July 10 ~ The Science of Mind in a Year

FROM THE TEACHING OF JESUS
By Ernest Holmes

God Can Only Give Us What We Take

"God cannot give us anything unless we are in a mental condition to receive the gift.  The Law cannot do anything for us unless it does it through us.  Belief is absolutely necessary to right demonstration.

We are on the path of experience, just waking to the real fact of our true being; as we awake, we find we are surrounded by many false conditions, but there is something within which remembers the real state.  If one will sit in quiet contemplation of good, as an inner experience, he will experience the good which he contemplates.  He can do this only as he turns from that which is evil and dwells on the good alone.  The Universe will not be divided.

The Universe Holds Nothing Against Us

The Universe holds nothing against us.  No matter how many mistakes we have made, we are still perfect beings within, and the within may become the without, if we will carefully train ourselves to listen to the inner voice of truth which speaks to us in our moments of quietness and solitude.

There is nothing in the Universe that wishes evil to anyone.  Indeed, it is only as we experience good that God is expressed through us.  The more completely we realize good, happiness and success, the more perfectly do we express God and the more of God do we become, that is, the more does God become personified through us.

As the prodigal returns to his father's house, so must we return, not with a morbid mind, but consciously and definitely, with direct intent and a complete concentration of purpose.  The journey back should be fraught with happiness and joyful expectation for we shall be met with a smile from the Universe and shall be folded in the arms of love forever.

The Eternal Completion

Substance and supply exist eternally in the Father's House; health, happiness and success are native to the Heavenly Home, and God Himself shall be our Host.  More we could not ask, more could not be given than that which has been given from the foundations of the Universe.

Discord, misery, and unhappiness are the result of a misuse of our true nature, the result of ignorance.  Ignorance of the law excuses no one from its effects; but knowledge clothes us in the seamless robe, while wisdom puts the ring of completion on our finger and understanding feeds us with the fat of the land.

No one who has tried this has failed; it would be impossible to do so.  If any have thought they have failed, let them realize that somewhere they have fallen short of the divine calling.  The Truth cannot fail, for it is God, the Absolute and Unconditioned One, who is the Truth.

Let us no longer fight the old; let us no longer remember that we were once on the outer rim; let us forget the past and live in the eternal present of God's happy smile.  Today is good; tomorrow will be even better, and that vista of tomorrows that stretches down the bright eternities of an endless future will all be good, for the nature of Reality cannot change."

June 12 ~ The Science of Mind in a Year

FROM THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS
By Ernest Holmes

No One Gives to Us by Ourselves

"And he fain would have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat; and no man gave unto him."

"How true this is; no one can give unto us but ourselves and no one can rob us but ourselves.  "There are no gods to say us nay, for we are the life we live."  In our greatest extremity, in the moment of great need and dire distress, who can help or serve us?  All of our troubles come from an isolated sense of being; we alone can return to the "Father's House."

The question might be asked, "Where was God and why did He not come to the rescue of His beloved son?  Did He not care - was He heedless about His son's welfare?  Why did God allow such a thing to happen?  There is only one answer to all questions of this nature; God is always God, and man can always do as he pleases.  He would not be an individual unless this were possible.  The Father is never conscious of incompletion.  The Father's House is always open, the latch string ever hanging out, the door always ajar, but man must enter, if he wishes to abide within. 

Harmony can never become discord.  The truth can never produce a lie.  God can never be less than God.  Could God enter into a field of strife, then He would not be God.  God cannot enter the pig pen.  We cannot contract the Infinite, but we can expand the finite.  "As no man gave unto him."  It is always thus.

The Great Awakening

"And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father's have bread enough, and to spare, and I perish with hunger!"

"And when he came to himself."  This is the great awakening the moment in which we now live; in this moment we are asking this question of ourselves!  Is there not plenty in the universe?  Why do we want?  In this divine awakening, there seems to be an inner witness who remembers that we came from a heavenly state.  There seems to be an answer from that great within which says the Father's House is filled with peace, power and plenty.  The Universe is not limited.  It is abundant, lavish, extravagant.  Nothing can be taken from, nor added to, It.  Creation is the play of Life upon Itself.

We know, by intuition, that there is something beyond what we have so far consciously experienced in this world. Poets have sung of it and there are moments, in the lives of all, when the veil seems thin between and we almost enter into the heavenly estate.  This is the meaning of coming to one's self.  We are still in the awakening state, we have not yet consciously entered the state of perfect wholeness.  We know that such a state is a reality, and that we shall yet attain this reality.  Nothing can dislodge this inner and intuitive perception from our mentality; we know it as certainly as we know that we live.  This is God in us knowing Himself.  We are awakening to the realization that the Universe is perfect and complete.  It gives.  It is love.  It is good and wills only good to all alike.

Self-Condemnation

The prodigal said, "I will arise and go to my father and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee, And am no more worthy to be called thy son:  make me as one of thy hired servants."

This represents a theological state of mind which is quite common to all of us; one of self-condemnation and personal distrust; it is morbid and detrimental to our welfare; a theological state of introspective morbidity, which might be classed as one of our worst mental diseases.  Self-condemnation is always destructive and should never be indulged in by anyone, it is always a mistake.  There is no question but that all of us have done that which is not for the best.  From this viewpoint, all have been sinners, because all have fallen short of the Divine Calling.  If we have sinned, it is because we have been ignorant of our true nature and because experience was necessary to bring us to ourselves."

May 11 ~ The Science of Mind in a Year

We Are Allowed to Choose ~ Ernest Holmes

"Man has the ability to choose what he will do with his life, and is unified with a Law which automatically produces his choice.  While he does not have the ability to destroy the idea of himself, he does have the ability to deface it, to make it appear discordant, but he cannot destroy the Divine Image.  Man is an individual and does with himself what he wills.  The Scriptures say:  "God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions."  Individuality cannot be automatically produced; it must be spontaneous.   It would not be individuality without the ability to think as it chose.

We live in a Universe of Love as well as a Universe of Law.  One is the complement of the other - the Universe of Love pulsating with feeling, with emotion, and the Universe of Law, the Executor of all feeling and all emotion.  In this lesson on healing, then, let us remember that back of the man which we see is the Divine Image.  There is perfect Concept of Man, held in the Mind of the Universe as an already accomplished fact, but man is subject to the law of his own choice.

Man Re-enacts God

Man is conscious mind or spirit; this stands for his objective faculty.  The objective mind of man is his recognition of life in a conscious state - it is the only attribute of man that is volitional, or self-choosing.  Consequently, it is the spiritual man.  The conscious mind of man is the contemplator.

Let us bear in mind what we have already learned:  that the Universe is the result of the contemplation of the Divine Mind, or the Holy Spirit, which is God.  God creates by contemplating His own I-AM-NESS, and this contemplation, through Law, becomes the objectification of the Self-Realization of the Infinite Mind.

The Divine Nature is re-enacted in man; he is conscious mind and spirit, and, as he contemplates, he reflects his thought into the Universal Subjectivity where it is received and acted upon.

As Mind, or Soul, accepts these images of thought, It operates upon unformed substance and causes it to take definite form as body, which is unconscious form.  It becomes definite form, but the form itself is unconscious, because it is made of immaterial substance.   Body, of itself, without Mind, has neither consciousness nor volition.  Devoid of mentality, the body neither thinks, sees, hears, feels, touches nor tastes.  Take the mentality away from a body and it becomes a corpse.  Having no conscious intelligence, it at once begins to disintegrate and to resolve into the Universal Substance, or unformed matter, from which it came.

Although man is inherently a perfect idea, his individuality covers this idea with the forms of thought which he images.  Man comes into this life subjective to the race consciousness and to his own environment, he unfolds his own personality and begins to crate new subjective thought.  He thinks and observes, draws certain conclusions and deductions, and incorporates them within his mentality, until at last they also become a part of the relative cause of his objective existence.

Healing, then is accomplished by uncovering, neutralizing and erasing false images of thought, and letting the perfect idea reflect itself through subjective mind into the body.

When one realizes that everything is Mind and that nothing moves but Mind, and that the only instrument of Mind is thought (which is contemplation in some form or other) he will see that nothing can permanently heal unless it be accompanied by right thinking."