Jesus Christ heals, by Charles Fillmore, [1939], at sacred-texts.com
Jesus Christ heals, by Charles Fillmore, [1939], at sacred-texts.com
THE SPIRIT of wholeness quickens and heals me. The Spirit of wholeness is called the Holy Spirit in the New Testament. In classical mythology it is called Hygeia. Modern medical men refer to it as the restorative power of nature. It has been recognized by savage and civilized in every land and age. It has many names, and they all identify it as a universal urge toward perfection in man and the universe and toward keeping things going regardless of any interfering force.
We may look on this restorative power as merely the tendency of the cells in an organism to retain their homogeneity, and when we look at it in this light our consciousness robs it of any of the divine qualities it may possess. This is the way the scientific world regards what we call the Holy Spirit. To such a view the Holy Spirit has no warm heart. To persons holding such a view the Holy Spirit is not the Comforter referred to by Jesus but merely an abstract principle that works just the same way whether it is praised or blamed.
But to the Christian metaphysician the Holy Spirit is just what the name implies, the whole Spirit of God in action. In the Hebrew Jehovah is written Yahweh, Yah being masculine and weh feminine.
In the New Testament Christ stands for Jehovah. Jesus talked a great deal about the Holy Spirit: that it would bear witness of Him, come with Him, and help Him to the end of the age.
Do not be misled by the personality of the Holy Spirit and the reference to it as "he." This was the bias of the Oriental mind, making God and all forms of the Deity masculine.
Holy Spirit is the love of Jehovah taking care of the human family, and love is always feminine. Love is the great harmonizer and healer, and whoever calls upon God as Holy Spirit for healing is calling upon the divine love.
Just here, in connection with the Holy Spirit is an important point for a good Christian healer to consider. Do not regard the Holy Spirit altogether as a restorative principle without feeling, sympathy, or love. This reduces your healing method to intellectual logic and the slow process of mental science. Under this method the patient must always be educated in Truth principles before he can be healed. No instantaneous healing ever takes place under this method.
The Holy Spirit is sympathetic, comforting, loving, forgiving, and instantly healing.
Do not fear to call mightily upon the Holy Spirit, who has all compassion and healing power at His command.
Thy perfect plan of bodily perfection is now made manifest in me.
That Mind, which designed the universe, must have planned for man, its leading citizen, a body in harmony with the universe is good logic. This conclusion does not require inspiration but merely common sense.
The religions of every race have taught this perfection of the body but have usually assumed that it was to be given to God's elect in some heavenly place after death. They have not thought it possible that the body of flesh with its many apparent defects could be transformed into an ideal body. In consequence man has put the stamp of inferiority upon his body, and through the creative power of thought he has built into the race mind a consciousness of corruptible flesh instead of the inherent incorruptible substance of God-Mind.
This race thought of man's body as impure and perishable in time became so dense that no human thought could penetrate it. It was gradually consuming the little life left in human bodies and would have ended with their total destruction if it had not been for Jesus, who was incarnated as demonstrator of the perfection and immortality of man's body.
That the body of flesh had within it life elements that could be released and incorporated into a much finer body has always been beyond the comprehension of the sense mind, and it required a physical demonstration to convince men that it could be done.
Jesus made that demonstration, and some of His followers were convinced that the body with which He appeared to them after the Crucifixion was the identical body that suffered on the cross. Thomas, for example, was allowed critically to examine that body for the marks and wounds of the cross, and he found them and was convinced.
But the majority still doubted and do so to this day. Not understanding that the body that Jesus occupied for the thirty-three years of His earthly incarnation could be transformed into an imperishable body, they have assumed that Jesus really died on the cross and went to heaven where God gave Him a glorious body. There is no foundation for this in the facts given in the New Testament.
"God is Spirit," said Jesus. "Know ye not that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you, which ye have from God?" wrote Paul. Here are two statements by accepted authorities on fundamental Christian principles. If God is Spirit and He dwells in man's body, that body must have within it certain spiritual principles. Here modern science comes to the rescue of primitive Christianity, telling us that the atoms that compose the cells of our body have within them electrical units that, released, can change the whole character of the organism. Jesus had attained an understanding of the law that releases these electrical units, and He knew before the Crucifixion that He could thus make His body unkillable; which He did.
When Elohim God created man in His likeness,
He imprinted upon man's supermind two body pictures: first the picture of a natural body, and secondly the picture of a spiritual body. In the primal cell He then inclosed the elements necessary to the building of the natural and the spiritual body; that is, electricity on the inside and flesh on the outside. Then to man was given dominion and authority over these living atoms and cells out of which he must build mind and body into visibility. As God created man, His image and likeness, by the power of His word so man, God's image and likeness, projects his body by the same power.
Our physical bodies are carried in our minds as thought and they obediently reflect every mental attitude. When in the course of our evolution we discern that an allwise Creator must have designed perfection for all His creation and we begin to affirm that perfection, then the transformation from the natural to the spiritual body begins, and it continues until our body is wholly regenerated and appears objectively in its divine perfection.
Thou art the strength of my life, and I am made whole.
The mighty truth that everything in this universe is the product of thought few persons let sink deeply into their minds. Mankind have wandered in thought so far from the parent Mind that they do not reflect or observe that everything they do originates in mind. A very little observation and reflection will convince anyone that mind acts on matter in every part of life. The story of creation begins in the
first chapter of the Bible with God's command that the dry land appear. Then in the second chapter Jehovah God formed man out of the dust of the ground. Not only here in the beginning do we find mind molding matter; all through the Bible runs the same story. Jesus said of His body that He could raise it up.
When the truth dawns on man that mind rules matter in both the great and the small, he has the explanation of myriad mysteries, strange episodes, reputed miracles. This great truth that mind is the source and moving factor in all creation would, if studied and practiced, prove of tremendous worth to religion, science, and art. Jesus taught the supremacy of mind in many illustrations, but His followers have not understood the metaphysical significance because they have not analyzed the mind or directly applied its spiritual powers. When Jesus said that the Father was within Him and that the words He spoke were not His but the Father's, He must have referred to God as an interpenetrating mind.
Everything in this universe has both its mental and its physical side. Heaven and earth are parallel everywhere. Even the so-called elemental forces of nature are dual. Our men of science are puzzled because light sometimes appears as waves in space and again as particles. To a metaphysician the waves express the mind and the particles the matter. When Jesus walked on the water He blended His mind with the mind of the water and it obeyed His concentrated
will.
Nature's mind is always the servant of man's mind when man lifts his thoughts to Spirit. Nature will even obey a determined will on an inferior plane of consciousness. Concentration of will as practiced by metaphysicians of the Orient, African witch doctors, and a horde of occult adepts bears testimony to the power of the mind to manipulate matter visible and invisible.
It is reported that a great philosopher, Herbert Spencer, once said substantially that he would gladly turn his life over to any creative force that would plan and carry it forward without his having to take any responsibility.
Because of the many blunders that the natural man makes in his life, such a shifting of responsibility would be popular on the part of many who have ideals that they are unable to fulfill because they are bound by material limitations. Also in the secret recesses of all of us there lurks the conviction that there is a power somewhere that may be invoked to show us a hidden way into the city of success. We think we should willingly follow any path in life if we were sure that we were being led by the hand of supreme wisdom.
In his famous soliloquy Hamlet heaps up the measure of the burdens of life with the subtle argument that they could be shifted by death:
Spiritual insight reveals that Hamlet is right. We cannot escape life's experiences, be they ever so rough, by fleeing to another environment. All the conditions in this world have been constructed by the people who inhabit the world, and each individual is a builder of it and personally responsible for his immediate environment.
It is the mind that makes the man, and the mind and the thoughts of the mind endure even though the body be dissolved. So let no man think that he can escape the creations of his mind by breaking the physical chains that bind him to the earth. Nor does death in any of its phases relieve him of the states of mind that dominated him at the time of passing. The law of God is not mocked at any time or under any circumstances. "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." What we have sown in the flesh we shall reap in the flesh unless we repent, change our minds. When we do repent, we shall break mortal thoughts and ascend into a spiritual thought
realm, the kingdom of God. This ascension we do not attain by dying physically but by dying to ill thoughts and living in true, good thoughts while still in the flesh. "Yet in my flesh shall I see God."
"The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us," says John in the very first chapter of his gospel.
Of all the great spiritual teachers of the ages Jesus has given us the most vivid and vital evidence of God as Father and guide. We say as Philip did, "Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us." The disciples were looking for a flesh-and-blood God. Do not the majority of Christians today look forward to seeing sometime, somewhere, a flesh-and-blood God sitting on a throne? Jesus replied, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father."
He then explained that He was in the Father and the Father in Him. Yet His listeners did not understand, because they had not been trained to think metaphysically. God is Spirit, omnipresent Spirit-mind; and in Him "we live, and move, and have our being."
That God is the animating principle of all creation is not a new or startling teaching. It has been the conclusion of thinking minds ever since the birth of logic, and it will never be discarded so long as the faculty of logic continues to be exercised. Where there is an effect there must be a cause, and no amount of sophistry will erase the straight line from premise to conclusion. Timid men will cry pantheism
and scare both themselves and others with a bugaboo they do not understand. Nevertheless the fact remains that intelligence and design and all the other evidences of an omnipresent planning Mind are so palpable in us and the world about us that we cannot boast of our sanity and at the same time deny them.
When logic presents these mighty truths to us and we begin to turn our attention to the omnipresent principle eternally active and flashing its presence into us and the whole universe, we awaken within ourselves a consciousness of it, and it begins to think and plan through us. This is the first movement of Omnipresence, creating man as a self-conscious replica of itself, that is, of God. This replica is the Son of God or Christ, the exact reproduction in miniature of the mighty cosmic Mind. When this man of cosmic Mind arrives at full manifestation of Himself in habitation and place, we have Jesus Christ, the Son of God or God glorified in man. Jesus in ecstasy beholding this climax exclaimed "Glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was."
So if we have not begun our glorification by realizing this quickening life within, let us commence right now to recognize it in thought and word. James Russell Lowell wrote, "It may be that the longing to be so helps make the soul immortal." A great truth, spoken by a great man. Desire from within shoots a ray of energy from the imprisoned I AM to the all-infolding Spirit, and a thread of golden light unites
parent and child. Darwin taught that desire for light in the protoplasmic cell shot a ray from its center to its surface and formed the primary eye. If this be true, and it seems logical, it is possible for us to animate the thirty-nine trillion cells estimated by Doctor Crile to be present in the body and eventually make them all luminous, as did Jesus. Thus science is revealing to us the movements of mind in forming the primary or physical body, which by the quickening of the Spirit is raised to the glorified immortal body.
We should not lose sight of the fact that the completion of this glorified body that God has planned for us devolves on us. We must become conscious of God-Mind and co-operate with it in making His plan manifest in us. As Jesus said, "My Father worketh even until now, and I work."
The childlike simplicity of this primary work seems so insignificant that great men who have delved into philosophy and worked with weighty intellectual problems deem it beneath them to become as a little child and concentrate their thoughts on nursery rhymes. They do not realize that instead of molding and animating the cells of their bodies they have projected their thoughts outwardly in speculating about the universe and its laws. So the cells left to themselves gradually starve for want of mind stimulation and finally die.
If you, dear reader, have attained eminence in some earthly field of action and yet have not demonstrated health, it may be that you need to take sound
words in some simple form and go unto your Lord.
The Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus dwells in me, and I am made whole.
Paul wrote, "But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwelleth in you, he that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead shall give life also to your mortal bodies through his Spirit that dwelleth in you."
Few Christians realize the vital truth in this statement by Paul, although it is but one of many of like character to be found in his writings. Paul taught that what Spirit did for Jesus it would do for all who follow Him and adopt His methods of spiritual self-development.
Jesus claimed like results for His followers. In Matthew 19:28 it is written, "Verily I say unto you, that ye who have followed me, in the regeneration when the Son of man shall sit on the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel."
The promises of the power of Spirit to transform man from a mortal to an immortal state are producing a great company of spiritual-minded persons in the world today who work in the silence and speak but little about their heavenly experiences. In this way Spirit is forming a mighty Christian army that, when the need arises, will come out of its obscurity and save our civilization from extinction.
Although these spiritually quickened souls, often widely separated, may be working alone, they are bound together by the Holy Spirit, and the bond of
brotherhood that unifies them is far more enduring than any human relationship. They are developing latent faculties of the soul that will make them superpowered men and women.
In order to establish and perpetuate the new order of life that is being poured into earth's mental atmosphere from on high it is absolutely essential that a people be prepared who can make use of the finer forces of the mind. The great initial outpouring of Spirit took place at the Pentecostal baptism more than nineteen centuries ago. The few who received this primal baptism are the seed from which has sprung a multitude. The trillions of cells forming the body of Jesus swim in omnipresence awaiting our appropriation. They are the living, quickening seeds of new life.
I am strengthened and healed by the power of the Spirit in the inner man.
We all need a better acquaintance with that phase of creative Mind that reveals and forms a connecting link between the Most High and the mind of the natural man. Most of us have not made conscious contact with the Spirit within but are thinking and acting in the outer crust of our being. Consequently we cannot hold communion with God in His omnipotence but must have a mediator or equalizer of the light and power that proceeds from the originating source of existence.
This is illustrated in high-powered electric systems: a transformer is necessary to lower the voltage and adapt it to the capacity of small industrial
motors. If the full current from one of the big electric cables were turned directly into our small motors it would burn them up.
If the full current of God life were turned directly into the ordinary man's nervous system, it would destroy it. An equalizer has been provided--the Holy Spirit or Spirit of truth--through Jesus Christ.
Our human family has lost contact with the Spirit of truth, and our only salvation is through a soul strong enough to re-establish the connection. Jesus Christ released the electric atoms in His body and formed a conduit in the ether through which divine life is again flowing to the inhabitants of this planet. Without this purified life substance we should be unable to receive life or any message direct from God.
In John 14:16 Jesus said, "And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth: whom the world cannot receive." Again in John 16:14 He makes His identity with the Spirit of truth stronger: "He shall glorify me: for he shall take of mine, and shall declare it unto you."
All who have faith enough to believe these things are comforted and guided by the Spirit of truth. Read John 17:20: "Neither for these only do I pray, but for them also that believe on me through their word."
It is the Spirit of truth that talks to us in dreams, visions, and inner urges. The more we acknowledge
the Spirit as our indwelling inspiration and life the stronger its consciousness will be to us.
Through the Spirit of truth God moves the whole creation; hence any man may constantly increase his understanding of the source and relation of all things by claiming his unity with the Spirit of truth.