CHAPTER 23

PRACTICAL SPIRITUALITY:
LIVING IN GRACE
When you realize that God is producing all things,
you start relaxing immediately.

As I have said, we come to this planet to gain

experience. Looked at that way, everything in our
lifetime is designed to bring us closer to God. We also
knew before we came here that life is a challenge, a
challenge of awareness and of fulfillment. Here are
some keys for going through life and living in grace.
Remember That You Are Not Alone.
The first and foremost thing to do is remember
that no matter what you are going through, you are
never alone, abandoned, or forsaken. God is in you,
so how can you ever be separated from God? You
can feel separated, think you are separated, imagine
that you are separated, but the truth is that you are

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First you learn who you are. And when you
learn who the real self is, the false images fall
away. The person you thought you were, the reli-
gion you thought you were, the philosophy you
thought you were may fall away. You may find out
that all of these philosophies that you’ve been
adhering to just don’t work, but you may be afraid
to throw them away because you don’t know what
will take their place. When you get rid of the
things that don’t work, you will find the true self.

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 PRACTICAL SPIRITUALITY: LIVING IN GRACE

not. Knowing that connection is, of course, the key,

and I teach spiritual exercises and Soul Transcendence
because I know that this is a proven way for people
to know their own divinity.
If you are an initiate of the Traveler, the
Traveler goes through everything with you. The
Traveler’s promise at the time of the causal initia-
tion is, “I am always with you.” That does not
mean that the Traveler will do it for you. You must
do it yourself, but the Traveler does provide spiri-
tual support as you go through your life. If you are
not as aware of that support as you might be, doing
spiritual exercises is the most direct method I
know to increase your awareness, and you need to
check this out for yourself.
Remember Who You Are.
You must give up identification with anything in
the lower worlds. Only identify yourself as love. Only
identify yourself as one of God’s emissaries. Only
identify yourself as one who brings peace, under-
standing, and contentment. Only identify yourself as
the living Christ. Find your true self, this Christ with-
in, and when you do, you will find that its character-
istics are loving, caring, compassion, and forgiveness.

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The things that were important to you in the
first few years of your spiritual work are still
important. It is still important to send the Light
to people in a direct way. It is still important to
ask for the Light to fill, surround, and protect
you. It is still important to place the Light
ahead of you in the activities of your day. It is
still important to chant your initiatory tone, for
it is the foundation of your spiritual health.
Don’t let these habits slip from you as the years
go by. They are your strength.

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 PRACTICAL SPIRITUALITY: LIVING IN GRACE

Support Yourself Spiritually.

When you are dealing with challenges in the
physical world, it is very important to nurture your
spiritual connection because that can make han-
dling them easier. If you are an initiate, you can
reread your initiation booklets. If you have been
doing spiritual exercises sporadically or not at all,
you could recommit to doing them regularly for
whatever amount of time works for you; five or ten
minutes a day can do it. You can make sure you are
reading your monthly Soul Awareness Discourse or
listening to your monthly Soul Awareness Tape
release, and you can reread past Discourses and lis-
ten to other MSIA tapes, too. There are also PTS
classes and workshops, MSIA home seminars, min-
isters meetings (if you are a minister), and other
MSIA events that can assist you in keeping your
focus on the positive, on Spirit. And, as always, you
need to do it to get the results.
Acknowledge What Is Going On
and Then Get Going.
Dishonesty forfeits divine aid, and that refers to
what you do inside yourself. So be honest with
yourself, no matter what else you might be doing. If

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Don’t try to hide your mistakes and errors in
consciousness. You cannot hide them from your
Soul; it is your own Soul to which you are held
accountable. Be honest with yourself. If you’ve
made an error, own it, and take the steps neces-
sary to correct it. There is no disgrace in that.
There is an integrity that brings with it a
tremendous freedom.

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 PRACTICAL SPIRITUALITY: LIVING IN GRACE

you are sad and you say to yourself, “I’m not sad,” it
may or may not change your attitude. It depends
upon the intention of claiming a new direction. But
if you are denying what’s present, that is “stuffing”
and being dishonest with yourself.
Acknowledge what is happening. If you have a
headache, acknowledge that to the people around
you. Say that you are not going to be good com-
pany for a while because you are working to get
out of pain. Then you take care of your headache
as best you can. Or you may find that in a few sec-
onds the headache goes away and you start to
laugh and have fun. Acknowledging is part of
accepting what is going on, and what is going on is
really perfect.
If I am sad, I say, “I feel sad,” and I know sad for
me means to get my rear end out of the chair and
get going. If, for you, sad means to sit there and
wonder why you are sad, that can go into depres-
sion. So when you experience something that is not
to your liking, it is a signal to you: get your tush off
the chair, get your feet on the ground, start the
body moving forward, and do something good with
yourself anyway.

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If you say, “I am Spirit,” the law of this realm
says that you must become that because “as [a
man] thinketh in his heart, so is he” (Proverbs
23:7). Where you place your consciousness, you go.

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 PRACTICAL SPIRITUALITY: LIVING IN GRACE

Focus on the Positive.

You get what you focus on. So it makes sense to
keep choosing and focusing on grace in every
moment and to take the love and joy of Spirit with
you wherever you go. If you walk into a dark, black
hole with love and joy, you will find love and joy
there. If you walk in with fear and anger, you will
find fear and anger. Go into all the situations in your
life with what you want to find there.
The most effective meditation I have ever seen is
worrying. Unfortunately, it goes the wrong way, and
I have not seen too many changes made because of
worrying. But I know that holding a positive focus
on what you want and taking continual small steps
towards it is the way to bring it about.
Some people want to get to the root of the limita-
tions in their lives, so they continually look at why
they are not happy, why they do not have enough
money, why their relationships are not working, why
they are sick, why things are “so bad.” You can try to
do that if you want to, but it is much quicker and eas-
ier to move your focus from what you see as lack or
limitation to what is positive in your life.
Live your life the best that you can. It can be hard,
even on good days, but still do it, work the best you

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When you correctly identify your errors and take
positive action to change them into expressions
of learning, you are breaking patterns of fear
and tension and are freeing yourself to partici-
pate in Soul Transcendence.

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 PRACTICAL SPIRITUALITY: LIVING IN GRACE

can, and give yourself credit. And if you have flaws,

fine. Just do not focus on them; work on them. If you
looked only at your flaws, you probably would not
feel worthy to be here because you would see the
errors of your behavior and the imperfections of your
body. So focus on the goodness of the work you do,
and then correct the flaws as you go along.
Be Clear About Your Intention.
This is your life, so find an intention (an over-
riding purpose or goal) that you can live or die in,
and then follow that. It may take you some time
and some soul-searching, but it is worth it, because
you are worth it. You will be dying in something at
some time, so you might as well decide what it is
and what is really worth your time and attention.
You will come and work in this world, get mar-
ried, have kids, spend your life in slavery to car pay-
ments and house payments, work eight hours a day,
and then die, and you can take none of that with
you. Not a bit of it goes with you. The very thing
that is going to go on, that is going to live, that does
not die, is the Soul–you, the eternal one, the divine
one, God in this form. Yet you may not work on it
to know it and to have it establish itself as the fore-
most thing in your life, your intention.

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Many people talk about going to God, but few
people are doing it because it’s a very demand-
ing path that takes a great deal of ruthlessness
and impeccability with how you use your energy.
You don’t waste your energy doing this and
doing that and fantasizing. Instead, you are
ruthless with yourself and say, “Get this energy
back to me so I can get me going.”

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 PRACTICAL SPIRITUALITY: LIVING IN GRACE

Why not make your intention God conscious-

ness? Why not learn about the inner realms before
you die so you can know where you are going? If
you do not move in that direction, you will not get
it. And if you do move in that direction, you will be
moving that way all the time, every moment of
your waking consciousness. And as you start mov-
ing into it, you will start making wise choices. As
you make wise choices, your environment will set-
tle down, and you will begin getting free of it. Then
you will start to say, “Life is good.” It has really been
the same life all along. It is just your attitude that is
now creating peace and harmony, and you are more
aware of living in grace and in the Soul.
When you clear something during your spiritual
exercises, through Soul awareness, you can stay
clear with it by not going back into it on the lower
levels. You do this by saying, “I’m not going to par-
ticipate in that.” If you do it out of hostility, anger,
or separation, the people around you can perceive
your negative thrust and can be hurt. So you simply
declare your new direction–“I am going to partici-
pate in this”–and move into new activity, always
going towards your intention.

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Keep in mind two words: patience and gradu-
alness. In that inner rush when you feel like
your mind is being cut up with a jigsaw, say to
yourself, “Let’s just do it a little at a time, let’s
just take one thing here and finish it. Then I’ll
take the next one and finish it one step at a time.
I’m not going to rush myself.”

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 PRACTICAL SPIRITUALITY: LIVING IN GRACE

Take Continual Small Steps

Towards What You Want.
What do we all know about New Year’s Resolu-
tions? We break them. So rather than trying to
make big changes all at once, take continual small
steps towards what you want.
As an example that you can apply to anything in
your life, say that you want to do spiritual exercises for
an hour each day and you are doing s.e.’s for a couple
of minutes a few times a week. You could try doing
s.e.’s for two minutes each day. Do that for a month,
and then reevaluate. Maybe you will decide to do s.e.’s
for five minutes a day for the next month, or maybe
you will decide to continue with two minutes a day,
but whatever you decide to do, do it. And if your goal
is to do one hour of s.e.’s per day and you increase it by
five minutes a month, in one year, you will be mani-
festing your goal–one hour of s.e.’s per day.
As the old wisdom goes, it’s a cinch by the inch
and hard by the yard. It is called being persistent.
Stubbornness and determination use the ego, while
persistence utilizes spiritual energy. So, persistently
take small steps towards your goals and intention.

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When you come up against something within
yourself that’s difficult for you to handle or deal
with, handle it as though it were your next big
test before you break into God consciousness.
Instead of cursing it and hating it and fearing it,
stand up to it and bless it and move into it so
enthusiastically that you cannot be denied the
completion of it. Embrace it and love it. You will
find that no experience stands against you; all
can be turned to your advantage.

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 PRACTICAL SPIRITUALITY: LIVING IN GRACE

Use Each Experience to Lift and Grow.

One of the precepts in MSIA is “use everything
for your upliftment, growth, and learning.” Most of
us want to get out of our hard times as quickly as pos-
sible, and we will do all we can to change things. And
what if they do not change? Rather than going into
discouragement or any other form of contraction,
change your attitude and, if you have not done it
already, ask yourself, “What can I learn from this?”
You may be in a situation because you still have
to internalize it more and allow it to shake things
loose inside of you, until you finally say, “I don’t
need this anymore. I’m free of it.” Then the chal-
lenging experience, the stumbling block, becomes
positive as you use it as a stepping-stone. It may also
be that you are clearing karma or learning some-
thing so that when someone else tells you about a
similar situation they are in, you will have empathy
and maybe even some ideas to share about how you
got through it.
You are manifesting grace when, whatever you
experience, you use it for your upliftment. It will cer-
tainly be easier on you if you look at your life that
way. You can go through life laughing or crying. If
you have a choice–and you do–make it laughing.

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One of the most beautiful and gratifying of all
prayers is just saying, “Thanks.” In reality, that
is the only prayer necessary.

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 PRACTICAL SPIRITUALITY: LIVING IN GRACE

Be Grateful.
Gratitude is a powerful antidote to negativity.
When you are feeling up against it, the simple
approach of counting your blessings can help you.
This is a way of focusing on the good things in your
life even while you are aware of the challenges you
are facing and taking steps to handle them.
Who you are is a Soul, and from the point of
view of the Soul, there is nothing wrong with any-
thing that is happening in your life. For the Soul,
there are only experiences. Shifting any feelings of
wrongness over your experiences or how you are
handling them takes a change of focus and attitude.
This does not mean to deny what is going on but to
acknowledge it and then focus on the good things
in your life and be grateful for them. Your connec-
tion to the Traveler might be a good place to start,
and you can go on from there.
Love Yourself Through It All.
It is not necessary to delve into everything in
your life and try to figure out where it came from,
why it is present, and so on. You do not have to fer-
ret out each example of ego, doubt, lack, fear, or any
other expression you see as negative. Instead, in the
moment of realizing it, you can accept it, forgive

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Love is the key–total, unconditional love. Even
when you don’t feel like loving, you love the
feeling of not feeling like loving.

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 PRACTICAL SPIRITUALITY: LIVING IN GRACE

yourself for judging yourself for that expression,

and move to loving. When you do that, you flood
yourself with the Light and love of your own being-
ness, and in that loving, all is forgiven. This does
take discipline, and you can do it. It is a matter of
choosing–again and again and again–to love your-
self. You do deserve your own love.
The Soul, the Spirit part of you, does not care
about what goes on because what happens is just
experience, and the Soul sees it in all of its perfec-
tion. The part that you need to be kind to is your
ego, which comes out of the mind and the emo-
tions. Because the ego is tied to your mind and emo-
tions, if you beat it up, you will feel mentally and
emotionally beaten up. So be kind to that part of
you, too. Then when you go back inside, you will
feel the kindness in your emotions and your mind.
Demonstrate loving to yourself. When you eat
well, you are demonstrating loving for yourself.
When you exercise your body to utilize the energy
better, you are also demonstrating loving for your
body. As you think positive thoughts, you are
demonstrating loving for your mind. As you do
things to keep the emotions harmoniously balanced,
you are demonstrating loving for the emotions.
When you start to do these things, you will live in

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Misery is separation and the feeling of being
separated. Joy is the oneness of all. To reach the
oneness, you own all aspects of living. You own the
mistakes, the glory, the deceit, and the integrity.
When you own it all, there is nothing you are not;
you become one with God, which is all.

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greater balance and joy, and other people will be

attracted into that force of love.
Do the best you can, and have loving as the
keynote of your existence. Be happy and free in
your relationship to yourself. Nothing stands out-
side your loving. You love your mistakes along with
your successes. You love the down times as much as
the up times. In other words, you love yourself
through everything, and your effort goes into lov-
ing. When things happen that may seem unfair or
difficult at first glance, look for the loving lesson
underneath. If you cannot see it there, put it there
yourself so you can see everything that happens to
you through the eyes of loving.
Forgive Everything.
Forgiveness is the key to the kingdom, and the
most important thing for us to do if we are follow-
ing the Christ is to forgive.
What if someone hurts you in some way? You for-
give them. What if you forgive them and they hit you?
Forgive them. What if they hit you again? Forgive
them. What if they do it again? Don’t be stupid–get
out of reach. And forgive them again.
You may want to hang on to your anger and
hurt feelings because you are afraid that the same

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You can experience a healing and reconciliation
with any and all past actions as they come into
your mind by declaring them complete and mov-
ing into the glory of this moment.

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 PRACTICAL SPIRITUALITY: LIVING IN GRACE

thing will happen to you again. But what you are

really saying is that you think your judgment, hurt,
and anger towards the situation or person will keep
it or the person from hurting you again. I have
found that people are going to do what they do, and
your anger or hurt is probably not going to make
them behave any better towards you. The problem
with judgment, anger, and hurt is that you are the
one stuck with them. One of the greatest reasons
for forgiveness is to clean up your own inner envi-
ronment and make it nice inside where you live.
If you feel as though you cannot really forgive
something or someone, place it into the Light and
ask the Christ to help you let go. You will know when
you have truly forgiven when you also forget what
it was you were judging in the first place. You are on
to other things, and that situation or person is no
longer taking up energy inside of you.
A lot of the things we choose to keep remem-
bering keep us stuck here on Earth. But if you stay
in a state of forgiveness, you stay in a state of grace.
Historically, we can see that those human beings who
lived in a state of grace, as a statement of their lives,
became the saints. To live as a saint is to be living in
grace and extending grace. Even when you want to
tell somebody off, the words come out differently,

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When you recognize that we are all one, you
will know that if you hurt another, you hurt
yourself. You will–automatically–love and bless
each one you meet. You will–automatically–
forgive any action and seek to relieve any
process of guilt that might appear in yourself or
anyone else, so that no one will be delayed on
your account.

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 PRACTICAL SPIRITUALITY: LIVING IN GRACE

and the person senses the grace you are extending to

them, when you really had all the right, authority,
and moral and ethical positions to have laid them
low. When you withheld that, grace went in its place.
This is the forgiveness that continues on, and you will
not finish up the forgiving until your last breath.
So make peace with others and with yourself.
Forgive others for anything you have judged about
them. Forgive yourself for all the things you have
done where you knew you did not do the best that
you could.
Everybody has the same basic thing to forgive,
and that was when we gave up the Spirit world and
fell into the physical world. We can look back and see
where we thought, “I’ll go down there and be back
in just one life.” Then we found out that we liked it
here because it is a pretty nice place (in its own way).
At some point, we come to the realization that we
have to work this out. So the basic thing we need to
do is to forgive ourselves for forgetting that we are
divine. That is the real message to open up the
channel for our return to the Spirit.
So for everything up to this moment, you just say,
“That’s no longer real, it no longer exists, and this is
the moment that God has created. And in this
moment and in this day, I have my life.” With that

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When you’re in the Soul, you still need to keep
exercising awareness and eternal vigilance
because the negativity here on this physical level
tends to pull you back into the negative areas.
You can be pulled back easily, simply through
judging, blaming, separating, or in some other
way shutting down your loving.

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 PRACTICAL SPIRITUALITY: LIVING IN GRACE

attitude, you fall right back into the Kingdom of

Heaven, and you get to find out that you are an heir
to the Kingdom.
Be Eternally Vigilant.
At some point in our evolution (spiritual, moral,
financial, etc.), we must become more responsible,
conscious, directed Hu-man beings. We must con-
sciously take direction and control of our lives. We
must consciously watch what we put in our mouths.
We must consciously monitor the words that come
out of our mouths. We must consciously watch what
we think about and the energy that we put into our
thoughts. We must consciously watch the things that
we allow to cycle and recycle through our minds.
Watchfulness brings liberty. Liberty brings greater
freedom. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. If
you put off being watchful until tomorrow, you put
off your freedom until tomorrow.
Endure to the End.
One of the biggest keys to spiritual progression
in the physical is simply to keep moving. Do not
stop. When you think you have it made, look around
and see where your next move will take you. When
you think you have arrived, look up and get the

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If you’ve been moving forward and upward in
your spiritual progression and you get tired and
decide you want to take a break, be careful. You
won’t be able to stand still. If you stop your
forward progression, chances are you’ll start
slipping backward.

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 PRACTICAL SPIRITUALITY: LIVING IN GRACE

vision for your next step. Wherever you find yourself,

there will always be another step. Progression is infi-
nite. And at the end of every sentence, though it is
unwritten, there is always “et cetera.”
You do not have to get through situations in any
particular way. You might be crawling, but to keep on
keeping on is the most important thing. Sometimes,
it is a matter of simply getting the experience and
then moving on. You may not feel you handled
everything perfectly, but you went through it, and
that is what really matters. Sometimes you just need
to endure past whatever is happening.
I never say, “Oh, God, take this away from me.”
My prayer is always, “Oh, God, give me the strength
and the wisdom to utilize this.” And He always has. I
do not look for a way out. I look for a way over,
around, through, under. It also came to me to ask
myself about each situation in my life, “How do I use
this? What is it for?” As I looked back at my trials and
tribulations, I saw that each one had strengthened
me for the next one. They strengthened me in the
personality–not spiritually, but the Spirit came
through the personality stronger and stronger and
stronger as I gave it up to a higher and higher force.
One day I just said, “You do it, God. I don’t know
how.” That was not copping out; it was going to the

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As long as you keep moving in the direction of
God, you will get there. You may not always be
clear, but if you keep moving, the direction will
clarify itself. One day, you will wake up and
find yourself living in the heart of God. You will
know that all your experiences were but rungs on
the ladder that led to God.

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 PRACTICAL SPIRITUALITY: LIVING IN GRACE

source of all things and utilizing it instead of going to

the source of my own ignorance and trying to utilize
that. I suffered in my own ignorance, so I went to
God and became blissful. I never lost one thing. If I
had to do it all over again, I would go there faster.
One of the most profound things in the Bible is
the statement that “he wins who endures to the
end.” What is the end? When they throw dirt on
your grave. So do yourself a big favor and do not
look for perfection here. If I could say, “God, please
grant people one wish,” it would be, “Grant them
that they will make the best use they can of what
comes their way, and then go on.”
Be of Service.
Service is the highest form of consciousness on
the planet. I have never told anyone that it is the
easiest. In fact, it is the hardest. The willingness to
serve is not sitting home and saying, “Call me.” The
willingness to serve is going up to the place, knock-
ing on the door, and saying, “Is there something
here I can do to assist you?” That is the willingness
to serve. It is not just clear intention. It is intention
made clear by going and presenting yourself where
the service is needed.

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There are two spiritual lives. There is yours
inwardly and what you do, and then there is
yours out here in the world and what you do.
Inwardly, there is what you do traveling in the
Sound Current and the Light, following the
Lord; those are all one. Service comes from what
Jesus said: “When you’ve done it to the least
one of these, you’ve done it unto me.” That puts
service out there in the world as number one.
That’s where those two come from.

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 PRACTICAL SPIRITUALITY: LIVING IN GRACE

When you move into the consciousness of serv-

ice, you start realizing that the first thing you have
to do is love. When you love, you do not look at
anything as being a burden or sacrifice. Being of
service is freely doing, without any other thought in
mind than freely doing, To do something freely is to
put aside all the things you want and do what needs
to be done without expecting anything back. It is
not, “I’ll be of service so I can gain.” It is more like,
“I’ll just do to do, to do, to do, to do.” And that is it.
If anything comes back, it comes back, and if it does
not come back, that is quite all right.
What it boils down to is that service is when you
serve under any conditions, regardless of yourself
and your own feelings and thoughts. When we
truly do something in service, it is okay if somebody
tells us, “That’s good” or “That’s bad.” Why?
Because true service is given freely without expecta-
tion of others’ approval. The essence of true service is
self-fulfillment. In that inner fulfillment, there are
no regrets or apologies. You can probably always
look back and see where you could have done bet-
ter, and you can always look ahead and worry about
doing better, but in true service, you just handle
here and now with what you have. And you contin-
ue on with whatever presents itself to you next.

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If you don’t listen to the inner voice, it shuts off.
The inner voice is noninflictive, and to awaken
it again takes a lot of prayer, a lot of devotion,
a lot of spiritual exercises. One way it opens in
a hurry is to be of selfless service to the people
around you. That opens the heart. The Spirit
heart opens, and the communication of the Lord
starts to come with you.

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Love is your ultimate key. When love is really

present and flowing in your service, all other things
tend to fall in line. You find that your inner intent of
goodness and graciousness starts writing itself on
your eyes and face. Then you start transforming
everyone and everything around you. You do not
have to say a word. No one even has to know what
is going on, but everyone starts to feel better. And
your loving service is the key.
Spirit is not a process of the outer world, al-
though its qualities may be reflected here in kind-
ness, loving, and compassion. Let loving express
God’s presence in all that you do. When you speak,
speak with love. When you think, think loving
thoughts. When you act, act in love. When you use
your ego as a thrust into the world, use it in the
name of love, so that your works are good and bring
goodness to everyone around you.
Living in Grace
Jesus Christ told us the way to live in grace:
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and
with all your soul and with all your mind and with
all your strength. . . . Love your neighbor as your-
self” (Mark 12:29-31).

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It’s important for you to keep calling forward
the essence of spiritual love every day so you
keep lifting higher. Day by day. Let nothing
stop you from this endeavor. It is more important
than any other activity.

If you can always come from love, pretty soon

you will be love. Then you will be the living
love, which is the Beloved, and that is the spiri-
tual promise.

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 PRACTICAL SPIRITUALITY: LIVING IN GRACE

Grace is not hard. If it is starting to be hard, you

are under the law. So you even have to give up the
struggle of going for grace, which might be the thing
that releases you so you can experience it. Grace is not
something you go after as much as it is something
you allow. You just let it become. You may want it to
come like thunder, lightning, or a big train so you
know it is there–you know, with lots of noise and
drama. It comes in naturally, however, like breath-
ing, and you may not even know it is happening.
Some people who are living in grace and have
been for a long time are moving very slowly into
the realization of it. After maybe ten or twelve
years of Soul Awareness Discourses, they go back
and read Discourse 1 or 2 and realize, “Oh, my God,
I am really full of something beautiful.” They may
look at the notes they wrote in the early Discourses
and realize that they do not go through those
things anymore.
Living in grace is closely related to where you are
focusing your awareness, your attention. If you prac-
tice focusing your awareness, in your mind, on the
divine being that you are, you can see it or sense it as
a beautiful picture. But it is not necessarily a picture
you have to hold. It is an attitude. The attitude is
formed, practiced, and incorporated into behavior.

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A way to move from expressions of the law to an
expression of grace is to throw away your swords
of righteousness. That means throwing away
your judgments and your sense that you know
what is best for other people. It means allowing
others (and yourself) to make mistakes in this
world and loving them (and yourself) anyway.

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 PRACTICAL SPIRITUALITY: LIVING IN GRACE

Then the body mechanism takes over and incorpo-

rates it as a habit. When this happens, you can start to
walk through life not even knowing that you are
happy until people say, “My, you look happy!” You
may think, “I’m happy because I haven’t had any of
these other things that used to bother me.” What
other things? If you look, you may still be able to see
them, but they simply do not bother you any more.
Why? Because you do not focus on them.
I perceive grace in the experiences of my life, the
wisdoms that have come forward about what to do
and what not to do. Then I have the trust that I can
learn from my experiences, and that allows me to
step onto the path of faith. Some people call it luck,
some call it intuition, and I have very little problem
with what anyone wants to call it. You can call it a
lot of names, and if you do not step onto it, you have
called it nothing. But if you surrender to the truth
of grace that already exists within you, you will be in
alignment with all things holy.
Grace is actually the glory of God. From our level,
the only grace is loving God. If we start to love God,
we have stopped the judgments and the negativity,
and that allows grace to be extended. After grace is
extended, the next process is glory, and glory is the
essence of the Lord coming upon you. When that

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The ultimate is what we’re dealing with. Along
the way towards the ultimate, you can have a lot
of people, a lot of things, a lot of experiences, a
lot of laughs, a lot of jokes, a lot of illnesses, a lot
of happiness. The Bible talks about how there’s a
season for this and a season for that, and you just
participate in what season you care to and allow
other people to participate the same way. In that,
you’ll find your freedom. In the Spirit, you’ll find
your liberation. And if that’s all going to happen,
we might just as well laugh and live in grace.

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 PRACTICAL SPIRITUALITY: LIVING IN GRACE

happens, there is no mistaking it. It will shake every-

thing, even “the fillings in your teeth.”
To receive glory, you have to be prepared to give
up everything else. A lot of people say, “Well, I would
give up everything else.” That is not true, because it
is given to you according to your faith.
Faith is unseen substance, like air is unseen sub-
stance. We can demonstrate the existence of air as a
substance by lighting incense and letting it float in
the air. What is holding it up? The unseen substance.
We cannot see it, but if we put color in it (the
incense smoke), we get to see what the substance is.
The way we see faith is by our actions. Our actions
produce the “color” in the faith, and that faith is the
platform on which we step forward into nothing-
ness, the future. The glory descends upon us, and
we are sustained by the grace of God.
For More Information
For an explanation of personal-use and public-use
MSIA materials, please see page 837.
“Can I Solve My Problems?” (Personal-use audio
seminar #3406). The key to solving your prob-
lems is not to focus on them but to focus on the
transcendent.

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