One Of Those Days

Have you ever had one of these days?

It’s morning, your alarm goes off, and you stretch and look out of the

window. The sun is streaming in, you feel one with everything. Life is good.

And then you glance at the clock and realize that somehow your alarm

went off 30 minutes later than it should have. You rush to the door of

your bedroom, fling it open and dash down the hall to the kitchen to start your coffee pot, and you step in or on… something. And you’re barefoot… You limp the rest of the way to the kitchen on one heel, hurriedly start the coffee pot, and then race back to the bathroom to brush your teeth and shower in three minutes. You glance at your watch and realize you still can

make it on time.

You congratulate yourself as you head to the kitchen to toast a bagel to

have with your coffee, and you realize that you must not have put the filter

holder all the way in when you started the coffee because there is coffee…

everywhere… running over the edge of the counter and onto the floor….

Ever have one of those days?

You leave the house sans coffee, and someone has parked a moving

truck blocking your driveway or parking spot, and it’s clear you’re going

nowhere for another 10 to 15 minutes. By now you’re really late, adrenaline has replaced the missing caffeine, and all traces of good humor you may have retained are lost along with any notion that you are Spirit, one with an infinite and powerful Presence. Yup, all of that is 100% out the window: right now, the only thing that has your attention, is this day that appears to be going rapidly downhill.

Maybe, once we’ve returned home, and are sitting with a glass of

wine, or beer, or herbal tea, or kombucha, or an extra dry gin martini,

recounting to a roommate or loved one this crazy awful day, maybe once

we’ve slowed down a tad, we might say a bit sheepishly – “Oh, yeah. I

guess I could’ve used a spiritual tool somewhere in there…”

Ever have one of those kinds of days?

I’ll bet that we all have. Oh, the details will be different, but I’ll bet that

most of us, even with all the spiritual work we do, have a day where

something happens, or somethings happen, and we have a hard time

regaining our footing. We forget to use the tools we have. This is where having a regular and consistent spiritual practice and a solid grounding in the basics comes in handy, because when we develop that muscle, it’s there when we need it, and we can recover our footing more quickly.

Having a consistent spiritual practice keeps the knowing of our oneness

with God closer to the forefront of our minds, and knowing our oneness with

this Divine Intelligence is the bedrock of what we teach in Unity. It is what

our five principles rest on. It is what our affirmative prayer practice rests on.

Affirmative prayer is kind of like a divine argument - not an argument

we’re having with the divine - but an argument designed to logically

convince ourselves of what must be True. Kind of like in a courtroom where

a lawyer is convincing the jury about the facts of a case - we use a logical

argument about the divine to help ourselves shift our consciousness and

embody a higher Truth.

The foundation of this divine argument is an understanding that there is

only One Thing Happening, only. We begin by affirming that there is only

One. One Ground of All Being, One Life, One Power, One Presence. One

Mind. One Intelligence. And this is a powerful place to begin.

Once we are grounded in this knowing, the prayer work unfolds of its

own accord, with each subsequent layer of knowingness flowing logically

from this foundational beginning.

Getting to that level of certainty takes practice. We can have a mental or

intellectual understanding of being One with Infinite Mind, but that is really

just a first step. The key is to have an embodied knowingness, and that

takes time and diligent practice. As we practice, we “get it” in deeper and

fuller and more expansive ways.

It seems to me that if this foundational idea of Infinite is so central to

what we teach in the New Thought movement, it just might behoove us to

really understand what Infinite is, to the degree that we can; to not just have

this intellectual understanding of infinite, but to really get it in a very visceral

way, in the marrow of our bones. And in doing so, we release is a sense of

a life apart from God.

What does Infinite mean, truly? Only one thing can be infinite, only one

thing can be limitless. There is something back of all that we see, back of

every grain of sand, back of every tree, every chair, every cloud, every star.

When we say “back of” what we mean is that there is this One something,

an infinite quantum field which is the substance out of which everything

arises. This substance is infinite. It is one boundless something,

everywhere present, without limit.

This Presence permeates every particle of the Universe and the reason

it permeates every particle in and of the Universe is that it is every particle

of the Universe. And here is why it is so important of really get this: Since It

is every particle of and in the Universe, it is every particle of you. It can’t not

be.

Henry Wood, a new thought author and speaker from the late 1800’s,

early 1900’s says it this way: “One life permeates all things, and there is no

corner of the cosmos too remote to feel Its heartthrob.” There is no separation in God. We, at the very least, in our attempt to understand an infinitesimal fraction of the unknowable, can know this simple yet enormous truth: We as soul are infinite. Take that in for a moment. You, as soul, are infinite. You are an

individuation of this Boundless Creator.

And yet, even as we read this, hear this, attempt to incorporate it, we

wrestle with a race consciousness - the combined consciousness of

humanity - which says: “My eyes see a separate you from a separate me.

My eyes see a chair, a table, a house, a dog, and I am not that.” Most of us still manage to feel, or subconsciously think of ourselves as outside of the Infinite. Even after we learn about Oneness, we still discover ourselves delicately sidestepping or just plain forgetting that truth and see ourselves as somehow separate.

We do this in a myriad of subtle ways: perhaps we say that we each

have a little spark of God within us, which semantically says that there is us

and then there is this spark of God with in us. It sounds like we are separate

from that spark of God within. Or perhaps we speak of ‘our soul,’ or ‘your soul.’ But when we say those words, who is it that is talking about ‘their soul?’ It gives weight to the continued misperception of separation. Or we say we want to “connect” to God or the All That Is. But how can we connect to that which we can never be disconnected from?

We are not separate. In the same way that a wave, as it arcs up into the

air and sees another wave might think, “I am not that wave over there,” we,

from our perspective on the shore can see that all of the waves are of the

same ocean, individuations of the same sea, and yet simultaneously one.

This getting it, this embodiment of Truth, is by its very nature,

experiential and takes practice. It can take many divine arguments with

ourselves.

But the gift of practice is that, drop by drop, we fill the bucket of our

consciousness until there comes a day when this click happens and we are

almost blinded by the realization that of course we are abundance! Of

course we are health. Of course, peace is right where I am, of course

harmony is my true nature.

So, how do we do that?

As you move through your day, tell yourself that there is only one

something and you are of it. There is one fountainhead of all being, and that

fountainhead rushes into form as you. Remind yourself that there can only

be one infinite and therefore all that It is, you are.

Remember daily, hourly - as often as you think of it, that because God is

Love, you must be Love - there can be no other way. That you are Whole

because God is Whole. You are Presence because Presence is

everywhere present. You are inseparable from Love, inseparable from

Wisdom. Bathe yourself with words of Truth. They will percolate in your

consciousness and eventually, like yeast in bread, take precedence.

And then, when you find yourself having ‘one of those days,’ this Truth

will be closer at hand, and you find that you regain your footing more easily.