Monthly Archives: April 2020

Knowing The Freeing Truth

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That Old Feeling

The feeling that an all-powerful God is sheltering us in His loving arms while we go through dark and troubled times is a comforting feeling – I guess. Note the word feeling.

Many have moved from the traditional idea of God as a being separate and apart from them to an understanding that God is All. “But Allen,” they complain, “I miss that comforting feeling I got from my old-time religion God.”

Did Those Feelings Help You?

Those comforting feelings of a Savior leading you beside still waters and making you lie down in green pastures, how did that work for you? Did those feelings eliminate the pain or merely make it more endurable? Did those feelings “cure” the cancer? Did they put money in the bank account?

Feelings Defined

Think about it. Feelings are based on a reaction to some real or imagined circumstance. Psychology Today defines a feeling this way: “Feelings can be defined as a person’s response to the emotion that comes from the perception of a situation.” Feelings are always at the mercy of something seemingly outside of yourself. Yes, sometimes even a “God” outside of yourself.

God Is Changeless

Feelings are like weather vanes – constantly changing with the currents of “outer” stimulation. Yet your Holy Bible reveals a changeless God – “I am the Lord thy God, and I change not.” The mere fact that feelings are changeable is a clue that they have nothing to do with God – a changeless God. Changeable feelings about a changeless God is an indication that we’ve headed down a dark pathway toward a dead end. Stop!

The Power Is In The Knowing

Knowledge is power. You’ve heard that said. Christ Jesus said it this way, “Ye shall know the Truth and the Truth shall make you free.”

Do you need to be free from lack? Know the Truth.
Do you need to be free from some hopeless situation? Know the Truth.
Do you need to be free from a dis-ease? Know the Truth.

That’s the power of Knowledge. Christ Jesus did not say you shall feel a particular way and your feelings will free you. He said, “You shall know the truth.” And that truth sets you free.

There is, as you know, a difference between merely saying “I am the Presence of Infinite Goodness” and experiencing this as a living fact. It’s one thing to feel this statement is true, but another to KNOW it is true.

Every statement of Truth you’ve ever read will be just a statement – one that even a well-trained parrot can repeat. Saying the statement can give you a rush of good feelings. However, in times of seeming trouble, those statements will be as effective as fighting a lion with a feather duster. Conversely, when you KNOW that the statement you are saying is the absolute Truth, it fleshes itself out as a living reality in your experience.

Giving Up The Lesser For The Greater

Although there lacks that feeling of a helping, saving and comforting God, you have redeemed it for something of greater value: KNOWLEDGE. And with this KNOWLEDGE is FREEDOM. But don’t be confused. This is not a freedom from some illusory power. It is a freedom to enjoy the majesty of your True nature.

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There Is No Believer In Evil

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I’ve been asked why I never quote anything from Science and Health — the Christian Science textbook. It is undoubtedly a great book. Today I’ve chosen to quote from Arthur Corey, one of the brightest lights in the Christian Science movement.

Problems Are Truth Misread

When you reach the point where you know that all the errors appearing must be truths misread, you begin to realize the futility of handling appearances alone. Stopping with effects, you would fail to handle the underlying cause, so that it is like fighting the hydra-headed monster who shows another head or two for every one you cut off. To recognize that Truth perverted becomes the creator of error, is to imply a perverter.

A wrong sense of something indicates that there must be a wrong see-er, does it not? You may have to first recognize the devil’s lies as lies, in order to see who’s talking, but your work is not done until you have disposed of the devil himself. The fundamental claim is that there is someone or something to misapprehend or misrepresent divinity, and this claim is uncovered by the analysis and exposure of the lie as such.

If God Is All, There Is No Believer In Troubles

Again, to say that an error is only a belief is to admit a believer; and until you dispose of the believer, you are going to have either this troublesome belief or some other before you. You can’t alter the image in a mirror without getting at the thing imaged forth. Effect can be influenced only by way of its cause. The claim in every last instance is that there is an evil cause or believer, and so you are obliged each time to analyze the effect to uncover the fundamental error as the claim that there is an evil thinker and that this mind is yours. In human experience, this analytic approach must precede the realization of Mind as infinite and divine, inclusive of all reality and exclusive of all evil.

It may be superfluous to again reiterate that matter does not taste, feel, hear, smell, see or think, so matter cannot be the complainant. Doesn’t the claim always come to you as, “I see a sick man,” or “I see myself as sick, or material, finite, limited?” What is this I? Surely the divine Mind cannot know or experience anything contrary to its own infinitely flawless and harmonious nature. “Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity.” (Habakkuk 1:13). What is this other I or ego which seems to interpose itself? The claim that there is a conceiver or experiencer of evil is the claim we name “mortal mind,” and it is the root at which we must lay the ax, or the evil will but sprout forth in another form for us.

Are You Still Asking About The Reasons For Your Troubles?

Asking why error exists implies that it does exist as an actuality, and from that standpoint it is impossible to perceive that it cannot really be. The attitude that demands an explanation of the non-existent excludes the understanding of existence. You will never understand nothingness so long as you try to account for it as somethingness, whether in belief or otherwise, for “error” is simply a name for nothing. Mathematical understanding is not achieved through trying to explain the errors, but only by seeking the truths. Automatically thereby the errors are explained away, so that you are no longer handicapped by them. Finding God as All leaves nothing else to explain. There may be an intermediate period when you are conscious of both Truth and error, but you cannot climb up out of this while preoccupied with the error .

Rectify The Inversion

When assailed with the claim that your Mind is finite, material, mortal, counter that with the confident assertion that this that is Mind unfolding as your consciousness must be infinite, spiritual, divine, and that it cannot unfold negatively as anything else but itself and in accord with its divine nature. To see that evil mind and all its forms are divine Mind inverted – but divine Mind – is to rectify the inversion, and to find yourself truly alone with God, and all the hateful aspects of mortality fading away. “This is Life eternal” – and this is divine Mind. Appropriate your heritage through your God-given authority.

 

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