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Dynamics for Living
Truth Demonstrates Itself
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[Dynamics for Living]
[Charles Fillmore's Works] [Unity on the Web Home Page]
TRUTH must be demonstrated. It defines itself. Truth is
that which is true in the pure logic of the mind,
regardless of appearances. We can talk about Truth. We can
write books describing Truth, but we must realize the
informing intelligence of the Spirit of truth. Truth is a
quickening, creative energy. Truth is established by Divine
Mind omnipresent, and the Spirit of truth is now right here.
We enter into the consciousness of the Spirit of truth by
recognizing that it is. We enter into Spirit by praying and
affirming.
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Truth demonstrates all its propositions. Jesus represented
Truth. He was Truth. He had but to call attention to His
works to prove His authority. Jesus delegated all authority
for His doctrine to the Spirit of truth.
The Truth, as demonstrated by Jesus Christ, is a
restorative power. It restores all things to their divine
order. Error has torn down the natural world, including
man. Man is God manifest. If he is not demonstrating the
perfect structure of divine life, there is ruin somewhere.
Jesus demonstrated that Truth proves itself in restoring
perfect order and wholeness.
Know the Truth
When you "know the truth" in substance, in life, in power,
in love, in all its qualities, your body will demonstrate
it. Your eyes will receive their sight, and your ears will
be opened; you will walk as you never walked before; and
that poor, sinking, empty spirit in you will have the "good
tidings" preached to it.
Jesus did not mean that people poor in worldly things would
have the gospel preached to them, and that rich people
would go without it. He meant that those who were poor in
spiritual things would, because of their open mind, eagerly
receive the words of Truth.
Truth does not demonstrate its abiding
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power until it is understood. That is why the people whom
Jesus raised from the dead died again--they did not get the
quickened understanding of Truth. Propositions of Truth
must be thought out and lived out to be fully demonstrated.
Many people are deluded by cramming the intellect with
lessons on Truth. One Truth statement understood and
demonstrated in life is worth more than many lessons and
statements about Truth. Every mental process involves brain
action, and spiritual knowledge demands the deepest kind of
thought.
Something Intuitive
There is an intuitive something in us that tells us, when
we think, when we meditate, what Truth is. For God reveals
Himself to every one of us when we, with open mind,
listen--listen to the word of Being itself. "It is the
spirit in a man, the breath of the Almighty, that makes him
understand."
You can analyze God. You have a right to. Men have been
taught that they are poor, weak, and ignorant, that the
finite cannot comprehend the infinite. Inner logic and the
Spirit of truth assure that there is neither great nor
small in Divine Mind.
Man is the offspring of the one omnipresent Mind. He has
the capacity in him to know that
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Mind. He has the power to know himself as the one Divine
Mind manifest. Consequently all men can know and comprehend
God. Divine Mind is open to us through the Spirit of truth.
This understanding clears away all the fogs of personality,
ignorance, and superstition; all the wrong beliefs that we
have had about the character of God and man. When with your
I AM you pierce these limited concepts of yourself and God
that have separated you from your real being, the Spirit of
truth will open your higher understanding.
Toward Perfection
We know that the tendency of the universe is toward
perfection. Everything is striving to perfect itself. Where
does the initial force come from? We say that it comes from
nature; and nature is another name for God. Divine
perfection is making happy and joyous everything and
everybody in the universe. This is good; so we intuitively
and logically listen to our higher reason, and arrive at
the conclusion that God is good. This is the first
postulate and conclusion of Truth: God is good and good is
all.
Can you stick to that proposition in spite of all
appearances? If you can, the Spirit of truth is working
within you. But you have something
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to do to maintain your position. You will find, when you
declare this word of Truth, that there will crowd into your
mind every appearance of evil, and the voices, outer and
inner, will say to you: "Oh, yes, of course, God in
essence, in Spirit, away off somewhere in heaven, is good;
but here is a world of evil. See the evil in the world; see
the evil in man; behold the evil tendencies in yourself!"
But in the face of all error you must demonstrate: "God is
good and good is all."
God Is All-Powerful
Then you must lay hold of another quality of the infinite
good: "God is all-powerful." Now, remember that Divine Mind
is made up of ideas. Each one of these ideas must be
wheeled into line in man's mind before he can put on the
fullness of Truth. So, if we find ourself weak in our
demonstration of the allness of good, we must hold that the
good is all-powerful. It does not make any difference how
powerful the evil may seem, you must hold to the Truth.
The poor people, the lame people, the deaf people, the sick
people, do not disprove the proposition. I know that God is
good, and good is all, and good is almighty. This
knowledge, adhered to, will heal all apparent evils.
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Add this idea to your mind and you will find that a certain
clearness, a certain spiritual perception, and a power will
come to you that you never have had before, because you are
loyal to the Spirit of truth. With the realization of the
almightiness of the good there may come to you the thought
that all evil and all bad people should be destroyed at
once. Very zealous Christians have been so possessed with
this idea that they have given God the vengeful character
of the Devil, instead of the Spirit of good.
Spirit of Love
Right here all Christians should know that the greatest
idea in Divine Mind is love--"God is love."
When the Spirit of love begins to work in you, a soothing
tendency, then a forgiving grace and charity will spring
into your consciousness. The surest sign of the spiritual
mind at work is forgiveness. You will love those who have
despitefully used you. You will see unity in Spirit and
strive to establish it in the world. If God should destroy
all the evil people, what would become of the race? Why,
there would not be a baker's dozen of us left! We should be
like the man who wrote for prayer: "My wife and I do not
get along together; please treat her."
Do not let the destructive idea, the idea of
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burning up in hell-fire and the instant wiping out of all
bad people, enter into your scheme of Truth. God is
preserving His universe. He is redeeming it. He is
educating it. And if we, in our overcoming, would fall into
line with this patient regenerative process, which sets in
just the moment that we perceive Truth, we must take every
quality of God as revealed to us through Christ, and put it
into execution in its right relation in Divine Mind.
Body Building
Truth is a healing force. Truth builds up the man. Truth
restores the body. Some Christians have not fully perceived
this. When Jesus Christ was accused of healing through the
power of Beelzebub, He called attention to the
inconsistency of the proposition, a "house divided against
itself." Then He called particular attention to the
restoring power of God; that God is the only good; that God
heals man's bodies; that God is not the author of sickness.
God is not the author of evil in any of its forms. God is
the author of health, and all health comes from God.
Unpardonable Sin
In Truth there is no such thing as an "unpardonable sin"
but when we attribute our ills
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to God in the belief that they are sent upon us for some
good purpose, we are committing a so-called "unpardonable
sin." If you are under the thought that you have committed
such a sin, just remember that the only way to be forgiven
is to go to God and ask His forgiveness for your thought
that He was the author of evil.
You must get into your own mind a clear idea of what the
goodness of God is, and that that goodness extends into
every department of your being. If there is any evil in
you, it is the result of your own error thought. If you are
sick, do not lay it to God. Do not lay any of your ill
luck, your failures, or your shortcomings to God. Do not
think for a moment that God has sent them upon you for a
lesson.
Many people, good people, Christian people, sit down in
humility and claim that God is giving them a lesson through
some great trial, some great bodily illness. That is a
grievous sin. So long as you continue in that attitude of
mind, how can God forgive your errors and bring you back
into the kingdom? You can see that all people who stick to
such beliefs are beyond divine forgiveness.
Change Your Mind
You must change your mind. You must realize that God, the
good, demonstrates
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good only. Truth demonstrates itself in Truth. Know that
God is the omnipresent good, and that when God occupies (as
the Spirit of good) every part of your being, including
your body, then the Spirit of truth from that moment begins
to build you up. It restores your hearing. It strengthens
your eyes. It heals your lameness. It makes whole every
part of your body.
Do not let go of the proposition that God is the health of
His people. God is infinite life. Hold to the Spirit of
God, demonstrating itself in life everywhere.
That is what the scientific world is preaching today. We
cannot get away from this proposition of the omnipresence
of the one life. There is nothing else to come but the
Spirit of truth. We do not look for another. We know that
the Spirit of truth is here. It has always been here. We
have turned our faces in another direction. We have looked
somewhere else rather than to the Spirit of truth. The
Spirit of truth is in the midst of you. It is in you. You
will never have peace of mind, you will never have success
in any way, you will never have health of body, you will
never have anything satisfactory until you demonstrate its
presence and its power in your life.
Would it not be well to think about this, right now? We are
all striving for some ideal.
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I never knew a man or a woman who failed to have an ideal
deep within. Everyone desires to be something beyond his
present achievement. I tell you right now, you will never
realize that ideal until you go into partnership with God.
You must know Truth of Being. You must conform to Truth in
every thought and in every act. Then you will have success.
Then you will be satisfied. Then you will know that the
Spirit of truth does demonstrate itself in man.
Secret of Satisfaction
Many passages from the Bible come to us without force
because we apply them to a time beyond the grave instead of
to the present life. One of these misapplied texts is:
"When I awake, I shall be satisfied with beholding thy
form." The realization of omnipresence puts meaning,
substance, force, into this statement.
The foundation of the truth expressed in this text is
written in the very beginning of the Scriptures. "Then God
said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness' .
. . So God created man in his own image, in the image of
God he created him; . . . And God saw everything that he
had made, and behold, it was very good."
To awaken to the consciousness of this God-likeness is the
secret of satisfaction. The degree
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of awakening measures the degree of satisfaction.
To be lost is simply to be unconscious of the divine
perfection in man. This state of consciousness is
ignorance, darkness, dissatisfaction, fear, and all that is
pictured by the word hell. There is but one way to be saved
from this condition and brought into heaven, or divine
harmony, and that is through Christ, the perfect man, the
only begotten, the image and likeness of God, the real self
of every man.
Awakening comes from the quickening power of the word of
Truth. Sense man is under a great many delusions, all
arising out of the one great misunderstanding of the true
character of man. The truth about himself will make him
free.
Wisdom must be characteristic of man, since he is the image
and likeness of God. If a man does not manifest wisdom, it
simply shows that he is not awake to his true likeness. One
must choose whether he wills to identify himself with the
real self who knows, or with the natural, sense man who
does not know.
Choice
Men do not always consider that the responsibility for this
choice rests with them. Choose this day whom you will
believe in as yourself. Choose Christ and serve
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Him by identifying yourself with Him, in the face of
appearances that deny you. This course will bring the
quickening word of Truth into your consciousness, and you
will be begotten by the Word and made a new creature in
Christ.
The creature that you have seemed to be will no longer
appear. The new man, image and likeness of God, will become
manifest when you awaken to the consciousness of it. This
new man does not appear all at once. His likeness must be
held in mind in its absolute perfection or he will not
appear at all.
The best way to prove that all wisdom and all understanding
are in man is just to believe it to be true. Coming into
the Christ consciousness is, in its first steps, all a
matter of faith. The intellect, sense mind, thinks that it
could understand if only somebody would explain Truth to
it; but it never seems to understand.
The best way to prove this is to take some statement of
Truth that is not clear. Hold it in mind. The power of the
word will quicken the understanding, and light will flash
from within. This is spiritual knowing.
Believe in the quickening power of the word. Hold the word
in mind. It will reveal itself, for wrapped in the word is
its meaning, and you, being the image and likeness of God,
can understand it if you make connection with
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it in your inner consciousness. By planting it in
consciousness and waiting for its fruit, anyone can prove
that the word is seed.
The Eternal
Anything eternal has neither beginning nor end. We shall
never get the realization of eternal life until we see it
without beginning and without end. Jesus' words are a great
help in awakening us in the likeness of the life that never
began.
The demonstration of eternal life is open to everyone, but
it cannot be made by anyone who identifies himself with the
personal man and his limited concepts of life. Only he who
awakens to the consciousness of himself as a son of God can
have eternal life.
Selfishness has its stronghold in the personal man's claims
upon the things that he loves. No one was ever permanently
satisfied with personal love. Some of its fruit is bitter
and its end is death. This may seem a hard saying, but it
is true, and we might as well awaken at once to the love
universal, in which is perfect satisfaction.
Hope of Satisfaction
We are awakening out of our dream and false hope of
satisfaction in personal kinship, into the likeness of the
God-love in which
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we feel the joy and the satisfaction of universal
brotherhood.
This idea of awakening in the likeness of God might be
carried out in all that we can conceive as belonging to the
character of God. It will lift us out of negative
conditions to consider His power and His strength and to
awaken to His likeness in these attributes.
To be like Him in substance will clothe us with that
glorified body which Jesus demonstrated. "Christ in you,
the hope of glory" really means "Christ in you, the
assurance of glory." The word hope is not strong enough;
the glory is not in a far distant heaven, but within
men--"Christ in you."
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