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Healing Substance in Form

This Edna Lister essay is a chapter of her book, A Design for Ascension.











Healing Substance in Form

God composes the whole manifest universe of one substance, called life sparks, which are infinitely variable in their combinations. These combinations determine the different forms that substance takes in this material world of form.

To discover why substance has assumed some alien physical form, we must look for the answer in Mind and its operation within the individual consciousness. We cannot find the answer in the conscious mind of one who is determined to be healed, who prays night and day for that healing, who in all ways follows law. So our search forces us further back, into the involuntary, unconscious realm of subconscious mind, into the appetitive soul portion of the living soul.

Not until we discovered this vast, still largely-unexplored realm of subconscious mind could we understand the origin of disease, why one person would have an instantaneous miracle of healing while another continued for years in the same old state of mind or body. The answer could not be found on the outer, since both individuals seemingly prayed just as hard, had desires just as determined and led lives just as pure.

You store every thought, everything seen or heard, all the pictures an unguided, unbridled imagination can build in this realm of subconscious mind. It all lays waiting for something outside to knock at the door, for appetitive soul to push it open and come trooping out unexpectedly, much to your unprepared surprise and chagrin.

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Freedom Versus Suppression and Repression

As a student of the master psychologist, Jesus the Christ and followers of the law he taught, you know that you must free appetitive soul of its burden. Light must penetrate this darkened corner of mind so the whole living soul may ascend to its Maker, taking back every part of itself.

You learn that this process is natural: Vagrant thoughts swarm into consciousness, often shocking the self-satisfied soul. The subconscious also holds many records of matters you have only seen or heard, not in which you have actively participated.

Appetitive soul has only one method of releasing itself, which is exactly as a seed or bulb opens and sends shoots to the surface for light. The doors of memory open, most commonly in a dream, and out and up shoots what needs release — old suppressions and repressions, old memory impressions of thoughts, emotions or imagination.

In the past, when such thoughts finally reached your surface consciousness, you probably supressed them, immediately disowned them and closed the door without asking to whom they did belong, if not to you. You hide such thoughts and hide from them because you do not like them, they embarrass you, you fear them, so you repress them, which only makes them stronger.

A kind-natured and good soul may suddenly find his conscious mind full of thoughts of darkness and limitation, often hate-full thoughts about a loved one or friend. A happy, joyous soul may suddenly see a picture in imagination of something terrible happening, which is common.

Most souls are heartily shocked the first few times. Then, growing more accustomed to such thoughts, they move to the next step — fear. Unresolved, such fears will grow until they finally take possession of a previously happy soul.

Some souls may become preoccupied with a single dark idea, obsessed to the exclusion of every other idea or form of living. This can happen because appetitive soul is always trying to jettison the past. This results when you do not understand that you must lift such ideas into Light when they appear to ruffle the surface of conscious mind.

Such dark thoughts are nothing more than a dusty, musty corner you must air and made ready for the bridegroom. Your conscious mind hastily shoves such dark thoughts back into the subconscious and unconscious realm of mind and slams the door shut on them. The appetitive soul's only alternative then is to pop them up again at the first opportunity, for the law in this unconscious realm is to seek the Light.

You may play this little involuntary game of pushing negative thoughts down again into the subconscious until you develop what psychology calls a dual or split personality, first one then the other persona using the conscious mind. A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. – James 1:8.

Anything that "touches" you, "moves" you, "bothers" you or "gets to" you belongs to you. It arises from the unconscious for you to lift into Light, to a cloud continent of Light. When you feel that something of this nature does not belong to you now, you are right in one sense: It is just part of your past. You do not want to give it any more power in your life today. Yet ignoring, denying and pushing such thoughts back and down gives the past power over you today.

Denial infuses dark thoughts with new life. Constant denial feeds and sustains them with new substance. Denial is a form of fear. Yesterday has no part in your present activities, unless you renew yesterday's power. Yet you must sublimate and remake each past impression into Light.

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Conscious Lifting

Consciously lift the unconscious. Any memory impression of darkness that you unconsciously hold in the subconscious realm of appetitive soul must obey the same law of nature that guides plants, birds and animals in evolution — to seek the Light. So memory impressions must and do resurface until you work them out.

You must seek new methods to lift and erase them from the records of your past lives. Erasing them may take time. If the memory impression is deep, then it will take time to erase it fully from subconscious memory. Deep memory impressions include thoughts of family, heritage, disease, lack of success or old fears held often or for a long period.

How will you know when you erase a memory record? When it is gone forever, when you no longer remember it, when it never enters your conscious mind again. This is your sign that you have overcome this cloud of darkness, completely melted by the heat of your burning desire and changed into Light.

Every denial adds another dark thought to the pile already in your subconscious mind. One affirmation crosses out or overcomes just one dark thought.

Since you begin with a subconscious full of memory impressions to overcome, you may go on for years, seemingly standing still. Yet this apparent standstill is not real, for only a small ray of the Christ Light will ultimately melt any barrier of utter blackness. All Light needs is plenty of time to finish its work.

As long as you deny disease or any other negative, you are not free from the darkness, whether it is an idea of illness or a critical thought about a loved one or an enemy. Denial is proof-positive that you definitely accept a disease or negative is still there.

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If you really believed, consciously or unconsciously, when you asked God to heal you, then you could not still remember you had the darkness. So what you really need to cure is the idea.

The substance involved, no matter its present form, will instantly snap back to unalterable perfection, no matter how ungodly it appears. Substance is perfect now, even when you do not like its present form, because the One Substance can never become imperfect.

You cannot change substance. You can only send substance into an imperfect mold built from your own dark, negative thoughts, picture images and desires, your doubts and fears.

Some people can cure an idea with one statement and the body shows a miracle. Others may need years to cure an old idea. Many people have a "hospital" idea ingrained so deeply that only an illness requiring hospitalization will cure it. Sometimes, only surgery will cure the fear of an "operation" idea.

After you work out the idea, after you have dramatized and played it, prayer steps in and completes the work. Nevertheless, the substance removed in the operation was already perfect and exactly like the new-grown substance we use in physical healing.

Unless you have cut out the idea as well, it will grow again, perhaps in another form. An idea determines the mold and causes any disease or "growth" into which you pour substance. Doctors and hospitals are only agents the Father uses to rid subconscious mind of fear ideas so great that nothing else can erase them.

When you have a change of heart or reconsider old ideas, the One Power can finish the healing. Only you can cure yourself of disease ideas. God's healing Power cannot work until your desire for Light as a cure is strong enough to reach the Light. Until you fan the spark of desire into a flame, you will continue the same old game of "up and down."

The flame of desire in your heart consumes old ideas, and reaching ever higher, it soon contacts the down-pouring white Light of the Christ. In an instant, Light makes all old things new.

Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. – Philippians 3:13-14.

"Forgetting those things behind" is turning from the dark to the Light, which is "getting" Light from above "for" healing instead of more darkness of confusion. When you never again consider the past, you forget it.

To get the new for the old seems simple. When you "let go and let God," you find yourself suddenly so filled with life that you forget any old weakness. You are cured.

Waiting for God to heal you, asking God to heal you is not enough. You must so desire healing that it means more to you than your need for air, food or drink. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. – Mark 12:30.

This means loving with your whole living soul, the combined appetitive soul, rational soul and Oversoul acting as one. Not with part of your mind part of the time but all your mind harnessed in twenty-four-hour-a-day service with strong, continued, determined effort to lift all emotional desires, imagination and thinking.

Then Power expresses as activity in the physical cells. Your metabolism speeds its functioning. As your body tears down old cells, it builds new cells in their place. This rebuilding works as a lengthy earth process or by a quick heavenly process called instantaneous healing. You make the body whole and perfect after the original design in God's image and likeness.

They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint. – Isaiah 40:31.

Power is divine action, divine activity and all the passive waiting in the world will not take its place. You "wait upon the Lord" in the sense that you know, even when you cannot see that divine law is working in you and through you, both to will and to do.

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Ignore the Appearance and Act as If

Ignore the outer appearance of what "seems to be" according to earth understanding, and allow your faith to wait upon the Lord in the high place of consciousness. Establish soul consciousness in the Oversoul's heart center of poise while your lips form words of praise. Send prayers of ever more love in ever-increasing gratitude.

Believe you now have what you desire and have asked for or decreed as God's will for you. This is letting Power act as you. Mind and Substance used as thinking and planning begins its perfect work at once under divine law.

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. – Hebrews 11:1. Power and Substance beget action. Faith is the "substance of things hoped for" that the cells themselves use to build or rebuild into the body or affairs. You operate under the trinity of fundamental principles and apply just one substance of healing to all life and its forms.

Two actions only are possible to substance — you may raise or lower its rate of vibration. When you raise the rate of vibration, substance expands until it passes beyond visibility, from ice to steam. When you lower the rate of vibration, substance condenses and absolutely crystallizes into form, from steam to ice.

The only alternatives possible in any healing are raising or lowering the rate of vibration of substance.

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Balancing the Inner and the Outer

A clear distinction lies between the inner and the outer. Any illness or unlikeness to God is a lowered rate of vibration you cause by closing your outer body to the great inner River of Life. You form your physical body of the one Substance vibrating at a lower rate than Mind; therefore, you must consider the physical in any healing.

Fever is an outer vibration of some cells vibrating too rapidly for the rest of the body, which registers as confusion, congestion, irritation, inflammation or some sort of eruption. In all cases of mental confusion, fevers and congestion of cells, you must lower the inner vibration physically to outer stillness. Simultaneously, the white Light of the Christ lifts the whole body's spiritual rate of vibration.

For example, an imbalance of Love and Wisdom manifests as an imbalance of alkalies (bases) and acids in the physical endocrine glands and their secretions. So, you regain a normal body balance (60 percent alkaline and 40 percent acid) by rightly using the food substances provided by the one Mind.

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Energy Conversion

Life consists of taking that which is not self and using physical processes to convert it into the physical body in the renewing, rebuilding processes of cells. This is your perfect share of responsibility in working out your own salvation while you wait upon the Lord in the high place.

You must breathe the Holy Breath to renew the spiritual activity in every cell or you have no life. Your body uses everything you eat and drink as energy and substance for rebuilding the body temple.

All quickening, vitalizing Power comes from above. When you separate the inner from the outer, you lower the rate of vibration of your body, affairs or consciousness into the static ice stage.

When you refuse to accept the outer physical as the divine process for creative life on earth, when you want to leave it all to God, you most surely lower the rate of vibration of your substance, physical-material body or affairs, toward lifelessness.

The Neophyte's vow is to make the body a fitting dwelling place for the soul. Many lesser vows, including breathing, drinking water, resting, including diversions, re-creation and sleep and exercise come under this. Drink two quarts a day, besides other liquids and what you use in bathing.

When you fail to observe these lesser Neophyte vows, then the body automatically responds to the physical trinity of emergence, maturity and decline — a trinity of earth urges. Condensation of substance in the cells is why elderly people shrink in size age.

For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath. – Matthew 13:12.

Lowering the rate of vibration and condensing substance causes the process of "from him who has not shall be taken away even what he has." If it is too great an imposition to live in proper obedience to Neophyte vows, your body will automatically respond.

The rate of vibration will lower, the cells condense and the ice stage inevitably descends. This lowers the rate of vibration of brain cells and memory, thinking and other processes slow. Such neglect creates a debt to law.

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Healing Is Letting

You do not need to decline, descend or regress. All you need do at any place along the Path is to become aware that being healed is possible.

Healing is letting the Mind of God operate as your thinking and planning. Healing is letting the Power of God quicken you into a divine desire for activity. Healing is letting the substance of the Spirit vitalize your very cells into the ability to change. Letting is the cleansing, purifying process of Spirit.

The thinking and planning phase of letting changes your subconscious habits of illness, lack or any limitation into a flaming desire to be whole. Letting in turn opens the physical cells or affairs to the Power-full recreation of their substance into perfection.

Once you free appetitive soul or subconscious mind of all old memory impressions of falseness, darkness and repressions, nothing earthly can penetrate your barrier of Light to touch you or move you from your standpoint in the Light. Then you can say with the full soul-conviction of all truth, "None of these things move me," for you no longer have any affinity for them. Light attracts only Light.

If old thoughts and fears arise for lifting while you are praying, instantly stop and lift them. The secret of freedom is to never again try to shut these old ideas into the subconscious dark-room.

Lift the old memories and ideas into the Light and continue lifting while such thoughts come into the conscious mind. Until you completely erase them from memory, you will remember them. You forget old thoughts and fears when you completely erase them.

What pays your spiritual debts and hold you in stability? Sublimation, cleansing, and lifting the hold of appetitive soul, making right all your old records.

You transmute all past darkness into Light while lifting your appetitive soul to become one with your rational soul. Thus, you become a creator-servant of the One Mind, One Power and One Substance. Mind, Power and Substance are perfect. You shall become so when you let them use you.

Free the past. Let it come up. Lift it up to a cloud continent of Light. Let God use you in the present. Praise up. Then your future shall be as bright as all your highest dreams of glory.

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Edna Miriam Lister
1884 –1971
The original Pioneering Mystic
minister, teacher, and author

Edna Lister


References

The Compact Edition of The Oxford English Dictionary: 2 volumes. E.S.C. Weiner, editor. Oxford University Press, 1971.

The Holy Bible. King James Version (KJV).


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