Inspirations and Affirmations
| What we Believe |
| The Art of Spirituality - Self Awareness |
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D E C L A R A T I O N O F P R I N C I P L E S by Ernest Holmes We Believe in God, the Living Spirit Almighty; one indestructible, absolute, and self-existent Cause. This One manifests Itself in and through all creation but is not absorbed by Its creation. The manifest universe is the body of God; it is the logical and necessary outcome of the infinite self- knowingness of God. We Believe in the incarnation of the Spirit in everyone and that all people are incarnations of the One Spirit. We Believe in the eternality, the immortality, and the continuity of the individual soul, forever and ever expanding. We Believe that heaven is within us and that we experience it to the degree that we become conscious of IT. We Believe the ultimate goal of life to be a complete emancipation from all discord of every nature, and that this goal is sure to be attained by all. We Believe in the unity of all life, and that the highest God and the innermost God is one God. We Believe that God is personal to all who feel this indwelling Presence. We Believe in the direct revelation of Truth through the intuitive and spiritual nature of the individual, and that any person may become a revealer of Truth who lives in close contact with the indwelling God. We Believe that the Universal Spirit, which is God, operates through a Universal Mind, which is the Law of God; and that we are surrounded by the Creative Mind which receives the direct impress of our thought and acts upon it. We Believe in the healing of the sick through the Power of this Mind. We Believe in the control of conditions through the Power of this Mind. We Believe in the eternal Goodness, the eternal Loving-kindness, and the eternal Givingness of Life to all. We Believe in our own soul, our own spirit, and our own destiny; for we understand that the life of all is God. Science of Mind in its broadest and truest sense includes the best in science, religion, and philosophy. Science of Mind is not a personal opinion, nor is it a special revelation. It is the result of the best thought of the ages. It borrows much of its light from others, but in so doing does not rob anyone, for truth is universal and never personal. We need the entire revelation of the whole world, and even with this we shall have little enough. The philosopher, the priest, the professor, the humanitarian, the empire builder, each has caught some gleam of the eternal glory. SScience of Mind does not scoff at the works of medical science, for instance. Science of Mind is a complement to medical science and when so understood and practiced will help heal the world of its physical infirmities. The world of knowledge needs to be knit together and not pulled apart. We have no objection to any form of healing. What we insist on is that there can be no permanent healing of the body without a correspondingly permanent poise in the mental and emotional life. Psychosomatic medicine has shown that mental disturbances, conscious or subjective, produce physical reactions in the body. If the body is to be permanently well, one’s mental life must be creative, peaceful, and happy. This is the purpose of mental healing, whether it be approached from the psychological or the metaphysical angle. Science of Mind teaches that there is a favorable physical reaction, an effect, which follows a pattern of thought incorporating ideas of health, for the law of cause and effect governs everything. Similarly, it is held that right thinking will result in a greater experience of success and abundance. A successful person thinks success, and the law of mind that reacts has no other choice than to produce an effect corresponding to the causative idea. The road to freedom lies not through mysteries or occult performances, but through the intelligent use of natural forces and laws. The law of mind is a natural law in the spiritual world. We need not ask why this is so. There can be no reason given as to why the truth is true. We do not create laws and principles but discover and make use of them. God, the universal life-force and energy running through everything, is an intelligent presence pervading all space; a self-existent cause; a perfect unit, a complete wholeness. The unthinking would believe that God keeps books and checks up on the wrongdoing of each individual member of the human race, and that some are sent to heaven and some to hell and all for the glory of God. Each has believed in the kind of God who best fitted their personal ideas, or in the idea of God that has been imposed upon them by ignorant or superstitious leaders. But always there has been the voice of those crying in the wilderness of superstition, ignorance, The universe is impersonal. It gives alike to all. It is no respecter of persons. It values each alike. doubt, and fear; the voice of those who have thought things through to conclusions that have been independent of race beliefs, of the subtleties of religious dogma, and of theological superstitions. These have been the way showers of humanity and millions have lighted candles from their flames. But the world progresses slowly; evolution and the growth of knowledge and wisdom is a process of time and experience. In principle the great religions of the world do not differ as much as they appear to. Stripped of their accumulations of adornments and observances, and the encrustation’s of interpretations, it is found that each acknowledges that there is one central Power, Force, or God, which is self- existent; and it is from this one power that all things emanate. All of life flows from it and is a part of it. Nothing can exist separate from it. The Christian interpretation of the ultimate nature of the creative Source of the universe places more emphasis on the life of the individual as being an integral part of the one life. But even in the Christian religion, much of its real meaning is hidden by words that are misleading and symbols that but few understand. We could scarcely find a greater riddle to solve than the meaning of the "Holy Trinity." Also, most people either reject the Bible entirely or accept it totally and literally. Both these methods are mistakes. Religion is our idea of God, and the Bible is a written declaration of the belief in God held by a great people-the Jews. It is, in many respects, the greatest book ever written and does truly point a way to eternal values. But it is only one explanation and cannot be considered the only light on religion; for there are many others, which, taken together, weave the story of truth into a complete and unified pattern. The many sacred books of the East constitute other Bibles which point ways to the truth; but each is only another way and cannot be considered to be the way. All peoples have had their religions and have had their Bibles; all have pointed a way to ultimate values, but can we say that any of them has really pointed the way? It is unreasonable to suppose that any one group encompasses all the truth and alone can reveal the way of life for all others. Science of Mind reads every Bible and gleans the truths contained therein. It studies all peoples’ knowledge and draws from each that which is self-evident. Only that which is self-evident can stand the test of reason and time. Without criticism, without judgment, but by true discrimination, that which is true and provable may be discovered and put to practical use. We should take truth wherever we find it, making it our own. Borrowing knowledge of reality from all sources, taking the best from every study, Science of Mind brings together the highest enlightenment of the ages. We note that through the ages people have been healed by the prayer of faith, which is a practice of every religion. There is a law governing this possibility, else it never could happen. It is the business of Science of Mind to view the facts, evaluate the causes, and in so doing provide a definite knowledge of the law which governs the facts. What do we do when we pray? We talk to God. Where do we talk to God? We talk to God in our own mind, through our own thought and feeling. It is quite impossible for us to talk to God outside ourselves, for we cannot go outside ourselves. Whatever God we talk to is our own thought or approached through our own thinking, feeling, and knowing. When we ask God for abundance, we ask God in our own mind. God answers through our affairs. But some have asked God for money for some worthy purpose and have not yet received an answer to their prayers. Indeed, to be perfectly truthful, can we suppose that God is or can be more interested in one good deed than in another? This would be dangerously near making the divine Being more limited in thought than we are. But the fact remains that many prayers relative to worthy purposes have been answered. It must be that the answer to prayer is in the prayer when it is prayed and not in the inclination or the disinclination of God to answer some and not others. God answers prayer according to law and order, the immutable law and order of the universe. Prayer is a thought, a belief, a feeling, arising within the mind of the one praying. This feeling becomes a complete belief and a perfect acceptance when the mind is most completely in tune with the Infinite. The mind is most completely in tune with the Infinite when the emotions are most constructively aroused. The highest faith comes from the greatest spiritual awareness. The prayer of faith is answered because the prayer of faith admits of an answer, while the prayer of unbelief does not admit of one. Perfect faith is an unqualified acceptance of the desired result; and this acceptance is a mental attitude which cannot be shaken by any objective evidence to the contrary. The prayer of faith looks through the apparent condition to a perfect fulfillment. Prayer is a mental attitude aspiring toward God as the great giver of all. Faith is the acceptance that God has given or is now giving. Prayer and faith are both mental attitudes. A continual prayer of faith repudiates all that contradicts the desired end and culminates in positive acceptance. When prayer removes distrust and doubt and enters the field of mental certainty, it becomes faith; and the universe is built on faith. The mind will soar to new heights when fired by a potent constructive emotion. This explains why people with high spiritual emotions generally receive the most direct answers to their prayers. It matters not what stimulates the emotion so long as it is constructive and agrees with its ideal. The intellect is a cold thing and a merely intellectual idea will never stimulate thought in the same manner that a spiritual idea does. It so happens, or the universe is so organized, that it is quite impossible for us to arouse the highest emotions and the most creative ones without using the highest ideals. These ideals are always what we call religious or spiritual. But spirituality and religion are not to be thought of as either unnatural or supernatural. Spirituality means dependence on spirit. Religion concerns beliefs in God. Both are normal and quite natural to the average person. God gives some more than others because some accept more than others. The divine Giver knows nothing about size. Prayer should build up a greater acceptance of God’s life, truth, and action; and when it does the response will be commensurate with higher acceptance. When the whole emotion is aroused and the mental acceptance is complete, the answer will be certain. The law has not changed, but has responded in a different way. The universal Mind contains all knowledge. It is the potential ultimate of all things. To it, all things are possible. To us, as much is possible as we conceive, according to law. Should all the wisdom of the universe be poured over us we should yet receive only that which we are ready to understand. This is why some draw one type of knowledge and some another and all from the same source-the source of all knowledge. The scientist discovers the principle of science, the artist embodies the spirit of art, the saint finds spiritual awareness, all because they have courted the particular presence of some definite concept. Each state of consciousness taps the same source but has a different receptivity. In this way the universe is infinite, the possibility of differentiating is limitless. We waste much time in arguing over things that cannot be answered. When we have arrived at the ultimate, that is the ultimate; it is the way the thing works. Therefore we have a right to say that there is a law involved and that this law executes our word or prayer. We discover laws, find out how they work, and then begin to use them. Therefore, we say it is the nature of thought and of creative law to be this way. I would say that law is an attribute of God. God did not make law; it coexists with the Eternal. The infinite law and the infinite intelligence are but two sides of the infinite unity; one balances the other and they are the great personal and impersonal principles in the universe. Involution is the inworking of the conscious and the volitional, and evolution is the outworking of that which is tangible and mechanical. We can no more do without spirituality than we can do without food, shelter, or clothing. Indeed, the spiritual instinct is so firmly implanted that it is inseparable from life and living. According to our belief in God will be our estimate of life here and hereafter. To believe in a God of vengeance is one thing, but to believe in a God of love and a just law of cause and effect is another. We live in a universe of spirit and of law. From the one we are to draw inspiration; from the other we are to utilize power. Each is a complement to the other and both are necessary to existence. To believe in a just law of cause and effect, carrying with it a punishment or a reward, is to believe in righteousness. To believe my eternal damnation for any soul is to believe in an infinite monstrosity, contradicting the integrity of the universe, and repudiating any eternal loving- kindness inherent in God. To feel that we suffer for our mistakes is justice, but to feel that our mistakes are eternal is to be already in the suppositional hell of a false theology. A sin is a mistake, a mistake is a sin; both will ultimately be done away with. To believe that evil draws as many benefits as goodness from the storehouse of God is unthinkable, and to feel that some are foredoomed forever to be evil is also unthinkable. It denies solidarity to the universe and creates a house eternally divided against truth. All truth is our truth. No one can rob us of our own soul, and our spirit is already one with the eternal goodness. Everyone’s belief is good insofar as it is in line with reality. We have no controversies with anyone. As we claim freedom, so we extend its privileges to everyone else; we will give and accept on no other terms. The past is behind us and whatever doubt it may have held is gone with it. The future is before us, bright with prospects; the eternal sun of righteousness is ever ascending, never to descend. Let us look toward the high goal of lasting attainment, fearless and happy. Let us live in the present, looking neither backward in horror, nor forward with apprehension, but looking into the present with joy-"abiding in faith." Religious Science is a correlation of laws of science, opinions of philosophy, and revelations of religion applied to the needs and aspirations of humankind. Your Mind is Creative: Thoughts are Concepts which Develop into E X P E R I E N C E S We believe in spiritual mind healing; it is part of our conviction and our practice. At the same time we do not disbelieve in any form of healing, whether it be medicine, surgery, psychiatry, diet, or exercise. Some people say to me they think that we should believe in only one. Every new discovery in medicine is just as much a revelation of God for a specific purpose as a new invention or a new interpretation of Life itself. There is only the One operating in all the channels. To deny this would be to rest our case on the basis of superstition, which is ignorance. And an ignorance that leads to a new form of dogmatism is built on a sense of fear and separation from the Universe. In our field we are interested in spiritual mind healing. I do not consider this the most important thing we teach, but I think that it is important that we should be relieved from suffering. The person who is in pain or fear naturally wishes to be released from it rightly and as quickly as possible. I do not believe that God has imposed suffering upon anyone to punish them or to teach them a lesson. To me this is stupidity and ignorance. Human beings seem to have assumed the prerogative of determining that God inflicts the suffering. Actually, we appear to be responsible for our suffering through ignorance of our Divine nature. We believe that spiritual mind healing is a complement to medicine, to psychology, and to every system of therapeutics. Some day these fields will all come together now more than most people realize. I have not known one single physician who would not have been glad to have had a spiritual practitioner working with their patient. I have had hundreds of them tell me this. That is the way it ought to be, because one field does not interfere with the other. However, spiritual mind treatment, under right conditions, can and may transcend other methods. We shall have to recognize this if we believe that we are living in a spiritual system, because that is the way the Universe is organized and operates. it is a spiritual system of Intelligence acting as law. There is One Mind and we use it. Our word is operated upon an intelligent creativity superior to our own. Therefore, when it comes to the act or a spiritual treatment, it is a conscious declaration of our belief in a Presence whose wisdom moves through our ideas and whose action as Law manifests that treatment for definite purposes. There is nothing more specific than a definite spiritual mind treatment. The simplicity of it is this: A spiritual mind treatment is an atmosphere of feeling followed by words consciously and definitely formulated, with a supposition that these words acted upon by Law, are for the person with whom they are identified; and that what is implied in the treatment will transpire in the experience of the person being treated. We always find this is one of the most difficult things to explain because of its simplicity. The first point I want to make clear is that we do not send out anything to the person we are treating. We believe, along with the great thinkers throughout the ages, that God is everywhere; therefore, all of God is wherever God is - what God knows is known everywhere, so to speak, and everything is present at all times. Modern physic is beginning to take this position, too. It is no longer strange to think of an unbroken unity of the whole. Nor should treatment be thought of as a concentration of anything. No on ever concentrated the principle of harmony or of mathematics of or beauty - they only used it. Our treatment, then, begins with the recognition that there is One Life, that Life is God, that Life is Perfect, and is the life of the one we are treating, say John Smith. He is a Divine being now, not by-and-by. He didn’t make himself a Divine being, nor did we - any more than we made the world round. That is the way he inherently is, regardless of any appearance to the contrary. Now, according to what you and I mean when we say the word "God" there will be in our world an essence - that which we call the spirit of the treatment which is different from the letter. Both are necessary; one is the conviction of awareness, the other is the form of wording of that awareness. What does it mean when you or I say that there is One Life, and that Life is God, and the life of John Smith now? It means that in reality there is nothing in this man’s life different from God, other than God, separate or apart from God, and that there is nothing in the Universe that desires to harm or hurt this man. But we all know that this concept is not accepted everywhere. however, psychology and psychiatry have made a tremendous contribution to our field. Let me say right here that wherever you can get any truth to add to what truth you have, grab it. Learn once and for all that sugar is sweet, whether you find it in the sugar bowl or the dustpan. Truth is truth whoever announces it, from whatever source it comes. You and I will learn more by putting together all true knowledge for a still greater synthesis than by rejecting ideas because we may not like the source from which they come. Now, psychologists point out that a psychological repression, in conflict, is a group of highly emotionally charged thoughts, ideas, and feelings so deeply buried in the unconscious that it cannot be brought to the surface by an act of will or though the imagination. They tell us that seventy-five to eight-five percent of all illnesses and accidents is the result of an unconscious desire on the part of the people now have them to get away from the liability of living. At the core of a neurosis are always four constituent elements: rejection, guilt, insecurity and anxiety. it is believed that every person has a neurosis because there is no one who has not made mistakes or "sinned"; it is just a question of how active it is. this takes us right back to why Jesus forgave sins. he knew what he was doing; and what he did is as up to date as the very latest invention is today. His teachings are timely because he spoke from the Heart and Soul and Mind of the Universe. that was his mission. We believe it is scientific in our field to relieve people of their sense of guilt. A spiritual mind practitioner in talking to their patients and in treating them will relieve them of their neurotic liabilities. You may ask, "How will they do it?" Here is one of our basic principles: Thoughts are things; mental states in total become a mental impulsion to create and produce that which is like them. In a spiritual mind treatment we incorporate those ideas which relieve the sense of isolation, the burden of guilt, and the condemnation of rejection; it relieves the tension of insecurity and anxiety and heals the neurosis in such degree as it goes deeper than the thoughts that gave rise to the neurosis. For instance, most weariness we are now told is the result of a lack of enthusiastic joy in living. Therefore, spiritual mind treatment must realize joy. John Smith must be awakened from apathy that was first mental, then subjective, and finally physical. Someone might ask, "How are you going to get this over to John?" In our practice, what the practitioner silently realizes for John Smith is his or her own mind is known in the medium of the One Mind, which is also operating through the patient’s mind and, theoretically at least, rises to the same level of realization in the patient’s mind. therefore, the person treating or praying for John Smith must have a deep feeling about God. Let us continue our hypothetical treatment: "God is Love. There is only this One Love, and he is aware of it. He is aware that he is wanted, needed, and loved. he belongs to the Universe. God hasn’t rejected him, and no one else can. He does not reject himself. there is no condemnation or judgment operating through him. Every plant that my heavenly Father hath not planted is rooted up and cast out. This word establishes perfect circulation, assimilation and elimination. Whatever there is that does not belong, is eliminated. he has a consciousness of belonging to life, of feeling the Divine Presence, and now accepts his good. He has a complete sense of being unburdened and enters into the joy of living, which is reflected in every aspect of his experience. He has faith in himself. The perfect action of God casts out all unlike god, and I give thanks that it is doing this right now for John Smith" Each person can speak out of their own consciousness of God and heal the discord within the lives of another. Have you more love than there is hate in them, more joy than there is grief, more beauty in your own soul than there is ugliness in theirs; is heaven more real to you than discord? Do you really love your fellow beings and in compassion wish them freedom as much as your own? Declare it and decree it, and as surely as the day follows night, shall it dawn upon you through experience, out of practice, that there is a silent Power, actual and dynamic, that heals. Like the blind man Jesus healed, you, too, will know that the people you prayed for have been befriended by the Infinite One, whose Compassion they felt, whose Love overpowered and restored their vision of life. And you, too will hear them say, " ... whereas I was blind, now I see." Standing Room Only : A Thing of Destiny "It has always been my idea that the greatest life is the one that includes the most--that we have to study what everybody has to say, we have to be the judge principally of what we think is right or wrong, good or bad, or true or false. There is nothing else, and we must not live by authority. We must have no more prophets or saviors." by Ernest Holmes, founder of Science of Mind I consider Religious Science a thing of destiny or I wouldn’t be here. I have given my life to it. I never even made a living out of it, because it doesn’t interest me in that way. I think it is a thing of destiny. I believe that the evolutionary process, periodically in history, pushes something forward as a new emergence to meet a new demand. What I have gathered has been from reading, studying, thinking, and working--it is a long, laborious, tough method, but it pays off. I don’t believe there is a real other method. What you will really learn will be what you tell yourself, in a language you understand, you accept--giving yourself a reason that is rational enough to accept, reasonable enough to agree to, inspirational enough to listen to with feeling, profound enough to sink deep, with light enough in it to break away the clouds. Because there is a place where the sun never has stopped shining in everyone’s mind, and there is ever a song somewhere and we all have to learn to sing it. There would be no Religious Science movement had there not at first been a New Thought movement. We are one of the New Thought groups of America, which have come up in the last 60 years and influenced the thought of the world and this country more than any other one single element in it--that is, spiritually, religiously, theologically, and psychologically too. But the New Thought movement itself, which originated in America, had its roots in a very deep antiquity. We happen to have the most liberal spiritual movement the world has ever seen, and yet it is synthesized and tied together by the authority of the ages and the highlights of the spiritual evolution of the human race, all of which I have been familiar with, since I have spent 50 years studying it and thinking about it. I was always studying; and since I had to make a living, I took a job as a purchasing agent. A superintendent asked me what all the books that I had around my office were, and I said they were books on philosophy and metaphysics, the occult, New Thought--everything you can think of. He said, "They look interesting to me." I said, "You are an engineer and wouldn’t be interested," but he thought he might. He borrowed some of them and after a while he said, "How would you like to come over to my house and I will invite a few people one evening and you can just talk to us?" I said that would be fine--and we did it. Those were the first talks I ever gave, in two homes. During one of these evenings a lady came to me and said she was at the Metaphysical Library (we used to have a big metaphysical library at 3rd and Broadway, and I used to get books out of it) and she said, "I told the librarian you would come up next Thursday and talk." I said, "Talk on what?" And she said, "Like you talk to us! You are really better than the people we hear up there." I went, and the librarian said, "You have a class this afternoon at 3 p.m." I said, "I wouldn’t know how to teach a class." She informed me I could pay a dollar for the room and charge 25 cents a person to come. I decided to teach Troward. I had read The Edinburgh Lectures. I believe I had 13 in the class and got home with a five-dollar gold piece above my rent. Within two years I was speaking to thousands of people a week and never put a notice in the paper. They just came. This went on for a number of years, and I thought I would like to see how it worked in other places. For several years I went to Eastern cities and around and discovered that people everywhere wanted it and were ready for it. I had already started on what I consider our great synthesis, putting the thing together. I had a beautiful home here and had made many friends, so I came back to Los Angeles after several years of being out of this local field. In 1925 we took the little theater which used to be in the Ambassador Hotel. It seated 625 people. We put an ad in the paper and started on a Sunday morning. Within a year the people couldn’t get in. Then we took the Ebell Theatre and within a year were turning people away from there. It seated 1,295 people. Then, because we needed the space, I took the Wiltern Theater, and we turned away many, many hundreds every Sunday. This was during the time of the Depression, and probably many people were looking for help even more than ordinarily. I had a big radio program, too, which was a big help. I want to go back before this happened. I came back here in 1925, and in 1926 some friends of mine said, "You should organize this." But I said, "No, I don’t want to do that; I don’t want to start a new religion or be responsible for it; I don’t want to tell anyone what to do. I don’t know what to do myself, so how can I tell anyone else?" But they argued that this was something they thought valuable and the greatest thing in the world, and they finally convinced me--and we became incorporated as a nonprofit religious and educational organization. It was called the Institute of Religious Science and School of Philosophy. It wasn’t until it had many, many, many branches that I really thought to myself, something is going on here, this really is a thing of destiny; it is really going to become the next spiritual impulsion of the world--and I believe it. I finally came to see that it had to be organized so it wouldn’t fall apart. We have a very wonderful organization, democratic; we are governed by a top board of 19 members, seven of whom are elected by the field. This is a new spiritual impulsion in the world; it has certain objectives in the world, has certain purposes: to teach and to practice, and nothing else. Teach and practice, practice and teach--that is all we have; that is all we are good for; that is all we ever ought to do. We must bear witness to a spiritual truth which has come down to us through the ages; and if there is any truth, this is it. It is a compilation, a synthesis--a putting together of all the great thoughts. If you take the deep thoughts of the ages -- Plato and Moses and Jesus, Buddha, Socrates, Aristotle and Emerson and Plotinus, all of them--you will have to have the greatest teaching the world has. It is a terrific thing to synthesize the wisdom of the ages. I don’t claim to have done it, but we have come nearer doing it than ever has happened before in the history of the world. Therefore, we are beneficiaries of innumerable sources. Those sources we gladly recognize, and we feel very proud and happy we have had sense enough to use them. They must be brought into line--the great philosophical and spiritual truths must be brought into line with the modern metaphysical knowledge of the Law of Mind in action, which the ancients did not understand at all. If they did, they didn’t practice it or, as far as I know, teach it. They taught the broad, generalized principles that underlie it and which will explain it--but not in action. We have launched a movement which is destined--I won’t live to see it and don’t want to--in the next hundred years to be the great new religious impulsion of our day and of modern times. I am convinced our movement is a thing of destiny. Now what do we teach? It is very simple: God is all there is. There isn’t anything else; there never was and never will be. When the psychological reaction of condemnation is done away with in the world, Hell will have cooled off; the Devil will be out of business; present-day evangelism will have been rolled up like a scroll and numbered with the things that were once thought to be real. Something new and grand will have appeared. We are the forerunners of a new race of people; we are the arbiters of the fate of unborn generations; we are the custodians of the chalice of truth. But we are not hung on a cross. We have a song to sing; we have a joy to bring to the world, and love and peace and happiness. I think we should feel as though we are on a mission. Not a mission of sadness to save souls--they are not lost, and if they were, you wouldn’t know where to look for them--but a mission that glorifies the soul. Not to find we are here for salvation, but for glorification--the beauty, the wonder, the delight of that Something that sings and sings and sings in the soul of humankind. Gateway to Tomorrow Ernest Holmes - One of the questions so frequently asked me is, "Do you believe in eternality, and do you believe that all people are eternal?" Personally, I consider that the eternality of the individual life has been conclusively proved; and I am convinced that you and I and everyone else are destined to live forever, because the life which we now experience is the life of God in us. It is this life of God in us that is eternal, not the external form of flesh. In a certain sense each one of us is two persons. One is physical and the other is mental or spiritual. The mental or spiritual uses a physical body in this world because it needs it. But at the time of death the spirit within us, which is independent of this physical form, severs itself from it, or as the Bible says: "Or ever the silver cord be loosed... Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it." To those who have inward vision, it is not at all uncommon to see the separation of the spirit from the body. And perhaps more frequently than we have realized, after this separation takes place we are able to communicate with those who have left this world. Personally, I haven’t the slightest doubt of this because I have had too many experiences in this field to question its reality. And it has been my privilege to know a number of highly trained scientists who have spent years of very careful research into this subject only to come to the conclusion that there is an eternal side to our nature. There is something about the personality that does not die, that continues beyond the grave. But someone might ask, "How can you believe this when you are dealing with such an intangible thing? How can you trust your feelings and sentiments alone? Perhaps the whole thing is but an idle daydream, an empty wish, a forlorn hope?" You might as well ask an artist if their vision of beauty is a forlorn hope. They don’t see the beauty but they do feel it. You might as well ask a mathematician whether or not the principle of mathematics is a reality. No one has ever weighed or measured it. As a matter of fact, while biology is the study of the life principle in the physical body, no one has ever seen this life principle. And yet, at the very moment that it departs from the body, the body begins to disintegrate. Who can doubt that the integrating factor, the thing that held the body together, has actually left its earthly home? Psychology is the science of the way the mind works in us; but no psychologist ever saw the mind, nor is there one who doubts its existence. It is an interesting fact, but a true one, that all we deal with in this physical world is the effect of invisible causes, of an invisible intelligence working through physical forms. Jesus said: "In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you." In other words, there are different planes of existence and we progress from one to the other, always more and never less ourselves. We can see how this principle works right here in this world. There is a certain form of intelligence even in a piece of steel. There is an atomic intelligence in every physical object. And we see another level or graduation of this intelligence in animal life. Then it broadens out and reaches the human being, and we find this same intelligence with conscious awareness. Next, we find that occasionally some people have what is called a cosmic intelligence, which takes in a lot more territory. We speak of them as being illumined and spiritually aware. Jesus, of course, was the greatest of these, and he definitely said that he knew about this world and about the next one. He knew how people lived here and how they lived there. Everything that Jesus did was done as an object lesson to teach us the relationship we have to this world, to each other, to the next world, and to God. He taught that there is no long period between sleeping to this world and waking to the next; for he said to the thief on the cross beside him: "Verily I say unto thee, today shalt thou be with me in paradise." It seems as though the whole life and teaching of Jesus was to give people the hope and the assurance that they are one with God, and therefore their personal lives continue to exist beyond the grave. There is no doubt that Jesus had enough spiritual power at his command to resist any violence had he so wished. In order to teach the lesson that he wanted us all to learn, it was necessary that he permit himself to be crucified, that his body be placed in a tomb, and that he become resurrected and appear as he did to hundreds of people who knew him personally so that there would no longer be any doubt in their minds. The triumph of the cross was infinitely more than one man proving that he was eternal. It was a lesson, chosen for a definite purpose. The cross stands for the Tree of Life, whose roots are in the earth, whose arms or branches are stretched out in a protective manner, and whose head or top piece is pointed toward the sky. This really represents the threefold nature of humankind-spiritual, mental, and physical; or as the Bible says, spirit, soul, and body. And so Jesus permitted that which was human about him to hang on this Tree of Life and to be taken down and placed in a tomb, which stands for everything that means an obstruction to life, everything that looks as though life were buried, inactive, and dead. Let us not forget that even in this experience the tomb was filled with a light—the light that the Bible says lightens every person’s pathway, the eternal light of heaven. And it was this light, this life, that Jesus took into the tomb with him. It was the light that emerged from the tomb. The cross and the suffering and the anguish and the tomb were but preliminary incidents to the resurrection, to the triumph of the spirit; and the certainty that the cross cannot long crucify nor the tomb long contain that which is destined to live forever. It is no wonder that the Psalmist long ago chanted: "’Wither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me." And in another psalm of confidence, he says: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me." We might call these the songs of the boundless soul, hymns of praise to the eternal Creator; a glad and joyful recognition that that life which has been given to humankind is guided and guarded into eternal pathways of self- expansion. But perhaps there is more than one cross from which we need to be delivered; more than one tomb that needs to be opened. Fear and lack, failure, disease, and unhappiness are crosses upon which we hang until the day of deliverance. And too often we lie in some tomb of uncertainty and deny our good. However, even here there is a light accompanying us. Even here there is a voice that still speaks, telling us that the tomb doesn’t really represent life, that we can arise and walk forth free and whole. What we need to do, then, is to rediscover the secret that Jesus knew, which carried him triumphantly through every experience of life and finally delivered him from the last enemy of humankind—death. He gave us the key when he said: "I and my Father are one... the words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works...for my Father is greater than I." It was this understanding that God is all there is that gave Jesus the power to do everything he did, whether it was the miracles of healing or the raising of himself from the dead. I believe the possibility of all these things rests on just one simple proposition: There is one life, that life is God, and that life is every person’s life. Of course, we are human beings and we do miss our friends. But when we understand that every person is eternal, that death is but the gateway to a larger life, we shall have a different viewpoint; and often, indeed, we shall recognize that our loss is their gain. It is necessary for us to realize that eternality is a principle in nature and comes alike to everyone. Sanity would forbid us to believe that some persons are eternal and others are not. Jesus understood that and that is why he said that God causes the sun and rain to come alike on the just and the unjust. He knew that for the most part we do not live as though we were eternal beings; that we get caught up with our little problems and often get lost in the maze of our own confusion. But he saw through all this to the final end of humankind. He knew that every person has the same divine spark within them; that finally the Spirit will triumph in everyone’s life; and that good comes to all. But he also said that the good is here now could we but see it; that the kingdom of God is at hand and we need to realize it. And he told about a daily resurrection that we may experience. We already possess the power; and when we learn to let the old slip away and be replaced by the new, when we no longer carry the burdens of yesterday into our tomorrows, we shall find each day a day of resurrection and of rejoicing. Eternality is something to be experienced here and now. We can open our minds to that other side of ourselves, that part which seems never to have completely been caught in the flesh. "Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom." You and I did not earn our eternality. It is a gift of God. But we do have to earn the ability to experience and enjoy it. This is a gift we shall have to make to ourselves. This world and the next are but two parts of one journey, which can, if we permit it, be filled with hope and joy. |
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