Welcome to a place of peace. You can lounge in your favorite kind of chair or just perch on a bench and stare out to sea, enjoying the beautiful range of changing colors and the soothing sounds of the surf on the shore. You can smell a slight tang of seaweed, almost taste the salt, and feel the freshening breeze on your cheek and ruffling your hair. Sea air invigorates and energizes; it is healing.
You can set aside anything that has been burdening you, be it health challenges, wealth challenges, or relationship challenges. Place it to one side like an old suitcase. You can always pick it up later, if you choose. And you can know that in a sacred place, a place where it is easy to feel God's presence, problems are not so much solved as dissolved. You return to the everyday world "with sturdier limbs and brighter brain". For now, just step aside, relax, and let God work in you and in the situation.
The pounding of the breakers pounds the tension out of your body. The scent of blossoms delights you. The sea air renews your mind and spirit. Rest in the now. Let go, and let God. . . .
Come back as often as you like to refresh your mind, body, and spirit.
Healing at a Distance
Healer Agnes Sanford believed that it was preferable to heal by laying hands on the patient rather than trying to heal at a distance. She points out that Jesus most of the time did not heal at a distance. However, in her first book, The Healing Light, she also admits that for a long time she did not know how to deal from a distance:
How could I reach across the miles in prayer? Finding no answer to this question in my own church, I sought the answer elsewhere. I inquired of a lady minister who through her open-mindedness had found a practical application of the eternal verity of God that my own church had insufficiently grasped.
"How do you do it?" I asked her. "I can help them when I’m with them, but my prayers from a distance don’t seem to result in healing at all."
"Oh my dear, you’re seeing them sick," cried the beautiful old minister.
"What do you mean?" I asked, puzzled. "I’m not seeing them at all, I’m just thinking of them. And, of course, they’re sick, or I wouldn’t be praying for them."
"Yes, you are seeing them," she replied patiently. "When you think of someone, you always see the person in your mind. If you really believe he’s going to be well, you see him well. If he pops into your mind like your eyes saw him last, or like your friend tells you he is, all moans and groans and fever, that shows that your subconscious mind does not really believe he’s going to be well. And so you only fasten the illness on him. When you pray for someone, dearie, you must learn to see him well."
Agnes then set out to learn to "see them well":
This required mental training. I would exercise my visual faculty, that part of the creative imagination that is most like God. I would create in my mind a definite and detailed picture of each person for whom I prayed, seeing the whole body radiant and free and well, with light in the eyes and color in the cheeks and a swinging rhythm in the walk. . . . By an act of will I would hold this picture in my mind until it outshone the picture last suggested to me by my eyes or by a letter. I would hold this picture until it came to me spontaneously and naturally—until when I prayed for the person who had been ill I would see him well instantly, not by an act of will but by the joyful and triumphant belief that it was so. And feeling this joy and this power, I would dare to say, "Amen: So be it". . . . Jesus the love-manifestation of God healed with the Word of power. His healings sprang from that continual communion with God that He found through prayer upon the mountain-tops. "The Father within doeth the works," He said. But His healings were projected by the Word of power, and the only spoken part of the foundation-prayer on which His works rested was the Word of command: "Arise and walk!" "I say unto thee, arise!" ... Therefore, having constructed by thought and will a picture of the patient well, peaceful and happy, we then ask Jesus Himself to go through us and abide in the one for whom we pray, resurrecting him after that likeness of all beauty that is Himself. And believing that He is doing so, we learn to see within the patient, Christ.
New Thoughters figured out early in their history that such an approach helps to prosper people in other ways just as successfully as it does for healing.
Healing in Nature
One of the things I find most interesting about healer Agnes Sanford is her emphasis on the importance of healing the mind and spirit as well as the body. Despite her being a person of great faith, she suffered from serious and prolonged mental depression. She has described more than once in her writings her own rather sudden and complete healing and its importance. For when you are under a mental cloud, your ability to develop your relationship with God is impaired, and certainly your ability to help others is limited. Well-meaning people may tell you to just snap out of it, which is like suggesting that you flap your wings and fly. Other supposed remedies such as counting your blessings or resting are only of limited usefulness and do not address the underlying problem, which Sanford attributes to memories embedded in the subconscious mind, a sort of subpersonality that can jerk you around without your awareness of what is really causing the difficulty.
Sanford describes the symptoms she suffered from, saying,
Read them and rejoice. For they were healed, every one, so that to remember them is a delight. When I wake in the morning nowadays, and my mind turns to the day’s plan, I recall the days when I dragged myself out of bed and thought, "Another day; well, I have got through a lot of them and I’ll probably get through this one too," and I laugh. As I glory in the sunshine, seeing how it lights blue flames upon tree leaves and how it sows the lake with diamonds, I recall the days when sunlight lay upon my soul as heavily as blackness and I thank the Lord that those old days are gone. As I remember the cold fear that at one time would hold me in an agonizing grip if husband or child did not come home on time, I am amazed that nowadays I cannot recall the actual feelings of terror that would send my heart hurtling into my stomach. Nowadays when decisions come to me with lightning speed I remember with wondering joy the old days when it was almost impossible to decide whether to cook rice or potatoes for dinner; when I would stand in the middle of the kitchen floor, head in hands, in an agony of indecision, trying to start the faltering battery of my mind. (The Healing Gifts of the Spirit, pages 17-18.)
She assures us that we are not crazy, nor was she. "Your emotional tone has dropped too low, that is all. Why? Weariness. Exhaustion from too much tension in your business or from the constant confusion of house and children or from the strain of holding down the bitter memories of the past or from the battle of the soul against anger and resentment—or from all of these."
She explains, "One in the condition which I call mental depression—a condition of such darkness that the pilot light of the soul seems to have gone out—cannot deal alone with the haunting specters of the past." Professionals can sometimes be helpful, but for her, the way was
to seek and find the nonprofessional help of a person powerful in prayer and skilled in the understanding of the mind. . . . The change that took place in me through the simple prayer of faith was comparable to the change that takes place in a gas stove when one lights a pilot light that had gone out. This change did not automatically solve all my problems any more than the lighting of the pilot light automatically cooks one’s dinner. But the light was there. The power to think and, even more important, to feel had returned. And from that light one could light all the burners, one after another, and could learn to cook with them. (page 19)
She encourages us:
This is not a battle you must fight alone. There is a power that watches over you whether you know it or not. There is the Creator who made you and who therefore cares—as every creator cares for the thing he makes. Being a creator, however, and not a magician or despot, He has given you the wide range of free will and therefore He cannot, or will not, overrule your own power of choice. If you are far away from Him then, you can choose to come back and at least to be near enough to Him so that He can help you. (page 20)
Where can we find life and peace?
Rest upon the beauty of this world. There is always the earth whence one came. There is always the old sea mother. There are the clouds and the far skies and the birds that fly within them. There are the little animals who run and frisk upon the earth. There is the sun pouring out life and light upon us. All these God made and He mad them out of Himself, for there was no other source of life except Himself. . . . The simplest and oldest way, then, in which God manifests Himself is not through people but through and in the earth itself. And He still speaks to us through the earth and the sea, the birds of the air and the little living creatures upon the earth, if we can but quiet ourselves to listen. (pages 24-25)
She therefore suggests that mental depressives seek to feel the presence of God in nature, whether they are in the city or the country, in the mountains or at the seashore.
Finding God in Nature
Recently I have been reading Sealed Orders, the autobiography of 20th century healer Agnes Sanford. She was brought up in China, the child of Presbyterian missionaries. Her life was full of beauty: flowers, gardens, mountain views that refreshed the spirit and made her feel close to God. One of her earliest mystical experiences came when she, as a young teen, was a passenger on a small Japanese freighter taking her to the United States. Here is how she describes it:
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The need of solitude still remained with me. . . .One night I absented myself from the stateroom shared with three other females . . . and went alone up to the boat deck. The railings of the deck were somewhat informal and terminated, as I recall, where lifeboats were situated. I crawled beyond them and came to rest in the lee of a lifeboat, lying flat on my back and facing out to the black sea with its wild salt breath and the wheeling sky, spangled with a million stars—for we were in mid-ocean, far away from the heavy banks of cloud that haunt the area of the Aleutians, and the skies were clear with a clarity that I have never seen before or since. How long I lay there, I have no idea, for I slipped beyond the swing of time or place. I was one with the stars—I was one with the universe. I felt in me the life of the strange creatures within the sea and beneath the waves and flying above the waves. I was not myself, I was life. And yet I was myself, and life was me. Words cannot say it nor can I now remember the actual feelings of that time between time and eternity—only that it happened. Once since then I have remembered it: when Stokowski conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra in Debussy’s La Mer. I was listening, thinking rather sadly, "But that doesn’t sound like the sea," for there were no crashes of timpani suggesting waves at this point nor any cadenza of strings with the sound of wind—when there it was! That feeling beyond words! That glory evanescent and unbearable in its bliss for which one would yet die that one could enter into it again! There it was! I have tried to find it again in recordings of La Mer, but it cannot be thus caught. . . . Only once did God show Moses His glory in a light that cannot be seen. There is in the Creator such a passion for diversity that He cannot be standar[d]ized, He cannot be commanded. Our times are in His hands, and He will come to me as He wills, when He wills, but never in the same way twice. (Sealed Orders, pages 35-36.)
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In another early-teen experience, she comments:
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Only now, looking back, do I realize that it was God who met my spirit when my spirit met Him in faraway places quite alone. One time I had climbed to the highest valley, a shallow trough between waves of shining silver gray rocks breaking upon the hilltops. Tall rough grass filled the valley, and I lay upon it full in the sun, and what I thought about I do not know. But in some way that I could never recapture, I entered into a state of indescribable dreamy bliss wherein I was one with the tall crisp grass, and with the tiny creatures that lived within it, and with the high blue sky whence sunlight drenched my body with pure joy.
There was no more time. It was yesterday and today and forever. And there was no more me as a separate being. I was part of the tall grass, and the tiny sounds when it crinkled in the sun sounded within myself also, as truly as did the beating of my heart. The wee grasshoppers were part of me, and the ripples of warm breeze that flowed through my being, and the far sky—the far, ever-reaching blue of the sky.
What was it?
Surely—although the mind and the tongue of man had not been able to describe Him to me—surely at that moment (or eternity) His Spirit communed with mine. And possibly this is why, in spite of all the dullness and cynicism with which "religion" became encrusted during these unawakened years, I never once doubted that God was real. (Pages 29-30)
*****
A Victorian Romance
Nineteenth century businessman Henry Wood was forced by ill health to retire from a very successful career at age 54 in 1888. After seeking various cures at home and abroad, he was healed by New Thought practices, still known at the time as "mind cure". He then commenced a new career as an author on New Thought topics, his first New Thought book being a novel, Edward Burton. It was highly successful, going through numerous "editions" (probably printings). The publisher billed it as "An Idealistic Metaphysical Novel", in which Wood places his own views on philosophy, religion, politics, and society into the mouths of his characters. It includes a love story, villains, rises and falls of business fortunes, and summers in Bar Harbor, Maine.
Here is an excerpt from Edward Burton, originally published in 1890.
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Love is unique. Lovers love not each other, but their own ideal. Before Cupid can mount the throne and assume undisputed sway, he must have idealized his object. This may be a shorter or a longer process, but it must be effectual. Love is an enchantment which seizes upon the human complex nature and works a revolution. It is a delicious fancy, kindling the imagination and gilding its object with beautiful, heroic, and almost sacred attributes. It matters little to love whether in the abstract its object be beautiful, or the reverse, for it invests that counterpart with charms even if they are non-existent. Pursue this course of logic to its ultimate, and it is found that objective character, quality, and even existence are all contained in subjectivity. No one can therefore affirm that the external world has real existence, but only that it exists to his own consciousness. Absurd as it at first might appear to material sense, if we delve deep enough, we may in the ultimate analysis find that all is mind. Love is divine. It is only when dragged down from its normal realm and stained with the grossness of materialism, and its expressions mistaken for its goal, that its heavenly banner is trailed in the dust. Then it becomes a base counterfeit. Love not only invests its object with supernal charms, but it illumines the whole horizon. The lover is a new man, with new perceptions, new powers, new senses. He has become the graceful abode of sweet sounds and sights, and the pupils in the eyes of his soul are gently dilated. Nature has been reconstructed for him. The birds sing a new song, and flowers and trees put on a subtler beauty, and all the world’s intonations have become more melodious. The clouds have fair faces, and the sun and moon perceptibly smile upon him, and sympathize with his gladness. Earth, air, and sky, tender their congratulations. Nature, as it environs him, becomes a vast mirror to reflect back and multiply his inspiration.
The felicity of love toward its special object is only a rudimentary experience in the eternal procession of soul-impulses, from within, outward. Its limitation is but temporary and educational, for its outgoing circles are destined to be ever expansive, like the waves from a pebble dropped in mirror-like water. Special love is only the kindergarten for the development of ultimate broader love. As it becomes clarified and free from all baser sediment, it grows impersonal. It is designated by Emerson as "a fire that, kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom caught from a wandering spark out of another private heart, grows and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and all nature with its generous flames."
Love’s grand climax will only be reached when it becomes, not only impersonal, but blossoms into universal recognition as the One Force of the Universe. All other forces, qualities, and attributes will at last be discovered to be but colored lens effects of the one principle varying at each new standpoint in the upward path of progress. The successive views through higher mediums, as step by step they gain new transparency, will gradually correct former distorted views of the One entity. A recognition of such an Ultimate, is a recognition of God. All other characteristics which we ascribe to Him are but reflections of our own states. The "consuming fire" of pure love may wear a terrible aspect to the persistently base and perverse.
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Henry Wood
Henry Wood (1834-1909) was an early New Thought writer, praised by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience along with Horatio W. Dresser as the two most worthwhile writers in the New Thought movement. He was known as a businessman who founded no denomination nor was ordained as a minister. He was one of the movers and shakers in the Metaphysical Club and at one time served as its president. His exceptionally clear, logical prose endeared him to many, and his ten books sold in the tens of thousands. His topics ran the gamut from business to fiction to at times verging on the mystical.
Here is an excerpt from "The Divinity of Nature", published in 1896 by Wood in his book, Studies in the Thought World.
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The revelation of God in Nature is not less sacred than that through the Son or the Book. It is a great volume of pictorial illustration, at the centre of which man himself is the grandest feature. "The groves were God’s first temples." The simplicity, freedom, and spontaneity of the early religions were manifested in a sympathetic oneness with Nature, and an instinctive feeling of her divinity. The people assembled for worship or sacrifice at natural shrines, or under the broad canopy of heaven, rather than in temples made with hands.
In process of time, as sacred enclosures, synagogues, and temples became common, men began to feel that in a special way these structures contained God, and that there was little divinity outside. Instead of being omnipresent, as men proclaimed with their lips, in their feelings He was either divided and limited, or else far away. They could only awaken their sense of Him at special times and in particular places. The consciousness was still further limited to set ordinances, sacraments, and ceremonies. God consecrated all things, and yet men so lost an appreciation of the overwhelming presence, that only those particular places and environments are regarded sacred which men, through their own special, puny forms, reconsecrate.
But we would have no place less sacred, but lift all up to the high level and ideal. Men have effectively deconsecrated nature, art, institutions, customs, and even our own physical organisms, which have been truly declared to be temples of the Holy Ghost.
We have drawn a sharp line around a few things which we have identified with God, pronouncing everything outside of these secular. We have virtually shut him out of all religions except our own, and through a limited inspiration, out of all books save one. We have dispensed with him in history, with the exception of the doings of one race; and so, not feeling his particular presence in other records, have rated them as profane. We have, perhaps unwittingly, almost declared that God could not be found outside of one institution, one system, one round of observances and saving ordinances. We have not so intended, but our anthropomorphic and limited ideas of our Deity have logically closed the portal of the higher consciousness.
The church and the Bible are good, but are not all. We may truly meet God in the groves or fields, on the mountain-top, under the azure canopy, or by the shimmering sea; but, as we are constituted in his image, most nearly, face to face, in the sanctuary of our own soul.
We go to meet him one day in seven, but he is with us all days, and upon invitation will dwell in our living consciousness. True thinking, service, and aspiration are profitable on Monday as well as on Sunday.
We have put God out of business, out of politics, out of political economy, out of education, and out of society, and thereby made them Godless. Encased in our sensuous pursuits, we fail to feel him, though he besets us behind and before, and is nearer than our thoughts. Only his immanence explains all the marvels of nature within and around us. Not merely worship, but communion and fellowship with the "All in All," should be the noblest, sweetest, truest, purest experience of life.
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To read Studies in the Thought World in its entirety, click on that title on our Henry Wood page on the left.
The Rhythm of Life
Californians enjoy an abundance of beaches, just as we do here in Florida. Recently, two of our California friends have written about rhythm in ways that gave us new insights.
Rod Hyatt Carter recently wrote a little article in the Founder's Church newsletter, The Word (May-June 2006), titled "Rhythms of Rest and Rejuvenation". He explains clearly and succinctly how psychiatrist Milton Erickson, who made clinical hypnosis a respectable scientific discipline, discovered the use of ultradian rhythms in the healing process. Erickson's work is very much in line with that of the father of New Thought, P. P. Quimby. Erickson's student, Ernest Rossi, carried this research farther. Hypnosis is simply a state of altered consciousness, and at certain intervals during the day (ultradian rhythms), we are more receptive to healing. The bottom line is that the body-mind calls for time out at regular intervals, and we are wise to heed the signals and take a break. Rod suggests that we "consciously synchronize our healing prayers with these 20-minute windows of access to our creative unconscious."
Patricia Adams Farmer has written a beautiful book of meditations, Embracing a Beautiful God. A Disciples of Christ minister and process thinker, Patricia describes her trips to the beach for rest and renewal.
"God is like the alluring ocean on a bright day, compelling us to abandon everything but who we really are. When all the crustiness is washed off, we are simply shining beings flying kites and holding tiny hands and jumping like fishes.
"Restless, rolling, mysterious--God is the ever-moving continuity and freshness of the sea, never the same in any moment. God's heartbeat is like the rhythm of the ocean, and when we succumb to this alluring force, we cannot be anything less than shining beings on the edge of a playful universe."
