SPIRITUAL TOOLS FOR A BETTER LIFE

In a recent class, a student spoke out honestly and explained that he had made a serious effort to use the Science of Mind teachings in his life, to little effect. Other approaches had worked better for his particular issues, he said. While I was not surprised, I was a little concerned that other members of the class might lose confidence in the effectiveness of the approach I was teaching, at a critical stage where faith was a necessary ingredient.

It is a quality of faith-based processes that without faith, they don't work. People trained in science, such as myself, are often frustrated by this, and they are tempted to ignore or even ridicule processes that rely on faith as an essential ingredient.

We know that social systems rely on faith to work. Faith and trust are related, and without trust, no one would buy or sell. Without faith, no one would invest. Remember there was a time when no one had faith in science, and so we failed to derive the many benefits of the scientific approach. Today is is one of our most vital tools. It should be no surprise that faith is essential to anything in which the human mind is involved.

We often forget that science is only a tool, and that it is not our only tool. It is the same with any spiritual tool. Prayer is a tool for applying human consciousness to call upon the Divine. We cannot grasp what the Divine is, any more than we can grasp what a magnetic field is - we just know what it does. Affirmations are a tool to place a new idea into our unconscious - to build our faith in a new idea. Then we are guided through life by our unconscious thought process - at a deep level, no one knows why that works either.

I have five or six different kinds of hammers in my garage... a carpenters hammer, a welder's hammer and a ball-pein hammer for pounding metal, a rubber hammer for jobs where I don't want to leave marks, a wooden hammer for pounding on chisels, a heavy brick hammer, a sledge hammer, and so on....there's also a tack hammer. Each one is good for the job for which it was intended, and if we choose the wrong hammer for the job, we should not blame the hammer if we get poor results.

Spiritual tools are no different. It depends on the job you are doing. In our class, Science of Mind 101, we taught about three kinds - meditation, affirmations and treatment. Others we did not discuss would be simple centering, being in the moment, the 12-step process, and on and on.... The number of spiritual tools cannot be counted.

The Science Of Mind 100 series tools are meant for beginners who want to learn to manifest 'stuff' or 'conditions' in their life. They help to set what Wayne Dyer calls "Intention", in his great book "The Power of Intention". Later in the course of the teaching, students typical open their minds to focus on pure qualities of Spirit, knowing that the 'stuff' and 'conditions' of their life will take care of themselves.