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Jesus Christ Heals
Chapter 12
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[Jesus Christ Heals]
[Charles Fillmore's Works] [Unity on the Web Home Page]
Chapter XII
Holy Spirit Fulfills the Law
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.
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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.
"Who forgiveth all thine iniquities;
Who healeth all thy diseases."
Do not fear to call mightily upon the Holy Spirit, who has
all compassion and healing power at His command.
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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.
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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,
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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
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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
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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.
"I sow no seeds of care and strife;
But those of love, and joy, and life."
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:
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
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The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
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
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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."
"God lives in me; no more I pine;
For love, and health, and joy are mine."
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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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