Spiritual Solutions

I remember a time when Ed Rabel, Unity Minister and a former teacher at Unity Village in the ministerial program, was teaching the students when Bill Fischer, Director of Ministerial Training, was away. Ed was taking the students for speech assignments. The top four or five students were scheduled to give their talks in front of their classes. The talk that they were to give was based upon a question: “If you had just ten minutes to speak to all the people on the earth, what would you say?”

Just think about that for a moment. What would you say if you had just ten minutes to speak to all the people on the earth? What would your message be? 

Ed Rabel said the students he heard “Blew it!” Their response to the question was to try to reach out to all the people of the earth and tell them of some great and wonderful philosophical theory. In doing this they did “blow it,” because only that which you experience is true for you. You cannot take in someone else’s knowledge; you can only gain knowledge for yourself.

So if you were speaking to everyone on earth it would have to be something that people could find for themselves, work with, and experience from within their own being. You can’t really tell anyone else how things are. You can express from the depth of your own being that which is true for you, and in that way you speak with authority about your own experience. You can share that with someone else; and you can share ways for the other person to experience for themselves. But borrowed knowledge is not true knowledge. So when you speak with borrowed knowledge you don’t really come across, you don’t really reach a person.

This is what Ed Rabel was really saying, that the students blew it in regard to that. They were trying to get across a great message of God and what they believed about God, but speaking in a way that was not necessarily based upon their own experience. It was based upon knowledge that they had taken in from borrowed sources. They were not being real.

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I have heard some people say that they never feel the flow of inspiration, that they never have original ideas. So, I suggest “Why not take time to get still and listen?” It’s impossible to experience the inflow of creative ideas if one constantly surrounds oneself with activity and noise and a ceaseless babble of conversation.

When we consider the word “listen” we think of listening with the ears, but you really listen with your mind. Listening connotes receiving an inward vibration or response to an outward stimulus, and it implies sensitivity to it. Vibrations are everywhere, and we can and must cultivate the ability to hear and to heed the message of a transcendent spiritual source within and in the world around us. Shakespeare points to this in As You Like It when he acknowledges the existence of “tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.” And, as Emerson says, “There is guidance for everyone, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word.”

In the book of Ecclesiastes we find this wise observation: “In everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven . . . a time to speak, and a time to keep silence.” In our complex way of life today, though many of us pride ourselves in the way in which we order our lives, I wonder how many of us really find the time or make the time to keep silence? Every one of us has a deep and compelling need for solitude, for quietness, but often do not realize this need.

In the Gospel of John we find a reference to “The same light that lighteth every man coming into the world.” The implication is that there is a common mind, a common source of inspiration within us all, and that each of us contains within the same fountainhead of ideas and power that is occasionally revealed by the genius. Only a few acts upon it, but the Truth is that each of us is a spiritual being with an inner potential guidance and strength. Anyone who cares to may cultivate the inner side of life, and release a tremendous potential.

We need to know that God is forever speaking to us in the form of a creative flow, and that we must cultivate the attitude of listening in prayer, in quiet meditation and silence. It is true that many turn to prayer to correct the problems of life, but there is prayer and there is prayer. For the average person, prayer is an attempt to contact an outer agency through which his experiences can be righted. His prayer may be words, form, ritual, in which there is no letting go, no stillness, no inner contact.

There is a kind of prayer that is called “The Silence.” It is inner prayer, not just a prayer of words, but a time of quiet realization, inner communion, stillness, and oneness. And the interesting thing is that all the really great people of all time have unconsciously realized that to make the journey through life solitude and silence must be practiced. All knew that occasional retreat from the surface rippling of experiences into the hidden depths of silence within is the source of the best vistas, the newest ideas, and the closest contact with the great heart of the allness of God.

There is that within you that knows your needs. Jesus said, “The Father knoweth what things you have need of even before you ask him.” And in the Old Testament we read, “Before they call, I will answer.” Has it ever occurred to you that whenever you have a need or a problem of any kind, the answer, the guidance, the help is as close to you as your inmost self? We live too much at the circumference of life. We act and react on the level of the human, the material, and the superficial. We feel strain and tension and mental and physical depletion because we are out of tune. The need is to relax and let go, to be still and know our spiritual unity is with God, to be charged and re-charged by the creative Spirit of God within us.

Man is never quite mature in a spiritual sense until he cultivates the silence, this inward stillness, until he realizes his unity with the Infinite and takes time regularly to listen to the inner voice.

Perhaps the words of prayer we say are not for God at all, but for ourselves to condition our minds and hearts to become receptive to the voice, the spirit, the feeling of the Infinite. Perhaps our words need to be directed to our errant thoughts, our tense minds, our worried hearts – to cultivate the true feeling of “letting go” so that we can truly “let God.” This requires humility, relaxation, and a complete trust in the Truth of the inward reality. We must be willing to accept the fact that our own imperfect thoughts are insufficient, and that of ourselves we can do nothing. We must make a supreme but gentle effort to get completely relaxed, and this means finding the time and the place. And we must stir up the belief that we are spiritual beings, and that when we let go, God takes over.

One important point relative to inner prayer – though we usually pray when we have a problem, we pray for help or healing or supply, the practice of the Silence has no other goal than the refreshment of spiritual breathing. Just as an electrical appliance cannot function unless it is plugged in, so man is inadequate and incomplete until he is in tune with the Presence within.

This evening, as you retire, resolve to spend the last few moments “laboring for an inner stillness.” Become relaxed and still and then quietly breathe some words, such as “There is nothing in my life but God. I live in God, and God expresses through me. Without God I can do nothing; with God I can do all things. I and the Father are one.”

Just relax; know that you too are one with the Father, that the Infinite power of the Universe is your resource, your help in every need. Just relax and accept it. If you go to sleep tonight feeling this unitive relationship with the Infinite, you will awaken in the morning feeling like a new person. If you practice this Silence every day . . . you will be a new person.

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It seems that people are constantly searching for something to fill whatever seems to be missing in their lives, whether it be relationships, education, experience, thrills, pleasures, food and drink, or the acquisition of all manner of things.

The basic ingredient that we are really looking for in life is the understanding that we are spiritual beings; that we come into life with the dynamic to unfold, power to release, love to express, a veritable Kingdom of Heaven to outpicture.

On occasion a prophet has appeared telling of the world within, but instead of following him into the deeper experience, man invariably has made a god of the prophet, worshipped him, built monuments to him. Thus he has been trapped in religious practice that contains no within. The missing link in traditional religion has been inner prayer.

Man has built shrines and temples, has orchestrated lavish ceremonies employing ornate accoutrements for worship; however, this has but fulfilled the human longing for pageantry and his prayer has merely satisfied a sense of duty to pray which seems without life and ineffective in healing life’s problems.

Prayer must be an effort to harness the depth potential in man in meeting life’s experiences at the circumference. Prayer should not be simply a formal act that requires a sacred place or a special sacrament.

How free is the person when he realizes that at any time he can get still and find an inner place of quiet and oneness. Charles Fillmore, co-founder of the Unity movement, used to say, “There is a place within us where there is a church service going on all the time; we need but to enter in and listen.” In this place, the still, small voice within comes forth easily.

True prayer is inner power, the true man is the inner man; thus, the true way of prayer is inner prayer. Listen to what Jesus says of this: “But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” This is Jesus’ ideal of inner prayer. It is not so much words as it is realization. It might be described as communion, stillness, oneness.

Man can live out his life second-handed, leaning on others for inspiration and creativity, at the mercy of the continuous stream of outer problems, or he can live from within out. He can thereby find his own inner guide, having a first-hand and immediate experience of God. We are told that there is a spirit of man. There is that within you that knows, because there is that in you which knows itself to be the very individualization of the Infinite.

Man must start to realize that spirituality is not something to be acquired by outer search or worship, but something to be released by quiet meditation and soul reflection and self-realization.

Prayer is not an attempt to locate God, to find God; God cannot be found because God is not lost, never has been lost. Prayer is rather an effort on our part to find ourselves consciously in spiritual unity with the allness which God is. This can never be severed because we can never have existence outside of God.

Prayer is the key to realizing and releasing our inner potential; it is the key to finding inner peace and spiritual security. It is a means fo perceiving ourselves as we really are. Thus it may be said to be the key to embarking on the role of acting the part of our divinity. Prayer is listening. Any speaking of words is simply a prelude to prayer.

If we speak words but fail to listen then we are like a student arriving in the classroom, telling the teacher a thing or two, and then departing before the instruction begins. This does not mean that God tells us to do this or to do that; the voice of God is a wordless voice. We receive it through feeling and then we interpret the feeling in the words and thoughts and images of our own consciousness.

Man may have hopes and aspirations; he may have hunches or flashes of insight, but when he knows the dynamics of inner prayer he realizes that these showings reveal the inner power to produce them. The key to inner prayer is that we are not trying to change things or to do anything; we are simply trying to release, to let things be done. So we meditate on the truth, realizing that which is changeless and beyond appearance.

Reflect on your depth potential, on your spiritual reality. Then, use the great formula of divine creation - Let there be! Not there must be, or there shall be, or make there be, dear God, please – but only, Let There Be. No suggestion of effort, no strain, no hurry or force, no anxiety or doubt. Just simply, “Let there be light,” and there was light. “Let the dry land appear,” and it appeared. This is inner prayer in its most effective use.

Rev. Alan A. Rowbotham

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The year 2010 can be the best year you have ever known if you will have it that way. To make it so, you do not need to draw up a long list of good resolutions, although these are fine if you can keep them. Whether you have already made some resolutions or not, I suggest you adopt a policy of great expectations instead of good resolutions.

A spiritual law as exact as the laws of gravity, electromagnetics, and atomic fission, stands in back of this phenomenon of great expectations. Jesus stated it in the gospel of Matthew in this way: “Go; be it done for you as you have believed.” (Matt. 8:13) and “According to your faith be it done to you.” (Matt. 9:29) In the J. B. Phillips’ translation we read: “Everything will happen as you have believed it will.” Could you not characterize these statements as saying that convinced expectation is a forerunner of a certain outcome?

What are you expecting in 2010? Your expectations will have much to do with what the year will bring you.

God made you in His image and after His likeness; therefore, it follows that you are creative, even as God is creative. You create your own circumstances through your thinking, feeling, believing, and expecting faculties of mind. Many of the great men of the world have known this. Thomas Carlyle put it this way: “Man makes the circumstances and, spiritually as well as economically, is the artificer of his own fortune.” Disraeli said, “Man is not the creature of circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of men.”

Behind every outward circumstance stands an unseen, invisible thought, feeling, or word – an expectation of good or ill. The Bible tells us: “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.” (Prov. 4:23, KJV) The “heart” here means our deepest inward convictions and beliefs about what we think we are worthy of having, in the outer, as a part of our life experience.

The word to be stressed as yo make your own blueprint of your expectations for the upcoming year is “great.” Great expectations! Make those expectations large, if you would experience the largeness of God’s abundant giving. All the good and great desire for more health, wealth, and happiness, is really His own spiritual desire to fulfill Himself in and through you – in a joyous, rich, and expansive way of life.

Remember, only a happy new you produces a happy new year!

I would like to share with you a prayer, coming to you straight from my own heart. I pray that this year may be a truly happy year for you, a year filled with rich and wonderful belessings. I pray that it may be a year in which you walk in close companionship with God, a year in which you know and feel God’s loving Presence enfolding you and your loved ones. I pray that this may be a year in which the good is magnified in your heart and in the heart of every person, a year in which all of us may come to see more clearly our oneness with one another. I pray that, in the words of Psalms 65:11, “Thou crownest the year with thy goodness.”

Rev. Alan A. Rowbotham

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