Pioneering Mystic Sermons, 2019

The Virtue of Healing

Linda Mihalic, Palm Sunday, April 14, 2019, Cleveland, Ohio, Mark 5:25-34, John 8.

  Edna Lister said that to understand the events in one chapter of the Bible, you often need to read the chapter before and after for greater insight. I read John 7 for greater clarity and found myself turning back the pages to John 6 for the answer. In John 6, when Passover was nigh, Jesus fed the multitude of the loaves and fishes he had miraculously increased. The next day, many who had been fed the food of faith found him gone, and followed him to Capernaum, on the other side of the sea of Galilee. They wanted more food; they wanted Jesus to feed them for free, just like today’s young socialists. He knew they had not followed him because of the miracles, but for the “free stuff.” They became disillusioned and irate when he refused to perform for them,—they wanted more proof that he was worth following!
  He taught them that he was the living bread of heaven come to feed them of the Spirit, but they did not really understand what he was saying. Many of his disciples left him that day, and he asked his remaining faithful twelve of they would leave him also. Peter answered, “Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.” Peter was the most loyal of the twelve. He thought he was loyal enough, and he believed that he understood what Jesus was teaching them,—but we know from his later performance that he deserted Jesus in Gethsemane, and his understanding was sophomoric at best. Each of these philosophic terms is deliberate; pay attention.
  So for a period of about six months, Jesus traveled only locally and remained quietly low-key in his activities. John 7 opens with his brothers preparing to go to Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles in October. When they saw that he was not preparing to travel with them, they began baiting him, saying, “No one does anything in secret if he seeks to be known openly. If you work miracles, show yourself to the world.” The fifth verse, the number of freedom to choose while standing in the Light, reads, “For even his brothers did not believe in him.”
  Doubts and disbelief can easily tear down a newly emerging high vibration, so keeping your plans for a new creation to yourself is better than talking about it for others to stomp it with steel-toed boots of disbelief. Every creator learns this lesson the hard way. His brothers acted and spoke like typical Adepts who believe that if you’ve got it, you should flaunt it for the world to see. However Jesus was building for the ages and was acting as a Master and a Priest, persistently walking toward his Crucifixion and Christing. After they left he waited and went to Jerusalem also, but secretly, letting no one know he had arrived. The celebration, which lasted a week, was halfway over before he revealed himself. What was he doing during that time?
  Jerusalem, although it is the city of peace, was enemy territory in those days. The temple priesthood ruled in two factions, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, served by the scribes, who were the local bureaucracy. He had been hounded for months by strict legalists who were constantly on the lookout for any reason to convict him for crimes against the state religion. He was scouting the territory and taking the temperature of local politics. Everywhere people were looking for him, expecting him to show up and take charge, to give them a good show, or whatever they wanted most. On the fourth day, Jesus acted.
  But before we speak of that let us shift the focus to the woman who touched the hem of Jesus’ robe in her search of healing. “A certain woman, who had an issue of blood for twelve years, had suffered many things of many physicians, and she had spent all that she had—everything. The woman knew that if she could just touch his clothing, she would be healed. “And Jesus, immediately knowing in himself that the virtue had gone out of him, turned in the press, and said, Who touched my clothes?” What is the virtue of healing? Virtue is “moral excellence and righteousness; goodness; an effective power.” Every virtue is a soul power. Why have we been given such dissimilar Scriptures for the subject of healing? We can readily understand this one, but the other?—how do they mesh? The answer is that they both deal with healing but in dramatically different ways.
  Let’s start with this woman’s experiences: She had been ill for twelve years with some sort of chronic blood flow. According to Jewish law that rendered her ritually unclean, and unable to live with anyone else. She was, in effect, a total outcast from her family and her community. Further, she “had suffered many things of many physicians.” Anyone who has suffered a delayed diagnosis knows how nerve wracking it is to travel from doctor to doctor seeking help, and without insurance, it’s a disaster. She had spent all her money, which means she was probably destitute. Was she a homeless person? Or did they make a little hovel for her to live in? Was it cardboard? No, they didn’t have that then. Maybe it was palm fronds. Who knows? It couldn’t have been very great. To ice her cake, nothing she tried helped; she grew no better but increasingly worse. This woman had nothing to lose and potentially everything to gain.
  All power remains mere potential unless someone acts or speaks to put it into action. Light is the ultimate power of God. Let me say that again so you understand how important the point is. All power remains potential until someone speaks or acts to put it into action. You release Power by speaking the Word. Light is the ultimate Power of God.
  She approach Jesus from behind. Perhaps she had learned not to approach others after living twelve years as an outcast. Perhaps she was afraid to ask Jesus to heal her because she had been rebuffed and rejected for so long, by so many. She said, “If I may but touch his clothes, I shall be whole.” Was that her faith speaking, or was she just desperate? Does it matter? The answer is Both. The greatest miracles come when you have finally given up believing in the world more than you believe in God. You could have a miracle a minute if you really believed in the power of God’s Light, when you know that only God’s Light can heal you or anything else.

What happened that day on that crowded street was need meeting supply. Her need was great, so great that it had become the focal point of her entire life. She could have no life worth living unless someone or something healed her of this chronic uncleanness. She did not have the means within her, but she had hope. She had hope. The someone was Jesus. The something was God’s Light, which he knew how to release by letting it flow through him constantly. The woman’s need was her seed of faith. How can that be? For a faith seed to germinate, take root and grow from a mustard seed to a mighty tree, you must first have a need for faith. Your need must be real, not imagined. The things most people think they need are really nothing more than what they want. This is so prevalent in the world today that the moochers claim their wants are “human rights.”
  This woman’s need consumed her, literally. She was so needy that she was ready to try anything, so she followed Him through the crowd until she was close enough to reach out and touch his robe. And because he always remained open to the Light of God flowing through, the flow of Light through him healed her flow of blood. Need plus supply equals a miracle. He knew it instantly and asked who had touched him. Why? Jesus was always aware of what was going on around him and within him. Did he not already know who had touched him? Obviously his disciples thought he was crazy for asking. “This crowd is huge! You’re asking who touched you?” Of course he knew, but he knew more than that—in such an intimate exchange as healing, he knew her need and that she must acknowledge the gift of God’s Light as it healed her.
  This woman knew she was healed, but she must ratify the healing publicly. And when she did, Jesus confirmed the real miracle, saying, “Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole.” Do you see it? You do! You see how it is so perfect. It’s so methodical, step by step. It is literally a design for perfection.
  Now let us shift the focus to a topic that at first may seem wildly unrelated, but which reveals the essence of the virtue of healing. The word sophisticated has come to mean “having, revealing, or proceeding from a great deal of worldly experience and knowledge of fashion and culture.” Sounds great, doesn’t it? Chic and slinky, refined, being one of the “beautiful people.” Stop! Don’t be in such a hurry to embrace that so-called “good life.”
  The earliest definition of sophistication was quite different—“the use of sophistry; sophistic reasoning; the process or result of becoming knowledgeable or disillusioned; the process of becoming more complex, developed, or subtle.” The root, sophist, comes from Greek sophistēs, meaning a “wise man” or “expert.”
  Originally, prominent teachers of rhetoric and philosophy among the ancient Greeks styled themselves as sophists, and others often considered them to be adroit and subtle in their reasoning; however, so was the serpent in the Garden of Eden, as described in Genesis 3:1: “Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the feld which the Lord God had made.” Plato described the Sophists as sham philosophers. Benjamin Jowett, a notable Platonic scholar wrote:
  “The Sophist in Plato is the master of the art of illusion; the charlatan, the foreigner, the prince of esprits-faux [meaning false spirit], the hireling who is not a teacher, and who, from whatever point of view he is regarded, is the opposite of the true teacher. He is the ‘evil one,’ the ideal representative of all that Plato most disliked in the moral and intellectual tendencies of his own age; the adversary of the almost equally ideal Socrates. He seems to be always growing in the fancy of Plato, now boastful, now eristic, now clothing himself in rags of philosophy, now more akin to the rhetorician or lawyer, now haranguing, now questioning, until the final appearance in the Politicus of his departing shadow in the disguise of a statesman.”
  Congeress is willed with career politicians who are the modern Sophists. Keep that in mind. Thus, we see that the sophist became known as argumentative or as a fallacious reasoner. Fallacious is a mistake that results from being ill-informed, or from using unsound sources. So sophistry is reasoning that seems plausible on a superficial level, but is actually unsound—or reasoning that is used to deceive. “Plausible” is a word Edna Lister used to describe the appetitive soul. It believes all things plausible are true, which is what happens when you don’t use logic but only reasoning.
  How common is sophistry? You see the face it wears every day when you first look into the mirror, and every time you watch or listen to the so-called news. It’s all sophistry now. You know it always, every single day if you watch “The View,” whose women are excellent sophists. You see sophistry without even knowing it when you look into the mirror as you put the toothpaste on your brush each morning—you are seeing the face of a sophist.
  A marvelous definition of “lying to yourself” comes from an unexpected source: Thomas Hill Green, a British idealist philosopher, spoke of this as “self-sophistications.” You use sophistry on you. He said, “Perplexity of conscience seems always to arise from conflict between different formulae for expressing the ideal of good in human conduct, or between different institutions which have obtained authority over men’s minds without being intrinsically entitled to more than a partial and relative obedience.” This statement of the problem is exactly what we see in the world today in three areas of life—education, religion, and politics, which is the art of human communication, or the public discourse.
  Green goes on to say that such self-sophistications are “deliverances of conscience.” When someone gives you a plausible explanation of something you may feel delivered from the need to . You feel you don’t have to worry about this anymore. Ain’t that great? In his Prolegomena to Ethics, Green wrote, “There would be no such thing as conscience at all but for the consciousness on the part of the individual that there is an unconditional good which is his good—yet it does not follow that all the judgments which arise out of this consciousness are unconditionally valid.” Conformity to custom, and obedience to the powers that be arise from man’s inarticulate idea of the common good. From this, men have accepted such customs and powers as deserving their conformity and obedience. Such ideas, he wrote “have become part of ‘the a priori furniture’ of men’s minds,” in the sense that they are accepted as valid. He called these the dogma or “dicta of conscience,” which include family duty, obedience to the law of the land, of conformity to a law of honor or opinion, and certain religious ordinances. 1 Children are not getting this in school because it’s been a hundred years since moral ethics were taught, we restate these truths for all inquiring minds on earth today.

1 Thomas Hill Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 388.

  Such ideas are “received wisdom.” We could call them a herd of “sacred cows,” “toeing the line,” “this is how we do it,” or “Well, everybody knows that!” The difficulty is that so many accepted invalid dogmas not based on truth or sound reasoning. This sets the stage for the events forming the text of John’s Gospel, the eighth chapter:
  Jesus went to mount Olivet early in the morning, which means that he ascended into the golden silence until he was ready to teach in the temple. Many people came to hear him, so he sat down, and taught them. What happened next could have been taken straight from Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. With such a ready-made audience, the scribes and Pharisees just couldn’t miss this golden opportunity: They brought him a woman caught in the act of adultery. And they said, “Moses in the law commanded us that such should be stoned: but what do you say?” (They were’t his friends, you know.)
  As good sophists, they were legal hair-splitters just itching for a good fight with this upstart from the provinces who dared to question authority and ignored their demands that he conform to their dogma. Jesus had spent enough time in the silence to be ready for anything the world could hand him that day, even this public attempt at entrapment. His answer was silence as he stooped to write in the dust with his finger, as though he had not heard them.
  They badgered him, so he stood and said, “He who is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.” Again he stooped and wrote on the ground. Edna Lister said that he wrote their sins and names in the dust, and that those whose conscience convicted them left, fading into the crowd. When only he and the woman remained standing before those who had come to hear him teach, he asked who accused her. When she said, “No man, Lord,” he said, “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.” He refused to judge her at their bidding. Her sins were of the flesh, but theirs were of the soul, and some of it was unforgivable blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.
  Jesus resumed teaching brilliantly. He said, “I am the light of the world: he who follows me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” When I was nearly finished with this sermon, I said, “Lord, if you had prefaced your every statement with, ‘I am the Light of the world,’ perhaps they would have understood what you said.” And I heard, “Some do understand, which is why they are my sheep and the sheep of my Father’s flock, and why they always come to me, no matter into what circumstances of life they are born. Those who know me, know me for all time, and they find me, one way or another.”
  Instantly the enraged Pharisees remaining accused him of baseless boasting. Jesus said, “Though I bear record of myself, yet my record is true: for I know where I came from and where I am going; but you do not know where I come from or where I am going.” They knew him by reputation and thought him a rabble-rouser, a troublemaker because he excited the common people who followed him everywhere.
  I read an article that said the average of congregation in the Church of England today is twenty-eight people. And the only growing congregations are those that teach the Bible. Edna Lister always emphasized that the Bible is our soul textbook. If you truly study Holy Scripture you will know Him as He is because his vibration permeates the gospel record and it cannot be mistaken. And please, do say to yourself, “I follow the Light of the world.”
  Then he taught the difference between judging righteous judgment and being judgmental: “You judge according to the flesh; I judge no one. Yet if I do judge, my judgment is true; for I am not alone, but I am with the Father who sent me.” The Pharisees were devoted to studying the law, obedience to which they believed was greater than anything else. He had called them “whited sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones.” That pedigree-reading is a grim condemnation. Their dogma was to obey the letter of the law, but as they killed its Spirit, they dug the graves of truth’s dead bones. They thought Jesus was unschooled because they didn’t know his teacher, but he quoted the law that the testimony of two souls is true. “I am One who bears witness of myself, and the Father who sent me bears witness of me.” These men really needed healing, but being unaware of their need, they were dead men walking.
  Scoffing, they asked where his Father was, and he said, “Ye neither know me, nor my Father: if ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also.” “No man laid hands on him; for his hour was not yet come,” because the Light was flowing through him in such tremendous measure. The only event that exceeded that Light, was the Roman guard at the cross who speared him in the side and drained his bloodstream into the ground, which drove out the sin of Cain, the taint of brother-murder. This event is critical to understanding Jesus’ life, but no one teaches this. The crowd knew these officials sought a reason to arrest Jesus, yet made no move to do so. They were the powers that be in Jerusalem. Did he fascinate them even as he baffled them? Were they astonished that he didn’t fear their authority? They’d come to bait him but he was baiting them, annoying them to strip the veil from their spiritual blindness.
  “I am going away,” he said, “and you will seek me, and will die in your sin (trapped within sin). Where I go you cannot come.” They murmured (they always murmured when near him), “Will he kill himself, because he says, ‘Where I go you cannot come’?” Again he openly spoke truth saying, “You are from beneath; I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world. Therefore I said that you will die in your sins; for if you do not believe that I am he (meaning one with the Father), you will die in your sins.” All souls come from above—we know this, but he told these men that they were from beneath. Beneath what? Beneath God-consciousness, lacking the soul illumination to understand their false position. They were intelligent but only in the most worldly and intellectual way.
  How he must have exasperated them! They were chewing sticks! Finally, one plainly demanded, “Who are you?” Nothing about this exchange was friendly. Jesus answered, “I am who and what I said I was from the beginning. I have many things to say and to judge of you: but he that sent me is true; and I speak to the world those things which I have heard of him.” Still, none of them understood that he spoke of the Father. So he said, “When you lift up the Son of Man (speaking of his coming crucifixion), then you will know that I am he, and that I do nothing of myself, but as my Father taught me, I speak these things. And he who sent me is with me. The Father has not left me alone, for I always do those things that please Him.” As he said this, many believed in him. Then said Jesus to those who believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are my disciples indeed; and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
  Jesus, the Only Begotten Son, is the Word made flesh, and his only teacher is the Father Himself, because “before Abraham was, I am.”
  Now the Pharisees shouted, “We are Abraham’s seed, and were never in bondage to any man: how dare you say, ‘You shall be made free?’” By then they had to be spitting acid. Jesus fired right back with more truth bullets: “Most assuredly, I say to you, Whosoever commits sin is the servant of sin. The servant does not abide in the house forever: but the Son does. (This point is so crucial.) If the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed. I know you are Abraham’s seed; but you seek to kill me because my word has no place in you. I speak that which I have seen with my Father: and you do what you have seen with your father.”
  Your father is not my Father—nothing could be clearer than that. God the One is the One God to both Christians and Jews, but he is not the father of the sons of Ishmael who worship a god named Allah, and they will proudly tell you that of their own free will today. Jesus’ word had no place in them because while the sons Ishmael and of Isaac were born of Abraham’s seed, their mothers were different—Sarah had been a princess, but Hagar, Ishmael’s mother, was a servant in the house who did not abide forever.
  Angrily they insisted, “Abraham is our father.” But Jesus said, “If you were Abraham’s children, you would do the works of Abraham. But now you seek to kill me, a man who has told you the truth, which I have heard of God but which Abraham did not. You do the deeds of your father.”
  In no way could this have been a calm and civil discourse. The words of the text do not convey the rancor and rage in their manner when they shouted, “We are not born of fornication; we have one Father, even God!” Jesus replied, “If God were your Father, you would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God; nor have I come of myself, but He sent me. Why do you not understand my speech? (this was a rhetorical question which he answered for them)—because you cannot hear my word (meaning they could not stand to listen to what he was saying).
  What he declared next was equivalent to a 500 kiloton thermonuclear blast: “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father you will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it. And because I tell you the truth, you do not believe me. Which of you convicts me of sin? And if I tell the truth, why do you not believe me? He who is of God hears God’s words: therefore you do not hear, because you are not of God.”
  “Devil” is a generic word, usually defined as being Satan, but that was not who Jesus referred to; instead he was describing Belial, who is the Father of Lies, the author of evil and murder. Belial means worthless, wicked, and without redeeming qualities. According to Kabbalah, the study of Jewish mysticism, Belial is the crown of the Tree of Death or anti-Life. Belial is the embodiment of all that seeks to destroy the universal Good.
  On the Via Christa, a lie is “an untruth, a false statement made with intent to deceive.” That sounds just like sophistry. To lie is “to speak falsely, to tell an untruth to mislead another.” Lying is closely associated with terms meaning “to deceive, to belie, to betray.” The word “lie” is not found in Latin, Greek, or Sanskrit, but it is found in Arabic. Lying is untruthful, mendacious, deceitful, and false. Lies are falsehoods, a deliberate deviation from truth.
  Lying is a perversion of the spoken Word, and is a sin. Lying with malicious intent is evil, which is worse than just a sin. The Oxford English Dictionary, notes that the word “lie” is normally a violent expression of moral reprobation, which in polite conversation, tends to be avoided, the synonyms falsehood and untruth being often substituted as relatively (notice “relatively”) euphemistic. A euphemism says something without really telling the truth about it. Political correctness has brought us to the travesty of “your truth” versus “my truth, which Isaiah described as “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness.”–Isaiah 5:20.
  Those Pharisees and Scribes must have been shrieking “You’re a Samaritan, and have a devil!” The Jews viewed the Samaritans as pagan heretics who worshiped strange gods. Relentlessly Jesus incited them, saying, “I do not have a devil. I honor my Father, but you dishonor me. I do not seek my own glory, but there is one who seeks and judges. Most assuredly, I say to you, If a man keeps myword, he shall never see death.”
  “Now we know you have a demon! Abraham is dead, and the prophets; yet you say, ‘If a man keeps my word he shall never taste death.’ Are You greater than our father Abraham, who is dead? And the prophets are dead. Who do you make yourself out to be?”
  Without hesitation, Jesus replied, “If I honor myself, my honor is nothing. It is my Father who honors me, whom you say that he is your God. Yet you have not known him, but I know him. And if I say, ‘I do not know him,’ I would be a liar like you; but I do know him and keep his word. Father Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it and was glad.”
  This claim was beyond bearing, so the disbelieving Jews cried, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” Notice how they construed what he said as literal. And Jesus finished frosting that cake by saying, “Most assuredly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I AM.” They took up stones to throw at him; but Jesus hid himself, meaning that he had become invisible, and went out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and passing them by.
  Today we have been transported in time to serve as witnesses to the events of that day in the temple when Jesus so greatly angered the proud Pharisees. Like the crowd who gathered as an audience to his teaching, you have shared his presence, his handling of a difficult situation. If your reaction feels chaotic, don’t be surprised or wonder if you are the only one.
  You are all used to meeting adepts of lesser or greater degree, but Jesus Christ is the Master of Masters. His methods begin with, proceed as, and conclude as the action of truth on the living soul, stripping away all sophisticated veneer, grimy patina of ancient dogma, dead men’s bones, and a priori furniture. “A priori” means “proceeding from a known or assumed cause to a necessarily related effect; derived by reasoning without reference to facts or experience.” In short, a priori knowledge is what you presume to be the truth.
  What is the virtue of healing? How does the story of the woman who touched Jesus relate to Jesus’ encounter with the Pharisees? Both stories are about healing, a similarity not apparent at first glance. A virtue is a soul power. Jesus promised “He who believes in me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do.” Therefore, we must accept that we can, and are able to heal. We can do the work of healing. What are the steps in healing? First, the soul in need must be aware that he or she even needs to be healed. You have to believe that you need it. If you think nothing’s wrong with you, you can’t hear what Christ is saying to you. You have to feel the need, and to know that you need.
  One certain fact is that you are on planet earth because your soul is unwell in some degree; you couldn’t be here otherwise. You may not believe that or even want to consider the question of your health, but your need for healing is an inescapable fact, a fact that you must accept before you can be healed. The next step in healing is understanding what kind of healing you really do need. Allopathic medicine treats only the symptoms that people suffer, not the underlying cause. If you are depressed, you are given a prescription for a drug that will suppress the effects of depression on your body chemistry. This will not help you, but will add another layer of veneer to your problem.
  If you have been diagnosed wth a condition that requires surgery, you can endure that, but what if the condition resurfaces? Surgery excised the physical expression of hidden problems, but not its source, the underlying error in function that permitted the condition to express in the first place. So again, you find that when you have endured merely treating the symptoms, they can return. Worldly healing is a misnomer, because no such thing exists. The world itself affects you in ways you cannot see and usually do not even register, recognize or understand. The cause of what ails you is invisible and intangible, which is why you will never find the answers you need in physical drugs, surgery, or therapy.
  All the ills of the human race have now been codified under the headings applied by agnostic or atheistic materialism. Psychology is rightfully the study of the soul, but the leaders in that field defaulted on their role at the beginning of the 20th Century, when they gave up the battle for man’s mind and his soul, thus enabling the dualism of body versus soul. At some point in the metaphysical realm of being, mind and soul are recognizable as the mind that was in Christ Jesus.
  Worship of the body is hedonism, and you are all devout hedonists, more devoted to your body than to your soul which is the vehicle God gave you in the beginning. Yes the materialists, the pragmatists, the utilitarians, the atheists and yes, even the agnostics have joined forces to consign the soul to some filthy dustbin of history along with the shoddy remnants of religion. Bodies do not need religion, only souls do.
  Humanity seems to be in its death throes today. The polarization of good and evil is nearly complete. We live in a world of cults that are dedicated mostly to death and degradation. The first Christian edifice, the Roman Catholic religion stands revealed as a collection of cults devoted to sexual perversions that have led it for more than a thousand years. Such cults are also the don’t-see-don’t-tell structure of governments worldwide, of the entertainment industry here and abroad. Child protective services stand revealed as sex trafficking systems enshrined within the government bureaucracy at every level in society. Evil claims and flaunts the banners of these and every other manner and type of soul perversion.
  Abortion is a leading cause of death in civilization today, lagging behind only heart disease, which is understandable because the soul is most closely aligned with the idea of “heart” as the loving, kind and caring attribute of humanity. The creed of sophists and materialists is “Man is the measure of all things.” If this is true, then the “all things” are traveling the dinosaurs’ path to extinction!
  We are on the very brink of complete polarization into the cult of life versus the cult of death, and every condition just cited proves this to be true. Yet this dire situation is nothing new. The first record is the Flood of Noah’s day: “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” Then came Abraham, Lot and the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. The story has been repeated in every age throughout the earth.
  Unless you are a student of history you will probably miss some essential points. Hitler and WWII illustrate how evil must masquerade as the good to gain power. Hitler unified the German people by highlighting the unfairness of the world treatment of them, citing the horrific inflation resulting from their WWI debts and reparations at Versailles. Then he demonized the Jews, which was easy because they were bankers and have been a convenient whipping boy since the early Catholic Church had made the so-called “murder of Christ” a central dogma. Next Hitler classed all “undesirable” groups as subhuman class approved ethnic cleansing as the Final Solution. This illustrates the epitome of a death cult. Death cultists to this day are numbered among the Holocaust deniers.
  Fast forward to the news today and you see the same tactics and situation in full bloom. That may seem disheartening, but that view is a lie. Evil cannot create anything, it can only steal from others. Believing the lies is the only source of illness on this planet today. That is a fact, the truth, a law, so remember it. Everything else is an illusion! No other fount of illness exists but Belial’s lies promulgated by his followers who are devoted to the perversion of truth and goodness. They would make the whole world as ugly as they are.
  “Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment.”–John 7:24. Despite what some may say, you must judge; every single day and decide what is the truth. What kind of believer are you? Do you prefer the well-worn dogma of ages past, or the ever fresh and living Word of God? It’s time to do away with self-sophistication, lying to yourself or accepting the worn out platitudes of conscience deliverances. Redecorate after you eliminate the ‘the a priori furniture’ of the mind. Question everything you think you believe, and keep only the beautiful, the truthful, and the good. You are your own physician. You are your own surgeon. You are your own healer. Possess your own soul!
  Lotus Landis quoted Edna Lister in saying, “All it takes is one soul to turn the tide.” She renewed that declaration on a Palm Sunday more than 25 years ago, and I heard it. The words changed my understanding into comprehension and altered my soul’s trajectory high enough to make the climb. Let it work for you, too. “All it takes is one.” Will you be that one?

Burning the Veils of Illusion

Linda Mihalic, Pentecost, June 9, 2019, Cleveland, Ohio. Luke 14:26-33, 2 Corinthians 3.

  “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. And whoever does not bear his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not sit down first and count the cost, whether he has enough to finish it—lest, after he has laid the foundation, and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish’? Or what king, going to make war against another king, does not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? Or else, while the other is still a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks conditions of peace. So likewise, whoever of you does not forsake all that he has cannot be my disciple.”–Luke 14:26-33.
  “Do we begin again to commend ourselves? Or do we need, as some others, epistles of commendation to you or letters of commendation from you? You are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read by all men; clearly you are an epistle of Christ, ministered by us, written not with ink but by the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of flesh, that is, of the heart. And we have such trust through Christ toward God. Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God, who also made us sufficient as ministers of the new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. But if the ministry of death, written and engraved on stones, was glorious, so that the children of Israel could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of the glory of his countenance, which glory was passing away, how will the ministry of the Spirit not be more glorious? For if the ministry of condemnation had glory, the ministry of righteousness exceeds much more in glory. For even what was made glorious had no glory in this respect, because of the glory that excels. For if what is passing away was glorious, what remains is much more glorious. Therefore, since we have such hope, we use great boldness of speech—unlike Moses, who put a veil over his face so that the children of Israel could not look steadily at the end of what was passing away. But their minds were blinded. For until this day the same veil remains unlifted in the reading of the Old Testament, because the veil is taken away in Christ. But even to this day, when Moses is read, a veil lies on their heart. Nevertheless when one turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.”–2 Corinthians 3

  Seven veils of illusion blind the self to what the soul knows. An illusion is “a wrong or misinterpreted perception of a sensory experience; a deceptive appearance or impression; a false idea or belief.” To create an illusion is to illude, “to trick or to delude.” Edna Lister said, “Illusion is always founded on a fact one distorts to hide some perversion of truth. Illusion is an initiation in perception of the difference between the truth of appearances and the truth of reality. Illusion is the misrepresentation of reality by persons and personalities.”
  As a soul, you accrue illusions over time, in this case a long time, often spanning several lifetimes. Unless you continuously struggle to overcome illusions, they thicken, forming layers that obscure reality until your soul beholds the truth as merely a dream, or a nightmare. How did this happen originally? Genesis 2:21 states that “the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept.” Qabalist Carlo Suares noted that nowhere later in scripture does it say that man ever awakened, implying that we are still asleep in some degree.
  The author of the Letter to Ephesians wrote in the fifth chapter, “Let no man deceive you with vain words…ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of light: (for the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness and righteousness and truth;) proving what is acceptable unto the Lord.…all things that are reproved are made manifest by the light: for whatsoever doth make manifest is light. Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.”–Ephesians 5:8-14.
  Being asleep in this sense is equal to being dead. This topic is difficult to understand without a background in scriptural metaphor and symbolism, so we must examine it further. Being asleep describes a level of consciousness either above or below the level that we call being awake. Dead in this case is being dead in Spirit, which is being unaware of the soul’s life in and through God.
  The first veil of illusion blinds us as we enter the physical body. The soul falls asleep because it instantly becomes lost in and vulnerable to the physical effects of blood chemistry. “The life of the flesh is in the blood,” God said, “and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.”–Leviticus 17:11. The life in the blood is complex; it includes more than water, red and white blood cells, platelets, clotting factors, sugars, fats, vitamins, minerals, hormones, enzymes, antibodies and other proteins. Light makes blood its link to bind the body and soul together as one with God.
  The brain is your soul’s physical interface with the body, the waking consciousness, the three levels of subconscious, conscious and super-conscious mind as your contact with the divine Mind that was in Christ Jesus. The blood brain barrier, called the BBB, is a semipermeable membrane (a veil) that protects the brain from the effects of the body chemistry. Several factors can put the BBB at risk, including high blood pressure, high amounts of drugs or alcohol in the bloodstream, microwaves (including cell phones), radiation exposure, infection, inflammation, and injury. When the brain’s integrity is compromised, the soul cannot properly maintain its connection with the body or commune with divine Mind via the super-conscious mind.
  This describes the first veil of illusion that clouds your soul’s ascension of consciousness, the veil of the Neophyte. While it is physical in construction, you also experience its effects emotionally and mentally. The veils of illusion are the sources of all varieties of misperception, cognitive distortions, and every form of so-called mental illness. Your body chemistry does not cause these illusions and mental illnesses; you accept and permit the illusions that create deeper, heavier illusions. Pay attention to this: No soul is or can be the victim of his or her blood chemistry, but the illusions that the soul fosters create the mental-emotional distortions.
  The second veil of illusion emerges two ways during the first seven years of an earth life. First, most illusions are hangovers from previous life existences, meaning that you bring them with you. Second, the conditions surrounding your birth or adoption into a family are profound in their influence. The patterns for your personality, your belief in your own nature and worth, your personal identity and self-perceptions are set during the first seven years of life. This is the veil of the Disciple Degree, aptly named because during this period the soul is always following instructions from one source or another, parents, older siblings or teachers.
  Think back; how old were you at the time of your first vivid memory? Is your memory from that point clear and detailed, or vague and spotty, like the after-image of a strobe light? Are most of your memories pleasant and good, or unpleasant, even frightening? Do you remember being praised or scolded most often? Did you love and feel loved by your parents, or did you often fear them, and feel desperate that you were not good enough to win their love and hold it? Do you think of yourself as being a good child, or as being a burden and a problem.
  All these and many more conditions are the bricks and mortar of your self-perceptions and your judgments of yourself. You probably still hold to this personal identity today. Consciousness is a messy topic, so broadly defined that it defies clarity. Further, every field of inquiry has evolved its own definition, based on some scientific materialism, or some abstract idealism. Science is a Latin term, meaning “knowledge,” but science today is merely systematic; it builds and organizes knowledge, accepting as valid only those explanations and predictions that can be tested and replicated in a laboratory. Scientific materialism is the source of agnosticism and atheism because if you believe only in materialism but nothing transcendental, you do not need a God. You may worship self unchallenged.
  Immanuel Kant defined transcendental idealism in abstract metaphysical terms, as the belief that reality is made up of ideas, each of which is the true pattern of a single component, some virtue of the good. This definition stems from Plato’s idealism, which describes a life spent in the pursuit of the ideal, the perfect state of truth, purity, justice, and the good. Idealism holds that the soul knows all elements of the good are facets of God.
  The soul remembers everything, every word heard or spoken, every act, every experience—and it does so faultlessly. A Greek myth reveals the crucial detail that the soul drinks of the Cup of Lethe in the anteroom of birth into earth life, and that dark wine is lethal to the soul’s memory of truth. The only way to access the soul’s memory is to awaken from the sleep, the belief in the world’s truth of appearances, and to awaken into conscious recollection of the truth of reality. The embodied soul attains conscious recollection by burning the veils of illusion.
  The embodied soul has already achieved some degree of self-consciousness when the child begins kindergarten at age five or six, earlier if he has older siblings or was enrolled in preschool. So, his degree of socialization accelerates his development. The child has no control over the input he receives up to then, whether social, moral, emotional, or mental. Every experience leaves a stamp on his psyche. Any parent can easily detect the onset of self-awareness as the point at which their child first learned the meaning of and began saying or shrieking the simple words yes and no. Yes means “I accept,” but no means “I refuse.”
  The third veil, that of the Adept Degree, has no set time of onset, but in most cases is present from birth. In fact, few souls among earth’s teeming billions have ever progressed beyond this third degree. The first two veils generally form the illusions of this particular life, and set the pattern for the soul’s needed lessons during this life. The details backing this pattern are known only to God, His Heavenly Councils, the Oversoul, and the embodied soul’s personal sponsors above. In other words, you take life’s initiations blind, proving the wisdom of the law that “A virtue untried is no virtue at all.”
  The veil of the Adept Degree is the aggregate of his misperceptions of reality and what he identifies with personally, including his moral values and the ethical code by which he lives. An old proverb, “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree,” holds the promise of the soul’s full recollection of truth through obedience to law as learned during the earliest years of each life. If the parents fail in their duty (a sad condition in earth life), the soul will have to overcome deeper sleep, greater spiritual blindness, and a heavier weight of soul debts throughout life. Make no mistake: Such challenges are not punishment but necessary steps to strengthen the soul into the ideal of its own degree and kind.
  In the work of soul conquering self, you learn that your soul’s identity begins and ends in God, the Source of all life. God is the source of your being, your nature, your essence; His laws direct and control all your actions, speech, and thoughts when you let them do so. If you are just along for the ride, letting life’s breezes waft you from here to there, you may be sure that life’s storms will drive you from one imagined “safe haven” after another until you choose the right course. Desire is always and eternally the first step, and you must first amalgamate all your lesser disparate desires into a single unified desire to serve God in obedience to His laws, and to practice His way of loving with perfect compassion. Otherwise, you can never forge your perfect weapon of the soul, the sword of truth ever-ready to sever truth from the illusion of appearances.
  The veil of the Adept is particularly hard to pierce because while its vertical warp threads are the thousand strands of Light that bind your soul to God, its horizontal weft includes every real or imagined tie that still binds you to earth, including your illusions, desires, appetites, and soul debts. If you were making a magical flying carpet to take you home to God, but fail to keep the vertical warp threads anchored straight and taut in the Father, then the crosswise weft threads that you weave through the warp will result in a misshapen lumpy mess. You can never destroy your lines of Light to the Father, but your poor choices can wreck the beautiful design you originally desired to create. This metaphor also describes how you create your soul’s prayer shawl, your talis, which is a mesh of Light.
  No matter how far you climb, you are always working on all seven degrees at once, which means you must make sure you do not allow self to recreate any old veil. Wield your sword of truth with a deft, light touch to sever the negative ties that bind without damaging your silver cord of 1,000 lines of Light.
  The fourth veil of illusion deals with the Degree of the Mystic and your prayer life, which is really your whole life, because it includes speech, idle words, tones of voice, the amount of force you use when speaking, and the accuracy of your words. Every word you speak is how you use, misuse, or abuse the Power of the spoken Word, the greatest of the gifts God has given you. The words you speak release Power, and that Power will either build and heal or tear down and destroy. One of Edna Lister’s greatest works on the power of prayer and its power in your life is the text of God as Consciousness Appears as Form. Read it regularly.
  The fifth veil is illusion, which is composed of all the self-expressions that you’ve not yet mastered. As a Master you are responsible for everything and everyone around you, every soul with whom you’ve had contact, from the beginning of time. If you make an effort and fail, you think, “Well, that didn’t work!” and you may promise, “I’ll do better the next time.” True mastery is cleaning up every mess you’ve made or participated in creating, with no excuses. Every “that” that did not work is both an idea and an action for which you remain responsible until you return the whole of it, substance and vibration, to the Light. Responsibility has no end, no conclusion except the Light.
  The sixth veil of illusion includes every form of service you’ve given or failed to give as a dedicated servant of God’s Light and law. This represents the Degree of the Priest who chooses to serve faithfully under any and all conditions for however long it takes to finish the task. When you hear yourself whine about how long this task is taking to do, you uncover another illusion about the relative value of your time and effort in contrast to God’s eternity and omnipotence. Self can never win this game, but soul can grow in poise, patience, and strength in the release of Power. In his Practice of the Presense of God, Brother Lawrence left us a compilation of his life’s lessons on becoming aware of the presence of God in his life. His great secret to success was constant awareness that everything he said or did was to God’s glory, or not.
  It comes as no surprise that the seventh veil of illusion consists of all the leftover odds and ends, the niggling irritants that you didn’t lift and redeem elsewhere. This veil represents the Christos Degree where you learn that there is no small thing, everything is a detail; yes, this law does mean you, no exceptions will be made, and so on and so on. Every time you make a soul inventory of remaining self you thin this veil. Its effect is pervasive and all-encompassing. Every time you turn around, you meet it again until all your refusals, protests, and resistance fades into one great “Yes, Father, I shall do whatever You desire me to do.”
  So now it seems as though we have reached the end, but that’s only a another illusion. Plato tells us that Socrates highly valued the Delphic maxim, “Know thyself,” and said that “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Plato records another enigmatic statement, too: “Let no one ignorant of geometry come under my roof.”
  The following excerpts from Plato’s dialogue, the Philebus, shed great Light on our topic: “We say that the one and many become identified by thought, and that now, as in time past, they run about together, in and out of every word which is uttered, and that this union of them will never cease, and is not now beginning, but is, as I believe, an everlasting quality of thought itself, which never grows old.”
  We are seeking wisdom, which is greater than mere knowledge or opinion or prejudice: “Whatever things are said to be are composed of one and many, and have the finite and infinite implanted in them: seeing, then, that such is the order of the world, we too ought in every enquiry to begin by laying down one idea of that which is the subject of enquiry; this unity we shall find in everything.”
  “The sound which passes through the lips…is one yet infinite.…When you have learned what sounds are high and what low, the number and nature of the intervals and their limits or proportions, and the systems compounded out of them, which our fathers discovered, and have handed down to us…under the name of harmonies; and their correspondences in the movements of the human body, which when measured by numbers ought…to be called rhythms and measures…when you have learned all this, then you are perfect; and you may be said to understand any other subject, when you have a similar grasp of it. But the infinity of kinds and of individuals in each of them, when not classified, creates…a state of infinite ignorance” [paraphrased].
  Finally, “I do not mean by beauty of form such beauty as that of animals or pictures, which the many would suppose to be my meaning; but…understand me to mean straight lines and circles, and the plane or solid figures which are formed out of them by turning-lathes and rulers and measurers of angles; for these I affirm to be not only relatively beautiful, like other things, but they are eternally and absolutely beautiful.”
  Every veil includes elements of all seven veils of illusion, and you face them 7 x 7 = 49, which when added together = 13, the number of the Christ. Four symbolizes one face of a square cube, the base of a pyramid, the bounded plane of service, or a servant’s sphere of influence. We speak of fourfold man as the expression of the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual dimensions.
  Pythagoras (theoretically Plato’s teacher) taught that the diagonal of a square inscribed within a circle equals the circle’s diameter. Consider a cube encased within a sphere. The veils of illusion may be parted by comprehension of the mysteries involved with their numbers, which both conceal and reveal them.
  Today we have been conducted to the Gates of God’s Eternal Mysteries by His Begotten Son, who is the Word of all Power as Light. Ponder the meaning of the verses from Luke 14, remembering that 14 is the number that signifies choice and separation:
  “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. And whoever does not bear his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not sit down first and count the cost, whether he has enough to finish it—lest, after he has laid the foundation, and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish’?…So likewise, whoever of you does not forsake all that he has cannot be my disciple.”
  Our Lord Jesus enumerates the categories of illusions and their sources, which you must overcome to build your high tower of refuge in the love and wisdom of God. To begin, you must tear down your old worn-out tower of Babel. Gather all those illusions into a pyre of self and burn them with the Fire of God’s Eternal Love.
  In conclusion, remember that Jesus used Paul to write the letters to the early churches. Each of us has our own particular collection of character flaws and soul taints to use as fuel to this Pentecostal Fire of Love. These scriptures are part of an instruction manual, quick reference “How-to-DO-It” guides for the soul!
  We are the leaders of God’s Elect, elected because we have chosen to serve Him. We are the officers of the Legions of the Lamb, who has redeemed us “out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation” to be his royal priesthood. As a summer study, read the Book of the Revelation, especially chapters 5, 7, 13 and 20.
  We are in the midst of the Armageddon; the battle lines are drawn and the legions of the damned stand in array against us, we who are the Legions of Light. Satan, the Adversary, has been freed for decades now, and as the Revelation (20:8-9) says, he has gone out “to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.” Gog and Magog embody the evil of the tribes of Ishmael and the inhabitants of Sodom and of Gomorrah, together with every sin and perversion they represent.
  As a leader among the Elect your every thought and action carries the Power to affect tens of thousands for the good or the not-good. Every veil you burn in the Pentecostal Fire of Love lightens the burden for earth and its billions. Your conquering of self strengthens others, lifts their hearts, and encourages them to do the same. Together we can help to lead the millions, the billions to the Light in the Valley of Decision. This is our work program for the summer to come. Join me and let us finish the Armageddon quickly!

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