Does Unity avoid evil? Je suis un avec Charlie. Je suis un avec Ahmed. Je suis un avec Nigeria. Je suis un avec ISIS. Je suis un avec Al Qaeda.

Transcription

1 Does Unity avoid evil? Je suis un avec Charlie. Je suis un avec Ahmed. Je suis un avec Nigeria. Je suis un avec ISIS. Je suis un avec Al Qaeda. Je suis un avec Boko Haram. Je suis un avec tout le monde. Maybe some of those phrases sound familiar. They are not exactly the phrases that have been in the news. You may have been alarmed by some of the names you heard. Today we examine a question that seems to be on the hearts of many: Does Unity avoid talking about evil? When I invite questions, I always get questions on Evil. Many of us worry about evil, and wonder what Unity teaches about it. We don t talk about it much, especially not in the way other religious traditions do. So today, we ll examine the concept of evil and what Unity might teach us. I found these definitions of evil in traditional dictionaries: profound immorality, wickedness, and depravity, especially when regarded as a supernatural force; the force in nature that governs and gives rise to wickedness and sin; the wicked or immoral part of someone or something. In these definitions we find a very fundamental concept that Unity disagrees with and this gives rise to a lot of confusion: Evil cannot be a separate power because there is only One Presence and One Power. Evil is not a force that compels humans to act. In Unity beliefs, that cannot exist. Unity co-founder Charles Fillmore in the Revealing Word says that evil is: - That which is not of God; unreality; error thought; a product of the fallen human consciousness; negation. I might add: That which is produced by human consciousness operating from a sense of separation. A sense of separation from what? From God. From our Oneness with all. From that One Power and Presence which is our essence. Fillmore goes on to say: Man has the privilege and freedom of using this [One] power as he will. When he misuses it he brings about inharmonious conditions. These are called evil. Evil appears in the world because man is not in spiritual understanding. He has not learned that all is Mind; neither has he conformed to the law of Mind, with the result that inharmony appears in his body and affairs. He can do away with evil by learning rightly to use the one Power. The first problem I observe when examining the concept of evil is the reaction to Unity s position that Evil doesn t exist. That kind of simplistic phrasing has caused people to dismiss Unity s position as Pollyanna or head in the sand. A fuller examination of Unity s teaching is that evil does not exist as a 1

2 separate force. Evil does not exist in the absolute but can only be seen in the manifest world. When Charles Fillmore says evil is that which is not of God, he seems in contradiction to the idea God is everywhere present. So let me try to work through my understanding of this apparent dichotomy. There is One Power and it can serve as a source of ideas, wisdom and guidance. Evil is not a power and cannot inspire us. However, our own human minds, acting from the illusions of fear, anger, and pain, can conceive of plans out of a sense of being separate from others, from our Oneness and from that One Power. Unity s philosophy that evil is entirely our own human doing is unsettling. Perhaps because it lays the solution solely in our own control. There is no evil force to fight and to conquer. There is only our own mind and our sense of separation. Joel Goldsmith, in his book, Realization of Oneness, writes: God is not a power over evil, and we have no power over evil. To believe that God is a power over evil, he adds, is to believe that evil has an existence. And then we either must believe God to be the cause and creator of evil, or we must accept another cause or creator; and the acceptance of any other cause or creator does away with Omnipotence, Omniscience, Omnipresence. We must have only one Creator, and that one without capacity for evil of any kind. Then we do not need to have power over sin, disease or death because these have no existence in God, and if they do not exist in God they do not exist. Our rational, outer focused minds rebel! Sin, disease, death DO exist. They are everywhere around us! Look at the news! Look at Facebook! We live in the midst of great evil. Yet from the perspective of our teachings, we live in the midst of products of our own creativity acting out of alignment with Spirit, acting out of alignment with our true nature and we have labeled these products Evil. How challenging to keep coming back to the concept that Evil is our own creation. No wonder we don t like to talk about this. Some of you might be beginning to think, This is a great philosophy lesson but it doesn t sound very practical. Whether evil is an illusion created by our minds or it doesn t exist in the absolute, what advice do you have for living in the here and now? We come now to the second challenge I observe when people are trying to understand Unity s teachings on evil: they don t like the solution. Fighting evil sounds like a grand endeavor! It is action oriented, we understand war, we 2

3 like a good fight. Fillmore s advice, He can do away with evil by learning rightly to use the one Power, sounds boring. And perhaps, too difficult. The simplest language I can use to explain this advice is this: Evil is produced out of our sense of separation. We hold error thoughts that we are separate from God, from One Power; and the thought we are separate from each other. We falsely believe that actions that harm others have nothing to do with us. To eliminate evil we must eliminate separation. We must continually keep our minds aligned with Spirit and we must be vigilant in breaking down the barriers we have created between ourselves and all others. That, to me, is how to rightly use the one Power. It is not easy. But I don t think it is a new idea. I believe Dr King s dream is bigger than we have imagined. I believe the dream is simply to return to our sense of oneness, honoring all others and accepting our diversity without judgment. I believe Dr. King and others invite us to begin practicing the hardest concept of all: empathy. Empathy is defined as the ability to understand the thoughts, feelings or emotions of someone else. Compare that to compassion: a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering. Compassion allows us to remain separate, even if we are motivated to good action. Empathy requires us to move to a place of oneness in which we see through the eyes of another and attempt to understand their thoughts and feelings. In 1967 Dr King said, Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence: when it helps us to see the enemy s point of view; to hear his questions; to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weakness of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition. Here indeed is an unattractive option: empathy may be the light which illumines those ways we are out of alignment with our true self. As much as we say we want to move in the direction of being our true self, we do not care to have those blemishes lifted up into the light. It is so much easier to point in the other direction and say, This is evil. It is so much easier to hate the haters without noticing we have become a hater; without noticing we have engaged our mind in evil separating ourselves from them. In the news, the media, and on Facebook we have seen, Je suis Charlie. This is French for I am Charlie. I understand the intention is oneness, yet Unity also teaches us a unique meaning around, I AM. 3

4 I AM is my Christ nature; my true, spirit self. My true self is not named. I began today with French statements, which I ll return to now. Je suis un avec Charlie. I am one with Charlie. Charlie Hebdo is a French satire magazine where 16 journalists were killed recently, spawning large demonstrations for peace in Paris. Je suis un avec Ahmed. I am one with Ahmed. Ahmed was a Muslim policeman who died defending the lives of the magazine journalists mocking his religion. Je suis un avec Nigeria. I am one with Nigeria, the scene of a massacre of hundreds, perhaps thousands, in two villages which is receiving relatively little public attention. Je suis un avec ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram. I am one with ISIS, Al Qaeda and Boko Haram. These are all Islamic extremist groups claiming responsibility for acts of destruction. Lest we believe our world has become more violent, more perverse, we have only to read the Bible. The Old Testament has great stories of mass slaughter, of heads on poles and carried on platters. Perhaps a sadder observation would be that we have not been able to move beyond that level. Or have we? My last statement: Je suis un avec tout le monde. I am one with all the world. Our awareness may be increasing. Demonstrations of solidarity in Paris. Media and technology gives us access to immediate information from around the world. More and more, individuals are seeking to understand one another. More and more individuals are standing up for the greater good, not the individual agenda. We are not there yet. My challenge in the phrase popular after the recent police violence, Black Lives Matter, is that all lives matter. So long as we continue to make distinctions, even as we believe we are correcting past inequalities, we maintain our sense of separation. To truly eliminate the inequality we must understand the fears and beliefs that perpetuate the inequality and to do that, we must have empathy for those acting in ways we have labeled evil. We must acknowledge our thoughts and feelings which arise from a sense of separation and see the evil we do. In our empathetic view, what will be revealed about our own actions and attitudes? To eliminate the power groups like ISIS, Al Qaeda and Boko Haram seem to have, we must understand what their view is and what appeals to those they are recruiting. How are we contributing to their illusory power by our own actions? The great irony is that if we are to move beyond separation, when we understand the stories that fuel the fear driving our plans for evil (not of God and not in harmony with our true selves), we must let go of our stories and find peace together. If we are locked in a battle with evil, we are ensuring its perpetuation. That which we resist, persists. To claim I am not one with any person or group is to maintain a sense of 4

5 separation. This is the challenge of Unity s views on evil: they require selfexamination, thorough honesty with ourselves and a deep commitment to the transformation of our own thinking. The good news is there is a power available to help us. The One Power and One Presence, constantly available. There is a Light able to illuminate our error thinking; able to guide our transformation and able to give us courage to begin. We can call that Power anything or nothing. The important thing is to open to that Power and allow it to be the only power we acknowledge. Unity teachings do not encourage us to turn away from the events in our world or pretend they do not exist. Our songs remind us there are many painful events in our history; events we seem to continue to repeat fed by our actions and our consciousness. Unity teachings challenge us to look beyond the appearance of the events. We must begin to ask different questions. From a place of empathy we wonder what is causing the violence? What are the stories of hatred we are living from as we look at our reactions to the news? How can all people find the place to begin releasing these stories and creating a story of peace? There is a path to peace. It is a path that begins within. It is not new; it is not impossible; it is not someone else s job. To eliminate evil in our lives and in our world, we must each learn to rightly use the One Power and One Presence I AM. For our meditation today, I d like to use a prayer from Dr. Howard Thurman. Dr. Thurman was an advisor to Martin Luther King Jr and he has a certain wisdom I like. Let us begin by singing When I Pray. *** We come in prayer in the silence of this place. Our minds are troubled because the anxieties of our hearts are deep and searching. We are stifled by the odor of death which envelops our earth, where in so many places brother fights against brother. The panic of fear, the torture of insecurity, the ache of hunger, all have fed and rekindled ancient hatreds and long-forgotten memories of old struggles, when the world was young and your children but dimly aware of Your Presence in the midst. This is the world we have created; not the world manifesting only divine creation. For every thought we have contributed to this creation, we seek to forgive ourselves. We seek to transform our thoughts of pride and arrogance; our 5

6 thoughts of greed and selfishness; the bitterness, hatred and revenge we have harbored in our hearts and minds. We open to the Light of Truth. While we are still in Your Presence, search our spirits and grant to our minds the guidance and wisdom that will teach us the way to take, without which there can be no peace and no confidence anywhere. Teach us how to put at the disposal of Thy Purposes of Peace the fruits of our industry, the products of our minds, the vast wealth of our land and the resources of our spirit. Grant us the courage to follow the illumination of this hour to the end that we shall not lead death to any man s door; but rather may we strengthen the hand of all in high places and in common tasks seek to build a friendly work, of friendly people, beneath a friendly sky. This is the simple desire of our hearts which we share with You. Please hear my words as your own: Open unto me Light for my darkness. Open unto me Peace for my turmoil. Open unto me Forgiveness for my errors. Open unto me Love for my hates. Open unto me Thy self for myself. Sweet Spirit, open unto me. Amen. 6