The Still Waters

“Awake, awake: shake thyself from the dust;” (Isaiah 52: 1 [to first ;], 2 [to ;]).

“...now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.” (Romans 13:11).

“Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the Lord delivereth him out of them all. He keepeth all his bones: not one of them is broken.” (Psalms 34: 19, 20).

      My third, and most life-altering, spiritual experience occurred when I was fifteen, just a few months before my sixteenth birthday. It brought spiritual healing into my life as a solid reality and led me to search for a spiritual healing religion for the next twelve years. Here, in detail, is my best recollection of what occurred:

      It was Autumn and a lovely, Friday evening. My family now lived in a small town in Central Illinois. I was on a country hay-ride, with lots of new friends, pretty much unaware of things spiritual. The hay wagon was a heavy, flat bed, with no side railings, heaped with hay and loaded with teenagers. The wheels were large, iron spokes with a rim.

      Late in the evening, someone called my name, and I crawled along the edge of the wagon as I moved toward that person. Suddenly, we hit a bump, and the balance of the wagon shifted. I tumbled off, hitting my head on the blacktop of the country road. I blacked out for a moment, unable to see anything. I felt something on my leg, but didn't realize that the wheel, with the entire wagon-full of people, had rolled over it. As many were rushing about me, I felt a sharp pain in my leg. Someone lifted me up, and I was taken to the farm house of the people sponsoring the hayride. Those moments after the accident are still a blur in memory, but when the people around me were convinced I was fully conscious, the farmer and someone else drove me home.

      Now, by that time, my left leg had swollen so much that my jeans had to be cut, from the bottom to my knee. When we arrived at my home, it was after midnight, and the people dropping me off wanted to come in, but I talked them out of it, promising to wake my parents and let them know what happened. Actually, I had no intention of doing so, since my mother hadn't wanted me to go on this hayride. She felt something might happen. If she found out I'd been injured, I may never get out again.

      Looking back, it was foolish to imagine my leg would simply heal over night. But I needed time to think; so, I tried to sleep and think at the same time. Unfortunately, the pain in my leg allowed me to do neither. By the time it was five a.m., I knew I was in trouble. My plan was to stay in my bed until my dad left for work. Then, I'd face the music with my mother, and probably get to the doctor as soon as possible.

      In a way, it worked. My mother was upset, but that storm blew over. The way it didn't work was that my dad had taken the car to his job in the city about twenty-five miles away. It was the only vehicle we had, and I hadn't thought about how I'd get to the doctor's office, several blocks away from our house, over steep hills. I finally convinced my mom that I could walk it, slowly. My leg was swollen and quite purple, but no bones were sticking out, so we thought it was just a bad bruise.

      As I started to climb the first hilly block, I began to complain, mentally, to God. I argued that I'd always tried to do right, and that my past experiences had made me feel that God was always invisibly present with me, so I was protected. But, I didn't deserve this, I claimed. I'd done nothing wrong to deserve this. Why hadn't God protected me? Why was I allowed to be hurt? Was God all in my imagination? My anger with God grew as the pain in my leg increased. Soon, after just half a block, I could no longer step down on my leg, and I had to hop on the other to go forward. This brought me to a tree at the top of the hill, right next to the sidewalk. As I clung to the tree, I began to cry, feeling utterly abandoned. Just before I heard the Voice, I remember saying to God, “Don't You ever claim to be loving and caring for me again! You let me be hurt! You didn't do anything to stop it! Where is all that love for me and all your children?”

      Then I heard it: a calm, quiet voice among my own angry thoughts. It said, “You're being pretty hard on God, aren't you?” I mentally answered back something like, “I don't want to hear it! I'm really hurt. I'm really in pain and can't move.” Then it told me, (so softly that it sounded a long way off) that if I'd calm myself, it would tell me what I needed to know.

      Now, those who've read some of my other articles (under the name Rachael Wolfe) know that I've had spiritual occurrences since the age of five. So, when the voice within began to speak quietly, I knew I wasn't alone anymore. I did calm down some. Then it started to speak to me (and I'm paraphrasing to the best of my recall ability). The Voice said: “What if I told you, that there's a you that was never hurt? That this you is entirely spiritual in body and mind, and that nothing in this world can touch it. This is the you, and everyone, that is safe and sound in God's love forever. No wagon ran over this you, so your real leg was never touched. This you can't be touched. God really is holding this you in safety forever. God's love has never abandoned you to injury, no matter what the physical body is doing.” I remember reacting to this message with, “Do you mean there's two me's, one physical and one spiritual?”

      “No,” the Voice replied. “There's only one you, and that's the spiritual one. But you believe that your identity is physical. You believe that your life and health is flowing through the blood, bones, breath, of a physical body. That's the veil, or illusion, over everyone's mind. (I'd been told of that veil before, when I was eight. Re: “Removing the Veil” article.) The voice went on, “Everyone here believes in this physical place, which is really a mental place. You can't really feel the fleshly body, nor be in it. This is an illusion only, but believing you're physical makes you mentally feel the physical form, as though this form has pains and sensations. Your real self, the real you, is separate and apart from the physical form, and place; but your real, spiritual body is still here with you, just the same. And it's perfectly fine. Everyone's life and health is really safe in God's love, no matter what happens in this place and time.”

      Something made me blink, as the light began to go on. I'd heard much of this from the voice within before, but I'd forgotten it, as in a dream. It was as though something was clearing my mind, now, and the physical self didn't actually feel true anymore. I'd always wondered how it was that Jesus and his disciples healed people. Now, a glimmer of light showed—it was the spiritual and mental things they knew! But as these thoughts swirled around me, my reply to the voice within my consciousness was, “Well, that's just crazy! If I told this to anyone, like, if I said, “we're not really physical beings but spiritual beings,” they'd lock me up for sure! Or if I said, “we aren't a spiritual soul in a physical body; we're really only spiritual, in both body and soul,” they'd think I lost touch with reality completely.”

      “You think it's crazy?” the voice said. “Step down on your leg.”

      I stepped on my injured leg, as directed, and felt no pain. I became alarmed, because I thought the leg might have gone numb. So I pinched it. There was normal feeling in the leg, but no pain whatsoever.

      “Walk on it,” the voice told me.

      I did so, venturing out from the tree, and the entire leg felt fine. “Now, RUN!” the voice commanded. So, I actually ran all the rest of the way, over the hilly ground, to the doctor's office. By the time I arrived, the voice had left me, as people met me at the door.

      As I showed the nurse my leg, she quickly called the doctor out into the waiting room. My leg felt fine, but it was still swollen and purple. I tried to tell them both that it was fine, but they lifted me up, as the doctor scolded me for having even walked on it. They x-rayed the leg and the nurse drove the x-ray to the hospital in the city that Saturday afternoon. I could tell they were fearful, but I felt no fear at all. I knew I was healed. The truth of spiritual wholeness had taken hold, and I no longer believed I had been physical and injured. Somehow, I realized: this knowing of a spiritual self, safe in God, caused my leg to heal physically. Still, I told no one what had happened. The doctor wrapped my knee and told me to stay off the leg, then drove me home and spoke to my mother.

      It was a day or two later that the call came from the doctor. He said the x-ray had shown a crack, all the way up the calf bone in my leg, but the bone had been set, perfectly, and that the scar tissue was about three months old. We told him that the accident had only happened Friday (the night before). He investigated this and found it to be true. (There were lots of witnesses of the accident.) He went on to say, that the hospital in the city wanted me to come in to examine the leg, since they'd never seen a break healed in such a perfect way. And if it had three month's scar tissue, after only one day's time, it was healing super-rapidly. (The swelling did go away quickly, and the color came back within days.)

      I declined the request to go to the hospital for tests. The medical personnel became convinced that I had some rare type of healing agent in my blood. Our doctor became agitated that I wouldn't cooperate and let them track the healing, to see why it was healing so fast. I was stubborn. I knew what had happened, but I sure wasn't going to tell anyone. It was 1958. I knew better than to say anything! My mother claimed that I'd always been a quick healer because she'd nursed me. My parents didn't force me to turn myself over to the medical establishment. Soon, it was forgotten.

      But I knew. Once a butterfly is out of its cocoon, it can't go back inside. I was never able to go back, entirely, to the old, physical me. No matter how much I still seemed to be physical, I just couldn't accept it as the ultimate truth any longer. I knew that reality was a lot more than it appeared to be. I hid this experience within, slowly searching for a world religion or philosophy that would incorporate my new-found knowledge.

      It took me twelve years to find out what it was that I had been tapping into all my young life. At the age of twenty-seven, I found a religion, Christian Science, which was able to explain all of my unusual, spiritual experiences. The voice within, I came to realize, was the Christ identity (the spiritual and true identity) of each of us. Jesus was the individual, who entered into the dream of material belief, trying to show us the Christ of our own being—our spiritually, awakened Self, that isn't touched by anything, or anyone, in this dream of originating from the dust. Our true origin, and Source, is Spirit, not matter. Our true, awakened self, (our Christ Self) is trying to reach us, and awaken us, out of the sleep of materiality and mortality, into spiritual and eternal being. This universal Self, within us all, comes as the quiet, all-knowing voice within. This loving voice can deliver us from any evil, when we let it.

      In the book of Revelation, I think it is of the Christ Self within, that is being referred to in this statement: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” (Revelation 3: 20). I believe that the “door” mentioned here is the door of consciousness; and when we hear that awakened voice in consciousness, if we invite it in, and listen to it, that Christ Self will visit with us, and we can converse with it. It's the voice of our true identity, and the voice of God; for both are at one with each other. We live in the God consciousness of life, and the God consciousness lives within all life in creation. It is the great Oneness of all.

      With each enlightenment, we awaken ourselves from the sleep of materiality, just as a butterfly comes out of its cocoon, to an infinite universe, unseen before. And when we are fully awake, we have shaken all the dust (materiality) from our being. Then, like the butterfly, we can fly in a wondrous, new realm, proving ourselves untouched by anything that has gone before.