Global Change Teachings for the New Millennium

Presented by Niánn Emerson Chase

to members and guests of Global Community Communications Church at a World-Wide Sunday Service

(Also available in the book, Teachings on Healing, Second Edition)

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We are all aware that this planet is in dire need of healing. In order for the planet to heal, the individuals, the human beings who have caused its devastation, need to heal.

In her book, Ordinary Times, Cycles in Marriage, Faith and Renewal, Nancy Meyers shares one of the most significant epiphanies of her life.

A couple of years ago, I had an experience that struck me, in spite of its familiar setting, and maybe even in some people’s lives, its predictability, as odd. I was at the Newman Center Mass I often attend on Saturday afternoons. Still walking in those days, I had just received communion and returned to my pew, where I knelt, and after one coherent little prayer, began the interior jumble that forms my post-communion meditation. This was even more of a mess than usual because I felt panic-stricken. My multiple sclerosis was getting worse, almost by the day, and my resolve to cope bravely in a manner befitting my stern Yankee heritage was weakening even faster than my muscles were. I just wanted to get rid of the damned disease. God, God, God, I prayed. Please cure me, heal me. And then for the first and only time in my life, I got a response. I had never heard voices, and I didn’t hear one now. Three monosyllables simply materialized in my consciousness: “But I am.”

Nancy Meyers goes on to describe her own inner process of realizing how God could be healing her while her physical symptoms of multiple sclerosis continue to get worse. She realized that in her mind, the actual intent in her prayer was, “Cure me of this physical ailment, of this disease.” That didn’t happen, but she discovered that she indeed was being healed, and that the healing process is different from the curing process. Now she is in a wheelchair and continues to believe that she’s in the process of being healed.

People today really aren’t that different than the way they were in Jesus’ time. Jesus dealt with thousands and thousands of people who would come to Him clamoring for a quick cure of their physical ailments. They wanted their physical lot in life improved, and they also wanted a meal thrown in with it. In actuality, The URANTIA Book tells us that Jesus cured only a few who came to Him, and out of that few hundred who were cured of a physical ailment, only a small portion were actually healed.

Today, most Americans and Europeans go to a doctor, or someone in the medical profession, to be cured of a physical illness. Sometimes they are cured, at least temporarily, when the treatment gets rid of the physical symptoms that they are having. Often the physical problem comes up again later on, or some other physical symptom emerges. They can go into remission at some level. Sometimes the patient ends up even worse off physically than before going through the treatment. What exactly is healing and how is it different from curing?

On pages 1836 and 1837 in The URANTIA Book, we are told about an elderly woman who wore a downcast expression, was much bent in form, and had come to hear Jesus teach. For eighteen years this woman had been fear-ridden, and all joy had passed out of her life. Life had just gotten to her, and she was literally beaten up by it. Jesus looked at her with compassion as He approached her. He touched her hunched shoulder and said, “Woman, if you would only believe, you could be wholly loosed from your spirit of infirmity.” This woman “who had been bowed down and bound up by the depressions of fear, believed the words of the Master.” She had faith, and “faith straightened her up immediately.” When she saw that she had been made straight, “she lifted up her voice and glorified God.” In that section of The URANTIA Book we are told that Jesus frequently delivered victims of fear, like this woman, from their “spirit of infirmity,” from their “depression of mind,” and from their “bondage of fear.” The people thought all such afflictions were either physical disorders or possessions by evil spirits, when in reality the disease was only the state of their minds.

Healing has to do with a shift in the mind, in the thought processes of the individual. Healing has to do with some kind of personal encounter with God the Father. For those who lived during Jesus’ time and were healed by responding from a soul level to Jesus, they encountered God through Jesus. For Nancy Meyers, the woman with multiple sclerosis, the encounter came with the spirit of the Father that was within her, what The URANTIA Book calls the Thought Adjuster. In Ms. Meyers’ continued healing, as well as in the healing of those who were actually in some manner touched by Jesus during the first century, the Spirit of Truth from the Creator Son and the Holy Spirit from the Universe Mother continued to coordinate with that fragment of the Universal Father to aid each individual in their healing. Healing is a continued process; it doesn’t just come and then it’s over and done with. Healing is a continued encounter with the Threefold Spirit of God within you.

That is not what curing is. Most doctors really aren’t in the business of healing; they are in the business of curing. They can go into surgery with a knife and cut out the tumor, but they haven’t dealt with the mind of the individual, the thought processes of the individual. For Nancy Meyers, her healing—which was a real and valid healing—did not include a cure of her multiple sclerosis. Yet she knows that God is still working with her, healing her. “Please God, God, God, heal me.” “But I am.”

Jesus’ Encounter with Two WomenOne of my favorite stories of Jesus’ encounters with others is about when He and His seventeen-year-old student, Ganid, were walking one evening, and they met two prostitutes. (Ibid., pp. 1472−73) The women approached Jesus, and young seventeen-year-old Ganid started sputtering self-righteousness. “How dare you women come up here! Don’t you know who you are approaching?” He started berating these women and yelling at them in indignation on how they had insulted Jesus, and Jesus said, “Calm down, Ganid, this is not it.” Jesus said to this boy,

I perceive, Ganid, that neither of these women is willfully wicked. I can tell by their faces that they have experienced much sorrow; they have suffered much at the hands of an apparently cruel fate; they have not intentionally chosen this sort of life; they have, in discouragement bordering on despair, surrendered to the pressure of the hour and accepted this distasteful means of obtaining a livelihood as the best way out of a situation that to them appeared hopeless. Ganid, some people are really wicked at heart; they deliberately choose to do mean things; but, tell me, as you look into these now tear-stained faces, do you see anything bad or wicked?

Those two women, who had been beaten down by the world and who had made the best choice they thought they could make, given their circumstances, were simply trying to survive and make a living. In those days, if a woman didn’t have a husband or a family to provide for her, prostitution was probably the only way she could make a living.

One of the women died a couple of years after of an illness, but she died a happy woman who had some self-respect and dignity and knew that she indeed was a beloved daughter of God. The other one became a powerful leader in the movement to help bring healing and Jesus’ teachings to others.

I recall a recent news report of two mothers who killed their children and then also killed themselves. A mother who does that to her young children has been driven to a point where in her mind she sees no way out. She sees the world as so unacceptable to live in that the only thing she can do is leave it. She’s not about to leave her children there to suffer in that world, for who would take care of them? The world is too terrible to live in anymore. It is a tragic thing that the world had gotten to those two women and that was the only choice they thought they had. Somehow they weren’t able to hear the spirit of God within them, and they didn’t have any human being who was somehow able to reach them to bring them to that realization that there were other options and other choices. These were just two mothers; there are hundreds of thousands of mothers across the planet who need to hear another message and who need true healing.

An Inner Life Needed for HealingWe know that in order to heal, we do need to provide the inner environment for the ministry of the Threefold Spirit of God and the other living spiritual forces to work with us. Often that inner environment has to have the outer environment, and that is what Jesus provided for the two women that He met. He changed their environment. He first encountered them in their hearts and minds, and a shift happened, a ray of hope came, and then He got practical and provided the logistics for them to change their outer conditions. He didn’t just go on and say, “Well, I’ll see you. Good luck!” and leave. He enabled them; He empowered them to move into another life circumstance.

All of us here sitting in this room have something in common with everyone else who lives in this country and in European countries and Canada. We are human products of Western civilization, of a corporate system, of an industrialized and high-tech society that has all of existence mechanized for humans and all living things on the planet. Most decisions in this dominant culture are based on the profit motive—very little soul, or heart, or spirit in any of it, and part of that environment is that constant rushing around.

Many believe they have to make all of these time limits. Many are always aware of the time on their watches. They find themselves rushing outwardly as they try to beat the traffic on the freeway, and they get impatient with the person in front of them who may not be driving as fast as they would like them to drive. There has been quite a bit of media publicity recently about the increasing problem of road rage. It is just an outward manifestation of the rage and the frustration that is happening to people on the inside.

People are also rushing around inside their heads. That is why a lot of people don’t want to be still; they are uncomfortable sitting down, being still, and actually reflecting or meditating, because their minds are going a mile a minute. “I can’t meditate, my mind’s going too crazy.” The URANTIA Book tells us that Jesus never was in a hurry. That was because He was in the moment, and He was in God’s will in the moment. You don’t have to be rushing when you are in God’s will in the moment, but our dominant culture does not provide a safe place for us to slow down and to develop an inner life. The URANTIA Book has a wonderful teaching about the inner life and the importance of developing the inner life, and how if a civilization does not encourage that and provide an impetus, a catalyst for the youth of the culture to develop that inner life, that civilization will crumble and fail. We see this happening in the civilization that we live in, which is simply a product of the Lucifer Rebellion.

One of my favorite authors, Madeline L’Engle, in one of her books, The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet, says:

A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child finished and complete. A self is always becoming. Being does mean becoming, but we run so fast, that it is only when we seem to stop, as sitting on the rock at the brook, that we are aware of our own “isness” of being. But certainly this is not static, for this awareness of being is always a way of moving from the selfish self, the self-image, and towards the real. Who am I then? Who are you?”

In order for us to really discover who we really are within our God-given personality circuitry, we do have to have that inner life. We have to sit in that circle of quiet. If we don’t sit still at some point and are running around busy all the time, we truly are in static spirituality. Even though it seems like there’s a lot of activity going on, much of it is basically meaningless activity, getting us very little of eternal value, and certainly not bringing healing and inner peace to us.

A Personal Healing ExperienceAll of us in Global Community Communications are in an accelerated process of healing. That time of healing can be very painful. It has been a real struggle for me in the past years having to deal with the physical aspects. I am no longer able to daily ride my bike four miles or do long hikes up to fifteen miles, though I can walk up to about four miles. My physical vehicle (body) won’t allow me to do as many activities as I have enjoyed in the past, but I realize that I am really healthier than I have ever been in my entire life. I am in a process of healing, and it has nothing to do, right now, with being cured of all these physical symptoms that I am struggling with.

I have always been a person who has moved fast through life, having six children, working (teaching up to one hundred and twenty-five students a day when I was in the public school system), and being a single parent. I moved quickly, managing a household and working in a profession that I loved. There is a place for moving fast, and we can get a lot of things done, but God had been trying to get my attention for a long time, because at times I told God how I thought things should be and what His will should be for me.

So, it was a wonderful thing that happened to me when I was bed-ridden for about three months. During that time my heart beat very slowly, and I could not even get up to walk to the bathroom. It seemed as if my heart was saying, “I am not going to beat any faster than this, and this is the way it is.” There are medical explanations why my heart slowed down, but more important to me are the spiritual reasons.

I needed to be forced to sit in that circle of quiet for a lot longer than five minutes, or twenty minutes, or a day. In that circle of quiet that I existed in for those months—lived in, grew in, unfolded in—I became more and more aware of that deep smoldering anger and resentment that was very much a part of me, though I thought I had gotten a handle on all of that. Being a person who has had a few past lives, I had chapters and chapters, layers and layers of experiences where, as a woman on Urantia (Earth), I had been beaten down by the situation on the planet. We women have a lot of reasons to be angry, but I am not going to get into all of that in this teaching.

I know for my healing during that time, my anger had to be dealt with because anger and resentment must be dispelled or transformed into something productive and helpful. Resentment is simply unexpressed anger, and if not appropriately and effectively expressed, anger can sit deep inside you and manifest in some form of physical dis-ease. There was a healing process that had to go on within me, as it does within most women on this planet.

Anger can be used for good when it moves us into a place of activity, good activity, activity for God. We need to become activists of the Divine New Order. We need to become those change agents, and you can’t just sit around talking about it. Remember, when Jesus met with those two women? He was very active in helping them bring about a change in their lives. He didn’t just talk it; He walked it too, and that is what an activist does. In order to help bring about a healing for this world, the first thing a true activist has to do is bring about a healing within himself or herself and then help bring healing to other people, and it is an ongoing process.

What has helped tremendously in my own healing is the “Father circuits” (Father circuits with a capital F) of some of Celestial Overcontrol and my beloved spiritual complement, Gabriel of Urantia. I am not talking about “macho;” I am not talking about that imbalance of the men on this planet; I am talking about the Universal Father circuits, which can be very strong and appropriately confrontational.

The people of Urantia (Earth) need the Universal Father circuits as much as they need the “Mother circuits,”—the Paradise Mother and Universe Mother circuits. We all need them both, and part of our healing is to come into a connection and balance with both. My intent is to continue to get this true healing, to be able to have the kind of mind that is in alignment with divine mind. Often I feel like I am too “human.” I want to be the highest human, the highest perfection that God is asking me to be.

Jesus is the person who walked this planet as a beautiful and perfect example. He did have His human ups and downs, and The URANTIA Book talks about His struggles, though He didn’t struggle nearly like we do. He had His human mind, and He had His divine mind. We know that we have divine mind within us through the Fragment of the Father, through the Thought Adjuster. We have our human mind too, and my intent is to have my human mind fuse with my divine mind, to truly be cooperative every moment with that Thought Adjuster, so that all of my responses to individuals in my life are responses rather than reactions.

When we react, we get a little charge; someone gets on our nerves or if someone gets upset with us, we have some emotionalism about it. Responding in true love to someone is being able to get out of our own agenda and to have an emotional aloofness, not having that sense of possession or ownership with that person. That is why Jesus had such a positive impact with those people He came in contact with who were open and responsive to His gifts of ministry. He didn’t have an attachment to them; He just loved them, and He could discern immediately whether He needed to use His Father circuits with them or His Mother circuitry. He may have needed to treat them gently, as He did with the women I referred to. Or He may have spoken very strongly and confronted, as He often did with those particular Pharisees and Sadducees who were deceptive when He confronted them about their hypocrisy.

For each one of us, in our healing process that is ongoing (it is really our ascension process), it truly is a personal thing, and my process isn’t going to be yours; we are each different. You should never want to try to make your process like someone else’s because then you are denying your individuality and who you are. In order for our planet to heal, a unity (not uniformity) needs to happen on a global level, but in order for us to begin to feel that union with others—that union of souls within our uniqueness and our diversity—we must realize that what we all have in common is the need to heal, and that it is going to be an ongoing process. We need to also realize that we all have the same First Source, and we all have the same destiny to be embraced by that First Source of All, the Universal Father.

I would like to close with a prayer that was written by an American Confederate soldier who was seriously disabled in the Civil War. This was taken from Michael Lerner’s book, Choices In Healing. This soldier, like Nancy Meyers, realized that though he may have a physical infirmity, he was truly being healed by God.

I asked God for strength that I might achieve; I was made weak that I might learn humbly to obey.
I asked for health that I might do great things; I was given infirmity that I might do better things.
I asked for riches that I might be happy; I was given poverty that I might be wise.
I asked for power that I might have the praise of men; I was given weakness that I might feel the need for God.
I asked for all things that I might enjoy life; I was given life that I might enjoy all things.
I got nothing that I asked for, but everything I had hoped for.
Almost despite myself, my unspoken prayers were answered.
I am among all men most richly blessed. (Amen)

Thank you.

March 29, 1998