HEALING
Mystical Consciousness operates through individuals while staying impersonal.
God, Who Is continuously miraculous, at the right time in this human scene provides Itself eyes and ears with attentive awareness, revering Its activity. These moments of contact make the healers.
Early in this work, the dedicated student, who goes to God for God alone, will be able to heal and will witness many miracles, for meditation does outflow. This happens early because it’s one of the easier things to achieve along the spiritual path. And since our Sacred Self is ever the healing agent, we’re all destined to reveal the present perfection. Let’s remember, Beloved, it’s a bigger job to dispel the egotism that would settle the new territory.
Reaching the spiritual level is only the beginning of our journey. Clearing the streambeds of our loving heart, here’s a lifetime of deepening yet to meet, sometimes in the seemingly simplest ways.
Freeing God
In meditation, when we realize that this Is a spiritual universe, it’s the preparation for everything. There are no special cases. Float in the Joy and Peace.
To try to take the kinetic energy of the freewheeling endless Invisible and direct It willfully for specific hopes and fears inevitably makes diminution, limit and further pain.
God does not step out of Its place at the center of the universe to accede to our demands, to react to our conditioned faults or virtues, for God already is this center of every being, infinitely fulfilling and complete.
Confidence: God is ever opening Its unexpected way without need of coaching. Drop in. Be beholders, beholding the unfolding.
Bring God to God.
Let God Go: A Meditation
My peace give I unto me. This is happening beyond any virtue given me, only forwarded by any faults. God within loves us all the same. I relax. In quietness and confidence, I return and rest. I feel God’s presence like a robe. God curves through Its perfect orbit. I sigh and let go my grip on God, and glide through trackless ways. I let God open out Its bliss, blessing and blessing and blessing.
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Three Key Points
Three key principles we delve into when we meditate: 1. God Is Being, being this universe, is already on the field. 2. So there is no opposing power, no overpowering: non-resistance. 3. Our impersonal center: The Real person cannot harm or be harmed.
Healing Meditation
When we enter meditation, we turn away from the problem, we drop it. Along with these three key principles, specific truths may come to us that take off from the problem, like smoke drifting from burnt offerings. This process often suffices to bring healing contact, so we’re learning this step first. In part four, we’ll continue round the loop to hold the outer scene in compassion and love, as well.
If faced with a claim of disease or natural disaster, we might start with “God is being this universe” or “My body is the temple of the living God.”
If the appearance is lack, we might explore “All that I have is thine,” or “I have meat ye know not of,” or “I must be about my Father’s business.”
If called due to a strained relationship, we might examine “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and....love thy neighbor as thyself,” or “Love your enemies” or “Love one another, as I have loved you.” (In part four, we dig deep into the nature of our troubles, especially relationship problems.)
If the picture is death, we might remember “Life Eternal.”
Starting with such a specifically relevant principle, we proceed further and further into the holy realms beyond thought.
If nothing comes to us from within, we might begin our contemplative inquiry with the statement of truth that we have been staying with in our meditations, or simply start with the word “I” or “God.”
When we return from our inner travelings, we rest content. We don’t peek to check the outer changes. News of that will come to us at the right point in our growth, sometimes years later, not to enhance our ego but as a blessed reassurance on our journey. Everyone who asks for our prayers is our precious child, yet not an object of anxious concern.
Problems float on deeper currents. Someone may call because they’re sick, and the fruitage of our meditation comes out of left field with their new life work or reunited family.
The purpose of the meditation is not to change a bad human picture into a good human picture. These pictures are shifting metaphors that indirectly reflect the movement of Consciousness. The purpose of meditation is always to lift our awareness (which equals universal awareness) onto the spiritual plane, to re-member our union with this one Life here. Outer fruitage is the spin-off from this everlasting inward activity carried on by meditators throughout time, the gaily visible expression, the artistic production that must result from the Creative process. These signs following are spiritual births into this our growing world.
As soon as some suggestion comes to us, now we address it, “instant in season.” Optimally, we don’t store things up or list them to deal with later, and once released we don’t have to return to them, unless they return to us.
Miracles are supremely natural. Meditation ends the sense of distant detached exile, and brings us in direct contact with What really Exists, feeling It, living It, experiencing our hidden Consciousness which expresses outwardly as harmonious vision.
“Help!”
Once, my closest friend on the path was suddenly engulfed by a swarm of mosquitoes. Covering his head, he cried out, “Help!” Instantly, he looked, and the mosquitoes had vanished.
A very present help in trouble. We have known the real nature of Being and gotten many messages. Then in a desperate moment, if we simply call out for help, as anyone does, our voice rises from the nightmare right up into the heavens we have walked, and in God’s good timing we’re freed.
And You Are God
Remember, meditation is recognition, not transmission. Healing is revealing, says my teacher. Wherever the needy one seems to be, the sick, the poor, the imperiled, the confused, there we find the Presence divine.
Once I heard a woman singing: “I am God and you are God, what does it mean that we are God?” Sometimes in meditation I have seen between Me and the Other a figure-eight on the ground, the infinity symbol, signifying that the blessing which pours out through me snakes right back from them to me, making an endless round and round flow.
“I am God and you are God.” We do not bring healing to another, we do not supply that which is deficient in the Other. We do not control or direct or fix or correct the Other. Rather, through meditation, we witness and embrace the unpredictable unfolding perfection of the Other. As our collectively shared, interim beliefs advance, fresh visions of growth spring up. We may see health where there was disease, abundance where there was lack, love where there was strife.
As wonderful as relief of suffering is, such events don’t happen for their own sakes alone. We’re not content with good humanhood only. As we seek the kingdom of heaven, so we find the Renewed World on earth. To seek is itself to find, so we constantly voyage further, homing in on the Source and uncovering with it ever new metaphors blooming, to o-pen and unpen the perfectly round Thinglessness appearing.
“Healing” means wholing, necessarily within myself, to uncover “my own” Consciousness, for this is the only living Consciousness. So the awareness of each and all expands, not in response, but as the One awareness evolving.
Meditative contact always yields fruitage, with divine intent taking the field.
Something changes as we pray efficaciously, even if we’re not in position to tell what happens. The apparent crisis may be seen to change last. For instance, a horse strains, the rope twangs tight, then the load moves. For instance, death is the “last enemy.”
With meditation, machines or weather systems or plants and animals can heal and reveal themselves---miracles abound for every being.
The students’ reach for healing is unconsciously a search for awakening, a learning to stand firm on the principles: the very contents of our own meditation.
Progress goes beyond being a physical or psychotherapist or a spiritual therapist; we’re released from being a “helper” to communing joyfully with our brethren.
There is no one to heal. Our sacred relationship is divine equality, Oneness.
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Undercover
My teacher recounted this joke: A man was lost in the woods, and he told someone after he got home, that he’d really prayed. His friend said: “God answered your prayer, didn’t he?” “Oh no,” he replied, “a guy came along and showed me the way.”
The Holy tends to unveil through subtle ameliorations of the human scene, muted perceptions of heaven on earth.
Miracles usually carry disguise kits. They slip by unobtrusively, so other people can stick to what they’re working on undistracted, as we’ll see. We float upon Paradox, so miraculous signs can be taken two ways. Since we’re operating undercover, the Only Power likes to have the widest possible effect with the least notice. Do we the same.
The fruitage of meditation works freely, uncontained while exactly delivered, not disturbing the surface of neighbor events.
Each of us, together in a crisis, may receive a teaching at a different level. Suppose a member of our family is gravely ill, doctors keep misdiagnosing his problem, but he winds up restored to health. One of us sees God operating through all the disorder. Another sees that if a mistaken doctor is well-meaning, his intentions help anyway. Another learns in the chaos to be assertive and brave.
Had a big hole inside my cheek, a tooth digging in with each bite. Thought, it’s unbelievable to me now that God could cure this---it would take ages to fill, and it’s constantly re-exacerbated---harder to picture than raising the dead---and happening to myself. Fell asleep worrying, healed overnight---but hardly noticed, such is our sluggish awareness.
We shouldn’t expect thanks for healings.
On Seinfeld, Jerry said “divine plan” just as I read the words in a letter, “grand unified master plan.” Must be some sorta plan.
Great Peace
Forty years wandering in the desert, a process in myself: Every time a new problem hits, the Israelites give up, then the Moses in me prays, and problem solved. Again and again, a new problem, more worry. If nothing else does it, then the pressure of my troubles leads me to pray more deeply. So my meditation was never simply a remedy I rubbed on, it’s actually a path to living in peace.
“Rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you, but because your names are written in heaven.” I give my whole heart to the One I Am, the One We Are.
God within perceives human events, It just doesn’t perceive them as reality.
We’re warm and loving on the outside, while inwardly we’re tranquil before the appearance, knowing it only has power to expand us. So from both levels we take the people who seem caught up in the picture, and bathe them with holy compassion and love.
If we remember those suffering when we meditate, we don’t take that vision as reality. So they meet us in serenity, Is-ness, completeness, desirelessness. Like a mother holding her distraught child with love, a great smile, reassuring security. Our Self holds each of us so, each of us is really all right. “My peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you.” Great Peace.
Calls for Help
We do meditate, and approaching it metaphorically without getting engulfed, knowing it’s a dream scene, we do take the normal-appearing outer steps to kindly help ourselves and others in the meantime: cleaning up, assisting where needed, lending an ear and a hand.
And people phone or write or talk to spiritual healers, asking for help. Prayer is yet more effective for someone when he’s consciously roused and asks to receive it.
Two inaccuracies in early years as practitioners: 1. Thinking we’re the elite of the fleet---rather, we’re all in the same boat. 2. Acting cold or abrupt, thinking non-attachment means detachment, disengagement. To be unattached means to be completely engaged in divine Oneness, in the delicate strength of wondrous meeting this moment, confident that no harm can come to ourselves or the Other.
When someone calls asking for help, why answer shortly with an impersonal mien of touch-me-not? A brief interchange can be warm, unhidden, giving them something to work with, beyond what’s strictly needed. When we don’t buy the picture, we can sympathize all the more with their great mission.
Since our practice combines non-reacting with love, we don’t react to a harmless appearance with fear, or worried concern, or need. If we’ve already reacted, that’s okay, in meditating we just see through and transmute it. Simultaneously, we reach out, embrace in tender closeness the people involved, and love them at every level of Being.
God loves unreservedly, through us, As us.
Our well-meaning, knowing human advice runs smash into a wall. Spiritual guidance involves directing people towards the principles, not telling them what to do or thinking that we know what they ought to do. We don’t try giving advice, which always entails making judgments. Going deeper in meditation is the way.
If we react, we can examine our own conditioning in the light of meditation. Do any of our brothers have aught against us? Do we have aught against ourselves? Is God loving through us?
One night I lay awake in awful pain. Come nine o’clock, I called my teacher, and as soon as she said “Good morning!” I was back to normal.
So if we’re called for help, we don’t need to know anything about the nature of the problem, since what we’re doing is dissolving within ourselves a universal vision of separation, of a power outside us, whatever its ramifications.
Yet encountering the person we’re helping, if only through the mail or by phone, we have unconsciously picked up lots of information. When we’ve been told the nature of the claim, we have an occasion to garner some principles specific to this lesson. Then if (as we’ll learn) we tap into compassion for our shared struggle and honor it, hugging it in the Everlasting Arms, we don’t need to go out of our way to sort out the issues or find every principle related to them.
A phone rings, we answer, no one’s there. A call to meditation. We can happily know nothing about the outer trappings of the Other who called.
God speaks within the versatile silence.
Busy signals (or any waiting, even years) are helpful delays calling us to meditate first.
For the spiritual worker, it’s always a gift to be contacted frequently. The person who calls for help, the student who comes for instruction, is brought forth to lift up the practitioners, pulling us to return ever again to our practice.
While we call our teacher for help with our crises, we can also ask (then or at other times) simply to meditate together to raise our awareness, which is what our teacher is doing anyway.
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Fruitage
Entering meditation is eating an apple with skin, meat, seeds.
Just acknowledging a higher power is already nibbling the skin, while remaining hungry.
The varying tastes of the ripe flesh reveal differing divine aspects: assurance, harmony, peace, the sweet and tender presence of the Guest. “O taste and see that the Lord is good.”
The seeds yield the fruitage of the completed union.
We take great miracles that we witness and lodge them so deep within, that they only remain in the Mind Sublime and we ourselves forget them.
At a nursing home where I worked as a physical therapist, lived a woman whom we took into meditation, who had a pelvis that was worn clear through at the hip joint. She needed maximum assist to get up or go a few feet with a walker, in constant pain. She was shipped off to a foster home. Then one day, working for home health, I “happened” to see her there, traveling through the house alone with her walker without complaint.
This shows that no one is ever lost, that we don’t peek to discover the fruitage of
prayerfulness, that we rest secure about those out of sight, that our reassurance arrives on schedule.
In the loving certainty and self-completeness of our contacts with seekers, we’re not obliged to hold onto their memory or what their problems were. Whatever instructs us both sticks with us.
When God lifts up our eyes, It acts immediately, while our impression of this moment may spread out over long years.
A situation doesn’t “exist” for us until we perceive it, so delay in hearing of the outcome affords us an opportunity for deeper meditation. Then we find out that everything went okay, maybe before we meditated, but we still needed to pray.
The transcendent Now cuts across time. Affecting the past: We may meditate and then hear of a change in a situation that happened long beforehand. Affecting the future, planting anything there: Hiking a logging trail with my neighbor Scott, 1971, recounted my dream to him, which forecast in detail our future families and our lives a decade later, together again in a distant town.
What if we meditate with miraculous results, but not what we’d consider sufficient? Whatever the fruitage, that is it. We do not control and are not responsible. We witness the free, unpredictable unfolding of God, the really new, the evolution we knew not. Our meditation resembles the blossom before the fruit, an instructive sequence, yet all caused at once by the life of the tree.
Miracles occur, no matter what happens later.
Sometimes a person completely recovers, then has a setback to overcome, so much as to remind us, these are miracles, not to be shrugged off as the course of nature.
Sometimes a healing takes place which is later reversed. These signs show Omnipotence to those who see, they don’t purpose to retain good humanhood forever.
“Help! I fell down again.” People raised partway up can sink again. Sometimes in the past this has distressed me, as if it were their ingratitude, impugned my abilities, or disproved God. Rather it is dissatisfaction with veiled benefits (with physical healing seen, when we thirst for awakening), a loving call to travel on, the faithfulness of the questing. And I have fallen down again too. We’re each incomplete outwardly in a unique way, working together on the jigsaw puzzle. Missing the mark just propels us on, our virtues are not enough. While always in God’s palm.
When we’re desperately searching we accept all sorts of notions, systems of prayer, without expecting consistent results as we would do in every other matter. If we drive a car, we always manage to stay on the street without riding up on the sidewalk. This is only natural if we know how to steer correctly. Similarly, when we eventually learn to pray effectively, as we all will, our prayers will always bear fruitage.
Of course, this pattern isn’t on our ego’s terms. On this ride, we never know where we’re being taken.
The real fruitage of meditation is the peace, love and joy that we continue feeling afterwards, the wisdom we’ve been given, and this is translated into the outer events.
We used to sweep up the ocean with a broom. Now the Ocean is being us.
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In and Out the Window
The good I do is never done by me and I can’t do more than is done. As much as I make an effort, the energy to do so remains impersonal; a razor’s edge.
Nor is it ever my individual meditation that dissolves an appearance, even if presented only to me. All contacts ever made operate everywhere. And God within us, It doeth the works.
It’s so easy to miraculously help people even when largely abiding in humanhood, so easy to turn to the Holy, Who ever responds fast as gravity, and so irrelevant to Grace our human visage and the grievous faults we’re processing.
Thank You for sending alarm bells to awaken us. When we fully awaken, we don’t see things as problems. Til then we are presented with various dumb shows, miming truths we’ve yet to fathom.
Do I ever harden my heart and inwardly turn away when someone presents an insoluble difficulty? Do I feel there’s too much responsibility and “work” to do? Am I afraid of failing to give help? Do I doubt that God indeed Exists? If I just relax and soften and get off the stage, I can let myself feel the all ready present Spirit functioning. God’s care is active everywhere, yet this heart needs to let in the awareness of It, and rest floating in the Milk Ocean.
“Like Mike.” The spiritual practitioner stays quiet and persevering in the face of looming defeat. And when we fall down we’re like Mike, as our inner being continues calm and of a good courage even with the collapse of our finite self. When we’re afraid, we no longer believe in our own fears.
At least we know that things are unfocused only because our awareness has faded, and that when we center again the scene will clear---though we’re still shaking! “Yet in my flesh shall I see God.” It IS ever a spiritual universe.
Instead of trying to persuade ourselves that we’ve had no reaction to a difficulty, it’s better to see it, embrace it, become aware that we’re constantly held in Love, and learn from our reaction.
When an electron falls from a higher orbit to a lower, energy is emitted, the sole and simple scientific metaphor undergirding all biological action. So let’s not grieve when we plummet from our high estates of soul, back to the workaday world, for in this way we take the bit in our teeth, we provide another engine needed to draw the great ship forward.
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The Practice of the Presence of God
Since a little bit of God goes a long way: When we leave the deep meditation, open our eyes and get busy, we can continue in a state just as precious.
When we prime the pump, the water starts gushing out of its own accord. We keep our mind stayed on the Infinite til the Infinite keeps us mindful.
Eventually we’re able to meditate with our eyes open, so natural it’s become.
Attaining spiritual awareness means reaching the point where we live at this level through our entire day---not always in a state of meditation to be sure, but relying on the unseen rather than on a material sense of body, supply or relationship. At first we hop up here on a pogo stick; later we dwell here on the slopes.
Like everyone, I’m apt to spend my time with mental chewing gum: working, chitchat, periodicals, TV, athletics, thinking, planning, fantasizing, kitchen and bathroom, sleeping, anything but spiritual activity. But when we’re on the beam, these each and all become enveloped and uplifted within the meditative carry-all.
Throughout the day we lightly re-interpret the appearances, we don’t sit heavily ensconced. Anybody who visited the Beloved for even a substantial minority of the time would be pretty amazing!
When we “pray without ceasing,” we’re only meant to meditate just so much at a time, then turning to other things at hand is also prayer.
Practicing the Presence. A background music is playing each new day: This is really ever a spiritual world, alive and one. And so we maintain this spiritual plane of awareness.
Periods without trepidation, response to problems, fixing disorders, or looking for folks to help. Worshipful wonder becoming our constant sense. We’re aware of the perfection that Is Being.
Run to See the Works of the Spirit
“Run to see the works of the Lord.” If we have meditated, if we are on the beam, then we approach the pivotal door cheerfully and confidently, knowing we find fruitage for our progress.
We don’t run to be there, we run Being Here.
Run to see the works of the Spirit. We greet our friends, we welcome this whole world, with joyous expectation and openness.
Everyone we meet is our family, the cast of the great play, the permeable face upon the whole of the globe.
Run to see the Other. If they’re suffering, don’t flinch, hold them closer; together we have a glorious opportunity, together we reveal a miraculous reality.
And the works of the Boundless come running to meet us.