WITNESSING THE WHOLE WORLD

 

 

    The purpose of meditation is to consciously experience the sacred Presence. And in the Renewed World we’re now exploring, we’re getting acquainted with the Presence in all our encounters.

    As we learn to contact the I without desire, and raise up these claims of alien powers that continually hit up against us personally, then the challenges of those around us, we eventually find that we’re praying for the whole world at once. Global events are endured within each soul, we pool our efforts, for we are all One Life. We don’t go home alone. The lifting tide within our own awareness is lifting all ships. A little heaven leavens the whole loaf.

    So it becomes very helpful that we follow the news and practice healing for the world, just as we do for our personal circle. Daily if possible, as Mary Baker Eddy recommended. Those fearsome appearances aren’t dangerous; they’re our terrified mass psyche reaching out to the beckoning messiah, working our way along the caduceus, through all our schoolwork problems.

 

    

    We take principles into meditation; all our contemplating leads to that meeting ground beyond the mind. As always, we pray not to change the appearance world, but to feel the invisible Spirit. This union brings peace beyond understanding.

    Some key principles we delve into when working for the world: This is a spiritual universe; a world of great peace, holy beauty, and flowing superabundance; God is Being now; nothing to resist, everything to praise; I salute the problematic angel that brings to life the further implications of a principle. And enfolding it all, realizing that We awaken universally.

    For a threat to the environment or a disease, we might know There’s no material law. (Contemplation may be in images, not words.This is often so with Nature.) For economic crises, the principle of providing, that Divine Substance pours out into circulation from within us.

    For wars and violence and group hatreds: Principles of the Oneness of Life and Divine Relationship. No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper---With him is only an arm of flesh. Groups only imagine walls between them; “For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us.” Let’s remember the key steps in loving meditation: Impersonalizing, forgiving, compassionately honoring our painful tasks, all leading to loving our enemy.

 

 

    The news tempts us, but its anguish is no worse than what we ourselves have gone through en route to spiritual Consciousness. And now that we’ve been lifted up within the joyous realm of contact, we meditators are shown the world passing into the same sphere.

 

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    A plane crashes in the East, and I think, what does it have to do with me? Then: A friend’s brother was killed. We are intimately linked to every distant news event, all closely interwoven even when it’s not apparent, in formed ways as well as by our oneness outside form.

    After we have a reaction such as this, we let God’s love release us from guilt. We hear it as an alarm bell alerting us again to go deeper.

 

 

    We may be witnessing the whole world, when the smallest thing will cross our mind to be healed. The cry for help in the news reaches us like the cry of our students, relatives, or neighbors. International difficulties are the same size as theirs, of the same importance, no harder to see through.

    “Importance” as perspective. The nearby problem looms as large before us as the world-shaking problem thousands of miles away. So the metaphors are equally large within our personal myth. Microcosm, macrocosm.

    Praying for the world has the same “importance” as living out as God in action: helping a neighbor, or doing household chores, or a child’s play. And what remains central and all-encompassing is changing my own awareness, the only gateway that there is onto this scene. Allowing God in, forgiving and loving me, is the bedrock of our outflow, of global salvation.

 

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Principle: All Things Work Together for Good

 

    Invisible intent is so ungraspably subtle and wondrous. Everyone’s path is equally valuable, the healer, the sufferer, the doubter, the credulous. We help each other up the ladder by turns. The receiver helps the giver.

    As we meditate consistently, we’re divested of our old prejudice. Sometimes unknown purposes are fulfilled by the “worse” man coming to power.

    Not “May the best man win,” nor “May the blest man win.” It doesn’t matter who’s won, only Who’s One.

    People who are metaphysically minded can see, for example, that the emergence of fundamentalist movements, complementing our path, is part of humanity’s awakening. A bird with only one wing would promptly tailspin from the sky. All things work together for good.

    “The government shall be upon His Shoulder:”

    Watching the news, we step back from our judgments, our blaming, our smartness. We hop out of our sankaric, conditioned ruts. We impersonalize and we extend compassion. We surpass our sense that good must be done in a material way, we stop running from fire to ire. In rest we realize the One goodness in our billions of moving parts. Prayer raises all lives towards unveiled awareness; other tangible fruits are the added expressions. Trust, forgive, come in again.

    Resist not evil. Non-judgment. There ain’t no right positions on the issues. Each has justification within its karma and context, and spiritual purpose behind it. The two sides represent a divided opinion within the human mind, which is my mind as well as everyone else’s. While we’re wanting to be generous and non-violent, a part of us guards against trying to walk on the water prematurely.

    When we take one side, we’re creating an enemy within our own Self. So we embrace both parts of ourselves. When we suspend judgment, we’re rising to a higher level and stepping out of the maze, onto its top.

    When I start to criticize or hold opinions, I develop the ear to hear that this is humanhood talking, so it’s an automatic feedback system. An edge saying, “Step back.” Then I don’t have to solve the problem, and I myself never could untwist this sense of separation. I just drop it into meditation and begin to witness the clarifying processes of God’s love.

 

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    1986: Reported on the radio, explosions ripping through war-racked San Salvador. Could this picture totally dissolve, to reveal divine cooperation in this very place? Upshot: It was an earthquake; enemy Nicaragua was sending the city help and local rebels called a ceasefire. While material eyes record mere disaster, Omniscience whispers to us with boundless ingenuity.

 

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Maintaining Our Spiritual Awareness

 

    Many items of the day might relate for instance to economic struggles, like those jewels sewn on the one fabric of Indra’s net, each containing all the other jewels in reflection. So a single great principle realized in contemplation nets them all.

    Three broad areas I have customarily taken in: the imaginary lines drawn between groups; the global economy; the environment.

    And with increased busyness in our spiritual activity, we see miracles open up from our basic state of Being Now, a relaxing, rather than a specific focusing-in all the time. (Being specific still applies wherever the situation invites it, disturbing us til we delve into certain principles, to return Home.) The same holds right around us as in working for the world.

    Abide in Me, and I in you---we don’t wait for a problem before meditating. Then claims approach and we simply don’t buy into them, we experience the loving Presence and don’t have to “work” on the claims.

    So in praying for the entire world, we’re sometimes brought to the point where we can be still, abide, and let the so-called problems bring themselves up in an orderly, self-effacing manner for God’s resolution and benediction.

 

 

    The fact that global events can be changed by prayer, in the same way as a personal picture, shows that our world as a whole will climb the rung of spiritual awareness just as we singly are handed up.

    None of us has fully ascended individually, and so our world as a whole has not completely overturned. Just as we ourselves are being advanced, the totality of unified Life is progressing in good timing towards enlightenment. This awakening is the only object of our prayer.

    But it’s never yet been seen! Well, that’s why we’re here, now (always here, now), gathered together to shed such doubts and leap across once and for all.

    We may live for a time in a pocket of tranquility, but we have no island paradise, for the entirety of awareness moves to turn. The pocket of peace isn’t just a prefigurement, it’s a teaching device, a refilling station, another synthesis of opponents, above all a world made new. The Consciousness of one is totally at peace as the One Consciousness is totally at peace, uplifted. The whole world secretly shares such moments.

    We don’t pray for a Renewed World, prayer is a Renewed World.

 

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    A meditation circle, of seekers who’ve learned to pray: Disasters sometimes erupt in synchrony with our meetings. Unconscious material expelled from our mass psyche to be optimally seen through.

    Or sometimes we meditators are removed from a situation---we aren’t contacted, we don’t hear the news, or we just don’t do the work. These lapses in communication are meant to happen so. No blame. We bear no responsibility. While we do the best we can, God is carrying us, and really does it all. Nothing needs healing.

 

The Hologram of Meditators

 

    From a shred of a hologram, the entire picture can be reproduced. When people worldwide are taking in a problem, every solitary worker who’s opened to that inner divine contact is as necessary as if he alone had beheld it.

    That’s one person in the Room.

    If several people are in the room (or together in our intent, since we’re strewn broadly like the leaven), in a group together, then this roomful, our cosmos of the moment, is likewise witnessing the unveiling of this spiritual universe. It’s not that we add up to a greater quantity of energy than a lone worker, it’s another principle at work: the crowning mission of Sacred Relationship within Oneness....