What is meant in those words expanding consciousness? We understand, in this Association, that the word consciousness means God, the Divine, the Infinite Intelligence. And so it is while we are here encased in flesh that we are striving to expand our awareness of this Divine, this God, that is everywhere present. In what way, we ask the question, may we best expand or broaden our horizon, or understanding, of the Divine Presence, this Infinite Intelligence? We know that man, our mind, is, perhaps, likened unto a great computer that records all things and loses, in truth, nothing. We know that we have been programmed in our minds to accept or to reject certain things that we experience in life. And so it is that by our own volition, our own choice, and our own will we have established within ourselves a limitation, for we have established that we will accept certain thoughts and ideas and experiences and we will reject others.
How is it possible, we ask, to expand or to broaden our understanding, when we are already conditioned, from childhood on, in what to accept and in what to reject? When we consider accepting in our mind, in our thought, that good exists and expresses in all things, at all times, and in all experiences and all places, then we will become in tune, in rapport, with the good that exists in all things. For if God is God, then there is no experience, there is no place, there is no thought in which God, the Divine Intelligence, is not expressing itself.
Through a lack of understanding of the divine principle, known as creation, man has decided, within himself, what is beneficial to him and what is detrimental. With each person, those decisions, those values, change according to the experiences of each person. What we are trying to share with you this morning is the possibility of entertaining in thought what is known as good. For its opposite is nothing more than undeveloped. When we seek a greater understanding than we have so far awakened to, we will broaden our horizons, expand our consciousness, and our God will become, in our being, a universal God, a God of freedom, and a God of peace, a God that does not reject, nor a God that does not deny. My good friends, it is our rejections and our denials that cause us all of our problems.
Whatever we are seeking, again and again it has been stated, is also seeking us. And like the hands of the clock of time, every so often they meet. But because of our limited expression of the divine understanding, we reject so many things that come to our lives. We reject them because we do not understand them."
