Peace

This is a transcription of a talk given December 26, 2010 at Kingston Unity.
 
In Christianity, this is the season of the birth of the figure of Jesus in the Bible. But the same date, December 25, was also the birth dates of Mithras in Persia, Dionysus in Greece, Krishna in India and Horus in Egypt. Why do all these God-men share the same birth date?
 
Because this is the date of the visible birth/rebirth of the Sun. To explain.
 
September 21 or 22  marks the Autumnal Equinox, when the day and night are of equal length. To the ancients, this was the end of the fruitful time of the year; the harvests were over, and the first signs of fall were in the air. More importantly, the Sun was rising further to the south each day, never getting as high in the sky. By December 21 or 22, the Sun was as far south in its apparent path across the sky as it would get. The days were short and dark, and so in this season the Sun was said to have died. In matters such as these, every term such as “death” or “birth” is to be taken symbolically, not literally, so here the Sun’s death just meant its position and situation on the Winter Solstice.
 
Now at this time, careful watch was made of the Sun’s “return” or “rebirth,” often just called its “birth.” Commonly, this was done by observing the length of the shadow a stake placed in the ground made; the longer the shadow, the lower the Sun was on that day. It wasn’t until the third day after the Solstice that the shadow was visibly shorter. This corresponds exactly to the part of the Jesus story when he is in a “cave” (keep it symbolic, remember) for three days before he was “reborn.” (This mysterious correspondence is interesting in itself, but will have to wait for another time.)
 
This year, though, we had not one astronomical rebirth, but two—an event that hasn’t happened for over 400 years. There was a Lunar eclipse at the same time. This event, you may recall, or may have observed yourself, is when the Earth comes directly between the Sun and Moon, and we can see the shadow of the limb of the Earth pass across the full Moon until the Moon is dark. Well, this is another “death,” one that occurs in just a couple of hours; its followed shortly by the Moon’s “rebirth.”
 
Now to bring this whole analogy around full circle, these astronomical events just mirror the events—or possible events—in our lives. So I suggest that in this season, you consider that it the celebration of your birth or rebirth also. A new beginning. In fact, a new year in just a few days. But to accomplish such a rebirth, we need to work on ourselves. How?
 

By saving ourselves from harm.

 
Which is actually the central tenet of Unity. To understand this, we need to back up for a second. The last time I spoke here about Myrtle and Charles Fillmore. You can check our website—KingstonUnity.org—for a summary of it. Well, the central tenet of Unity is stated like this:
 
Salvation is attained by atonement with God.
 
There it is. That’s all there is to it. The problem was, I didn’t understand a single word of this statement. I had heard about salvation, of course, but didn’t know what it really meant. And “atonement”—I could use that word in a sentence, but not with the meaning it apparently had here. And “God?” Who really knows that that is? So I tackled these words one at a time.
 
“Salvation” just means “to be safe from harm” or “to save from harm.” Okay, that was easy enough.
 
In Unity, the Fillmores meant safe from harm in three specific ways:
 
1. To be safe from bodily harm. This means externally and internally. To be safe from external harm means, for example, if there’s a mugging on Fourth Street, You’ll be on Third Street at the time. It’s the possibility of being physically safe. To be safe from internal harm means to be healthy, without sickness or disease. You may recall that Unity began when Myrtle healed herself from tuberculosis. In fact, she was sort of a worst-case scenario. Her doctor had given her less than two years to live, but in fact she lived another healthy fifty years. Myrtle taught thousands heal themselves after this, and  so Unity began first with saving the body from internal harm.
 
2. To save the mind from harm, which means to free it from limiting thoughts and emotions that are detrimental to our well-being. It means not getting hooked into limiting behavior. Without this aspect, the other two aren’t possible.
 
3. To make our affairs safe from harm. This refers to our relationships with each other, and our economic affairs; it means being safe from economic harm. This doesn’t necessarily mean to be rich, but it does mean to have abundance and prosperity. (Note that if you’ve tried the so-called Law of Attraction recently, and it hasn’t worked, the reason is you haven’t worked on all three of these areas, specifically #2.)
 
So that explains “salvation.” What about “atonement?” It is at-one-ment, which means being at one with something, being in union or resonance with something. Hence, the appropriateness of the word Unity.
 
Finally, the word “God” has too many misleading and unfortunate meanings to do us much good here. The word all too often means somebody who is far off and separate from human affairs, or is seemingly so. A better term for these modern times is the Presence of God, which connotes something right here, right now. A synonym would be Universal Spiritual Presence.
 
So to sum it all up, the central tenet of Unity, “Salvation is attained by atonement with God,” now becomes,
 

To be saved from harm, we must come into Union with the Presence of God.

 
And now we have something we can work with. But, still, how? How are we supposed to do this? Myrtle’s way was to talk to her body. She addressed every ailing part of her body, sending healthy and healing thoughts and words, never losing faith that she could heal herself. Eventually, she did. But Myrtle wasn’t talking in an ordinary manner. This requires some training and practice.
 
Now if this idea is the central tenet of Unity, and the Fillmores were such excellent teachers, you would expect they would leave some clues for the rest of us.
 
They did.
 
They wrote these clues on a wall of every unity building. In fact, these words make a building a Unity building. Here they are:
 

Peace. Be still.

 
If you want to celebrate your own birthdays of becoming safe from harm, this is how to do it. But what do these words really mean. They are two imperative sentences, so they are telling us to do something. Maybe “Peace” means world peace. Maybe it means don’t fight with each other. Live and let live. Admirable sentiments, but they don’t make us safe from harm in the way meant here.
 
Be still. Perhaps they were saying don’t jostle your neighbor in church. Don’t be kicking the chair of the person sitting in front of you. Maybe Myrtle and Charley were stern and strict: ‘Stop that fidgeting, Jebadiah! Sit still, Mary Beth!” But no, it doesn’t mean these things
.

Peace means to achieve a calm, inner, peaceful state, regardless of your surroundings.
 
Be still means to quiet the mind’s inner chatter, to still the inner voice that constantly speaks, sings, replays, and so on, inside our heads.

 
These are the two essential prerequisites for achieving at-one-ment with Universal Spiritual Presence according to Myrtle and Charley Fillmore.
 
Imagine my surprise when I discovered this about six weeks ago. Not only was this what I had been teaching in my Fool’s Journey classes as long as three years ago, it was the same initial teaching that appears in every authentic spiritual tradition, from the ancient Vedic and Tantric scriptures in India to the idea of separating the fine from the gross in Western alchemy. Now here was the same thing in Unity, although until I had gone back to some of the original writings by Charles, Myrtle and others (in The Unity Treasure Chest, for example) I had never heard these ideas in the context of Unity before.
 
The ideas covered by Peace and Be still are large enough to split them into two sections. Peace this time; Be still next time.
 
“Peace” means essentially that we can’t get sucked into the emotions and thoughts around us, nor those from our past or from speculations about the future. Saving ourselves from harm in the ways we’ve discussed means being present for the Presence, as it were. I mean, this is exactly as it has to be. This is another way of saying Be Here Now, but this is why. If we are filled with emotions triggered by someone near us, and we get hooked into them, we can’t be present; we are carried away by emotion. Or thoughts, as we replay some past event, or project what we think is a probable future event.
 
The practice of creating inner Peace just means this: We can observe our thoughts and emotions, but without passion. We must be an observer of our thoughts; we must be a witness to our thoughts and emotions, and not get hooked by them. We can remember, but not replay. To do this, we create an observing center in ourselves. With a little practice, we can learn to see thoughts and emotions coming. For we always have a split second to decide to get hooked by something, or let it pass. Take anger as an example. We can experience anger from another person and just think, “Oh, that’s interesting. This time I don’t have to get angry back.” Or, we might be apprehensive about a business meeting tomorrow, but merely think, “Oh, it’s interesting that I’m worried about this,” and not get hooked into the worry right now.
 
I remember an “anger” experience from many years ago, where I didn’t think about what I was doing; I wasn’t watching myself. No, I got hooked but good. My wife Pam and I were at a two-day seminar at Asilomar, which is a conference center in Monterey, California. I forget who the speaker was now, but he asked us to split into pairs for an exercise. So Pam and I paired up with about forty other people. We were to take turns. First one would stand and turn to the other one, shake a finger, and say as angrily as we could, “Don’t ever do that again!”
 
Now I don’t remember why he asked us to do this, but it doesn’t matter. I did it without thinking. I wasn’t observing myself dispassionately and neutrally. Instead I got hooked by an authority figure, and did exactly what he told me to. Of course, there was no “that” that anyone had done; the point was we all did it without thinking. (I think I did it. Pam said I caught myself in time, but I don’t remember. I do remember the angry emotion of it, concentrated by all of us together. Ugh. It was terrible.)
 
We are to become witnesses to ourselves and the world. We are to say, “Oh, this is interesting. I was going to allow myself to get angry now, but this time I won’t. Cool.” In the Bible, the figure of Jesus counsels that we should “turn the other cheek.” We commonly think this means he was meek, or mild. A sissy or a coward. It doesn’t mean this at all. It means we are to turn away from anger. Not stick out the other cheek and dare the guy to hit us again, but to turn away inside ourselves and not participate in his anger, or whatever the emotion or train of thinking is at the moment.
 
This is hard. First, because it’s often hard to remember to do this. It also requires us to be very brave, because often we must go against social or cultural norms. “No. Just because everybody else does it, doesn’t mean I will.” So second, it’s hard to not do what our peers are doing. The payoff, though, is that by becoming a neutral observer we have taken the first step toward saving ourselves from harm.
 
The effects of becoming an observer spread through our lives amazingly rapidly. You will not be able to take my word for this; you will have to experience it for yourselves.
 
We can’t become saved from harm if we get hooked into the world or into ourselves.
 
And we can’t do any lasting good in the world if we are not ourselves safe from harm first.
 
The airlines, for example, know this. They say that should there be a drop in cabin pressure, the oxygen masks will drop down, but the parent must put her mask on first, then her child’s mask. Why? Because if she passes out, she won’t be able to get either mask on.
 
We can’t help either ourselves or others from the middle of a situation. You can’t pull someone out of quicksand if you are also in it. You need to be on solid ground before pulling on the rope will do any good.
 
A little aphorism sums this up:
 

Witnessing is the soul of compassion.

 
We can’t be compassionate if we are wallowing in sentiment or emotion. We can only be sucked in, which is not helpful. Indeed, if help actually comes from Universal Spiritual Presence, we’re never going to be able to hear it or access it from within anger, or any other all-consuming thought or emotion. Compassion requires us to be in a neutral state.
 
But what about another person wrongs us with some deed or even cutting or hurtful words? This is even harder. How can we be detached now? By forgiving them. Which can be stated in a second aphorism:
 

Forgiveness is the heart of compassion.

 
Of course, it is not only forgiving others. Perhaps more often, we must forgive ourselves. This is the last piece of the imperative, “Peace.” Being a true witness of the world and ourselves involves forgiveness at every step.
 
The cost of no longer getting hooked is high. The cost can be most of who we are. But the payoff! The payoff is to become safe from harm, in body, mind and affairs. These are things we all want, and Myrtle and Charlie wrote on our walls exactly how to achieve them.
 
So that’s what “Peace” means. Try to be a witness during this next week. Try to remember yourself, see yourself from an inner observation post. Practice being in neutral. Say to yourself, “Oh, that’s interesting,” and let whatever it is go. Remember, but don’t replay. Aim for a steady, inner peaceful state. Try to hold it, and remember to hold it, as long as you can.
 
Only when we can do this can we go on to the next imperative: Be still.
 
And if you’re having trouble, or are wondering if all this effort is worth it, also remember what’s at stake: To become healed and safe from harm in body, mind and affairs.
 
When you can do this, it will indeed be your re-birth day, whether or not it’s the Christmas season.
 
Next time: Be still.
 
 
P.S. You may be wondering just what Myrtle Fillmore told her body that healed it of TB. Here is some of what she said, in her own words.
 
I told the life in my liver that it was not torpid or inert, but full of vigor and energy. I told the life in my stomach that I was not weak or inefficient, but energetic, strong, and intelligent. I told the life  in my abdomen that it was no longer infested with ignorant ideas of disease, put there by myself and by doctors, but that it was all athrill with the sweet, pure, wholesome energy of God. (From an article by Myrtle, “How I Found Health.”)
 
And just to tie all this up and put a bow on it, here’s a quote from Charley.
 
Here is a mental treatment that is guaranteed to cure every ill that flesh is heir to: Sit for half an hour every night and mentally forgive everyone against whom you have any ill will or antipathy. (From an article by Charles, “A Sure Remedy.”)