Woman Who Touched Christ's Garment (Rabel)

(Back) Jesus Heals the Gerasene Demoniac Rejection of Jesus at Nazareth (Next)

Matt. 9:20-22 Mark 5:24-34 Luke 8:43-48, Harmony Gospels p.75, pp. 100-103 of transcript.

This is the woman who believed that if she could but touch the hem of His garment she would be healed and she does just that as she believed and so is it done unto her. As I said a little while ago it is good to think of Jesus as the living symbol of the conscious embodiment of a healing consciousness which is available to all of us; that is, the divine potential in all of us to develop a healing consciousness. In Jesus’ case it had already been developed; it was there in total therefore, He was a walking healing consciousness and people could tune in to Him just as you can tune in to your own Healing consciousness and get the results. This is different from thinking of Jesus as a supernatural person who had the gift to heal; don’t equate healing with a gift that anyone is given, it is a valid consciousness that can be established and developed in any person. Through touching your spiritual awareness of healing, of the healing consciousness which is really within all of us, in any way to make a connection with it and it will bring forth a healing result, that is, that healing consciousness that we touch, make a connection with, does not need to be our own; it is there. If it were our own we wouldn’t be seeking in the first place and thereby need it. If one has a true healing consciousness, or a life consciousness, a health consciousness, he doesn’t get sick; this is why when I am sick I must do one of two things: I must either get my own healing consciousness back into shape and that would be my healing of, if I feel that I am incapable of doing that, which often happen (sometimes the sickness itself make me feel incapable of do-it-yourself-ness where healing is concerned), then I must touch a healing consciousness of another. We have in the fourth dimension available to us Jesus Christ, and we can touch His healing consciousness any time we have need of Him; but since He is in the fourth dimension He is not visible, He is not tangible, many people are skeptical and suspicious about what is not three-dimensional, visible, tangible; so instead of relying on their belief in the presence of Jesus Christ, many persons then prefer to appeal to other people, Silent Unity, their minister, the healing group in the center or someone they know and love and trust. By doing this we can literally connect ourselves through our belief, through our dependency, through our soul-sympathy with a healing consciousness and derive from it whatever benefits we are capable of accepting. Here we have a woman who evidently had a sense of limitation where this consciousness represented by Jesus was concerned, and she very wisely did not place too great a demand on herself for the getting of the healing; instead of saying, “I ought to be able to do this, or I ought to be able to do that, or the books say you to do this or that,” she kind of instinctively, intuitively thought the limit of what she would be able to do as far as contact with this man Jesus, and in her own feminine way figured out the best way she would be able to swing would be to get near enough to Him. She just touched His garment, but that same intuition that created her feeling of limitation also gave her the certainty that she would get her results; and so that was exactly what happened, her intuition was right, that was about all she could do as far as connection with Him.

Metaphysically this means, a lot of persons place too heavy a burden on themselves in their seeking spiritual healing in so far as they think that in order to get the beneficial results of an available healing consciousness, they have to swallow it practically, get a complete hold of it, a firm hold on it or even crawl into it somehow, or duplicate it verbatim within themselves before they can hope for results. What they are doing is they are putting too great a demand, too strong a condition on what they must do or not do to make connection with a healing consciousness. In other words, some people even in Unity still believe that the only thing that qualifies you for a healing is to purify your consciousness and get rid of all causes of…it is too much, you can’t do that, not in that way. A lot of people think that in order for them to get a healing they must understand all the metaphysical rules and regulations that are involved in spiritual healing; that is too much, it is too big a demand, you don’t have to wait that long. The only thing that really is necessary is, either you make the effort and do connect yourself to the healing principle or you don’t’ make the effort and don’t make the connection. It isn’t a matter of how intimate the connection you make is, how great the hold on the principle you can get; all you have to do is touch it, make a connection with it. Even the lightest touch will suffice. Of course, when the person gets the healing, he must attempt a consciousness-purifying, that is the doctor’s bill; but you do not have to wait until the consciousness is purified to get a healing. You can get a healing from another person’s healing consciousness; but then you yourself work on correcting and purifying your consciousness, if you don’t then there will be recurrences may be more serious than the last. How did Jesus stated that? “Go thy way and sin no more lest the worst thing befall.” He did not say, that healing you just got is temporarily, it isn’t a real healing; He said, you are healed but not get down to some consciousness-purifying. How do we do that? Prayer & meditation, study of Truth, denial and affirmation; all of the consciousness conditioning techniques we know of are consciousness-purifiers and they may present future recurrences of things we have been healed of already.

In the efficacy of touching the hem of his garment, she was healed because of her belief in the efficacy of touching the hem of a healing consciousness’ garment. Jesus never said, “I have healed thee.” He has always attributed the healing results to something in the patient. It was either their belief or their faith. Both qualities will heal a person makes any kind of a contact with a healing consciousness. Please understand, the one who has the belief and the faith doesn’t necessarily need to have the completed healing consciousness. He may be only getting started in that direction. But he can be healed because he has the one ingredient that goes into a healing consciousness; this also enables an incomplete healing consciousness to connect to a complete one in another person. That is why I always list that ingredient first when I talk about a healing consciousness. This ingredient is belief. You see, if you have only belief that there is such a thing, there is such a possibility, but don’t have the other things that are needed to make it your own then you can use that belief to connect with another person’s. This connection will draw unto you the healing results.

Q. Will you remind us at this time, the difference between faith and belief?

A. Belief is a matter of choice. It proceeds from the human and it is the prelude to the quickening of faith. You can’t quicken faith, cold turkey, without preliminaries or any prelude. It has to be quickened by human consciousness, by seeming that is similar to it but of less intensity. Therefore belief is the natural one. You’ve got to believe that there is such a possibility before you can make the possibility itself a living thing, a living faith. You didn’t decide to have it or to cook it up. You decided to be, in a sense, as an Idea in the Mind of God. But the faith faculty is nothing that you did something to cultivate and earn and develop. It’s simply there. Your job is to become aware of it and quicken it and express it. Here you have to work with the things that your human nature can cook up, can formulate and decide what to do with it. Belief is this – you can choose to belief or not to believe in anything at all. You can choose to believe that 2 + 2 = 5. No one’s going to stop you. It’s a matter of your choice to believe. The manner in which you believe will build your attitudes. These attitudes will then enter in to the process of making your world and the predominant conditions on your world. Also, persistent attitudes based on your beliefs build your body.

When I said the healing consciousness that is not in the believer yet, I didn’t quite mean it literally. The healing consciousness is in every person. It is a characteristic of the Christ consciousness. However, what we mean is the ingredients of that aspect of the Christ Mind called healing consciousness are not fully accepted and quickened in most people when it comes to healing. All people have exactly the same potential of healing consciousness but you can’t claim that all people are manifesting a healing consciousness in its entirety, its full potential.

If they all have the same equipment then what is the difference? It’s the degree of awareness and quickening activity in the individual. Now, there is something called the Grace of God. This means you are not subject to the dead letter of the law, the mechanical inflexibility of the law. There is leeway granted within the framework of the law. A name used for this leeway given is Grace. Under the aspect of the law called Grace it is possible for a person with an undeveloped healing consciousness aspect of his spiritual nature to still be able to be healed spiritually but not without any kind of merit or effort on his part. One thing is required to get that advantage; you must believe that such a thing can be. If you don’t believe it can be, so be it done unto you. If you at least believe it can be then you’ve done at least part of your job. You will then be guided, led, or you will attract to you an individual or an organization or some printed words or something which will embody a healing consciousness which is complete and quickened for your purposes. By your belief in it, your willingness to be helped through it you can tune in on somebody else’s healing consciousness.

The Catholic Church has known this, in their own way for ages. Somebody in that church caught a glimpse of this and connected it to Jesus. They have come up with a doctrine which many people deride because they don’t really understand it yet. They only are exposed to the distorted surface of it and they think it’s a crazy theory. However, it is an intuitive acceptance of an occult metaphysical truth. They call this vicarious atonement. Somebody can become one with God for your sake if you’re willing and have belief that this can be done for you. Then you enter into that union and you are given the help just as though you had the direct connection. Now don’t put a period after this statement.

This is part of the Grace of God, the leeway. We can’t coast along in life on leeway all the time. Sooner or later, we’ll have to come to grips with our own self-development. What I found about receiving the benefits from somebody else’s advanced state of consciousness is that the person is exceedingly grateful. The receiver of such benefits does not feel that since he can have others do it for him he will simply let them do the work. Some dogmatists feel such a person won’t do anything about his own consciousness purifying. Do you believe this? Does that happen to you when you get benefitted by somebody else’s consciousness? Doesn’t it make you grateful that without really “deserving” it, you get help anyway? So now your grateful heart says that it now wants to become a consciousness of that kind of help. You see, at heart we are really grateful creatures. We may act ungrateful at times but the soul has its reasons for everything. But you’re helped and you feel you’ve got to do something to earn this, to pay it back somehow. So then you start working on your own development of spiritual powers and the first thing you seek to do with it is to find somebody for you to help the way you were in an abnormal state or what I call metaphysically insane at certain moments. But we snap out of this and then we keep on learning.

Text of the original transcript from the third paragraph of page 100 through the first paragraph of page 103.
Transcribed by Rev. Sherri James on September 3, 2013.