This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
Unification: I Am One With God – Rev. Aimee Daniels
DESCRIPTION
Recognition tells us God is all there is. Unification takes the next, more personal step: knowing we are not outside that Presence, but living expressions of it. This week, we move from believing in a distant God to living from a felt oneness.
The summary and transcription were auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
SUMMARY
Rev. Aimee Daniels explores the theme of unification as a core step in affirmative prayer, situating it within the broader context of a spiritual lifestyle. She explains that unification is rooted in the principle of oneness, the understanding that each person is inseparable from the one infinite presence that is the source of all life. Drawing on the analogy of a wave returning to the ocean, she illustrates how individuals are always part of a greater spiritual energy, whether or not they are consciously aware of it.
Rev. Aimee outlines the five steps of affirmative prayer, recognition, unification, realization, gratitude, and release, describing how each step builds upon a felt sense of spiritual connection rather than rote recitation. She emphasizes that prayer is an active, inward practice, citing Catherine Ponder’s teaching that “to pray is to do something” and that prayer is the highest form of energy available, changing conditions from the inside out. New Thought teachers including Emma Curtis Hopkins, Florence Scovel Shinn, and Neville Goddard are referenced to underscore the importance of feeling and acceptance in prayer, rather than emotional agitation.
The sermon contrasts praying from a sense of separation, which implies the prayer must travel somewhere to be answered, with praying from unification, in which the prayer is already fulfilled within. Practical guidance is offered on how to apply the unification step, including claiming spiritual qualities such as clarity, guidance, and grace as already present rather than petitioning for them. The sermon concludes with a call to embrace prayer as an ongoing spiritual lifestyle and an invitation for congregants to receive personal prayer from practitioners.
TRANSCRIPTION
Rev. Aimee Daniels:
Good morning, everybody. Boy, there’s a lot going on in the world right now, isn’t there? And we could spend a lot of time talking about that, but I’m on a tight time schedule this morning because we have to flip the room. But I do just want to acknowledge all the many things that have been happening, not the least of which was the anniversary of nine eleven on Friday, 25 years. And when I think about that, I think about some people, I was with someone the other day who was saying, “Well, that was really, we were united against an enemy.” And that is not how I think about it at all. I think it was an absolutely wonderful reminder of what’s important because you saw people shift. And we always have that opportunity to shift and turn toward what Paige was singing to us about love and to know our oneness and to know that we’re all on the same path.
So this month we’re talking about affirmative prayer. And I think affirmative prayer is a core part of what I call a spiritual lifestyle. That’s really what we’re doing here. We are cultivating a spiritual lifestyle, being in practice, being together in community, being around like-minded people, putting the principles into practice in our life and being supported by other people who are on this path with us. It’s a really pretty amazing thing. And Linda talked to us about recognition last Sunday, this idea that God is all there is. And she really talked a lot too about being in the feeling of the prayer. So this week we’re going to focus on unification. And to me, unification actually is all about knowing our oneness. That’s what’s underneath it. And prayer is one of our central practices. And I think about affirmative prayer. Ernest Holmes prayed affirmatively, but he didn’t really follow the five steps.
I think that those came later. If you look at this book and many other books that he wrote, there’s lots of little prayers that are in there that he wrote, which are wonderful if you’re still learning how to pray and you’re kind of like, “I don’t know how to do this.” Just pick up one of his books, read one of his prayers. It’s a beautiful thing. But I think that affirmative prayer is a brilliant energetic practice of our core principles. Think about it. Recognition is the first step. God is all there is. It’s this idea that there’s only one power and presence, that that’s the only thing that’s happening. Unification, I’m one with it. I’m not separate from it. There’s a oneness. We all partake in it. It’s the truth of our being. It’s the truth of everyone’s being. Realization, which Reverend Gene is going to talk about next Sunday is like I align with the good that I seek.
I align with the spiritual qualities of the good I speak. I declare what I desire and I know that I’m doing this from a place of feeling and presence. And really all the steps are about being and feeling and presence and then gratitude. I know it’s already done, right? I generate the feeling energy within myself that the prayer is already fulfilled. I give thanks for what is already present. And then I release, I let it go. I let the prayer go into the action of the law and I trust spirit to fulfill that prayer. So we’re focusing on unification. I want to start actually with a quote and an analogy. So Kabir said, “I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty. You do not see that the real is in your home and you wander from forest to forest listlessly.” When I first read that, I was like, “Did they spell real wrong, like real, like whatever?” But it’s like the real is in your home.
The truth is within you. That’s what that points toward. And I think a picture that helps us to think about this is, I’ve talked about the ocean before when you think about oneness, but this idea of a wave that’s going toward the shore. If we could think of the wave itself as having consciousness, it might think, “Oh, I’m going to hit the shore and I’m going to be gone and I’m not going to exist.” But what actually happens? The wave just joins back into the ocean because that’s all it really ever was. And I love that visual because it helps us think about what is this energy that we’re actually in and how do we remind ourselves that we are like the wave that is part of this bigger energy that’s happening? And when I was thinking about this talk, I just came back from vacation.
Rich is like, “Well, who’s speaking Sunday?” I’m like, “I am.” And he goes, “What are you talking about?” And I’m like, “Prayer.” And he goes, “Well, that doesn’t sound as interesting as a lot of the things you guys talk about.” And I’m like, “It’s actually fundamental.” But if you think about the relationship with prayer that many of us have, I grew up thinking prayer was petitioning. And I remember when I was in college, there were these ladies who invited me to pray at six in the morning and I though they were weird. I’m going to be honest with you. I’m like, why would anyone get up at six in the morning to pray? But I didn’t understand what I was being invited to at that time. And now I pray pretty much most mornings with someone. It’s not six, it’s probably more like seven. But why do we do that?
Why do we have the practice of prayer? Because we want to open the channel to our spirit. That’s what it’s about. And prayer is really what brought me to Centers for Spiritual Living. I wanted to learn how to pray and I wanted to learn how to meditate because I was going to a unity church, but they didn’t have the classes I was looking for. And I will say I was at a point in my life where I really did not feel comfortable in my own skin. And somehow I knew that my spirit knew that that’s what I needed and that’s what brought me to this teaching. And so praying and having prayer partners is part of my spiritual lifestyle.
So is anyone thinking, I don’t even know what I would ask for prayer for? Because sometimes that’s why people don’t want to ask for prayer. They’re like, nothing’s wrong. Nothing has to be wrong. It could simply be, you know what I like about prayer partner calls is you usually start the call, maybe visit for a few minutes and then you’re like, “What do you want prayer for today?” And it helps you to reset into the moment like, “Oh, what’s going on with me? What’s going on with my loved ones? What do I want to raise up to a more conscious vibration, a more conscious channel?” That’s what we do when we have prayer partners and we do prayer calls. Catherine Ponder, I think she’s retired now, but brilliant unity minister says, “To pray is to do something.” She tells a story about a young man who came to his minister and said, “I have this terrible problem.” And the minister said, “Have you gotten prayer about that?” And the young man said, “I can’t get prayer.
It’s time to do something.” And that’s the mentality that we can have. We’re too busy doing to stop and say, “Hey, I’m going to reset the channel right now. I’m going to get myself in a place where I am more open to divine wisdom.” So to pray is to do something. It might be the most important thing you can do about any problem. It’s the one action that changes things from the inside out. That’s what it does. And she also says, “Physical action is the weakest form of energy we have access to.” Think about that. We live our whole life. We’re moving around. I’m living my life, but it’s the weakest form of action. Our thinking and our mental energy is the strongest form of action. And I love this in the second paragraph, you release a potent spiritual vibration that can’t be released any other way.
Prayer is the highest form of energy in the universe and you’re not praying to something outside of you. You are praying from that which in you, which recognizes that it’s already there.
So when someone tells you there’s no time to pray, it’s like there’s no time not to pray, right? Ernest Holmes, as Jonathan read to us, tells us prayer is constructed. I love this line in his quote, “We’re less likely to be influenced by appearances around us or to judge by appearances when we pray.” Righteous prayer sets the law of the spirit of life in motion for us. So prayer is essential for our conscious wellbeing, body, mind, and spirit. Do you ever feel like you’re just at odds within yourself, but then you go get prayer and what happens? You feel a shift, right? You feel better. You can’t even say why. It doesn’t even matter if you have an insight in the moment or not, but it’s like something shifts when we pray. So we want to commingle our thought with spirit, as Ernest Holmes says, for our wellbeing.
And we are addressing the prayer to the presence that’s within us, not to something outside of us. In dwelling presence. And I think this is one thing we have to consciously break because we’ve been taught that we’re praying to something outside of us. And I also think for myself, I’m just going to speak for myself, if something is troubling me, sometimes I can’t get my head around it on my own to know that I’m not separate or to know that I’m not praying to something outside of myself. That’s why we need each other, right? Because it’s easier for someone to know the truth for you than it is for yourself sometimes when you’re in crisis. I often hear people say in the community, “I forget to pray for myself.” Anyone relate to that? I forget to pray for myself.
So Ernest Holmes is like, “This is like food.” And so we just want to know that we’re praying from our oneness. If we’re praying a prayer from separation, that implies it’s got to travel somewhere to be answered. And when we’re praying from unification, the prayer doesn’t go anywhere. It’s already home. It’s within us. We’re just activating the vibration in our body. And I like to think of it too for myself, reminding myself that I partake of the name and nature of spirit, that this presence, which is in everything, that it is also in me and that that is where I’m praying from.
So we already believe this, right? We’ve talked about prayer all the time. We decided to do this month because we’re like, “Wow, we would love more people to get prayer here at Cityside. We would love more people to make this a practice.” So that’s why we decided to make it a month. And I want to point also to our principles. They’re on our website, but one of our principles is oneness. There’s one infinite reality, undivided, complete and whole within itself that creates everything out of itself. So that’s what unification is all about. It’s not outside of you. We also talk about spiritual law. Universal spirit maintains harmony, equilibrium and balance through spiritual law. The law of correspondence, the law of attraction, the law of giving and receiving, impersonal, consistent, intelligent, always operating. And I think for me, one of the simplest ways to think about the law is the hermetic principle, if anyone knows what that is.
Basically it’s this, as above, so below, as below, so above. And for me, that’s very helpful to me to think like, no, whatever is here is here and whatever is here is here also.
Because whatever is true of the whole is true of the part and whatever is true of spirit is also true about you. And that’s the whole container of unification. Unification, oneness, we’re working with the law when we’re praying. And we have a lot of teachers who have taught this in New Thought. And I think the thing that many of them emphasize is this idea that you need to feel it. You can say I’m one with God, but if you don’t feel it, it’s probably a rote prayer like I grew up with. I think that’s why I was so enamored with learning prayer because I was like. I remember going to service when I was little, my family’s Methodist and the minister we had most of my childhood, he prayed the same thing every week. I’m like, “Why is he bothering?” But I didn’t feel it when he said it.
I know that’s terrible to say it that way. Bobby’s laughing at me back here, but I didn’t feel like he felt it. I felt like it was wrote. Emma Curtis Hopkins, teacher of teacher, she taught most of the people who became new thought leaders. She wrote, “The central spark, I am God that never dies is in our bosom.” So it’s in us. Okay? It’s in us.
Did I change the gender? I changed it from he to it because he is not. That’s how they wrote in the day that Emma was teaching, but really we’re talking it. Ernest called God it. But it that seeks me identifies with me. It lives as my life. It strengthens me as my strength. That’s what she taught. She was really big on it and they were very big on. At that time, they were very big on having certain affirmative statements that they said every day. Florence Scovoshin, another great new thought teacher, she taught in stories because she felt that that helped people to get the feeling more, like someone who lost the ring, someone who had an overdue rent check, someone who met a stranger on the train or whatever the story was. But her teaching was people don’t feel a principle from a definition. People feel it with a picture.
And that’s actually what we do in the later steps of prayer. I don’t want to steal anybody’s thunder, but we’re creating a picture, right? And Florence Govilschin said, “Your word is your wand.” She said, “Whatever man feels deeply or whatever a person feels deeply or images clearly is impressed upon the subconscious mind and carried out in the minutist detail.” So wherever our thought is, we’re manifesting from that. And that’s why prayer is so important because you’re resetting the channel. Neville Goddard, probably the greatest teacher of the felt sense I can think of said, “When I speak of feeling, I don’t mean emotion. I mean acceptance of the fact that the desire is fulfilled.” So it’s not asking you to get all worked up or emotional. It’s asking you to settle into acceptance of the prayer is already fulfilled, the feeling that it is already fulfilled.
So let’s talk a little bit about what we do when we do the unification step. We say I am one with God, but we also, when we pray in the unification step, when we go further in that we are claiming qualities of spirit for ourselves or whoever we’re praying for because presence has a character, right? It has qualities, love, grace, wholeness, health, healing, divine guidance. We could make a big long list of what those are, inspiration, creativity, but the unification, we’re naming those and we’re identifying those. We’re claiming our identity as those. I’m one with it. I am not separate from it. So let’s give an example. Saying someone. If you can go to the next slide. So let’s say someone wants prayer for clarity and guidance. So recognition, there’s one life, one power, one present, and it is all there is. Unification would be to say something like, “I’m one with that presence and because I am, I am one with the guidance that’s already inside it.
I’m one with the clarity that already knows the next right step. I’m not waiting for guidance to arrive. I’m one with the intelligence that gives guidance and it’s already active in me.” So we didn’t ask for guidance. We didn’t hope for clarity. We claimed it. We claimed the unification and we continue that in the realization statement of the prayer. So that can feel like a little overlap sometimes, but it’s like you are reinforcing your oneness with all the possibility that is.
And so we talked a little bit already about the five steps of affirmative prayer. So recognition sets the ground. Unification claims the quality and realization speaks it as if it’s already done, just to make clarity. And then gratitude receives it, release lets it go, right? We don’t tinker with the prayer after it’s done. So let’s do this for a minute together. I just want to invite you to close your eyes and I just want you to say to yourself in your mind’s eye. Actually, you can say it with me out loud first. I’m going to say it and then you’ll repeat it. I am one with God. Say it with me. I am one with God. Okay. Then I want you in your own mind’s eye silently to say, “I am one with,” and see what quality or qualities come up for you.
Just allow a quality, a spiritual quality to emerge for you and just speak it to yourself. I am one with grace. I am one with peace. I am one with ease. Whatever the word is, just speak it to yourself. And if no word has arisen for you, just sit with it. Actually, you’re going to have a chance to get some prayer in a few minutes. So just allow it to emerge for you. Even if it’s small, even if you don’t think you noticed anything at all, that’s just the doorway. You might feel a small physical shift. That’s what Hopkins called identification. We begin to feel something a little different. Shin called it feeling deeply. Neville called it acceptance. It can be very subtle. It’s not like a strike of lightning. It’s just like feeling a subtle shift.
So let’s bring our attention back to the room. We can spend our whole life in prayer. This is a novel idea for us, but Brother Lawrence, a lot of great spiritual teachers said that they spent their whole day in prayer effectively. Brother Lawrence said the time of business does not differ from the time of prayer. And in the noise and clutter of my kitchen, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees. I think this is a big invitation for us, isn’t it? I don’t know about you. I’m not always thinking about it when I’m doing the dishes, right? Even I’ve been trying now when I go for a walk with the dog to say like, “Okay, what is the presence I’m seeing here that I’m one with? All these animals, I’m seeing everything I’m seeing, this is the present that I’m one with.
How do I magnify that feeling of oneness within it?” He also said, Brother Lawrence also said, “A little remembrance of God, one act of inward worship are prayers which however short are nevertheless very acceptable to God.” So even though we teach affirmative prayer, which can go a little long and be a little elaborate at times, it’s simply in the moment you can also just acknowledge equality or send a little love. Really, that’s what you’re doing when you pray. In my opinion, you’re connecting with the field of love. That’s the truth. That’s what all the great teachers taught. Eckhart Tol also talks about presence and he says, “The moment your thinking is aligned with the energy field of the pain body, so with whatever’s wrong that you’re carrying around with you, you’re identified with it, again, feeding it with your thoughts. But what do we do when we pray?” Eckhart Tolle says, “When a thought subsides, you experience a discontinuity in the mental stream, a gap of no mind.” It’s a sense of presence.
That’s what we do when we pray. We get a sense of presence and it arises from beyond the mind. We’re not thinking in that moment. So this is what opening the channel actually means. Literally, physically, we have this available to us and we have this available to us in every moment. It’s a practice. It’s part of living a spiritual lifestyle, which I think is what we’re going for here. Ernest Holmes teaches us that prayer is its own answer. Cause and effect are but two sides of thought and spirit being all is both cause and effect. Prayer then is its own answer. Love that. Prayer is its own answer and that’s really what opening the channel is about and that’s what we’re pointing to. We often hear people say spirit knows what we need before we even say the word and I do believe that that’s true, right?
I believe that that’s true. Ernest also said we learned to go deeply within ourselves and speak as though there was a presence here that knows and we should take time to unearth the hidden cause to penetrate the inner chamber of consciousness. That’s what prayer is, going there. It’s most worthwhile to commune with spirit to sense and feel it. The approach to spirit is direct through our own consciousness.
We’re going to move into a closing prayer now because the way we’re going to end the talk is that you’re going to have a chance to have a practitioner pray with you a minute miracle. I’m going to begin the prayer and then I’m going to ask the practitioners to line up and if you would like to get prayer, go find one. Standing around the room, they’ll do a quick prayer for you. These need to be brief, so if you need more support than what you can get in a minute miracle, just connect with a practitioner or I think we are still offering prayer after service, get some prayer. So let’s turn within.
Let’s just take a deep breath, breathing in, breathing into this field of love, this presence, this power, this divine source that contains all, that is all, that is the truth of life. It’s the only thing that is happening. I know that I am one with this presence and power, this divine love, this divine possibility, this divine grace. As I know this for myself, I know this for each of the beautiful people hearing my word. Actually, I know this is the truth of everyone, that we are one with this presence, this power, this love, this divine source, this divine possibility, this grace and peace. From this place of oneness, I just speak my word and the word that’s coming to mind is a word of elevation for all of us. I just know and claim that in this very moment, our consciousness is elevated and I know and declare that we each make a conscious choice to live a spiritual lifestyle, to embrace the practice of prayer, to know this higher truth that God is the only thing that’s ever happening and to live our lives in the trust of this.
This is what I say yes to. I’m so grateful for this. I’m so grateful to know that we can always rely on spirit as we turn to God, God turns to us. I’m so grateful for this and with so much gratitude together we say, and so it is.