Thursday, December 1, 2016

November 30 ~ The Science of Mind in a Year

GENERAL SUMMARY
Ernest Holmes

"Effective treatment must be independent of any existing circumstance whatsoever else it will not enter the realm of an Unconditioned Causation.  It will have fallen to the level of those secondary causes which seek to perpetuate themselves in human experience.  To rise above the contemplation of conditions is to enter that field of Causation which makes all things new in our experience.  From this viewpoint there is no hard and no easy case to handle.  All cases represent but different phases of human belief and one would yield to the Truth as quickly as another if we were sure of our spiritual position.

Thoughts are more than things, they are the cause of things.  Things have no independent existence since there can be nothing external to some comprehending mind.  Our work is done in Mind alone and our entire equipment is thought and a knowledge of the Power which it utilizes.  This Power is superior to the intellect in Its creativeness.

Only when we put our very best into our spiritual work will it satisfy us.  A spiritual power is released through true thinking that is as much as law as is chemical affinity.  There is no deliverance of the real self without mental conviction.  To have faith in God is to follow this faith through by having faith in the self.  The real self is God and as such is to be implicitly trusted.  The spark which burns at the center of our own soul is caught from the living and eternal flame of the Spirit.

But the letter without the Spirit does not quicken the flesh into newness of action.  It is cold and unresponsive.  Feeling is at the center of the Universe and reflected through man's consciousness sheds its glow wherever the thought travels.  Law governs its action and God Himself fulfills its promises. 

There must come a time in our experience when we speak the conviction that is within us.  This conviction of the Spiritual Universe in which we live is real and powerful.  The light cannot be borrowed from another.  Each has been furnished with a divine torch whose wick burns from the oil of the eternal and ever renewing substance of faith in oneself and in others.

No good can come to us unless it make its advent through the center of God Consciousness which we are.  The hope of destiny is latent in the slumbering thought and genius lies buried until the attention is winged with love and reason.  To help those in need is indeed a great privilege.  But the blind cannot lead the blind.  We must awake to the realization that a Divine Partnership has already been formed between the seen and the invisible.

Unless there were a unifying Principle of life existing as One all-embracing Mind, in which everyone lives and everything subsists, then we could not recognize each other.  In deed we could not be conscious of living in the same world.  This Mind in which we live is at all times independent of any individual action on our part.  We are in It and It flows through us, but It is always more than we are.

Our own presence and our consciousness of the presence of the physical world around us implies the necessity of a Universal Intelligence which co-ordinates everything into one complete Unity.  This means that there must be a universal standard of Relativity which we do not set, but which we may discover.  One of the first discoveries we make is that living in a mechanical world, we are still spontaneous individualities.

The physical universe is always mechanical.  The Spirit is always spontaneous but because the Spirit is a Unity, It can never do anything that would contradict Its own nature.

Into this world we project and idea of ourselves as personalities.  Since this action is spontaneous, but at the same time subject to the reaction of the mechanics of the Universe, we may or may not be reflecting freedom, happiness and apparent wholeness into the Law.  Personality is bound, in its objective form only, to mechanical laws.  This is necessary else there could be no self-expression.  The way personality uses these mechanical laws, whether consciously or unconsciously, depends upon a realization of its right relationship to God, man and the Universe.

The chief characteristic of the subjective Law is that It is sensitive, creative and can reason only from a deductive viewpoint.  Being the very essence of sensitiveness It is compelled to receive the slightest impression of thought; being creative, It is compelled to act upon this thought; and being deductive, It cannot argue back or deny any use of It that may be made.

If someone should ask whether or not God has any intention for him the answer would be that the only intention God could have, if man is an individual, would be to let the individual alone to discover himself.  In this discovery of the self man impresses the Law (which is sensitive, creative and can deduce only) with the images of his own belief about himself, and the Law creates a form around these images.

Other than the instinctive and automatic actions of the physical body, the Law knows about us only that which we know about ourselves.  Therefore it makes all the difference in the world what we are impressing upon the Law as being true about ourselves.  For if we think poverty and lack we are certainly creating them and causing them to be projected into our experience.  If, on the other hand, we think abundance, then the Law will as easily and as willingly create abundance for us.  It is all so simple that it seems unbelievable.  But for the average person who has no knowledge of this Law, his only use of It will be a reflection of what the consensus of human opinion believes must take place in the life of the majority of individuals who may happen to be living at any time on this earth.  The savage thinks after the mode of his tribe and the more civilized thinks after the mold of racial belief.

To assert our individuality is to rise above the law of averages into that more highly specialized use of the Law which brings freedom rather than bondage, joy in the place of grief and wholeness instead of sickness.  We cannot do this sunless we are first willing to "judge not according to appearance."  In this judging "not according to appearances" we are impressing the Law with a new idea of ourselves...a less limited idea; and we are learning to think independently of any existing circumstances.  This is what is meant by entering the Absolute."

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