World Work in Joel’s Words – August 2018

The following excerpt can be found in The Foundation of Mysticism, Chapter 21, “Living in the Light,” and in the transcript for Recording 267, Side 1, from the 1959 Hawaiian Village Open Class, titled “Self-Purification, continued.”   

In one way or another, let your prayer be the realization that “I and the Father are one,” that “the Lord is my shepherd.”  Let your prayer always remain on that level where it is not reaching out or up or within for something.  Then you will find that prayer in its highest sense has no words and no thoughts.  No words are used in prayer; no thoughts are used in prayer.  It is an inner communion that becomes a union with God, a resting in God.

Then too, you are a clear transparency through which God’s grace touches the consciousness of all of those who are reaching out to you.  It is exactly as if this room were filled with God, but no one was aware of it.  They were in darkness or sin or disease or lack—as if there were no God in this room.  Then one individual realizes, “God is. I Am.  God is closer to me than breathing, nearer than hands and feet.  I and the Father are one.  All that the Father hath is mine.  The Lord is my shepherd here and now.”  That one can rest, be still, and be a transparency, and the presence and power of God can penetrate the consciousness of those who are in darkness.

As we do world work, thinking of those in this world who are influenced by evil, those who are outlets for evil, we realize, “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.  Let us not hold them in condemnation either, but open their consciousness to this light that they may be freed of whatever it is that binds them to personal sense.  With that, there is the removal of condemnation from them because we have declared that it is not sin; it is merely ignorance.  It is not darkness, but an absence of light.

So in our forgiveness, in our understanding of the impersonal nature of all this, we are a transparency through which this transcendental Presence can function in the consciousness of the world.  You never know where it touches or whom it touches.  You have no way of knowing how the light, which reaches earth through the transparency of those in prayer, influences legislation, or how it changes decisions.  You have no idea how far-reaching it is.