On Fasting I have been asked about my forty five day period of prayer and fasting. I undertook it as a prayer discipline, to keep me concentrated on my prayer for peace. It was in the second year of my pilgrimage when I was coming slowly back across the country and I wasn’t walking extensively. Fasting can have a great deal of spiritual significance, and though I had already found inner peace, it may have been that the fast helped me to learn to pray without ceasing.
While I fasted I was at the home of a chiropractor who used fasting for healing. He wanted to see how a well person would react to a fast because he had never fasted a well person. I talked to him as a friend; he just observed me, he didn’t examine me. (There are many doctors, including medical doctors, who are my friends-but none of them have ever treated me or even examined me. Although occasionally a dentist friend will repair an old cavity which came from my poor eating habits in younger days.) The last meal before my fast was a grapefruit and two oranges, so I wasn’t thirsty. The first three days were undertaken without food or water. After that I took distilled water at room temperature. Nothing else. And when I broke my fast it was not unusual-it was the regular way to break a fast. The juice of one freshly squeezed orange every hour the first day. The juice of two freshly squeezed oranges, alternating with the juice of one grapefruit, every two hours the second day; a grapefruit and two oranges three times the third day, and after that adding a little bit until in a week I was able to eat full rations.
It was no different from the usual pattern of fasting. I did obey the laws of fasting: no extreme exertion. I did not walk long distances, though I did walk some. I did some typing for the doctor. I typed until he took the typewriter away about a month ago in the fast. He didn’t think I ought to handle it anymore, so then I wrote by hand, which was really harder than typing. But I do the best I can with these things.
I didn’t go in and talk to his patients as much as I would have liked to because he didn’t want me to move around that much. I did go to see them occasionally to help keep up their spirits. Once during my fast – I remember I was in a state between wakefulness and sleep – I looked up and saw a dismal cross above me. It was just hanging there, and I knew someone must take up the burden. I reached up to accept it and I was immediately lifted above the cross where all was light and beauty. All that was needed was the willingness to accept the burden—and then I was raised above it. Instead of hardships, I found a wonderful sense of peace and joy.
On Healing One must be very careful when praying for others to pray for the removal of the cause and not the removal of the symptom. A simple healing prayer is this:“Bring this life into harmony with Divine Purpose…may this life come into harmony with God’s Will. May you so live that all who meet you will be uplifted, that all who bless you will be blessed, that all who serve you will receive the greatest satisfaction. If any should attempt to harm you, may they contact your thought of God and be healed.”Eager beaver psychic healers are those who work on the removal of symptoms and not the removal of cause. When you desire phenomena, you possess phenomena; you do not get God. Let’s say I am a psychic healer living next door to you, and you have chosen to come into this life to face some kind of physical symptom until you have removed the cause. Well, when the symptom manifests, I remove it. And so the symptom manifests again, and I then remove it again, and I manage to keep that symptom removed.
When you step over to the disembodied side of life, for another reason altogether, instead of blessing me for having removed the symptom you’ll say, “That meddler! I came to solve this problem but she kept removing the symptom and therefore I never solved it!” That’s what I mean when I speak about some who are content to deal with the removal of symptoms. When one meddles in the life of another it will just cause the symptoms not only to re-manifest, but carry over into another lifetime. Most healers do not know this and they go on merrily removing symptoms. I admit that a long time ago, before I really knew what I was doing, when working with people who had problems I comforted them by putting my hands on the back of their neck and the forehead. I certainly wouldn’t do that now. I did not realize I was doing anything but to comfort. Now I place any problem into my prayer consciousness. I place it into the best possible hands-God’s hands, and turn my attention to other things.
The Power of Thought Are you a slave to your self-centered nature, or does your divine nature guide your life? Do you know that every moment of your life you’re creating through thought? You create your own inner condition; you’re helping create the conditions around you. Christian teachings tell us – “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he” – which is saying very clearly that we are creating the conditions around us. If we could look a bit more deeply into life, we might see that physical difficulties are reflections of spiritual difficulties, and that negative thoughts and feelings are much more harmful than disease germs.
If you realized how powerful your thoughts are, you would never think a defeatist or negative thought. Since we create through thought, we need to concentrate very strongly on positive thoughts. If you think you can’t do something, you can’t. But if you think you can, you may be surprised to discover that you can. It is important that our thoughts be constantly for the best that could happen in a situation-for the good things we would like to see happen.I have met some New Age people who had heard some prediction of disaster and were actually concentrating on that.
“The desire for connection with the Divine and our formless inner self is at the foundation of all desire for human connection. – Donna Goddard”
What a terrible thing to do! Why, we’re creating every moment of our lives through thought. And we’re helping to create the conditions around us. When you hear of any predictions of disaster there’s a reason for it. The reason is that you are to throw the entire weight of your positive thought in the opposite direction.For instance, when there were dozens of predictions that half of California was to slide into the sea from a terrible earthquake, I deliberately planned to be in that section of California. There wasn’t a tremor. But I missed some of my friends who were on the east coast, playing it safe. until it is overcome by the good, but the good remains forever.
Just concentrate on thinking and living and acting in harmony with God’s laws and inspiring others to do likewise. Every time you meet a person, think of some encouraging thing to say—a kind word, a helpful suggestion, an expression of admiration. Never think of any right effort as being fruitless. All right effort bears fruit, whether we see the results or not. Be a sweet melody in the great orchestration, instead of a discordant note. The medicine this sick world needs is love. Hatred must be replaced by love, and fear by faith that love will prevail.Remember where it says there shall be prophecies and they shall fail? Why is it? Because all you can predict is the trend of things. You can never say what the outcome will be, because we are constantly able to turn that prediction in another direction, in a positive direction if we get together on that.
Every good thing you do, every good thing you say, every good thought you think, vibrates on and on and never ceases. The evil remains only A song has this phrase: Love is flowing like a river, flowing out from you and me. Spreading out into the desert, setting all the captives free.
Yes, the captives are those who don’t know who they are, those who don’t know they are God’s children. Remember this: Be still and know that I am God. Don’t ever forget who you are! You cannot be where God is not.
[Reproduced with glad consent of the publishers – Friends of Peace Pilgrim]To make bread or love, to dig in the earth, to feed an animal or cook for a stranger – these activities require no extensive commentary, no lucid theology. All they require is someone willing to bend, reach, chop, or stir. Most of these tasks are so full of pleasure that there is no need to complicate things by calling them holy. And yet these are the same activities that change lives, sometimes all at once and sometimes more slowly, the way dripping water changes stone. In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life.- Barbara Brown Taylor
“Convince yourself every day that you are worthy of a good life. Let go of stress, breathe. Stay positive, all is well. – Germany Kent”
Source: Akhand Jyoti Magazine May-June 2019