Hello, Friends – This email continues something new – a once-a-week email on Friday written by regular participants in our Fillmore Wings Study Program.
This week’s post is by Marty Keller, leader of Sunday morning's Unity Correspondence Course with Marty Keller and Capital City Unity.
If you do not wish to receive these Saturday emails, scroll down to the bottom of this email and click on "Change your subscriptions to our newsletters." That will open a box where you can change Subscribe/Unsubscribe to the Fillmore Events Newsletter and other newsletters we send out. – Mark
Mind and Heart
Bringing the Whole Self to the Practice
The power and vitality of the insights of Unity’s founding generation is their focus on practice.
First with Myrtle, then Charles Fillmore, and then with the extraordinary group of people they attracted in those early years, we have been treated to a tenacious insistence on practice as the key to “realizing Spirit,” as Emilie Cady put it.
As believers in the Truth that there is only God in all reality—that regardless of the evidence of our senses or childhood thought patterns we consist of the same substance as the Divine—they quickly recognized that dominant beliefs in the certainty of separation, lack, and the finality of death were where spiritual work must be concentrated.
And they understood that these beliefs lived in both the mind and the heart.
If we want alignment with God Mind, we must deal with them not only with dedication, determination, and patience, and but also as they express themselves in tandem in these two realms.
Although the Fillmores did not have modern scientific insights into psychology and neuroscience, they understood intimately the inner adversary that traditional Christianity had personified as Satan.
Our group study of the Unity Correspondence Course lesson “Denials and Affirmations” has been diving into the implications of their teachings on the matter. Regarding this inner devil, the authors write that “the devil” is also a state of consciousness built by man when he has forgotten that he is a child of the living God. This state of mind is built because a person is ignorant of the true use of divine laws (ideas), and when he reaps the unhappy result of misapplied law, he thinks there is something outside of himself causing him unhappiness. The state of consciousness that is “the devil” functions contrary to divine good; thus, it has accepted belief in separation, belief in the power of the outer world to harm him, and so it ignorantly rejects God.
Because the infant absorbs the consciousness of his or her birth family, he necessarily “believes himself,” as Dr. Cady writes in the first chapter of Lessons in Truth, “to be in bondage to the flesh and to the things of the flesh” (Liberty or Bondage, Which?)
This is what the Fillmores called “error thinking” or “error consciousness,” and is where our spiritual work must be focused.
A good deal of the text of the Correspondence Course addresses how to change or realign our error thoughts with the foundational Mind of God, in which “we live, move, and have our being.” Our current text digs deeply into the structure and content of denials and affirmations as the primary tool for bringing this about.
The work starts with courageously and honestly acknowledging error thinking in the moment it arises in our awareness. There can be no denial of something I do not see or perceive. I can’t change a thought of which I am unaware.
But it turns out that the diabolical error consciousness comprises not only thought but feeling as well. The Fillmores recognized the pervasive inner realm of the subconscious mind, where our primal thought patterns dwell in psychic darkness. They regularly equate the subconscious with feeling. They acknowledge that thought and feeling are two dimensions of a single activity.
And thus the work of transformation must incorporate both thought and feeling—head and heart. Thought and feeling are intimately linked: our thoughts carry feeling, and our feelings shape thought.
Because the mind is so powerful that it can generate dissociation from feeling, much of our initial spiritual work, once we develop a powerful noticing faculty, necessarily begins with conscious reconnection with our feeling body.
The Swiss psychologist Alice Miller wrote a book in 2004 she called The Body Never Lies; ten years later the American physician Bessel van der Kolk authored The Body Keeps the Score. Modern developments in psychology and neuroscience are giving us new ways to understand insights the Fillmores intuited from their own observations more than a hundred years ago.
We would do well to incorporate what the scientists pioneering this field have to teach us. Denials and affirmations of thought alone might yield us the results we intend, but working with the emotional resonance of our error thinking as the thoughts arise is even more effective.
The beauty of this integral approach is that, while the human mind is easily led astray, the body does not lie about what it is experiencing. Our feelings, whether painful or joyful, have the direct power of presence in our bodies. The feeling is real; it is actual; it is happening now. We could do worse than start by noticing how we feel when error thoughts arise.
When Myrtle Fillmore worked to change her belief in illness, she praised the cells of her body. Praise is emotionally healing. We respond not just mentally but physiologically to feeling validated, appreciated, loved. She wasn’t working just at the mental level, important though that was. She was simultaneously working at the emotional level, through the healing energies of praise, gratitude, and love.
She implicitly understood how “the subconscious phase of mind or the feeling nature (often termed ‘the heart’) becomes a ‘power of thinking’ in that thoughts carry out according to their own character.”
The willingness to bring our body into our transformational work can be a game changer. Charles Fillmore, in The Revealing Word (Body), says that “the natural forces of the body are eager to co-operate with man in manifesting” not just “the perfect body,” but in realizing Divine Mind in the present moment.
As we meditate on the practice this invites us to, Charles Fillmore himself brings thought and feeling—“mind and heart”—back together. We’ll give him the last word. This is from Keep a True Lent, p.192:
Through the appropriation and assimilation of the substance and life in our own consciousness, we blend our minds with the Father-Mind and there is a harmonizing of every fiber of our body with the Christ body, which is life and light. As our mind and heart are cleansed of untrue thoughts and beliefs, and as we feed on living ideas, our body takes on the life and light of our divinity, and eventually will become living light.
I affirm: “God’s pure life and substance are constantly renewing and rebuilding His holy temple, my body.”
– Marty Keller
Return to Fillmore Wings Newsletters
Hello, again, one more thing – Right now we have four ongoing Fillmore Wings groups meeting. THERE IS NO PREREQUESITE for entering a class. YOU ARE NOT REQUIRED TO PARTICIPATE, but we ask you to identify your name in the Zoom session and try to turn on video if possible. To join in, go the Events page for days and times; look for these classes:
- Sundays–Unity Correspondence Course with Marty Keller and Capital City Unity
- Mondays (starting July 13)–Fillmore Correspondence School Christ, The Only Begotten of the Father with Dara Bermick, LUT
- Tuesdays–Fillmore Wings Study Program with Rev. Mark Hicks
- Fridays–Fillmore Fridays with Rev. Melissa Hill Greenbaum
