May 19 ~ The Science of Mind in a Year

Healing is Clear Thinking ~ Ernest Holmes

"Scientific mental healing is the result of clear thinking and logical reasoning, which presents itself to consciousness and is acted upon by Mind.  It is a systematic process of reasoning, which unearths the mental cause or idea underlying disease, and presents the Truth about man's being.

For instance, say to yourself:  "God is all there is.  There is only One Life."  When you are treating, if there is any slight point which is not clear, do not continue with the treatment.  Stop at once, go back to your analysis of Ultimate Reality and build your whole argument upon It, in order to get a clear consciousness.

Repeat:  "God is All.  There is but One Power, Intelligence and Consciousness in the Universe, but One Presence.  This One Presence cannot change into but Itself.  It is Changeless, and It is my life now, It is in me now."  Claim that no form of race-suggestion, belief in limitation, subjective idea of limitation, thought of karma, fatalism, theology or hell, horoscope, or any other false belief, has power.  Accept none of them.  If you have ever believed in them, if you have ever believed that the stars govern you, or that your environment governs you, or that your opportunities govern you, recognize this as an hypnotic condition into which you have fallen, and deny every one of them until there is no longer anything in you that believes in them.

This is a good way to clear your consciousness.  We can readily see what it does:  it induces a clear concept of Reality, which must reproduce Itself.  This process of clear thinking, if carried out every day, will heal.

When you are giving a treatment, you are thinking.  You are meeting, opposing, neutralizing, erasing and obliterating suppression, fear, doubt, failure, morbid emotion and sense of loss - whatever the trouble may be.  Every time your thought hits fairly and squarely, it erases just as definitely as one would erase a chalk line.  Such is the mystery of the appearance and the disappearance of thought."

March 7 ~ The Science of Mind in a Year

Self-Healing Must Come First of All ~ Ernest Holmes

"If we think we can guide our brother aright, while our own feet still walk in darkness, we are mistaken.  We must first clarify our own vision, then we shall become as lights, lighting the way for others.  But can we teach a lesson we have not learned?  Can we give that which we do not possess?  To suppose so is hypocrisy, a thing to be shunned.  Jesus tears the mantel of unreality from the shoulders of hypocrisy, winnowing from the soul of sham and shallowness it last shred of illusion.  We cannot see Reality until our eyes are open; until the light of eternal Truth has struck deeply into our own souls.

Scientific Prayer (Matt. 7:7)

We now come to a definite teaching regarding prayer. we shall receive that for which we ask.  It shall be opened to us when we knock and we shall find that for which we are searching.  This teaching implies the definiteness of spiritual and mental work.  God is Intelligent Mind and Spirit, and there is a direct response from this Universal Intelligence to our intelligence.  If we ask for bread, we shall not receive a stone.  But we are told we must ask believing, if we are to receive.

Here again we are meeting the Law of Cause and effect in the teachings of Jesus.  Prayer is a mental, as well as a spiritual, function of intelligence.  It is a certain manner of approach to the Spirit, a conscious act of the mind, a concrete experience of the knowing faculty.  Prayer should be direct and specific, and should always be accompanied by a positive receptivity.  God cannot answer prayers which have no meaning. The answer to prayer is in the prayer when it is uttered or thought.  We do not "pray aright" when we are in opposition to the fundamental harmony.  The whole teaching of Jesus, relative to prayer, is that God will answer when we pray aright.  Jesus points to the fact that if we, being human and consequently limited, know how to give good gifts to our children, how much more will God give good gifts to those who ask; and he explicitly tells us to ask directly for what we want."