothing that you would normally do, need not be done, except that behind all that you do is the substratum of Spiritual consciousness.
Now, who has given himself the opportunity to experience that one day of retreat in the Spirit? Right there where they are without going somewhere, without taking a trip somewhere, without finding a quiet place somewhere, but right here where I stand, Spirit is and I am going to live in Spirit this day. And you are thinking, Oh, you haven’t seen my house. Well pick a day when you can honor the Spirit, there must be one and the point of it all is this; by the time your morning has come up to say, eleven or twelve o’clock you will know why you have been doing this. You will have found the depth of your Self quite different than your fifteen or half-hour meditation of the morning. Because now you are not just meditating, you are praying. You are living in Spiritual awareness and all of your questions begin to find answers. Before you were saying, Why can’t I be still? Because you hadn’t done this. Before you were saying, Why can’t I keep that mind quiet? Because you hadn’t been living this way. Before you were saying, Other people get results why don’t I? But now you are seeing that prayer really means living in Spirit – always.
And as you do this for one day, not just a morning, not just an afternoon—one day. You might be a little tired at 4:00 but you may be sure that will be one of the happiest days, one of the most rewarding days and your Father who seest in secret will reward thee openly.
For you see when you are living The Lord’s prayer instead of talking it, all of the seeds of Divinity, which you are, is being nourished by the fullness of God. Capacities hidden within you begin to bud and to bloom – depths beyond your mental capacities reveal themselves. A new you begins to emerge. And you say, All from one day? Yes, from one day because in that one day something happens, something happens and you are never the same. In that one day, you succeed in shutting the door of your closet. Something you have found very difficult to do for a long, long time. You thought you could sit down and shut the door quickly but you cannot. But when you dwell in the Spirit for that day, it isn’t too long before you realize the world is no more with you. The door is shut and then comes the great revelation.
Once the door of the world is shut, you have Spiritual realization. What was lacking wasn’t that Spirit wasn’t there it is the clutter of the world was there making it impossible for you to attune yourself to the present of the Spirit. And because of the continuation of living in Spiritual awareness, consciously, suddenly you realize something has fallen away, the world has, human thoughts have. I am in a different country right here in my own living room. It is the kingdom of God. Something swirls in and lifts you up and says I Am come. All because the world shut out, reveals something that was there all the time. And the mind now, uncluttered, you become conscious of this gleam of Light. There is no way to explain it, something happens, there It is. I Am. You feel It, you know It. And then you know why it was necessary to have a day of prayer.
When the Presence announces Itself, you can never be the same. There is no return to the old consciousness then and this Presence says, You don’t have to work so hard I have been here all the time. You didn’t make me come here, you didn’t reach out to get me. You simply dropped what wasn’t you and discovered that I Am here and I Am you and I Am the Grace that you have been seeking. That name which you kept hallowed was your Own Self. And now I will take over from here. I will show you what it is to live in the kingdom of Spirit. And then out comes the oil and you are Anointed, Initiated into Reality. And instead of talking about life and trying to improve life something says, I Am the Life and beside me there is no other.
Whenever I find myself stagnant, I take my day of prayer. In my mid-morning, I say to myself why in the world didn’t you do this before? Why did you let those last four days go by? Just being a token to Spirit. And I am sure eventually I will be wiser than that and not have to chastise myself, because as we do this allowing nothing in this world to tempt us from that day, we begin to glimpse a greater more beautiful universe than the mind of man can imagine. Right where we stand.
Now that’s our chapter today on prayer and the recommendation that we would like to make. It might fall into a weekday for some of you, Saturday for others or Sunday for others. Don’t think now while you’re in this day that you can’t read a book, you can even go boating if you want to. It is where your consciousness remains that day, which will determine whether you are in The Lord’s prayer or not, whether you are in the acceptance of Spirit as the only Being or not.
And for those of you who have had rough sledding in this work, this will do more for you than for anyone else. It will answer an abundance questions that you have sought to find answers for and it will also suggest questions that you should have been asking. Identity, I Am that Spirit of the Lord and our Spiritual Integrity, which permits us to maintain this awareness is the living of The Lord’s prayer which the Master gave to his disciples when they said, how shall we pray.
You will notice how every chapter in Joel’s books adds another facet to our understanding. This leads directly to Metaphysical Healing doesn’t it? We have seen how Our Spiritual Existence, our understanding of Christ, Soul, our understanding of Prayer leads into Metaphysical Healing. Because when you are living in a constant state of prayer, you will not need healing, the prayer, the awareness of Self is the healer. You have released the Saviour within and watch how subtly then Metaphysical Healing will solidify all that you have done up to this point, so that suddenly you find you are a practitioner, because the Master within you is the practitioner if you are faithful to the Master. That will be next week. Consciousness unfolding now each Sunday is our Sunday bread and we will be looking for your higher Consciousness to lift this group so that as we approach the great chapters on New Horizon and New Jerusalem, we should feel that we have no feet on the ground.
A very happy Sunday to you all .
Posted on December 27, 2015.
