Go For Whole

Celebrating my Ordination

2011-12-19T14:34:00.000-08:00

This past summer, the Centre for Spiritual Living, Saskatoon, hosted a New Thought conference titled "The Oneness Gathering", which was well attended. Keynote speakers were Rev. Dr. Suzanne Rubin and Drs. Kenn and Doborah Gordon, and there were many distinguished Pastors, Staff Ministers, and Practitioners from across Canada and the western U.S.A.

On the day prior to the main conference, there was a gathering of ministers in a discussion group. Just the day before that, I was told that I would be called away from the group for a panel interview regarding ordination. Three senior ministers, generally having the title of "Doctor", conduct this interview. Following a period of questions, I was sent out to a waiting area for several minutes, then called back to be informed that the panel was unanimous in recommending me for this honour.

I should explain that, unlike most churches, ministers are not ordained after passing their training period, but are 'licensed'. Then then work under the supervision of an ordained pastor, with annual reporting and an annual licensing fee. Their title of "Reverend" may be withdrawn should they retire or fail to be approved annually. There is a point system for ordination which results in the removal of the annual restrictions - the title becomes permanent unless removed for cause by the main organization.

The panel's recommendation was ratified by the Board of Directors at the Asilmor, California conference in late July, and so The Saskatoon Centre held a wonderful ceremony and celebration on November 19th for me and my colleague Shari Beckton, where they fussed over us to a high degree. It amounts to being given "tenure" if compared to the academic world.

Although my health has wavered this year, things have gone on without much effort from me. My books have been converted to e-books by www.lulu.com, and they are now available on iTunes as an Apple e-book in both the U.S. and Canada. They will also be available in some other e-book formats via Amazon and other online bookstores.

THE PRACTICE OF CHRISTIAN JUDGMENT

2011-02-23T21:01:00.000-08:00

I had coffee with a friend of long acquaintance some time ago - we had not met in months if not years, and I looked forward to catching up and exchanging news of our lives.

Not far into our conversation, he enquired about my religious activity. In particular, he wanted to know if it was Christian. As usual, I had a complicated answer, but I was really not feeling up to a deep discussion at that moment. There had been a loss in the family, and I was tired from the affairs of the week. As a result, my responses were, I felt, not quite up to par.

I am used to this kind of questioning from Christians, and I am past the point where I feel insecure about my chosen path, as I might have felt, say, ten or twenty years ago. But I always sense a kind of judgmentalism in the questions, as if I am not measuring up to some standard that others have chosen to set. Our group, although it has Christian roots, is generally not regarded as quite "Christian enough" for the more fundamentalist crowd.

This used to arouse in me some anger, but now it just calls up a sort of sadness, to think that those who claim to follow Jesus have not caught on to the teaching, “Judge not, lest ye be judged.”

The other thing that emerged in our conversation was a subtle kind of ‘sell job’, using the language unique to his chosen path, which of course did not have the same meanings for me. Each spiritual group will adapt the English tongue to illustrate their concepts. The repeated use of one particular catch phrase appeared to me to imply that this was something he had ‘got’ and I might not have ‘gotten’.

Our study of Spiritual Law is no different. It too brings with it an extensive set of definitions, words and phrases which we have adapted to have unique meaning for us. If each path of faith thinks that their definition or use of a word is the only correct one, it becomes hard to have a meaningful discussion. I made no effort to bludgeon my friend with the ‘in’ language that we have adapted to help ourselves in understanding Divine Principle. To do so would have been insensitive and even cruel.

I try to express my enthusiasm for the path of Religious Science without anyone feeling that I am ‘selling’ it to them. There are many paths, and ours is not for people who need something more rigid or more authoritarian, for example.

Selling your religion to others in a judgmental manner is a mark of insecurity - as if you need everyone to believe as you do in order to have your choices ratified. By all means tell me what it has done for you - I will celebrate with you - but it is like a prescription medicine: I am not always healed by taking the same pill that healed you.

All I ask of a friend is to celebrate with me the things that have enriched my life. I look for affirmation, not denigration.

Coffee, anyone?

Rev. Darrell Gudmundson

SPIRITUAL TOOLS FOR A BETTER LIFE

2010-12-17T18:10:00.000-08:00

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.

I AM A FAN OF JESUS

2010-11-13T20:10:00.000-08:00

Recently there have been ads on my Blog page that say, "Don't be a fan of Jesus". I only have limited control over the type of ads that people choose to display, but I want to make it clear - I AM A FAN OF JESUS!

The teachings of Jesus are the deepest and clearest expression of spiritual understanding that I know of. Sadly, most traditional churches either ignore or do not understand the deepest meaning of what Jesus said. I don't want to paint myself as a great Bible scholar (I am not), but as a student of metaphysics, I do have a grounding in the fundamental principles that underlie the teachings in the gospels.

Over the centuries, it has been a fundamental mistake to worship the messenger and miss the message. As a culture, we got so wrapped up in the divinity and uniqueness of Jesus that we failed to see him as the Divine Example for us, not the Divine Exception.

Monty Python, in the movie the Life of Brian, came closer to the truth than many churches have done. In the story, Brian hears the message of Jesus, and rushes to tell others about it. Ignoring the message, those others fall down and worship Brian, as he runs from them in horror and frustration. We have done this to Jesus, and thankfully, there are a few who do teach peace and the reality of the Kingdom within us.

SHH......IT HAPPENS!

2010-11-03T09:47:00.000-07:00

When we adopt a lifestyle of spiritual practice, and begin to move our spiritual understanding from the head to the heart, there are gradual changes that enter our life. The study of the Science of Mind is one such practice, as it opens up an avenue for understanding the Bible at a deeper level, and also introduces a more effective approach to prayer. Combine this with meditation or any other technique for inner mind exploration, and you will find these changes will show themselves.

Co-incidences

One such change is the appearance of coincidences. We call them GMCs or "God-Managed Co-incidences" because things will happen to you that seem entirely beyond random chance. In fact these things are likely around you all the time, but your focus on the materialistic business of living will have blinded you to them. As you sharpen your intuition, these things will become obvious.

Harmony and Flow

Another change is that the flow or harmony of your life will start to improve. Again, much of it will be driven by the changes in your perception, in that you will see the flow of things - but that does not mean there will not be real and effective changes in the harmony of the workplace, the neighbourhood, and within family relationships. People often find that the annoying people in their life, the gossipy neighbour, the whining relative, the needy child, will either change, or else they will no longer pick you as their target. You will have been 'immunized'.

To the point of this story, however, you likely cannot completely eliminate all negative events from your life. If you can, I will want to know your secret. We live in a world in which random events occur and what we do through our practice is to tilt the odds by removing ourselves from the chaos. We change the odds toward the positive through our change in belief.

But, stuff still happens - often when we let our thoughts drift to the negative side, but even when we have done what we can, we still have to live in the world, unless we are so rarified in our thought that we can float to the clouds.

Conscious Response, not Unconscious Reaction

That is when the third major change shows up. When things do not go our way, how do we respond? In fact, do we react rather than respond? Our reaction to the negative event is the greatest change of all. How do we handle a setback, and accident, or even a death (other than our own)? The Science of Mind teaches us to be RESPONSIBLE, that is, ABLE TO RESPOND, not just react. Reaction is the unconscious experience of an event, while responding is the conscious experience of an event.

An Example

The other day I was cutting oak mouldings to trim an archway in our kitchen. To fit it around the cupboard edge, a careful cut had to be made. I followed the age-old advice and measured not once, not twice, but three times before setting my saw. Then I proceeded to cut on the wrong side of the pencil line! Shh........it happens!

The moulding was particularly expensive, and I had prefinished it with several coats of lacquer. There once was a time when this mishap would have been followed by rage, curses, perhaps some foot-stomping. What would all that have accomplished? Nothing, but that would not have stopped me in the past. As it was, we considered whether to buy another piece ($25 for oak) and finish it (about $8.00 for another can of spray lacquer) or whether to patch in a Quarter inch sliver, about two saw blade widths. The latter is what we are doing.

Nothing in this world is perfect. The Bible tells us this. The entire physical world is an approximation, an estimation, of a pure and perfect idea. That's why we can imagine a perfect circle, but no one can make one. Atoms and molecules are lumpy things. But as we approach perfect understanding, though we see "as through a glass, darkly", we make the way as smooth as possible for ourselves, and for all who know us.

DON'T LISTEN TO ME!

2010-08-20T23:38:00.000-07:00

I have been told by people for whom I have great respect that they don't always agree with what I write.

This is good, because my writing is sometimes full of speculation - thoughts of the moment, to make the reader think.

Don't adopt my thinking, even if it seems reasonable - think for yourself!

Ernest Holmes said, "Don't listen to me - listen to what I listen to." In other words, look within yourself, and see what that still small Voice is telling you.

There are a lot of people in this world. Each has been given a viewpoint, and each receives inspiration (ideas) according to his/her capacity and background. Doctors may get great medical ideas, but they may not be tuned to receiving financial or horticultural ideas. We tune our mental radio according to our interests.

Just as there a millions of plant species in the world, millions of animal types, so people get millions of thoughts - millions of inspirations. Some are received with clarity and good judgment - some are not. Some are workable, some are not. That is as it should be.

I don't expect to be agreed with all the time. I'm not fond of arguing, but I like to hear other views.

There are many ways of looking at the world. These may be different without being wrong.

BOOKS

2010-05-01T00:31:00.000-07:00

I have been reading - something I do far too little these days. I find it's hard to write and read at the same time. I wasnt to give brief mention to some of the books I have enjoyed recently.

Last year I read THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE and found it fascinating.
More recently I have read THE FIELD by Lynn McTaggart, and I recommend it highly to those who can follow a little bit of science talk. It is an important book. I am going to have to read Lynn's more recent book, THE INTENTION EXPERIMENT, sometime soon.

Right now I am into a book by Biblical Scholar Bart Ehrman, called MISQUOTING JESUS, or THE STORY OF WHO CHANGED THE BIBLE AND WHY. This is a must read for anyone who feels the Bible is a vital source of wisdom, and who can take the truth about how it was written and assembled- or at least as much truth as is known. Ehrman is one of the top, if not THE top, scholar in this field right now, although I expect other Bible scholars would have something to say about that!

One of these days, I will have had enough of reading, and I will go back to writing - but not just yet.

THE EASTER STORY - AND YOU

2010-04-03T19:41:00.000-07:00

Over a couple of thousand years, the immediacy of the crucifixion and resurrection fades for most people. Some wonder if it really happened at all - was it a cruci-fiction? Humans being what we are, this is understandable - we need to find relevance in the story that links it directly to our own lives.

It is not possible to independently verify all the details in the story. Yes, we have the four gospels, written anywhere from 70 to 200 years after the event. The most painstaking scholarship tells us that the gospels were, in the main, not written by those present at that time, but by their followers of another generation.

Historians of the time report almost nothing but a line or two in passing, and nothing that ties directly to the gospel narrative.

So, it comes down to this. What kind of faith do you have?

If your faith is rooted in materialism, then you need to believe that the events were real, substantially as the gospels report them, and that there is physical, historical event that we celebrate each Easter.

If your faith is of another kind, as is mine, you will not care so much what happened or whether, because there is an esoteric (e.g., hidden) meaning around the notion of crucifixion and resurrection.

The agony of crucifixion symbolizes the pain of letting go of our material existence - the death of the person rooted in the things of the world. After a period of three days (three symbolizing a cycle of perfect completion), the spiritual person is reborn, with new powers that show how the material world has been overcome.

This process is one that calls out to all people - to let go of the world of grasping, getting and spending, appetites and addictions - and move into a new set of experiences, where we have risen above these things.

Wordsworth wrote "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;"

The Easter message is not about something two thousand years old, but about an opportunity that remains our, in this moment - to rise above our problems, our agony and angst; to succumb, to let go, and then to rise again, renewed!

By the way, sorry to disappoint, but 'Easter' celebrates the ancient goddess Oestre, the spring goddess of fertility - hence the symbolism of eggs, from which will come our Thanksgiving dinners; and bunnies, whose fertility always amazes. Oestre is the later version of Astarte, Ishtar or Ashtaroth, fertility goddess of ancient Sumer, Babylon, and Phoenicia. The Greeks equated her with Aphrodite.

Happy Easter!

HOW MY CAREER WAS HAPPILY ENDED

2010-02-02T14:30:00.000-08:00

I have a career story I have told to very few.

I am a professional Electrical Engineer who worked most of my life as a Strategic Planner, Futurist, and Business Planner.

About 23 years ago, I came upon a little magazine on the news stand at my local drugstore in Regina, Canada. It was called The Science of Mind. I had never noticed it before.

I bought it and skimmed the contents - it was not the sort of thing I was reading in those days - my focus was on my career.

My wife was used to me bringing home unusual magazines just for the fun of it, but when I bought the next month's issue as well, she scolded me for wasting money a second time! I'm not even sure why I bought it.

Then my company began to be re-organized, and my department was dismantled. Several managers were 'dumped' downward into lower level jobs. Some co-workers were fired, seemingly on flimsy grounds.

I began to be concerned for my income and my family - we were in a recession, and jobs were not that plentiful. However, the company was looking for people to move to other districts. I didn't want to move, but no one else did, either. It occurred to me that it might be a way out. I reluctantly agreed to a meeting to discuss moving.

It was a blustery, cold day in March of 1987 as I walked across town (by this time my office had been moved out of our headquarters), and I was grumpy, to say the least. Crossing a windy street, I clearly remember thinking (Why me? Why can't I seem to get ahead?)

At this point, a loud voice (NOT MINE) in my head said, "You need to become more spiritual."

This thought had never once occurred to me. It seemed irrelevant, and even somewhat angered me, given the frame of mind I was already in. I thought, in response I suppose, "I'm just as spiritual as anybody else - and so what?" My anger and frustration came boiling up.

Suddenly, my way was blocked by a tall young man, blond, in winter parka. He was a head taller than me, twenty-ish, with strong build, and he was begging for money. I felt angered that a younger, stronger, even taller fellow than me should panhandle on the street instead of seeking a job. I refused to meet his eyes, and stepped around him. I mentally directed my anger at the stranger.

I took only about four steps, and then I thought, "I've just been tested - and I failed!" My spirituality was indeed found lacking. So I quickly turned around - to find no one there.

I looked for alleyways - there were none - it was a typical concrete jungle. Doorways - none. The street corner was half a block away - surely too far for the time that had elapsed? I even quickly backtracked to the corner - there was no one in either direction.

I was somewhat shaken as I continued on to my meeting. I agreed to the move - to Saskatoon, 150 miles to the north - home of my alma mater in the sixties. It meant a lower income, and a considerable real estate loss, but it took me out of the head office turmoil.

One month after our family had moved into our new home there was an ad announcing the formation of a Centre for Spiritual Living, the first in Saskatchewan (then called Religious Science). Another 18 years further on, both my wife and I were licensed as ministers. She since allowed her license to lapse.

The Science of Mind has calmed my inner rage, and brought a sense of forgiveness. Though I had held five different jobs over four years, I was able to let go of the stress. I never did return to middle management, and I realize now that I didn't have the human relations skills to advance much further. Some of those skills I have learned through study of the Science of Mind.

In 2004, I retired after 36 years in my former career. I am a Staff Minister at The Centre for Spiritual Living, Saskatoon.

My latest book, "Insights" summarizes some of the lesson I have learned.

THE BLESSINGS OF OUR PIONEER FOREFATHERS

2010-01-24T20:19:00.000-08:00

It is good to be reminded that our blessings often come disguised as hardship and sorrow, toil and effort. They become blessings only when we stop to consider them, and when we look back to see how far we have come, and how differently things might have been.

My ancestors left behind the land they knew, Iceland, to find a better life for themselves and their children. I wonder if they knew that they were trading one life of hardship for another one.

What they found was often hardship and loss. In the case of my Great-Grandparents, all their family belongings disappeared between the dockyards and the train heading west. They arrived at Duluth, Minnesota, with nothing to their name, and were cared for by the local Lutheran Church for their first cold winter in North America, the land of milk and honey.

Later, their North Dakota homestead was thrown into chaos and poverty by the untimely death of my Great-Grandfather due to consumption, as they called it then – we know it today as tuberculosis. Starting out with no belongings forced him to work cutting timber and laying track for the early railroads.

This made a farmer out of the eldest son at fifteen, and a farm labourer out of my own Grandfather at 13. Two younger brothers and one sister grew up in this time of uncertainty and hardship, too young to bear a full burden.

What kind of blessing was this? Well, ultimately an entire collection of Saskatchewan homesteads, beautiful farms, were the result, as the brothers left behind the pain and hardship of North Dakota and came to Canada, to the beautiful lake country, which they called Vatnabyggd- the ‘Water Settlement’.

When the second eldest brother – my Grandfather - now a cowboy and ranch hard at 22 years of age - first rode up north in 1903 with his some of his cousins and several others, a dozen hardy riders in all, it was because they were driven by the hardship of pioneer life to continually seek something greater. That pioneering Spirit is the One Spirit that blesses us all, everyday. The pioneer brothers, one a blacksmith, one a horseman, and one an entrepreneur with a bent for music and fine literature, all lived that Spirit, that urge to be more to be better, and to move upward in all things.

They all felt that blessing.

The blessing comes in the people you meet along the way, in the closeness of a family that has supported one another, and in the final results of all that adventure. The blessing comes in the wind, the rain and the sunshine of the prairies. On this farm, it came in the strength of their families, hardy sons and daughters, whose grandchildren are now scattered across the Canadian and the American west.

The blessing comes down to us as the people we see around us, our families, our friends and neighbours. We ourselves are the blessing, and we are also the blessed. The life we have today is truly a rich one, by the standards of those hardy pioneers.

We are truly blessed because we are alive, and we are here, in this beautiful place, this land of plenty, prosperous and surrounded by family that we love and who love us. All that is truly a blessing. The word ‘Bless’ means ‘to make prosperous’– not just in money, but in good health and the love of friends and family, in riches of every description.

And so I call on that Great Spirit that urged our families to this land, the invisible hand that has led us and fed us, clothed us and taught us, to guide us ever onward. That Spirit lives in each one of us, and calls upon us even now to say “Thank you”, and to continue to bless our land, including all who occupy it, all who visit it, and all who care about it. We were guided here, wherever we reside, for a reason, and maybe that reason is nothing more that to count our blessings, and appreciate and care for what we truly have in our family, and in our community, and on this blessed Earth.

DON'T WEEP FOR THE PEOPLE OF HAITI

2010-01-22T19:45:00.000-08:00

Emotional moments can cause me to wax poetic. Sadly I don't normally have a great supply of the kind of 'wax' that it calls for.

What follows is meant to be a song, but I am not a competent singer, so I leave it to others.

I was awakened at 4:00 AM one night after the earthquake disaster in Haiti, following an urgent gift to the Red Cross.

This quatrain ran through my head over and over, coming not from me, but from a deep inner source.
Music and lyrics together, but only the initial verse.

Normally, I would have forgotten all about this early morning oddity by the time I woke up for the second time. This time I didn't and during the next day or two it kept invading my head, again and again.

What does it mean? I interpret it to mean that we waste our energy on hand-wringing and 'adopted sorrow'. To save a drowning person, we must not jump in and drown with them, but stay on firm ground and throw a line. Airlines tell passengers that adults should first put their oxygen masks on in the event of cabin de-pressurization, and only then help their children or the elderly. As heart-wrenching as these disasters appear, we must act to help rather than get caught up in sympathetic suffering. That's my understanding of the line; I did not create the verse!

I have the music running through my head, but not the skill to notate it. If anyone feels the urge to take this up and put their music to it, be my guest.

Don't Weep(January, 2010)

Don't weep, don't weep for the people;
They will do all the weeping.
Don't weep, don't weep for the people;
Just do what you can do.

Don't cry, don't cry for the homeless,
They will do all the crying.
Don't cry, don't cry for the homeless ones,
just do what you can do.

Don't feel needless pain
or torture yourself anew-
It's enough that these are felt
by those who are passing through
That valley of tears,
the shadow of death pervades
Keep yourself on that happier shore
That sadness never invades

Don't weep, don't weep for the injured;
They will do all the weeping
Don't weep, don't weep for the orphans
Just do what you can do.

Don't give in to the urge to wail,
Don't let the sorrow overtake you,
Never frown when the world seems down,
Just do what you can do.

2009-12-25T23:00:00.000-08:00

A recent comment reminded me of a most wonderful Christmas (a couple actually) when I was around 5 to 8 years old. An Internet acquaintance, referring to the lyrics of 'Jingle Bells', thought that the line "Sleigh bells in the snow" was rather odd. And so it is if taken literally, since bells in the snow would be somewhat muffled! But I knew right away what it might refer to - this is my story:

My mother entered a sanatarium hospital with tuberculosis shortly after I was born. I did not see her again till I was nearly three. In the months after she came home, she went from invalid (the strange lady who stayed in bed, who I was not allowed to see), to gradually doing kitchen chores. Her participation in this Christmas event makes it all the more memorable for me.

We lived in a part-log, part lumber farmhouse with no plumbing or electricity. It was drafty and often cold so we huddled close to the woodstove or the coal heater as we needed.

On Christmas Eve we had a family dinner, then our nearest neighbors would visit for coffee and goodies around mid-evening, and stay till near midnight.

Then on this particular Christmas, it began to snow in mid-afternoon, with flakes becoming bigger and bigger, till they were nearly an inch across. By the time dinner was over, it was about 5 inches deep. such heavy snows are always accompanied by a warming trend, bringing the temperature up to a few degrees below freezing.

My Dad went to the corner of the fenced yard where an old sleigh, made from the body of a Model T Ford, had sat for some years, surrounded by uncut grass. He took a shovel and cleared away the deep snow, then used a crowbar to pry up the sled runners which were frozen to the ground. He swept the accumulated snow from the seat and the floor.

We had two aging horses named Wolly and Tilly; a mother-daughter pair, gifts from my maternal grandfather, my 'Afi'; but there were three sets of harness. Two were purely functional, but the third set had bells attached in several places. Dad used this set along with one other to dress the horses, led them to the sleigh, and pulled it out of the corner, over the snowbank that held it captive.

The sleigh was brought to the kitchen door, and Mommy was led out, bundled for warmth, and placed in the seat with blankets piled above and below. With me in the middle, Dad clucked to the horses and snapped the reins, and away we went, snowflakes piling down by the bucketful, and bells jingling with every step the horses took.

I seem to recall a moon shining hazily through clouds, because I could easily see the huge falling flakes, the flying hooves, the dancing harness. There was no electricity on any farm around in those days. Had we had the gasoline lantern with us, surely the sizzle of snowflakes on the hot globe would have remained in my memory along with the jingling of the bells and the taste of fresh snowflakes on my tongue.

I never had to wonder what "Sleigh bells in the snow" was about. I remains in one of my earlest childhood memories. I think we repeated that jingling ride at least once, but only that one time was all of the magic firmly in place.

THE OBVIOUS QUESTION

2009-12-23T16:09:00.000-08:00

Are we human beings or are we mice?

How can we even think of going all through our life without ever asking the obvious question - what is the means by which we came to be here? What is God?

The usual, traditional answer to that question is that we are not meant to ask such questions, that God is a mystery, unfathomable, not remotely knowable. At this point the questioner is supposed to go away, suitably chastised, and get back to following the traditional, rule-based religious practices. And if you can live with a blindfold over your head, that's good enough.

Oddly enough, the answer is mostly correct. God is a mystery - to us. God is unfathomable, and not altogether knowable as a whole. But we do know God in part.

We know the part that is nature. We decode the rules and laws of nature with our science, and we deduce the actions of cause and effect on a physical level. All of that is God in action. So we can know the effects of God in part through science.

We know the part of God that is human nature - or at least we can learn it. We know how God thinks - as us. And human thought takes us out of the physical realm into a world of ideas and imagination. This too is God in action. The study of thought is philosophy - so we can know the action of God in part through philosophy.

Finally, we can learn the essential nature of God as our saints, poets and sages have tried to describe to us. There is an essential base of goodness that God must have, or else our creation would be self-destroying. Since we are here, these qualities must be the underpinnings of our universe. These principles form the basis of all the religions of the world, although they are masked by layers of ethnic and cultural ritual and costume. These principles are those which must apply in order that the world and life continue to advance and thrive. So we know the essence of God through religious intuition - that which we call revelation.

So what are we dealing with? What can we conclude?

Science shows us that God works through laws that are not personal. They work the same for all, and we can use them to our advantage. Ernest Holmes noted that there was just as much electricity in the world when Moses was alive as there is now - but he could not heat his tea or toast bread with it. The law - the principle has not changed, but our use of it has grown till we work with computers, robotics and iPods.

Many wise people have noticed that our use and governance of human thought and emotions has not kept pace with our understanding of science. We think that we can pick and choose our interpretations of science according to our desire for wealth and our need for resources. Accordingly, we think that we can choose our lifestyles independently of the effects on the Earth's water, air and climate. We still have a lot to learn.

I do have a little money in oil stocks. I might be tempted, when I hear that the rivers downstream from the oil sands have fifty times the poisons in them that they ought to- rivers that supply the native reserve lands downstream - I might be tempted to discard that information, thinking it doesn't matter. When the cancers and other illnesses show up a few years from now - if it takes that long - I can always say that the link has not been proven, because the studies I was unwilling to pay for were never done. Yes, in the world of ideas, we are back in the stone age, even though our science is far advanced.

We can see this more easily when we look at Iran or North Korea, waving nuclear capability in the face of the world. We cannot see this when we look at our own unwillingness to give over some of our profits to keep the earth and water pure.

Have you ever notice that philosophy is never taught in primary school or high school? Wouldn't you think that the knowledge of how to think straight, use logic, make fair comparisons, would be a fundamental subject? Not only that, but at university level, this area is underfunded and pushed to the back burner. A Ph.D. used to mean a doctor of Philosophy - now it can mean anything at all.

God works through the human mind - but we have avoided studying this aspect in our culture. When we teach the Science of Mind, we are at least partially filling a void that exists in our entire civilization. The linkage between Mind and matter, between thought and experience, is also God in action. We should teach metaphysics right along with physics.

Finally, there is direct revelation - that flash of insight that makes us go "Aha" and reveals to us yet another aspect of how the Universal Power works in our life. These are experiences that are near impossible to forget. They change lives, as they ahve done down through the ages.

There is one problem with revelations. They come in a flash, usually as images, dreams, visions and so forth. They rely upon us for interpretation. We interpret them through the filters of our minds; through our upbringing, our language, our culture, and our learning. Sometimes by the time we are done, there is very little left! This is why we have many different religions in the world, and on the outside they seem very different. It takes a lot of digging to see past the surface layer to the core ideas that they are based on. When this is done, we find the patterns repeating themselves, over and over, covered up under layers of sound, color, and movement. We interpret God in our own way.

So although we might ask the obvious question, "What is God?", the answers may not be obvious at all. In fact, we need to change the question a little, and ask, "What is God to YOU?", because each of your is going to interpret the revelation of God in your own way, as it applies to your own life.

God is infinite. God is the sum total of every possibility that there is, regardless of whether we think it is constructive or destructive, or whether we would call it good or evil. There is only one Power, one Intelligence, and that is God. From that one, we draw forth whatever action is held in our consciousness.

God's will is pretty simple. God's only, single desire is to unfold and express Itself in endless ways. The Power is eager to respond to your earnest belief and express as your experience. You are interacting with that Power at all times, whether you know it or not. God is being your life, through you, as you, right now.

You ask "What is the nature of God?" What is the nature of you, right now? Whatever you are, now, is the portion, the aspect, of the Life of the Universe that you are allowing to work through you. That's the nature of God, in your life.

With a change in perspective, with a growth in consciousness, with greater openness, you can allow more and more of the infinite nature of God to show up for you.

The universe is vast, perhaps infinitely so. It has been brought into being through the action of an intelligence, a wisdom, that has formed and applied both the laws of physics and the mental laws of creativity. Mind has always gone before matter; the greatest philosophers thoughout history have duly deemed it so. How could we hope to fully grasp the complexity and power of these forces? Yet we are part of them.

We think we are only a few years old. Yet the stuff we are made of, the very atoms, are nearly as old as the universe itself. They were forged in the hearts of the first supermassive stars, before they exploded and spewed their material products out into space, there to form solar systems and galaxies. We are as old as time itself, and we partake of the very nature of Nature.

In the simplest analysis, God is That Which Creates out of Itself. We exist within this creation - within God, as part of the Divine Product. In the image and likeness of this Creative Power, we too create our world, our lives, and our experiences.

The nature of God is as much as you can imagine, as much as you can channel into this world, and to you it can never be more than that. Like the faucet of a sink, the waters of Spirit will only flow as much as you are open. Open more, and more of God will appear in your life.

It is entirely up to you.

With a new year coming, you can think about it over Christmas! Merry Christmas!

CATS AND OTHER ANIMALS

2009-05-24T20:47:00.000-07:00

Speaking of cats, I noticed something about our Fluffy. When our children were in school, I would find her sitting on the boot shelf by the back door (or what passes for a back door at our house), sometime in mid or late afternoon. The timing would vary somewhat, with one exception - it would always appear to coincide with the time that our kids were getting off the city bus - a couple of blocks away.

I would see the cat hop onto the top of the boot shelf, about an inch from the door, and in about 2 minutes or less, someone would appear in the doorway.

I read that Rupert Sheldrake was gathering data on the apparent psychic ability of animals, so I fired off an e-mail. I received a quick response, but of course he wanted real data - such as a log of incidents, times, specifics. Sadly, I couldn't provide those, because most days I was at the office, and not available to log the behaviour. On those days when I was home, it certainly seemed to be a regular behaviour.

Animals have retained some abilities, I think, that we have lost. I think it is because they live more of the time unconsciously, whereas we are thoroughly trained to spend more time in the conscious awareness state. These psychic impression simply do not make it past our conscious thought process, perhaps due to the amount of ego-chatter that we keep between our ears.

Humans appear to have better access to their psychic impressions during sleep, and being able to remember, interpret, and even control our dream state is a way to get 'messages' that we normally would miss.

In the Bible, there are many examples of great revelations that came during the dream state. These stories show us that we do have the capability that animals have retained; and perhaps we can teach ourselves to decode these inner impressions that our culture has trained out of us.

A CAT TAIL - SOMETHING DIFFERENT

2009-04-16T00:38:00.000-07:00

I was reminded today of our family tale regarding cats

Many years ago, our daughters were promised a cat for exemplary behaviour, and we chose a short-haried tabby (male). He was extremely handsome, as I suppose we all consider our cats. When he was partly grown, he managed to disappear. Weeks went by, and we considered him gone. The girls were heartbroken - my wife was ecstatic!

But..... we had friends who were 'cat-people'.

They just KNEW that we must be mourning our loss, and they sent another friend to our house with a stray kitten he had 'rescued'. It was a fluffy female, and she was quickly so named. My wife was not thrilled. The daughters were.

Then, of course the cat came back, as the old song goes. Our tom returned, fat and healthy, from no-man's land - apparently to stay, checking out the new arrival with approval. Now we had two cats.

So- in due course, we had him neutered, at the proper age.

He stayed a month or so more - and left - this time, for good. We were out $80 for the veterinary bill. 'Fluffy' stayed on, and in her time was also 'fixed' at the veterinarian's. She moved with us, and lived to about 16 years.

Sir Tom, whose actual name I have forgotten, perhaps due to trauma :-)) came back once more, years later, for an impromptu visit, still looking well-fed and regal. His stay lasted only a couple of hours. He had found a home he liked better.

That is our cat-tail, or cat tale if you must. We mourned Fluffy when her time came, but the girls were both adults, away from home, and my wife had tears, although she insisted she hated having even one cat.

Now we have no cat.

Last year, we had mice for the first time. I trapped 10 of them near the kitchen garbage before we were free of them.

BRING YOUR FULL HUMANITY WITH YOU!

2009-04-02T22:20:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, someone will skip coming to church- not because they are sick or otherwise occupied, but because they have done something stupid or something they feel is wrong, and they don't want to be with anyone just then.

I think this is exactly the time that people should show up, warts and all, and let their friends show them some real unconditional love and compassion.

Although we know that we are spiritually perfect, In this human experience, we all carry some imperfection in the material sense. We have character flaws that are balanced by some excellent qualities as well.

I'm proud that the movement our Centre belongs to does not require anyone to check their humanity at the door. We are all just doing the best we can, and some days that's good enough, and the odd time perhaps it's not. Our teachers teach to learn, and they are working out their 'stuff', just like everyone else.

It is important that we don't pretend to be more perfect in the material sense than we are. It is also important that we are clear about our spiritual perfection - perfection in the realm of pure ideas. We work toward realizing more and more of that perfection as we learn and grow.

It's also vital that we don't put someone up on a pedestal and then expect them to stay there 24/7. We can be fellow pilgrims on the path and yet still be fully human at times, with all the foibles and errors that entails.

By choosing well moment by moment we continue to get better and better, with ease and with joy along the way.

A WEEK AT ASILOMAR STATE PARK CONFERENCE CENTER

2009-03-29T20:28:00.001-07:00

The International Centres for Spiritual Living held their Ministers' Conference last week, at the Asilomar State Park near Monterey. This is a magical stretch of wilderness on the ocean that is lovingly cared for and preserved as much as possible. Centres for Spiritual Living have held conferences there since sometime in the 1920s, when the park was a YWCA camp.

It was so great to meet the leaders who are taking our teachings forward in this new Millennium. It was really great to know that as a group we understand that we are part of a movement that world-wide seeks to bring more love, more peace, and more joy into the public discourse and decision-making of all peoples. Thinking and acting positively and with a belief in an abundant future for humankind, is our offering in contrast to some of the fear and anxiety that we hear so much these days.

No matter what the situation, a positive approach can draw more good out of it than giving in to despair.

My little book "Turn the World on Its Head" is a good start to seeing through the appearances of our world.
You can turn your world around just by understanding the Truth (capital T) of your own nature. See below.

A CHANGE OF NAME FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM

2009-03-17T23:14:00.000-07:00

The organization of churches in which I work is taking the big step of changing its name. It has been known since 1927 as Religious Science, and in the period shortly after 1950, was divided into Religious Science International and the United Church of Religious Science.

There has always been a certain element of confusion of Religious Science with Christian Science. However, in more recent years, the rise of Scientology has confused the public further, and it was determined that a more appropriate and descriptive name be chosen.

In addition, it have been further decided that the two main groups should gradually be integrated into a common organization. What this will look like, no one really knows yet, whether it is a complete merging, or a collaboration, like two people under the same umbrella.

However, the new name will be Centres (or Centers) for Spiritual Living, which aptly describes what both groups teach. There will be the United Centers for Spiritual Living, and the International Centers (Centres in Canada) for Spiritual Living.

I am proud of what our leaders have accomplished in a short time - and though our groups will be drawing closer gradually over some years, the process is ongoing and inexorable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_Science

A FUNNY NAME FOR PRAYER

2009-03-17T23:00:00.000-07:00

Every group has some jargon that makes it both unique and peculiar.

In a church I once attended, the pastor continually used words that I’m sure he learned in college, but they meant nothing to me, and as a result, his sermons meant very little to me either. They seemed wonderfully filled with high emotion, but they made no sense. I think they came from Greek, and they were certainly Greek to me!

When I worked in telecommunications, we had a huge vocabulary of jargon in Engineering, but I found there was a completely different set in Marketing, and when I got into Operator Services, which after all is the oldest department of any telephone company, the jargon was almost impenetrable. (Until you have measured the AWT on the SOST boards, and compared it to TOPS or to the Relay Positions, you have no idea what to put on your TDR reports!)

Meanwhile, back in Engineering, WebMethods is the integration engine in the Network Architecture, while Operations relies on Seibel for its Call Centres.

Everybody with me so far?

What’s this got to do with anything? It is no surprise that we in our church organization also have our share of jargon, and if you listen to us, or read us, you’re bound to encounter it. Trust me, it does mean something, and we’ll be happy to take a stab at explaining it if you ask.

For example, Spiritual Mind Treatment, or just Treatment, seems like a funny name for prayer. Relax, let me explain.

If you cast your mind way, way back to the Book of Genesis, or Guinnessis, as one small boy called it, it starts out by describing the process of creating both Heaven and Earth. After this very busy week is over, it says that God saw that it was good.

We believe that. We believe that this whole Earth, and all that is in it, is basically good. In fact, we believe that since Spirit, or Universal Mind, is all there is, and everything exists within It, then everything is created whole, perfect, and complete – at the level at which it was created. That is, it partakes of the wholeness that is its Source, at the level of that Source. This Oneness or Wholeness forms the background quantum reality for everything - the Energy (Matter) and the Intelligence.

But, you say, I’ve got the flu, my left leg hurts, and my doctor says my blood pressure is up. How in Heaven is that Whole, or Perfect?

Good Question – glad you asked.

There are at least two levels to our being – possibly more. The two levels we talk about are Spirit and Material – which you might say represent Heaven and Earth – or Mind and Matter.

We are not one or the other – we are both at once. We are one with all Being at the level of Spirit, or Mind, and we are individualized, or separate, at the level of Material.

Don’t expect to get this at a deep level right away – people take classes for several years to get into the meat of this.

The Spiritual level, or the level at which everything is completely at one, is the true reality. Unfortunately, we do not tend to experience it. We experience the thought-matrix of individualization and separation.

We experience the level of Individualized objects, or the material world, as we call it, because that is where our attention is placed during much of this thing we call life. This level is a carefully constructed ILLUSION, which allows us to roam apart from the Oneness of things, and pursue separate challenges and have separate experiences. The separation causes us to forget where we came from, until we gradually learn it again. Until then, we are trapped in the physical illusion – a player in the game of life.

Spirit is the cause to all things. Our physical experiences are the effect. When we want to change things in our life, we can work at manipulating the effects – that’s what most people do – or we can work at the level of cause, and direct our thoughts to the Spiritual field of omnipotent Oneness. Where you place your conscious awareness determines the level at which your thought will act.

The Psalm says, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.” Lifting up your eyes means lifting up your MIND – to the level of awareness of your oneness with all things.

The Science of Mind began as a healing teaching, so we started by using healing terminology. When something is wrong with your body, you treat it until it restores itself to its normal state, or you ask the doctor to treat it.

We believe that the normal state of our life is one described the qualities of Spirit. Wholeness, Abundance, Harmony, Joy, Peace, and whatever other good you can imagine. Remember what is said in Genesis – God saw that it was good.

Anything you could possibly want out of life - that is, anything you fee is missing - could be described as a deficiency in one of the Transcendent qualities of Spirit. Now that’s impossible. If God is everywhere– in everything- then there cannot possibly be any deficiency in reality – so there must simply be the appearance of a deficiency.

We alter an appearance by altering our mind – that alters our perception, and our perception IS our experience.
So, whatever appears to be wrong in your life is the appearance of a deficiency where none can exist, unless God is on vacation!

So we do Spiritual Mind Treatment – that is, we move our mind to the level of a realization of Oneness, and of our own Oneness with All things.

We lift up our eyes unto the hills, and then we declare, no begging, not bargaining, not beseeching, but with the boldness of a definite knowing, that all is well, that we have what we need, that God is with us now, and the Power pours through us, sweeping away all false illusions of lack, of illness, of loneliness, of inability.

We are Spiritual beings, and the Most High is our source, now and always!

Then, to complete our treatment, we allow the feeling of that knowing to flow, as joy, as gratitude, as the confirmation of our healing.

This applies whether it is the healing of our body, the healing of our finances, the healing of our family life, the harmony of our relationships, our dealing with neighbours, in business, or around the world. The power of Spirit knows no limits, no constraints, and no barriers.

Jesus said, "Whatsoever you desire, believe you have it, and it shall be added unto you."

Feel the joy of having this loving Power flowing in and through you, smoothing the way for your life, protecting you, whispering to you of love and encouragement. Feel it wash away all your fears, all your hesitation, and all your feelings of smallness.

In any crowd you operate in, you plus God make a majority!

Now, with your mind uplifted, with your confidence restored, your fears flushed away in the swirl of enthusiasm, now is the time to let it all go. Release it. Don’t feed your doubts by hanging on. Turn it over, knowing that the message has been delivered – the wheels of the entire universe have been set into motion.

That is Treatment – simply the restoral of your birthright – that’s what the story Jesus told, of the prodigal son, is telling us.

Jesus told about two sons – one was discontented with his lot and was not comfortable at home. The other was helpful, obedient, and hardworking. So the father divided all his wealth between the two, and sent the unhappy one on his way.

Well the fortune was soon spent, and the son wandered till be became a beggar. He was mistreated, until he ended up on a pig farm, where he had to live with the pigs, and share the swill that was brought to them.

You have to understand the context of this story. For a Jewish man, this represented the lowest level of degradation. The teaching is that pigs are the filthiest, most unclean of all creatures. He had sunk to the lowest of the low.

Yet, when he finally had enough, when it finally got to him, he decided to try going home. He changed his mind! And even before he arrived, when the father saw him coming, he sent servant out to him with clean clothes, with water for washing, he ordered a grand feast to celebrate, and not only that, he expressed the desire to once more share his wealth.

Now most of us are like the other son. We play the game by the rules, and we expect to be rewarded. Then when some smelly bum, some rebellious renegade, some maverick, gets rewarded the same as us, why we are indignant! That’s how the other son reacted, in the story. He complained – in fact, he was a bit of whiner.

The father pointed out that love is unconditional. In fact, there is something marvelous about someone who has had to turn his life around, and has taken that step.

Treatment is just a tool for changing your mind – to align it with that Master Mind that represents Oneness with all things. You can only go against the universe for so long – then it’s time to come home, and be welcomed with open arms – with love, and with abundance.

We call it Treatment because love and abundance is our normal state. The universe has been arranged to support us, and still we think we have to struggle, and manipulate, and grit our teeth and bear up under a burden.

When we see people who don’t do any of that get rewarded, sometimes greater than we have been, we think that’s unfair – but we just need to change our mind about what life has to offer us. To change our own minds, we do Treatment.

We treat our minds to see the good that has been placed before us. We treat ourselves to see the opportunities that abound. We treat so our bodies repair themselves like they were meant to – that our immune systems work like they were created. We treat to know the Kingdom of Heaven that is right within us, waiting to be discovered.

One more time – these are the steps:

• Understand the Oneness
• Know you are a part of It
• Know the Truth for yourself
• Feel the joy and gratitude
• Release it – Let Go and Let God do the driving.

That is Treatment.

DG

CHANGE

2009-03-05T11:33:00.000-08:00

(from talk in Winnipeg, August 2007)

I think the prospect of change frightens most people, even if they are not sure why. I know
why. People are afraid of the unknown. They have been taught to be afraid. When that un-
known involves who you are, or at least who you think you are, it can get even scarier. Letting go
of who you think you are is a little like dying. But we all have dreams, we have ambitions, we
have goals – and the only way to get to them is to become the kind of person who has realized
those goals. And so we embark on changing our thinking, our actions, our habits. Each small
change can be compared to a tiny crucifixion, followed by a resurrection to something greater.
We are spirit-beings. Our potential is infinite, but our actual life is limited by the box we have
built. We stay within the sides of our box, and the box is called our ego. It is also called our
self-image.

Our imagination is the key to forming a mental image of life outside the box. If we can unleash
our imagination, we can picture the possibilities: So we begin to expand ourselves in our mind,
and we start to break down the walls of our mental prison – and our outer affairs will follow. But
then the ego alarm goes off – like a bell clanging somewhere inside, and the ego-guards come
running. Someone is trying to operate outside of parameters – someone is trying to do some-
thing that we know is not possible – it’s not within our self-image. The result is a conflict that
must be resolved – between our old self-definition and the new one we are trying to put in place.
The result is temporary confusion. Actually, some people even get a cold or the flu at this point,
just to teach themselves not to try to escape! When you catch a cold – ask yourself if you have
entertained any conflict recently. When we push past those transition points, we enjoy the fruits
of an expanded, enriched, empowered life.

THE NEW BLOG IN TOWN

2009-01-19T17:17:00.000-08:00

There's a new blogger in town. This is one to watch, because this chap has a beautiful capacity with words, and the potential to be inspiring. Please check out his new blog.

The name is Carmien Owen, and here is the blog address:

http://consciouscalling.blogspot.com/

Let me know what you think, or better yet, give him the feedback!

Now back to watching the Obama Inauguration!

THE FLOW OF ABUNDANCE 2

2008-11-06T11:23:00.000-08:00

There are people all over the world in conditions of illness, poverty, loneliness, or possibly guilt and shame. If there was nothing they do about that, wouldn’t that be terrible? That would be Hell, wouldn’t it?

But if there was a way, a plan, a roadmap to take them out of that terrible territory, back to peace and joy and healing, wouldn’t that be wonderful? That would be pure Heaven, wouldn’t it?

Jesus said, “You shall know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free.” Freedom – that’s really the goal, isn’t it? Freedom from lack, from illness, and from loneliness.

The opposite of freedom is bondage – being tied and restricted to a condition that provided never-ending pain and sorrow.

Freedom and Bondage – Heaven and Hell – we can experience either one, and luckily, we know the way out of the dark places. We know how to turn on the light. We know at least a major piece of that Truth, thanks to our founder, Ernest Holmes.

Some people might have noticed that I don’t seem very reverent. I don’t speak of God in hushed and respectful tones. You should know that I don’t speak of anything in hushed and respectful tones – it’s just not the kind of person I am.

Why don’t I act more reverent? I don’t, because I’m not afraid of God. How could I be? Would it make any sense for a fish to be afraid of the water? God is what I am – what I am made of – there simply is nothing else. God is all there is.

Just like you, God and I together always make a majority. This mysterious Something that we happen to call God is the very fabric of the space we inhabit. The vibrations of that fabric show up as our universe, with us in it.

The fabric of our universe, which is the substance of God, known as Spiritual Substance or Universal Substance, bends our way when we set an intention. Dr. Wayne Dyer talks about the power of intention – but we know that the power is never in the intention – the Power is in the Mind and the Substance of God. Our intentions are more like the steering wheel, holding our direction, rather than the engine that powers our life, or the fuel that powers the engine.

THE FLOW OF ABUNDANCE

2008-11-01T23:25:00.000-07:00

The fabric of our universe, which is the substance of God, known as Spiritual Substance or Universal Substance, bends our way when we set an intention. Dr. Wayne Dyer talks about the power of intention – but we know that the power is never in the intention – the Power is in the Mind and the Substance of God. Our intentions are more like the steering wheel, holding our direction, rather than the engine that powers our life, or the fuel that powers the engine.

Thought directs Power. So this month, just for the fun of it, think of prosperity. Think of riches. Think of comfort, and money, and precious things. Think of your cup running over, so much that you can’t hold on to it all. Then think of generosity, and giving, and of gratitude. Feel your joy and delight at the abundance that comes your way – especially the unexpected abundance.

It’s an opportunity to try out your spiritual wings.

Don’t ever think that money is not spiritual. Money is the stored up energy of pure spirit. Money represents the reward that someone gets for doing something for someone else. You work, you provide service to someone, and you get money. Money is the stored up value of the work someone did.

You may say, what if I didn’t work for my money? What if someone gave it to me – what then? Well, that means that someone, who worked for their money, found that there was value for them in giving it to you. They got something from you, whether you knew it or not. It may have been inspiration, it may have just been to see the gratitude you showed, but if someone gave you anything, it was because they found their joy in doing do.

Whether it’s money, or compliments, or a friendly greeting, it’s all just a transfer of energy within the infinite body of God. It’s energy flowing from you to the grocery store to the store clerk to his girlfriend to the theatre to the theatre attendant to the government in taxes and out to the pensioner or the doctor in the health system. It’s all a flow and our job is not to interrupt it.

Healing with the Science of Mind

2008-10-14T00:45:00.000-07:00

To many the idea of scientific prayer is quite foreign. However, it has proven itself to many as a healing method which opens up the body and mind to its own inner Spiritual healing resources.

The body (or the mind) always heals itself. No medical, psychological, or other practitioner can force healing upon a client. All interventions can but open a way for the natural healing processes of the body to re-assert themselves. Healing prayer is no different.

Religious Science, the organization which teaches the Science of Mind, begins with the understanding that God or Spirit is the inner essence or reality of all living things; indeed of all things. There is a spiritual pattern, or universal idea, behind each form, which has drawn together the energy needed to make that form appear in the material world that we know. This is an idea derived from NeoPlatonism, building on the concepts of Plato.

This spiritual pattern contains no error, just as we know that our idea of a circle is perfect roundness, even though material circles are only a rough approximation. However, as we know, our bodies are not perfect. Therefore they are only approximate in adhering to their spiritual pattern. Returning to this perfection is a natural and continual tendency for us; blocked only by our thoughts and actions during the daily living of life. The greater the blocks we have, the further we drift from perfect health or wholeness.

Scientific prayer, known also as Spiritual Mind Treatment, creates a focus and a concentration on the reality of our perfect nature; and mentally casts aside the errors in thought which have caused us to drift away from our inner Truth. It begins by assuming that the innate activity of Spirit is to realize perfection, and therefore by removing blocks to this we may be healed. Call these blocks sins, if you wish; although they are approached without judgment, shame, or blame – much as one would approach a sliver in a hand or foot.

Spiritual Mind Treatment may seem to some like a vague or trivial process, but it is quite specific in its application, and has been shown to produce tangible results. It works by establishing positive faith, or belief, which brings about acceptance of Good.

Compiled by Dr. Ernest Holmes in the 1920s, the Science of Mind is primarily based on Biblical teachings; but it pays respect to other spiritual traditions, recognizing that wisdom has come to humanity by many routes and in many ways. It ignores much of the cultural and historical content of scriptures, concentrating instead on the specific truths which are being illustrated therein. It provides a method of prayer which is based on faith in the goodness and approachability of God.

The Science of Mind draws upon work done throughout the 1800s and 1900s, in addition to the Old and New Testament. It leans heavily upon the work of Thomas Troward, British judge and lecturer on ‘Mental Science’, and on Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great lecturer, professor and essayist. It also draws upon some of the modern faith healing traditions, including Christian Science. In the words of Holmes, it correlates "the laws of science, the opinions of philosophy, and the revelations of religion applied to the needs and the aspirations of humankind."

THE POWER OF CREATION - THE GOD-CONCEPT

2008-09-06T23:57:00.000-07:00

We have all kinds of odd ideas about this thing we call God. We imagine some anthropomorphic being, like either some chairman of the board, in a three-piece business suit, or the bearded old man, white-haired, in a snow white robe, or even a muscular figure in a roman toga, like some Arnold Schwarzenegger with super powers. People form all kinds of mental images of what God is.

Agnostics and atheists even react to these imaginary figures and these stunted, limited ideas of Deity underlie their positions of doubt or denial. For this reason, I like to say, "The God you don't believe in doesn't exist!"

Why must we superimpose our own limitations of imagination upon the intelligence that formed the universe, and which continues to evolve it to this very day?

The principles of metaphysics (literally, beyond physics) describe the relation between Mind and matter. Creation is something that is an action of Mind - an action which creates a mental template, a mental equivalent, that has the FORM of the thing which will finally emerge as the physical result. This process of emergence results when the universal substance, which we might now call zero-point energy in the world of quantum mechanics, collapses into the form that has been created in mind.

The process that we call creation is the use of Mind to choose from among an infinite set of possibilities, reducing it to the most probable, and finally the actual experience of life. We can each exercise this process, but in doing so, we are using a mental principle that is beyond us, and a Power and Intelligence that, in forming our universe, has Its origins before and beyond it.

Creation is the action of mind; and that which we define as Creator is pure Mind in action. The principle of creation, together with the invisible energy upon which It acts, together is what we think of as God, although the term seems outdated and weak to describe what we are talking about.

This is one thing that Islam goes about in the right way. It forbids the use of images to represent God, and this has the benefit of forcing people to avoid forming limited and limiting concepts. Instead we use the wounded man on the cross, a suffering God, not the very force of creation itself.

Ernest S. Holmes used another technique by referring to God as "The Thing Itself", and then going on to use a different term or descriptor on almost every other page of his famous text, "The Science of Mind". While this confuses many first-time readers, it does have the effect of making it difficult to form limited and rigid concepts about something that is infinitely vast and ineffable.

Other teachers have told us that our concept of God will limit the scope and power of our religious experience and the richness of our life. To expand either or both, we must form an expanded view of what God is, or as Rev. Helen Street used to say "Get a bigger God."

We can only experience as much as we can imagine, because the Principle of Creation is responsive to our thought. As we reach out in thought, It responds in kind. The more power we can imagine, and the closer we can personally feel to It, the more power is available.

Isn't it time to get yourself a bigger God?

A MONTANA JOURNEY

2008-08-28T22:49:00.000-07:00

I have just come back from a week in Montana, where I looked for the location of my Grandfather's homestead south of Ethridge. Grandpa was a range cowboy who settled in Montana in about 1904, and ran some cattle on open grassland and in the 'badlands' of the Marias River country under the lazy S bar brand. He also worked with the Blackfoot on the nearby reserve to buy horses captured wild in the foothills of Montana, and 'broke' them for farm use. He drove herds of horses into North Dakota farming country and up into Saskatchewan, where he later moved and bought a farm.

It was interesting to see that the area of his homestead is now being turned into a different kind of farm - a windmill farm, where dozens of towers are being built to produce power which is being sent to California.

While I am glad to see wind power being developed, it is interesting to me that we can never seem to manage to live where the elements of our life come from. Instead we ship water hundreds of miles, and we do the same for power. We ship food from half a world away. Doesn't all this add to the expense and the inefficiency of our life?

It bears thinking about.

THE DILEMMA OF DUALISTIC THINKING

2008-08-09T19:37:00.000-07:00

Have you ever been in a situation where there just didn’t seem to be any good choices?

Every once in awhile, we find ourselves in the middle of a situation, being asked to choose one way or another, and we know we don’t want to choose either. That’s a terrible feeling to have, because it seems there is no right way to go. In those cases, we often make choices we regret, but often the alternative still seems no better; it’s like we made one of a set of poor choices.

The confusion this causes often leads to illness, as our nervous stress damages the functioning of our immune system. If you read Louise Hay, she says that a cold is a sign of confusion. Cold germs are something we always have with us - we don’t need to ‘catch’ them - but they can take root and cause illness whenever our immune system gets weakened. Such weakening can be caused by stress of any sort - and a mental dilemma, being confused as to which way to take, is one such cause of stress.

Here is where the world around us and its thinking really challenges us. When Jesus said, “Be in the world, but do not be OF it”, he may have been talking about getting caught up in the choices that others expect us to make. Certainly he counseled many people to ignore the expectations of others.

When we ignore what others expect of us, we become a lightning rod for criticism. We are regarded as being callous and uncaring when we don’t act together with what seems obvious to our friends. This is some of heaviest pressure a person can ever feel, because it gets right at our own self-worth.

We all want to be considered kind, good and caring. Our personal self-worth may be tied up in our being able to feel that way. When we cannot choose the way our friends have done, whatever our reason, we become a disappointment to them. How can we stay knowing that their feelings are their own to have? Our empathy draws us in to share those feelings, even though they are not ours by right. Our own self-esteem takes a beating if others feel we are out of step with them.

We are born as individuals in order that the Universal Power may experience individuality through our being. As a Unity, it can know nothing of differences in thought, in feeling. Only through our individualized selves can this be known. Life, or spirit, can only know itself through individualising. An infinite entity cannot have a viewpoint - since a viewpoint implies that there is something outside of itself to view.

As individuals we follow a complex and widely different series of goals, motivations and priorities. It is almost guaranteed that we will come to different conclusions about many things. If these conclusions are important to us, and many are, we are bound to be frustrated when others conclude differently. We may suspect them of not sharing our objectives, of not caring about our priorities. We may feel they are not for us, but against us.

This last thought is the trap of duality. Duality is the separation of the world, of events, of things and people, into Good and Evil, For and Against, Bad and Good. Finally, it is the separation into Them and Us.

Duality is an illusion, created by our perception of the world. It is not the underlying truth of things. The underlying truth is Unity of all things, of Past and Future, of Them and Us. The Truth is, Them and Us is One.

Maxi-Mind

2008-07-29T21:05:00.000-07:00

Maxi-Mind is a book about Creativity, how it works in each of us, and how to make use of it in business and personal situations.

The title refers to the 'magic' that happens when both brain hemispheres are used in a creative sequence to generate ideas that are 'outside the box' and then evaluate and screen those ideas to produce a workable innovation.

This book is based on more than 20 years as an engineer and a strategic planner, during which I pursued a keen interest in how ideas are formed and implemented.

Freeing the visual, non-linear right brain to imagine produces ideas that range from wacky to dull. The great innovations often come from twisting the wacky ones to achieve a workable gem.

Applying this process to your life can really set you in a new direction. Try it!

Find Maxi-Mind at: http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=1223463

IT'S YOUR CALL - 3

2008-07-26T21:04:00.000-07:00

When people have a mid-life crisis, when people develop health issues, from skin rash to cancer to allergies to a heart attack, they are getting the kick in the trousers – the call they can’t ignore any more.

My story isn’t very dramatic – I had it good – my career was zipping right along, I thought, till our department was rather abruptly dismantled. My job played far too big a role in my life – I was in over my head with much of what I was doing. My job was stressing me out, but I didn’t notice. I had allergies – sinus problems – my nerves were raw. I didn’t have the tools for self-analysis and introspection that you can learn from classes in the Science of Mind. We used to have an expression – “I was like a guy with one leg at a butt-kicking”. I had no clue, and no clue that I had no clue.

I was shuffled to an unfamiliar job – and I buckled right down. In less than a year, a second shuffle removed my entire level of management from the company. I was shuffled to a new job that was somewhere between my old level and the bottom rung. Within months a new VP had deleted my new job and others like it.

I was stressed, discouraged, grumpy and angry – and I walked across the downtown, in an ugly November wind, to a meeting about possibly moving to another city. In an episode that I have described in detail on other occasions, I got the big kick in the pants – a voice in my head that was NOT mine – saying “You need to become more Spiritual.”

This is the way Spirit works in us – from the inside out – providing first an urge, a desire, then sometimes a kick in the pants – but calling on us to be, not someone else or something else, but to be outwardly the person we were made to be inwardly.

We have complete freedom – but remember our inward choices are still ours – not someone else’s. There is just more of us than we can be aware of, and that greater self remembers what we came here to do. It remembers who we really are. When we aren’t connected with It, we are separated from our greater selves.

Your call may not lead you to ministry as mine did – likely it won’t – but trust me, you are being called – to something. You have an urge, a desire that you are either following now, or ignoring.

Remember, it’s your call. Are you listening?

IT'S YOUR CALL - 2

2008-07-19T19:14:00.000-07:00

You see, the call comes to people from all walks of life, all backgrounds, all personality types from jolly to grumpy – everyone gets the call. We are all called to do something.

I have had people ask me about their urges – sometimes they have been taught that their urges are evil – from some inner demon seeking to lead them astray.

I cannot stress this strongly enough –NO urge of itself is wrong – but there can be a wrong interpretation of a desire.

If you are living from the ego side of your consciousness, if your awareness is focused in the physical, material world, you may translate your desires from fear or anxiety. This will translate into a general sense of lack. You may then feel lust, which flows from feeling a lack of intimacy or closeness. You may feel confusion, a lack of harmony. You may experience greed or poverty, a sense of lacking material support. When you interpret your desires from your fear, then a perfectly normal desire may be warped by the errors in your consciousness into something wrong and harmful.

If so, there is only one thing to do – THINK AGAIN – and think differently!

Be sensitive to your desires, and think them through. Think about how to fulfill this desire for the good of all – your self included. Desires are part of our feeling nature – add some thinking to them – and then fulfill them in a healthy and positive way. There is no wrong or desire – only a wrong interpretation and follow-up action. Do everything from the highest and best good for all, and you cannot ever go astray!

A tiny handful of people are lucky enough to follow their path right from birth or from childhood. For them, it may seem like the call never came, because they followed their path right from the start.

For most of us – we start out along a path that seems reasonable – we go with the flow, it seems – and at some point in our life we begin to fidget, we squirm, we are itchy, possibly unhappy.

At that point we have a choice – to listen and maybe hear the call – or to ignore it and hope it goes away. Many people are ignoring their inner call right now. It will not go away.

IT'S YOUR CALL - 1

2008-07-13T20:13:00.000-07:00

You are being called, right now, to do something.

Each and every one of us has within us an urge, a desire, or a voice, that pushes us forward to do or to be something that reflects our inner reality.

Not everyone is destined for fortune or fame. We may be called on to build, to lead, to communicate. We may be called on to love, to nurture, and to be a supportive presence.

You have either harkened to your call, or you have turned away from it, but it has not gone away. The urge to be your true being never leaves you, and the price of ignoring it can be terribly high.

How many of you have found yourselves following a path that surprised you?

Those of us whose lives have taken a surprising turn are those who have harkened to the call of an inner voice, or an impulse that we couldn’t quite explain at the time.

Whether from courage or curiosity, our choice to follow this impulse is an example that has been followed by many for thousands of years.

Have you ever gotten a call that made you shift 90 or 180 degrees, and turn your whole life in a different direction? Are you being called right now, but not listening? If you have ever felt an unexplainable urge, or a burning desire, or a powerful notion – it’s your call.

NEW BOOK AVAILABLE

2008-06-26T22:29:00.000-07:00

My latest book is now available on www.lulu.com. Just copy and paste the address into your browser.

href="http://www.lulu.com/commerce/index.php?fBuyContent=115675

Please check it out - you can even read the first few pages on Google Books!

I have created and saved about fifty or sixty talks, on a variety of subjects. This latest book is made up of seventeen talks, re-worked to remove local references and things not relevant to a book.

Enjoy!

ABUNDANCE - THE UNIVERSAL FLOW EQUATION

2008-05-31T23:40:00.000-07:00

THE UNIVERSAL FLOW EQUATION

It came as a revelation to me one day that the equations I was learning in Electrical Circuits class were variations of the same equations I was learning in Fluid Mechanics class, for airflow and water flow. There were variations because air is compressible and water isn’t, for example, but the structure, form and principle of the relationships were the same.

The formula for electromagnetism, and the generation of magnetic flux by the movement of electricity, also followed the form of the relationship, which by now I called the Universal Flow Equation. I no longer had to memorize any formulas for my classes, but could derive everything I needed from the Universal Flow Equation!

The form of the Universal Flow Equation is this:

[FLOW] = [A CONSTANT] times [PRESSURE CREATING FLOW] divided by [RESISTANCE TO FLOW]

Of course the units vary according to the type of flow being considered, and the constant varies accordingly as well.

For electricity it is the flow of current:

AMPERES = VOLTS / OHMS,

with the constant already used to calculate the Ohms of resistance for each particular material.

For water, it is:

VOLUME = C X HEAD/AREA CROSS SECTION OF PIPE

where ‘head’ is the term for static pressure caused by the depth of water, and C is a constant coefficient.

ALL LIFE IS A FLOW OF ENERGY

Eventually I encountered the study of metaphysics, and came to see all of life as a flow of energy in various forms. Then, I learned to see us as living our lives in the flow of ideas, I learned that we can ‘tune’ our minds to the flow to open up our lives to greater things, or close them down and constrict our experience.

The same equation fits, but the mathematics is far less precise.

FLOW = PRESSURE / RESISTANCE

So what corresponds to these quantities in the mental and metaphysical realm?

First, let’s look at PRESSURE. What is the thing that corresponds to pressure in the realm of thought? It is DESIRE. Desire is a form of love, so we could expand our equation to use LOVE as the motive force in our life. Love is another word for God in action, so this seems to fit. GOD is just our word for the source of all motive force, the source of all change.

What creates this pressure? Desire is created by a vision of what could be, as compared to what is. Desire is formed by a thought that there is more that we could be, more that we could have, more that we could experience. This vision, by the Law of Attraction, then attracts us toward it, and also attracts to it all things needed for its fulfillment. Thus, pressure creates FLOW in the world.

This bears some thinking about. How can the Universal Spirit, which we have said encompasses all things, all possibilities, infinitely, have any Desire? What is there to desire?

There is only one answer that comes to mind – that is, to express those possibilities, that potentiality, as fully and as completely as possible. Not only that, but to view that expression from as many points of view as possible, so that potential becomes actuality or manifestation, and actuality is witnessed or experienced in an infinitude of ways. Thus potential is realized, and possibility becomes actuality.

So, desire is not something that happens by whim or in spontaneous bursts. Desire is built in to the character of the Universe as a fundamental property.

Now let’s look at RESISTANCE. This is the tendency for flow to be blocked, or constricted.

What are the ways in which resistance is created?

In the case of electricity, the material itself plays a role. In the case of metaphysics, this is not the case, since all things are made from the same substance. Thought transcends all substance, and is not conditioned by it. So material or substance is a constant in the field of thought, and is therefore a constant in our equation.

In the case of either electricity or water, another cause of resistance is a constriction of the pipe or the conductor. The channel is made smaller, and the flow is affected.

Think of the ways in which we can make ourselves smaller. We are made smaller by our own beliefs about our worthiness, our capability, or our sense of what is right. Therefore it is BELIEF, which determines our resistance to flow, and our ACCEPTANCE of flow is dependent on our belief. Acceptance is the exact opposite, the inverse, of resistance.

So, our equation for all things metaphysical is:

FLOW = DESIRE X ACCEPTANCE, where

ACCEPTANCE = 1 / RESISTANCE

What kinds of flow are we talking about here, in the mental realm? Some of them are:

Prosperity Wisdom Joy
Peace Courage Faith
Beauty Harmony

Notice that all of these things have Love at their core, and all can be attracted through Desire and Acceptance. If we can control the flow of these things, our worldly experience will parallel our mental one.

Note also that FEAR is the opposite of DESIRE, and works like a negative pressure, which causes a stoppage or even reversal of the flow in our life.

This blog entry is adapted from my book, "THE LITTLE BOOK OF TRUTH AND WISDOM", which is available at www.lulu.com.

ABUNDANCE AND OUR ECONOMIC SYSTEM

2008-05-29T22:54:00.000-07:00

ABUNDANCE

Perhaps the greatest part of the illusion of our material world is the idea of lack and limitation. Our modern civilization is based on it. The regulation of money, wages, and investment in the economy is entirely for the purpose of distributing scarce resources. It is founded on scarcity.

The notion of economic theory is founded on the idea of a zero-sum game; that is, if you have more of one thing, you must have less of something else. It began as observation, but soon became a controlling factor, as the theories are used to allocate resources and make both political and business decisions.

It is further assumed that scarcity operates throughout nature, so that we can only have more if someone else has less. This teaches us to feel guilt for all that we do have, so that we are prevented from enjoyment of anything. Since we cannot enjoy what we have, we neglect to feel grateful. The absence of gratitude in our thinking leads to unconscious avoidance of opportunity, and pushes prosperity away from us.

The most dangerous idea in our economic system may be that things derive their value from scarcity; that there is no such thing as intrinsic value. Scarcity is contrived in order to maintain the value of goods. People apply this to themselves to destroy their self-esteem, reasoning that abilities they hold in common with many others are therefore valueless.

Again, this is a case of a belief system which does not serve us well. Is an egg, sausage or steak less tasty when eggs, pork or beef are more plentiful? Are they less nutritious? Yet we expect to pay less for them if they are not scarce, and we allow farmers to become bankrupt due to low prices if there is a plentiful supply. We have lost sight of the concept of intrinsic worth.

A new concept of abundance - the flow concept - can be found in my books TURN THE WORLD ON ITS HEAD and THE LITTLE BOOK OF TRUTH AND WISDOM. Yes I am flattering myself with the latter title, and I was tongue in cheek when something told me to use it! Both books can be found at www.lulu.com.

BOOK CATALOG PAGE on www.lulu.com

2008-05-22T11:51:00.000-07:00

This a partial list of my books on www.lulu.com - the first few pages can be read to get an idea of the content and writing style. I hope each book contains something that makes the reader think, or see something a little differently than before.

To go right to the catalog page, copy and paste this URL in your browser:

http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=1223463

Yours truly,
Darrell

OUR MAGICAL WORLD - 5

2008-05-22T00:32:00.000-07:00

The real magic is when we realize that God is in all the spaces of the universe. The suns and the planets and the rocks and trees and people are just the material forms that have arisen out of that powerful space. The things we see are made from that which is invisible, and the source is more vast that we can imagine.

You know by now that your form is not you – it’s just your form. The intelligence that is you is occupying your form – just for now. Someday it will move on – perhaps to a new form, if that’s what you want. You have come from the magic, and you are here to experience time, space, and matter . Eventually you will return to the magic- to those other dimensions – those other universes – to that place where the sub-atomic particles go when they are tunneling from place to place.

You see, we are not the magic. We are the magicians, and we just have no memory of the magic we have made.

When we remember, won’t that be something?

That will be real magic.

OUR MAGICAL WORLD - 4

2008-05-21T17:03:00.000-07:00

God has always been the name that we use when the mystery and the magic of life goes beyond what we can reach; past our understanding. God used to be the name for wind and weather; for the mysteries of sexuality, for the raw emotions that seemed to take over people’s minds. At various times, each of these was taken as the work of one or many Gods.

A wise Rabbi said, “God to us is always just the next level of Mind above where we are.”

I like that. God is the mystery, and God is the Magic of life – and no matter how much we grow or learn, there is always that next level above where we are, where God is waiting for us to catch up.

The God of the Old Testament seems to us today to have far too many human frailties – anger, jealousy, not to mention a tendency for genocide. The God of the New Testament is much more a God of Love, but many people have confined Him to a human form, ignoring the vastness and universality of the Intelligence that underlies everything that is.

Someone said, “As soon as you think you know something, you limit the Vastness.” We meet people every day who think they know about God, about Jesus, about the Bible. These people are limiting the vastness – any human concept does that. God is not in the pages of a book - any more than there is a pumpkin pie in the pages of a recipe book - nor is God in the body of one long-dead teacher. The vastness cannot be so limited. We must not confuse the map with the territory, or the symbol with the reality.

OUR MAGICAL WORLD - 3

2008-05-20T21:01:00.000-07:00

To me, it is magic to think that our minds, using some quantum effect we still have not discovered, may be reaching into or through an alternate universe. What are we doing – what are we contacting – when we use prayer treatment to alter the path of our life and our world?

Now please don’t go thinking we are like some kind of flying saucer cult, and the green men are going to come and take us away! But we do believe that mind and matter are linked in a mysterious way, and that we can explore that mystery – in fact we are meant to explore that mystery, until that vast Intelligence we call God is able to work through our consciousness and express in this world all the wondrous Good that lies in the invisible world of thought and vision. We do believe there is a kind of magic in that, and your own life can be an example of it.

Back to the mystery inside the atom – it gets more and more magical. It turns out that each 'wavicle' inside the atom is actually just a ripple in the fabric of space – what we think of as empty space! Some of these ripples are looped back on themselves, and some a just open-ended. These have become known as Strings, and string theory is upsetting to most physicists, because this theory tells us that there isn’t any there, there. The material world is nothing at all, except a set of wiggles in space itself.

Along with this idea is another incredible discovery – that every point in space actually has a potential energy so vast that we are surrounded by a power beyond our imagining. It is in us, through us, and all around us – DOES THAT SOUND FAMILIAR?

Well, it’s only a theory, at this point. So there is still more magic to be uncovered.

OUR MAGICAL WORLD - 2

2008-05-18T21:32:00.000-07:00

All these cells are made of organized molecules, collections of atoms that operate in that fluid environment that we were born into a couple of billion years ago. The atoms that make up our molecules are no different that the atoms that are all around us in the world. These atoms interact in a simple and predictable way, as chemistry dictates. The result is very complicated, as we can see. Just why is that we can see that?

Oh, the molecules…. They are made of a standard set of atoms, which were made in the giant suns of the early universe, between ten and fifteen billion years ago. We are made of very standard building blocks, found around the Earth and around the universe. Nothing very fancy about that.

Inside our atoms – all atoms, there is mostly empty space – almost ALL empty space, and a collection of things that act sometimes like particles, and sometimes like waves – you could call them wavicles, I suppose. You see, they are particles, only when we try to locate them; the rest of the time they aren’t. They are waves only when we try to measure them; the rest of the time they’re not. When they are particles, they bump into things and bounce; but when they are waves, they go right through things.

In fact, sometimes they don’t actually go through things, but they disappear from our universe on one side of a boundary, and reappear on the other side. This is called tunneling, but some think that the tunnel is through some other universe. This was discovered by a Welsh physicist, Brian Josephson, who earned a Nobel prize along with Leo Esaki of Sony Corporation in 1973.

(In my fourth year of Engineering in about 1967, a friend and I became interested in 'tunnel' diodes, or Esaki diodes, and borrowed a rare one from a graduate research lab to build a simple FM radio tuner on our lab bench. It worked quite well, receiving several local stations, but we were sworn to return it to the lab ASAP. Inside the Esaki diode, the 'magic' that made it work was something called a "Josephson Junction.")

Dr Josephson, by the way, currently researches psychic phenomena, and runs the mind-matter unification project at Cambridge in England as part of his quantum physics research, according to Wikipedia.

OUR MAGICAL WORLD

2008-05-16T22:28:00.000-07:00

We tend to think our lives are pretty ordinary, most of the time. We sleep, we wake, we eat, we bathe, we do various other very human and possibly animal acts, and we do most of them unconsciously – that is, we don’t think very deeply into them.

People who think deeply about stuff are few and far between, and we think of them as not too practical. After all, there is money to earn, things to buy, and food to prepare. There are things to clean, and errands to run.

When we do stop and really think about things, we uncover the magical in the everyday.

What makes us think there is something we call God behind all of this? Because when we dig deeply, we run into impenetrable barriers. We run into the magical, and we are left without any explanation, other than some intelligence is at work.

Here’s what we know about what we’re made of. We are, each of us, about 80% water. Not just any water, but water that happens to have just about the same salt and mineral content as seawater. That’s because the cells that travel about in our blood stream had their start, ten billion years ago, in the oceans of the world. We are a collective organism, using dozens of the types of cells that evolved individually as our symbiotic servants. We are the life of the Earth, in its latest effort to reach the pinnacle of aware intelligence.

Our blood cells, several types, roam our arteries and veins independently, each with its own purpose, like otters and beavers in a stream but without any idea where the stream comes from, or where it goes.

Each of our cells contains tiny sub-organisms that roam the cell independently, carrying and converting food to energy, and supporting our master programming, our DNA.

UNIVERSE, FORM AND MIND

2008-05-10T21:34:00.000-07:00

All things we can sense and experience, this world that we typically call "real", is the unfoldment of the original energy-stuff of the universe. Everything we are, and everything we can see is the substance of the original 'Big Bang' that was the starting point of the universe.

With telescopes and space probes, we know the universe is expanding outward. Working backward from the outward motion, it is estimated that the material universe began around twenty billion years ago, and was originally smaller than a basketball in size.

This is the story of the creation of what we call FORM, which is to say, of things that can be measured, with beginnings and endings, with the four dimensions of length, width, height, and time, or duration.

Most people believe that Form is only half the story. Behind form is Intelligence, or Mind, which is the organizing principle, making form out of the formless, order out of chaos.

Forms are the stepping stone from unconscious Mind to Consciousness. Mind can only know things as FORM, and mind creates form as It comes to know things. Therefore as God expands Its knowledge of Itself, more forms are created, and energy must flow into the forms that are created. Hence God knows itself as US, and as the entire created universe. As It does so, we are created, and the universe is created.

As Mind evolves, thought evolves, and we observe that the world evolves to keep pace. Creation and Evolution are but two sides of the same coin. Creation does not occur from outside, as we commonly think of it, but as an unfoldment from within.

FACTS, INFORMATION, KNOWLEDGE AND WISDOM

2008-05-08T09:01:00.000-07:00

There is a process by which we humans progress in our handling of intelligence. When you read this, ask yourself where you are operating on the scale of processing the nature of the world through your own intelligence.

We operate from our senses, however many there are. I know there are the usual five, but psychological feeling and intuition can add to those as inputs to our thought process, and imagination may also fit in there somewhere. This already brings us to eight senses, if we choose to see things that way!

These are sources of the elements that we begin to process. We could consider them data, of which some are facts, some are opinions, some are impressions. Do we really know which are which - and is there really a difference? Can we really trust what we think we see, any more than we trust what we emotionally feel? To wonder about these may be the beginning of wisdom!

Facts are of no value in themselves, unless we put them into a framework, or context. Then they become information. If I say "A jeep is heading for a fence", that may be a fact (or not) but it gives you no context. If I say "Your son's Jeep is heading for your fence", suddenly the context makes it information for you.

Now, if you take the latter 'information', and add to it the meanings that you have attached to those things, both what your son means to you, what the Jeep means (e.g., a brand-new, valuable possession) and the fence (which you just rebuilt yesterday) and it becomes critical knowledge to you, especially if you have time to act on it in the moment.

When we can place knowledge into a wider philosophy, that becomes wisdom. Knowing when you should take quick action, and when there is no point, allows a certain level of calm that can be brought to all things in life. The essence of wisdom is to see the connectedness between all things, including between ourselves and the wider universe around us. When our sense of isolation and separation is seen as an illusion of the senses, then we have a new way to interpret and bring meaning to all that we see.

POLITICS, ENTERTAINMENT AND THE PLAY OF ILLUSION

2008-05-05T17:11:00.000-07:00

It has been amusing to watch the interplay of political candidates, their handlers and their associates, and the continual parade of pundits that inhabit the cable news talk shows. People apparently make careers out of punditry, which is nothing more than personal opinion, only loosely connected to the facts.

The looping of controversial comments from the distant or not-so-distant past, ad nauseam, by people not directly connected to any campaign, is one way of spicing up the stream of 'non-news' by creating controversy out of next-to-nothing.

When Marshall McLuhan published "Understanding Media", in which he stated "The Medium is the Message", he was a prophet of our times. What we are seeing in these 'fake' controversies and the substitution of pundit opinion for news facts, is the direct result of creating the 500 channel universe, while not really wanting to spend the money to fill it with meaningful programming. It is cheaper to manufacture news than to go out and find it.

Punditry on the 'News' channels is the equivalent of 'reality' shows on entertainment channels. Neither is 'real' at all, but a fabricated pseudo-reality to fill up space.

The late Alphonse Ouimet, once the head of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, once wrote that television channels do not try to carry what people want to watch. They carry what people are WILLING to watch, given that it is on. This, it turns out, maximizes the total number of viewers, and thus appeals the most to sponsors. So if you can't find anything you really like on TV, it is because there has been no real effort to please any particular group of viewers - the game is to grip the eyeballs with some sort of adrenaline-causing controversy or dilemma, and then carry it on until it's time for the commercial.

Just remember, almost nothing you see is rooted in reality. When you watch TV, you are looking at a stream of lighted pixels, driven by a box of electronics, and fed by a carefully crafted media machine designed to titillate, to enrage, to amaze or to excite. Your job, presumably, is to stay glued, and behave as any modern adrenaline addict should.

End of rant - now, take a walk outdoors!

FROM "MAXI-MIND" - A BOOK ON CREATIVE THINKING

2008-05-02T00:50:00.000-07:00

Most people drift through life without questioning their day-to-day actions or their real wants and desires. Motivated by short-term gratification, they look forward to the next cold beer, eggs and toast in the morning, the baseball game or the football game. Rarely do they ever see themselves placed against the larger canvas of the universe, the world, the human race, or even their local community.

That larger sense of fitting or belonging to a greater picture is left to a precious few. Those who have it share a sense of self-worth, of meaning, which leads them to greater happiness and success in their life.

This larger mental picture is drawn for us by our power of creativity. It is our ability to imagine, to have vision, that helps us put ourselves in that picture. Our role in that big picture gives us our goals for the future, our purpose in life.

Research has shown that eighty-four per cent of people feel that they are under-employed or under-utilised. Thirty per cent of people are less than happy with their relationships. Only FIVE PER CENT of people have written goals for their life.

BUY "MAXI-MIND" ON LULU.COM

An overwhelming majority are just drifting, taking the path of least resistance. These people are easy, vulnerable prey for modern advertising or social pressure - anything that will tell them what they ought to do and who they ought to be. Most of our useful citizens are caught up in this kind of ‘rat-race’, working from school to retirement by putting one foot in front of the other, and conforming to the norm.

In the game of life, as in a race, the winner only leads by a tiny bit of distance--by a footstep, by a 'nose'. That tiny edge may be given by doing just one thing better than the rest, or it may be a dozen, a hundred, small insignificant differences where they do something just a tiny bit better. Those differences can come from keeping our eye on the goal, the target, instead of on short-term 'trivial pursuits'.

HIDDEN WISDOM OF THE BIBLE - 8 (FINAL)

2008-04-25T01:15:00.000-07:00

Conclusion

The Bible is a connected series of parables. It seems to be a book of history, it appears to be about the Israelites, but it really is about us. it portrays to us our secret fears, hidden longings, our love, rage, and tears; but it also reveals to us our secret innermost power, that marvelous secret we have each kept from ourselves - which is that we are Spirit at our core. We are God in action in the earth - the physical channel through which Creativity and Love may pour forth into the world!

Here is a symbolic translation of Psalm Number One

They are favored
who reject advice from those out of touch with their Source (Spirit):
who do not accept the viewpoint of those in error: or
who do not look with scom on the failings of others;

But who take delight in the working of Universal Law,
and who keep this law in mind continually.

They shall be abundantly supplied,
shall demonstrate accomplishments regularly;
they shall not lose strength, and their actions will lead to success.

Those not aligned with their Source are unfocused, and lack direction;
so they drift with the prevailing mood.

Those not aligned with their Source will think poorly of themselves,
and feel unworthy in the company of those who think rightly.

For the LAW supports right thinking; and actions of those not aligned
with it shall be self-defeating.

HIDDEN WISDOM OF THE BIBLE - 7

2008-04-22T16:52:00.000-07:00

Hidden Biblical Humour

There are even jokes- of sorts- hidden in the Bible. In the Science of Mind magazine, I love to read the colunms by Dr. Rocco Errico. He is a scholar of ancient Aramaic, the original language of most of the Bible. Our King James version is NOT translated from the original Aramaic, but from later Greek translations, for the most part.

Errico translates the story of Jonah and the whale. In most translations, it is given as a FISH, not a whale. Jonah was ordered by God in a dream to go and warn the people of a foreign country that they should change their ways or be destroyed. Of course, on the way he spent three days in the 'fish' before being cast up on their shore.

The Aramaic slang expression for being in a real pickle or dilemma is to be "in a fish" Jonah's dilemma was that he was unknown and had no credibility at all in the country where he was expected to preach and make them change their ways. Maybe he couldn't even speak the language! So, for the entire voyage, he was "in a fish".

The writers of ancient Aramaic told an excellent joke, and it only took us a few thousand years to get the punch line! Are we slow, or what?

Imagine if we wrote a story today about someone in a dilemma, and we wrote that he was in a real pickle. Four thousand years from now, people would be wondering what sorts of cucumbers we were able to grow, and how did we get them pickled! We might even have archaeologists rummaging for giant pickle vats - and of course they would find them - or at least something very large, which would immediately be designated a pickle vat!

HIDDEN WISDOM OF THE BIBLE - 6

2008-04-21T22:09:00.000-07:00

The Code Itself-

So what about the code? How does it work?

The ancient Hebrews were an oriental culture, where the NAME of a thing was chosen to reflect and symbolize its nature. This is not entirely unlike the practice in some native North American cultures, which are thought to have had an Asian origin. Thus the personal names and place names in the Bible are selected to reveal the nature of the person, or of the event which happened at a certain place.

Names & Symbols

In many places in the Bible, when an individual had a great change of heart and mind, we see that the name was changed to reflect that.

Abraham's wife Sarai (contentious or quarrelsome), representing the focus of emotional energy onto physical things, became Sarah (princess or noble lady), which refers to the direction of emotional energy to higher things. When this was done, she gave birth to Isaac, meaning joy and laughter, literally, God laughs. In this case the symbolism describes Sarai and Sarah as Abraham's emotional side; partner to his rational identity.

The most famous example was Jacob (the supplanter, or he who lies in wait), who wrestled all night with a strange man (of course representing his outward nature struggling with the inner), and upon being declared the winner, was told to change his name to Israel, meaning ruler with God, or Victor over All.

The most significant symbols used in the Bible are those of water and air, which are used to signify the fluid nature of spirit, which flows through, into and around everything.

In Genesis, it tells us "the waters were separated from the waters." Water, and sometimes air, is the symbol for Spirit, which flows into everything and assumes the shape of Its vessel. Separation of waters from waters describes the formation of our individual identities, as of Spirit dividing itself into portions, thereby creating individual points of view, separate souls. In this symbolic story, Spirit becomes individualized while remaining One.

When the Israelites fled Egypt, which is the symbol for bondage and slavery, they repeatedly complained of thirst, which is to say they became de-spirited. (Lack of water = lack of spirt) They had camped at Rephidim, the place of rest, and the people nagged and complained to Moses. Moses was instructed to take his stick and strike the rock, and water poured out, raisingthe spirits of the people. It doesn't say whether the stick was a rod, the symbol of authority or discipline, or a staff, the symbol of wisdom and learning. But he did strike the rock, which is the symbol of unchanging truth.

This is also why Jesus said of Peter (which is rock - Petra- in Greek) "Upon this rock will I build my church. ". The 'ROCK' symbolized the unchanging, the everlasting truth, the truth that sets us free. Maybe a church somewhere really was built on a rock, but that's not the point.

HIDDEN WISDOM OF THE BIBLE - 5

2008-04-19T01:56:00.000-07:00

New Thought teachers:

Many New Thought teachers have unlocked for us the meanings in these great books. These include Thomas Troward, Ernest Holmes, and Jack Addington. Their books should be on your book shelf.

Unlocking the Code:

The 'code' is the similar to what we might use in dream interpretation or in psychoanalysis. The symbols, both objects and events, of a narrative are indicators of what is in the creative mind of the narrator, whether it be dreamer, writer, painter, cartoonist, or subject on the analyst's couch. We dream in parables. We live in parables, as our life experience is an outward symbol of what is in our mind.

Metaphysical schools of thought like ours are based on the symbolic relationship between thought and thing, where the 'things' in our life have flowed into the forms created out of our thought, through the working of an Universal Law of creation. As Ernest Holmes tell us, this is because our individual mind is just the use we are making of a Universal Mind Principle, When we sit on a chair, or pour water, we make individual use of the Universal Principle of Gravitation; When we make coffee or toast we make personal use of an Electrical Principle. And we think with the Universal principle of Thought.

HIDDEN WISDOM OF THE BIBLE - 4

2008-04-17T09:21:00.000-07:00

Our role as channels of Universal thought.

As channels of God's Love and Wisdom, it is our function to be better readers of Truth, and writers as well. To do this, we each pursue spiritual growth in our unique way. Each of us adds another viewpoint to the Truth, though it is always the same Truth we encounter.

So how can we be better readers? The pure and contemplative mind is a better channel for high thoughts than the egotistical or overly busy mental attitude. Love purifies the thought process while Fear contaminates it. There is no work, however, that does not bear the stamp of the Creative Power of the universe. In that sense, we can do no wrong- we are always expressing Spirit, since there is nothing else.

The Bible as a symbolic document

The Bible shows evidence of being a book that was deliberately written in symbolism. The clue to this is in the New Testament, where the concept of the parable is introduced, and Jesus speaks a great number of parables, which many of his listeners could not understand. Jesus said, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear." or: "Let those with the tools to interpret this, understand it."

Parables

Thus the New Testament is a key to the Old. It reveals to us that Hebrew thought was oriented to the parable - a story complete in itself, but with a hidden meaning. Such a story, while potentially factual, is not the point. The point is the hidden wisdom which speaks to us about the human Spirit, Mind and Heart. The facts are not the truth.

Jesus talked about a farmer sowing corn. Planting corn is not the point of the story - it's not a lesson in agriculture! Even Biblical fundamentalists know that, yet they can't seem to see that the Old Testament uses selected pieces of history to teach in the same way.

HIDDEN WISDOM OF THE BIBLE - 3

2008-04-15T12:40:00.000-07:00

Writing and Reading
are parts of a single act in Consciousness;
The passing of a thought in Mind
over Time & Space

Writing and reading are two sides of the same coin. Taken together, they form a communication between two minds, over both space and time, with both writer and reader contributing to the final understanding of what is read.

When we view people as individual minds, only the writer knew what they meant when they wrote what they wrote. But only the reader can determine the final sense that is gained from reading it. But we know from our study of Religious Science that there are not two individual minds, there is only one Mind, and the great books convey a movement of thought within that Mind, from one part to another. Writing is just another way of planting a thought in Mind.

One thought
with a million viewpoints

A Bible passage, written 3000 years ago, and read by someone today, is such a communication in Mind, transcending time and space. Each reader triggers a different communication, so that one passage results in millions upon millions of transfers of thought across 3000 years of time, and millions of miles in space as the earth goes on its travels. Though there be a single Truth, millions of viewpoints result. And since YOUR spiritual self wrote it years ago, you know at a deep level what it means to you.

In Universal Mind, there is one Consciousness; there is no time or space to form a barrier to understanding; and Writing and Reading are two parts of the same act, the act of passing a thought within Mind itsell There is truly only ONE thought, not many, and if a million thoughts are held in Mind, they are integrated into an expanding Truth. In this way, God contemplates Itself from all points of view.

HIDDEN WISDOM OF THE BIBLE - 2

2008-04-11T22:24:00.000-07:00

All writing has symbolic content

Maybe you have heard somebody say, 'Why don't you say what you mean?" But in fact all of us say MORE than we mean, because hidden in our speech and our writing are the contents of our subconscious, influencing our communication without our conscious knowledge.

As someone once said: "Who you are speaks so loudly, I can't hear what you say."

All writings bear the mark of the subconscious thought of the writer. In this way, the inspiration of God influences the heart of every writing, since our innermost subconscious is our link to infinite Mind. Inspirational writings are a direct channeling of the thoughts of Universal Mind, while even ugly and angry writings reflect the authors' reaction and rejection of these same Universal impulses.

The Bible is not the only work that can be interpreted symbolically. The Chinese Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita of India, the works of modem poets, and writers such as Shakespeare, have high levels of symbolic content. They have a meaning that goes far beyond the literal, so that we may read into them vital and important messages which a literal interpretation totally misses. Literalists only get half the message; perhaps less.

HIDDEN WISDOM OF THE BIBLE - 1

2008-04-09T18:43:00.000-07:00

Why
symbolic
interpretation?

In New Thought churches, we interpret the Bible symbolically rather than literally. I want to discuss why we do this, and why it is important to know something of the symbolic way of reading the Bible or any of the ancient (or modern) mystical texts.

At the far end of the scale from us are the literalists or fundamentalists, who advocate a strict literal interpretation of the Bible as the only valid guide for living. This approach leads to some problems, for a number of reasons, apart from the personal inflexibility it creates:

First, translations always lose something of the original meaning. This does not inspire confidence in something that I am going to allow to have authority over my life. hi several versions, the Bible contains translations of translations; compunding the chance for misinterpretation and error.

Secondly, a literal interpretation runs smack into reality, in the form of scientific discoveries and obvious facts.

Thirdly, the culture of Biblical times and of the Israelite people is not our culture; their idioms are not our idioms. Russian-bom comedian Yakov Smirnof says that learning English gets very hard when you hear phrases like "The door is ajar” or "Exact change please”. We may have less trouble with, “What's goin' down, bro?” or "He got some bad mojo, man" than we do with biblical phrases from thousands of years ago. They had their own idioms in Biblical times, too, so a literal translation can result in a certain amount of nonsense.

The stories told in the Bible look like a literal history of the Hebrew people, and that's partially what they are. But if that was all they were, this book would not have become the guide to living of hundreds of millions around the globe.

If I wrote my family history, I don't care how good a writer I am, it would not sell billions of copies over a few thousand years, and become the guide to living for hundreds of millions of people. It is the wisdom buried in bible stories which is the real treasure. The stories may be true, but their literal truth is not the point.

Have you read the Celestine Prophecy? Is that a true story? No. Does it matter whether it is or not? No. Because it conveys an ancient wisdom to us in yet another form. It speaks past the mind, straight to the heart.

Great works like the bible do the same. The story matters a lot less than the message.

FINDING FAITH - 7

2008-04-06T15:24:00.000-07:00

“But what if I don’t have faith?”, you might say. Of course you don’t have faith - God has faith.

Why is that? because faith is based on knowledge - on certainty. You can’t be certain of anything, except what you know. That’s why you have faith that the sun will come up, that summer will come, that your toaster will make toast, that flipping the switch makes the lights come on - that. Some of you might even have faith that your car will start!

The more you are certain, the more you have faith - but only God has complete faith - that’s because all knowledge is contained in Universal Intelligence. And that’s the knowledge that is deep within you. At your heart, all knowledge lies. Within your feeble outward intelligence, lies the inward source of ALL intelligence.

How do you obtain it? Just ask! As Jesus said, “Ask and you shall receive - knock and the door shall be opened.” If you want faith, ask consciously for faith. Ask for the confidence to KNOW what to do, what to say, how to live.

Think for a minute about the things you have faith in. How did you come by that faith? Why do you believe with certainty that flipping a switch turns on the light? By experience, of course! You have faith because you have seen it done, and you have done it, many times before. Faith in other things comes about by practice, by starting small and then letting your experience grow. But it starts by asking.

Don’t listen to me - ask within yourself - Let that same Christ-mind be in you that was in Jesus, and Buddha, and other great teachers of truth. Follow your own advice - choose your own path - let your own faith carry you. If you only borrow faith, you will borrow someone else’s path too, instead of walking your own.

Start now with small things. Set an intention, and follow through - don't accept drawbacks, and let the completion of your intention be added to your storehouse of confidence - of faith.

FINDING FAITH - 6

2008-04-04T20:53:00.000-07:00

Jesus said, “The kingdom is at hand.” His disciples assumed he meant he would return as king soon. They thought of a physical king. But a king is ruler - and you are the ruler of y our life. No matter what happens to you outwardly, you are the one who controls your inner state. The kingdom of God means bringing the consciousness of God into your awareness, so that It rules your life so that It determines your inner state.

And what inner state would that be? What does this Universal Intelligence, this Supreme Mind, have to offer you?

First, the experience of oneness. No longer do you need to feel alone, or unsupported, or ‘out of the loop’. When you have a sense of oneness, you know that you are a part of everything.

Then there is the experience of pure harmony. Within oneness, nothing can be at war
with Itself. “A house divided against itself cannot stand”, as the saying goes. Oneness leads to harmony. You can experience that harmony in your job, in your family, in your community. You can BE it!

There is the experience of abundance. Oneness means that you can tap into the flow of wealth, the flow of success, the flow of opportunity that goes on all around you. You can capture opportunities because you know that they are there for you.

What is the difference between a supremely successful person and one who struggles? It isn’t brains - there are smart poor people everywhere, while folks like Ozzy Osbourne, who are talented but not exactly brilliant, are rolling in money. It isn’t birth - there are a million stories of people who inherited wealth and yet live like paupers. It isn’t luck - we know that about 70% of lottery jackpot winners are poor again within 5 years.

It is thinking! It is belief! It is attitude. It is believing that you are entitled to abundance, that you deserve it, that you attract it to you, and that you are squarely in the flow of it.

There is the experience of pure joy. Joy is the experience of lightness of heart. It is the result of en-theos - God within - from which we get the word “Enthusiasm”. People fly when they take themselves lightly!

That is Heaven on earth. And it is yours, here and now. Yes, the kingdom is at hand. It all begins with faith.

FINDING FAITH - 5

2008-04-02T21:35:00.000-07:00

Let’s come back to the questions that we started with. Maybe we do have some answers that will help:

What is God? What isn’t God? God is All There Is. Everything is God is form and in action.

What does God have to do with you? God is the life in you, the intelligence of your bones, your cells. You are that. You are not God - but God is you, and more than you. God is All That Is, and God is certainly all that you are.

What can you do with that? You can become more of what God is, that’s what you can do. This power is in you - it IS you. You can use more of It that you are doing right now. The creative ability in you is your Spirit. The urge you have, the need to build, to grow, to expand your activity - that is God in you calling for a miracle.

Does God speak to us? Yes, in many ways - in our dreams, though the people around us, through the things we notice every day. You have an urge to go somewhere. There, you notice something. You noticed because of an inner program that directed your attention. That was God speaking to you. Someone told you the same thing five times. The fifth time you paid attention, because God in you directed your attention.

Does this God have real personality? Oh, you bet! For one thing God has YOUR personality, and about 5 or 6 billion other personalities - and that’s just the ones currently living. God is infinite personality, all personality, any personality. There is no limit - it is open-ended.

So what can you do? First, stop looking away from yourself. Look at the qualities of God that lie in you, and bring them out to play. Stop waiting for Jesus to come back, and look to develop the Christ that is your fullest potential. Remember, the name of Christ is Em-man-u-el (In man is God). The Christ means the full and total realization of the Spirit of God within you. When the Christ comes down to earth, it means you have taken your Spiritual consciousness, and brought it into your physical life.

Truly, the kingdom is within you.

FINDING FAITH - 4

2008-03-31T21:51:00.000-07:00

The Self-Organizing Universe

Science has proven that there is a tendency to self-organization in the universe, through the mathematics known as chaos theory. Nothing can remain random, because the natural perturbations within randomly moving material will always eventually create nonrandom groupings and clumpings of matter. Stars will always form in the hydrogen clouds of the vastness of space. There is a bias for increasing order even when chaos (randomness) is the starting point.

This is the start of evolution. Stars form, and we are formed from stars, in a process that takes a few tens of billions of years. We are star-stuff, all of us. There is an urge, a tendency, a pressure, toward ever greater complexity, toward greater intelligence, in all of us. God is building not from outside of the world, but from within it. The Mind of God is working in each of you, in every instant when you allow It.

When we say we are searching for God, we are claiming that God is not here, but somewhere else. Meanwhile, what we are searching for, we are searching with! We are seeing empty air, using God’s eyeballs! We are standing knee-deep in the river, and dying of thirst.

Remember the Last Supper, where Jesus picked up bread and wine, and said “This is my body, this is my blood.”? This is the man who said “I and the Father are One.”

He could just as well have said, “The whole earth is my body and my blood, I am one with it all. We were formed in the heart of the same star. We came from the big bang that began the universe. I am one with all things.”

FINDING FAITH - 3

2008-03-29T18:22:00.000-07:00

Where can we begin to unravel this ‘God’ question?

First we are seeking to explain our own existence, and the existence of others, and the existence of the things we see and touch all around us. We see that these things are complex; they appear to be the work of intelligence - especially us!

At this point the superstitious person makes a leap of faith and says, “There must be some great Power out there that made all this - including me.” Certainly that is one way to interpret what we observe. Religious superstition, as it turns out, often works!

The practical mystic takes a different direction. This person says, “There must be intelligence in the universe - in fact, I know there is, because I know I am intelligent. But since I see signs of this intelligence in everything, everywhere, then this Intelligence must be part of the very fabric of the everything.”

The conclusion is that we are part of a self-organizing universe, in which this Mind, this Intelligence is inherent throughout. In fact, we assume that this Mind is the creator of what we see, because after all creation is a mental act. Creation is not mindless, it is the result of a mental impulse.

There are only two possible conclusions.

One is that there is a Mental Force beyond myself that creates, throughout the universe, which we can call God, or any other name we want.

The other is that I myself am an insane Godling, merely imagining all that I think I see, with the entire universe inside my mind.

If I choose the second conclusion, then I am imagining you right now! Don’t worry, I won’t make you disappear!

FINDING FAITH - 2

2008-03-26T13:24:00.000-07:00

I’d to say a word about those who don’t believe in God - and that is this:

The kind of God you don’t believe in doesn’t exist!

The images of God that we usually learn are either: the white-bearded old guy at a table with a big record book, or an angry guy with a staff or pitchfork or some pointy thing, ready to spew forth lightning or some other kind of wrath. There are Hindu gods with umpteen arms and two heads, and whatever else. There are animal-headed gods, animal-footed gods, and fierce monstrous beast gods. And finally, there are people gods, such as Odin and the ever-popular Jesus.

To the serious skeptic, non of these are very convincing. For one thing, none are recent - for another thing, the difference between history and mythology cannot be sorted out. To have faith, we must have more. We must have real knowledge, that comes from our own experience. We must have a commonsense faith.

When we teach the Science of Mind, we let you explore and practice for yourself till you can see the connection between your innermost desires and your experience. We teach practical mysticism - things you can try out. We show you have to build faith by trying it out.

Faith is something that many people have trouble with, because they have encountered situations which have caused them to be untrusting. Mistrust in things and people, all aspects of Creation, may lead us to mistrust the Creator as well. Do you honestly believe that the world, the universe is there for you? Or do you believe in Murphy's Law, that there is a built-in aspect to reality that means it is "gonna getcha"?

FINDING FAITH - 1

2008-03-25T22:45:00.000-07:00

What is faith?

Faith is confidence in something you can’t see or touch. It is knowing that something is there, even though you can’t see it.

We live in a world of scientific progress - how is it that we could have faith in an unseen intelligence that can guide us and work for us? Doesn’t that smack of the old world of superstition? Let's examine the issue.

The issue of faith breaks down into several questions:

• The first one is “Is there a God”
• The second one is “If there is a God, does that affect me?”
• And third, “If there is a God, and It affects me in some way, how does It affect me?”
• Finally, “If there’s a God, and It affects me, what should I be doing about it?”

The reason this is an issue faith is that most of us think we have never seen God. Most of us think we have never heard God. We are not sure if there’s anything there, and we don’t know if It affects us anyway. Do we even have an idea of who or what God is?

So what do we do about that? There are several approaches that people take:

• Some of us search high and low for God, and most don’t find anything. There is no office door with a “God” sign on it.
• And some people take the whole issue on faith, and with little or no evidence, we act as if God was there, and try to figure out what that means to us, and what we should do. These are people of blind faith.
• Some people reject the whole issue and refuse to believe in what they can’t see. These are the blind skeptics.
• Some of us ignore the whole issue, and get on with life. These are blind, period!

Which of these approaches is the right one? Would it surprise you if I said I think they are ALL missing the boat?

More next time...

THE COSMOS AND US - 6

2008-03-22T13:19:00.000-07:00

So now that we know where we came from, what exactly is out there. Many scientists believe that there must be more like us - like us meaning thinking, aware beings who express their creator as best they can.

The search still goes on and one. The SETI program, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, is run out of Berkeley, California. In the words of Eric Idle of Monty Python fame:

"There’d better be intelligent life somewhere out in space,
‘Cause there’s bugger-all down here on earth."

I’m less pessimistic than that. For those who like to bet on a really long shot, the SETI-at-home project uses the screen saver on your computer to process data from the SETI program. You can use the spare time on your computer to run analysis on the data from the giant radio telescope at Arecibo in Puerto Rico, helping the folks at Berkeley look for the LGM’s - Little Green Men. They probably aren’t green, but you can bet they likely won’t look much like us. A million years from now, WE won't likely look much like us!

A Trillion stars in each of Billions of Galaxies - doesn’t it just make you wonder? In the words of the first long-distance telegraph message by Samuel Morse, “What hath God wrought?”

END

THE COSMOS AND US - 5

2008-03-20T21:59:00.000-07:00

The materials from a previous Nova explosion form the heavy elements which our planets are made of, while the sun is still composed mostly of hydrogen gas, being turned to helium.

The key materials of our planet are carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulphur, and a lot of other things, including metals like iron. Many of these have been formed by complex nuclear cycles in a larger sun than ours, perhaps at the core of our galaxy. We really are made of star-stuff, each of us.

The planets came together the same way the stars did, a bunch of space debris pulled together by its own gravity. Our earth got luckier than most, and came together at the right distance from the sun to keep us alive. The Martians didn’t have that kind of luck, and neither did the Venusians. That’s likely why we can’t find them today.

On our Earth, there is no reason to suppose that life formed any differently than the stars did. There is an intelligence within all things that presses forward to become more and more. That intelligence has evolved into us, and continues to press onward, to greater and greater glory. We cannot be the end.

All human life on Earth has DNA that is identical to 99.99%. We are brothers and sisters, all of us. Recent work shows that all modern people can be traced back to a population of less than two dozen, some 200,000 years ago. This includes all colours and races of humanity.

The Mind within the Universe has brought us up from the ooze of Earth to express itself and be itself. We can have no greater glory than that. We get to express the creative energy of the builder of the stars. We have not merely been brought out of the ooze, but out from the Stars, where it was hot, so that we can be cool.

THE COSMOS AND US - 4

2008-03-18T20:45:00.000-07:00

Gravity is a fundamental property of any mass - a pull that it exerts on every other mass by the warping of space-time around itself. It pulls material together till the temperature rises from the increase in pressure, caused by the increasing proximity of material particles. Once temperature reaches a certain point, a nuclear reaction begins, fusing hydrogen into helium - and we have the beginning of a new star. There is an equilibrium reached, where the energy of fusion balances the pull of gravity, so a new sun can stay there for a very long time. Our own sun will last trillions of years, and then we’ll be back to kerosene to keep warm, unless we get some fusion of our own.

As hydrogen is converted to helium, it eventually gets depleted, and the reaction runs down. When the hydrogen runs low, there is no fusion energy to balance the gravity, and the star collapses on itself. What happens get depends on whether the star is large or small compared to our sun. If the star is small, it will flare up in size as a new cycle begins, turning helium into carbon, a mix of fission and fusion.

4.2 times the size of our sun is known as ChandraShekar’s limit. Above this limit, the gravity is large enough that when the hydrogen cycle is over, the collapse will trigger a new nuclear cycle - the carbon cycle. When this cycle is triggered, the star explodes, throwing material out into space. This is called a SUPERNOVA. The explosion disturbs new clouds of gas, triggering the birth of many new suns. More importantly it throws the material into space that planets are made of; leading to the eventual birth of our kind of life.

Note the intelligence to make this happen comes from within the Universe itself - not from outside. The forces and tendencies are built in to the fabric of space and time. No, it’s no accident, neither do we have to look to an outside God. Ours is an inside job. The kingdom is within. Both Galileo and Darwin are vindicated.

There are many billions of Galaxies, each with trillions of stars. Some are dying now, some just forming. Some are going to go Supernova, and seed our Galaxy some more. Some, like our own sun, will grow old and die, and turn into a cold dwarf star one day. This is star evolution, and it matches the evolution of life on Earth. In fact, it is part of the process.

More to follow .....

THE COSMOS AND US - 3

2008-03-16T08:29:00.000-07:00

Now, we can’t deal with whatever was before the Big Bang, because there WAS NO BEFORE. Time itself began for us at that point.

Stephen Hawking, in his book ‘A Brief History of Time’ deals with what happened next.

The Bang consisted of pure energy since the particles we know today could not have existed at the temperatures there must have been. But as the expansion took place, the temperature dropped, just as air trapped in a tire or a balloon feels colder when it get out. The expansion causes a cooling. And the particles that make up our atoms were formed as the cooling took place.

Here’s where we get the first inkling that Intelligence is built right in to the fabric of our Universe. From a pinpoint, there is nothing to suggest that the whole Universe shouldn’t just have been filled uniformly up with basic atoms of Hydrogen, with protons and electrons, and the odd neutron here and there. A uniform hydrogen ‘soup’ could not produce us.

There is a very modern branch of mathematics called Chaos Theory. What it shows it that pure chaos or randomness cannot be sustained. The tiniest of perturbations is inevitable, and leads to spontaneous creation of order from chaos. There is a movie called The Butterfly Effect, based on this idea - that a tiny perturbation creates a huge alternation of things over time. The title comes from a saying - that a butterfly flapping its wings sets in motion the stirring of air that starts a tornado.

In the case of our early Universe, hydrogen clumped together into clouds, till the clouds were pulled together by their own gravity, forming suns. The initial disturbance will have been a slight amount of turbulence in the early Big Bang, as energy condensed into the first particles of matter.

The bringing forth of order (non-randomness) out of chaos (randomness) is built right in to the nature of our physical universe. It is part of the Law by which we live.

THE COSMOS AND US - 2

2008-03-13T12:12:00.000-07:00

Of course the down side of the fundamentalist view is that if there is no evolution, then we aren’t going to improve any more, either, and we’re stuck with ourselves as we are. That’s not so bad, I guess, but given all that we think is wrong with us, I’d like to think there was some hope that we’d keep getting better. You’d think God wouldn’t give up quite so easily, either! We need a little bit of evolution just to sort us out.

Well, it turns out the two questions are related quite a bit, because where we came from starts with a good look way, way up.

Our story today starts with Hubble. Not the telescope in space, but the guy it was named after. Early in this century, Edwin Hubble, who I believe was at the Yale observatory, noticed that the further a star was away from our galaxy, the faster it was moving away from us.

There was a German named Doppler who first figured out that vibrations from something coming toward us get shifted upward in frequency, and they get shifted downward when the thing moves away from us. Kids notice this - that’s why their model planes and cars all go like this: Neeeerrrrrowwwwww! The only difference was that Doppler did the math, which the kids hate to do.

So Hubble used the Doppler Effect to figure out that the closer you got to the edge of whatever, the faster things were moving away. It seemed that the whole Universe itself was getting bigger. Hubble calculated and charted the distance and speed of a lot of stars. That’s how you get your name on a nearsighted telescope, I guess - but of course NASA has fixed the Hubble so it sees right out to that edge that the real Hubble couldn’t. That’s evolution of a type, in action.

Well, the Hubble expansion meant that the Universe was smaller once, and when you do the math, it turns out that about a dozen billion years ago, the whole thing would have been smaller than a basketball. Sort of a pocket Universe, except there were no pockets. And something caused it to blow out of the pocket and start expanding. Now there’s a mystery. Maybe our Universe came out of another dimension, or maybe we’re the rear end of a black hole in some other universe, who knows?

The expansion process is called the Big Bang. The ‘whatever it was’ that started the Big Bang is that mysterious impulse that bewilders the scientific community. Since it is a mystery, we call it God!

More about that later.

THE COSMOS AND US

2008-03-12T18:22:00.000-07:00

Ever since we humans discovered that we could think better than the other animals, we have been thinking a couple of things that has bothered our Western religions:

1) We have been looking up, and wondering what is out there, and
2) We have been wondering where we came from.

The answer to both these questions is in the same spot - the stars. No, I don’t mean the answer is in your horoscope! Those can be fun, but about as helpful as a good cup of tea or another Valium. I mean the actual stars, where the materials that form our bodies were made. But that’s a long story.

Some sciences were just meant to upset the churches. Astronomy is one of them. Ever since Galileo was locked up for saying the earth wasn’t the centre of the Universe, the Catholic church has had to back off and apologize for being wrong. Actually, I’m not sure if they apologized or not, but they said they were wrong, and since it took them over 500 years, I guess it doesn’t matter much. Most of the other churches beat the Catholics to the punch on that one, and Galileo can pretty much start the year 2000 with a clean slate. Too bad he’s dead.

That pretty well sums up the history of people looking up. The more we learned, the more we rubbed up against the dogma of traditional religion, as a class I once took in Bible History showed.

The other question, where we came from, is the other sore point. Darwin took a stab at partially answering that one, and once again, offended the churches, which surprised Darwin, since he thought he was just helping out. In this case, the Catholics beat many other churches to the punch. Last year, they admitted that Darwin was more or less right, only three hundred years later. Who says improvement isn’t possible? But the Fundamentalists, are still holding out, insisting that the whole thing happened in 6 days, which doesn’t leave much time for evolution.

(See my book on www.lulu.com called Creation and Evolution)

More on this to follow......

NEW SERIES OF BLOGS - TO BE DETERMINED!

2008-03-11T01:45:00.000-07:00

Time for a new blog series - I think it's time to take a different tack for awhile.

I am thinking of either a series on philosophers or science and how it links to spiritual teaching.

Watch for the results of my pondering!

LIFE AND THE LAW - YOUR PURPOSE

2008-03-09T23:05:00.000-07:00

So, your big life Purpose is unclear, you haven’t a clue how to find it, and you don’t know where to start. What do you do?

Well there is something you can do. All of us share one common purpose in Life, and that is to connect with our inner Spirit, and start to reveal the good qualities of Spirit out to the world around us. Our search for true purpose begins there.

The qualities include Love, Peace, Joy, Abundance, Courage. All these are recognized by us as good when we see them in the world around us. All of these are there within us, waiting to be reflected. When you spend some time thinking about these, and searching for them inside and outside of yourself, you will find that your life is transformed, a bit at a time.

As you find yourself changing, you will get new insights about your place in the world. Your purpose will become clear. Some call this being born again, we call it getting to know who you really are. You are that Intelligence passed on from the instant of the Big Bang - a fragment of the Mind of the Universe itself.

I have faith in you. Your path lies bright ahead.

LIFE AND THE LAW - FAITH AND PURPOSE

2008-03-08T13:54:00.000-08:00

So how can you have faith in your own life, your purpose?

1) First work on knowing who you are.

There is a new way to look at the world. We are taught to think of matter possibly having spirit in it. Today we know better - Spirit, or Mind, IS the main stuff; and it creates all matter. First Intelligence, then form. First Idea, then form.

2) Know that you are no accident.

There are no accidents. There is a random factor that operates on a small scale. But there is a guided purpose at work on a grand scale that stack the deck, loads the dice, and overcomes randomness.

If this were not so, then evolution would be downward as well as upward, and over billions of years we would have made no progress.

You cannot get a donkey from a pigeon’s egg, and you can’t get a carrot from an acorn. Everything flows out of the potential in the seed. If you trace your origins, back, and back, and far beyond back, you eventually get to the Big Bang that created the Universe. The potential for YOU was there, or you couldn’t be here. We are the children of the Big Bang, and it’s time to remember that.

3) Your purpose will be known if you are open to it.

Twenty years ago, I would never have believed I would be writing this. I know now that my purpose is to learn, and to teach. I will do this by speaking, and by writing.

Know that you have an unfulfilled purpose. So do your children. So do the people that drive you craziest. All those people you just can’t stand - Aall are here for a reason - and all have a chance to find out who they are, and be transformed in the process.

Can you believe that for yourself? Can you respect that for other people?

Finding out is so important, that it should take a fair bit of your time. Can’t you feel something urging you to live more, be more, love more, see more? Abundant Life is what Jesus taught. That means more of everything Good.

LIFE AND THE LAW - FAITH

2008-03-06T13:07:00.001-08:00

There are several things we can do to realize our faith.

1) Realize that we already have faith in many things.

We have faith in the sun rising, in science, in doctors, in microwave ovens. For crying out loud, we have faith in Lloyd Robertson, according to the surveys, so why not in God and our own future?

2) Recognize that faith is based on knowledge;

It’s not all blind; our faith in science is based on our knowledge and understanding of Science. You can build faith in God by building and understanding of God; and you can gain faith in yourself by getting to know your true self better as well.

3) Look for the faith OF God.

Understand that only God, the creator of all things, has perfect knowledge; so we are not seeking Faith in God, we are seeking the faith OF God. When we unify our mind with the Creative Power, we also unify with Universal Knowledge. All things that exist are written in the Mind of God, because it is the very fabric of the Universe. That means that at some level WE KNOW.

We think we have an idea how long a cold will last; God, as the Mind of the Universe, knows exactly how long it will last. Faith consists of a certain knowledge of the unseen. That knowledge does not belong to us as individuals; only at the level of inner Spirit do we have this knowledge. This is where we are at one with God.

2008-03-06T13:07:00.000-08:00

LIFE AND THE LAW - NO ACCIDENTS

2008-03-05T22:02:00.000-08:00

So what if you don’t now what your life purpose is?

What if you’re just too busy to care? What if you don’t get any feeling that you have a mission in life?

Start with the knowing that there are no accidents.

Everything that happens, no matter how bad it looks, contains the seed of something good in it. The Science of Mind is a teaching that shows you how to grab the good out of any situation.

The starting point is to realize that the cosmic pattern is always asserting itself in the background of every situation. It cannot do anything else; it’s nature is to create always; and always move toward greater good.

Our narrow viewpoint blinds us to the cosmic possibilities in each circumstance, until we deliberately move our mind to a point of cosmic awareness. We get to this point through TREATMENT of our Mind.

Our mission is to fully realize the Potential that is there at every step in our life, no matter how it might appear.

But it takes time to reach a Cosmic awareness; some of us might never do that; what do we do in the meantime?

Well, this is where FAITH comes in. Faith is a knowing that things are working for Good, no matter what they look like. It is a feeling of certainty that things are OK. That certainty is hard to get hold of, sometimes.

LIFE AND THE LAW - MEANING

2008-03-04T21:52:00.000-08:00

What does it mean to you if your life is not an accident?

• It means that you are here for some reason, and you should find out what that is.

• It also means that your life is a precious thing, and it should not be wasted. It has a great value, even if you cannot see right now what that value is.

• It means that the creative force which drives all things is part of you right now. It is that voice which cries out for order instead of chaos, for life instead of death, for love and faith instead of fear. Ernest Holmes said this in a prayer treatment; “There is but One Life, and that is my life now”

LIFE AND THE LAW - RANDOM BUT NOT BY ACCIDENT

2008-03-03T02:11:00.000-08:00

Don’t confuse the random processes found in evolution with the Spirit that guides it. If evolution was totally random, things would evolve downward just as often as upward. This is not generally what we find. We find that an overall trend lies behind things, and this trend is up.

Any knowledge-based system does this. As more knowledge accumulates, the system gets more complex and more sophisticated. In the same way, Life has gotten more complex. We are more complex than the dinosaurs, (even if we’re smaller).

In the same way, as we learn more, our thinking becomes more complex, more sophisticated. In the words of Jesus, “We put away childish things” as we grow.

So your life is not an accident. It’s a gift from a creative principle which determines the very nature of the Universe. This principle lies behind everything from the creation of suns to your toenail.

LIFE AND THE LAW - PURPOSE 2

2008-03-01T10:36:00.000-08:00

Does life have a purpose?

The reason we read or listen to things like this is often because deep down we understand that life cannot be an accident. We seek to know more about Its nature. To form Life, to create Awareness, is built in to the behaviour of the Universe. Chaos theory now shows that randomness cannot remain - it always gives way to order; so order, not chaos is the natural state of our world.

So we are not here by accident. Yet we do create chaos by our poor, limited understanding of the world and our place in it. We generate randomness by senseless interference with nature, squandering resources, leaving pollution behind.

How many people do you know who don’t know what their purpose in life is? Countless people go from day to day, focused on meaningless things, never thinking of how precious and important they are. To know your purpose is to know how wonderfully important you are. To know this makes your life appear precious. To know this is to stop wasting your life, to stop de-valuing yourself.

Do you really think that such as complex creation as you is here by accident? To use an old example, if you found a digital watch in the middle of the desert, would you assume it just happened there by accident, by the rubbing together of a billion grains of sand and soil? Or would you assume it was made somewhere? Aren’t we more complex than a digital watch? How could we think that we just happened by the working of a random process?

Well, it turns out that is an argument considered insufficient by some. The proof is not in the watch, it turns out; that is merely strong evidence. The proof, for me, is not in the watch, but in our awareness of a watch; our understanding of a watch; our ability to recognize, to classify and to CARE about finding a watch, or a dinosaur bone, or anything else.

LIFE AND THE LAW - THE MYSTERY

2008-02-29T16:35:00.001-08:00

Life is either fully there or not at all.

Nothing is partly alive. It is or it isn’t. Yet sometimes we act as though we are only half alive. We need to recognize the Life that is in us, and honour it as long as it is there.

When a person dies, there is no immediate chemical difference between the body dead and the earlier body alive. Yet something has changed - something has gone. What is that something?

Where does our Life come from, and where does it go? We know that matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. What about Life?

Someone said the greatest Mystery is that we are here to wonder about a mystery.

LIFE AND THE LAW - CHANGE

2008-02-28T08:37:00.000-08:00

LIFE, INFORMATION AND CHANGE

Life is that thing we have that is aware. So what is awareness? It is a knowing which recognizes our Self in relation to the other things around us. It is our knowledge of Self; of distinctness.

So Life is awareness, and self-awareness; awareness is a sort of knowledge. So what is knowledge? It is associated with Information, which is Order rather than Chaos.

Information is a stored or storable pattern that shows the presence of nonrandomness. All matter is simple energy arranged in a pattern, or as Deepak Chopra points out, energy and information.

Modern mathematics has given rise to Chaos theory, which shows that randomness always gives way to a nonrandom pattern, if there is any change at all. Only a complete lack of change could fail to be creative.

Creation represents change, but the action of Mind is also that which maintains the patterns. We know that the quantum world, which underlies our reality, is in constant flux. What, then, keeps our physical world from dissolving into quantum 'soup'? Could it be that the same Creative Mind that causes change also causes continuity?

LIFE AND THE LAW - PEACE

2008-02-27T20:09:00.000-08:00

PEACE OF MIND

Everyone seeks peace of mind. There is a park north of Saskatoon, Canada called Wanuskewin, which means "seeking peace of mind." Our North American native brothers clearly place high importance on this word--it is a power word, an action word, to them.

The Swami Satchidananda has said that everyone wants the same peace of mind; even criminals, addicts, and violent people seek this peace of mind; although they may have a wrong idea of how to pursue it- often with very short-term, not long-term thinking.

Peace of mind comes in part from knowing that you are in your right place. Knowing is believing with certainty. That is called faith. So have faith that you are at least on the right track. and let your mind be at peace, right here, right now and always.

LIFE AND THE LAW - SPIRITUAL PSYCHOLOGY

2008-02-26T09:30:00.000-08:00

PRAYER AS SPIRITUAL PSYCHOLOGY

Spiritual Mind Treatment, developed by Dr. Ernest Holmes, and also known a "Prayer Treatment" or simply "Treatment", is used throughout the New Thought community of organizations. This mode of prayer, constructed scientifically, but also modeled after many examples in the Bible, and also examples from many other worldwide spiritual practices, is constructed according to solid psychological principles. If you are seeking, learn how to construct a treatment, and practise it. As it builds the faith in you that your answers are there, the answers will appear.

Seek help from a New Thought Practitioner or a Minister if you don't feel comfortable in constructing your own treatments- they are trained to help you in that regard.

A friend of mine says knowing when you haven't got the answer is just as important as knowing when you have it- because all sorts of partial, incomplete, and inadequate answers may come up on the way to the real one.

One way of telling the real answer to any dilemma, is that barriers will suddenly fall away, as if by magic, as if no work was required. You may in fact be working, but it won't seem like it, things will appear to be so easy. So, if your life is already like that, you may not have to look very far.

LIFE AND THE LAW - BURDENS AND TRASH

2008-02-25T21:52:00.000-08:00

What kind of trash lies buried in your subconscious mind? What covers over the beacon that was intended to light your way? Here are some of the things that may get in your way:
GET "TURN THE WORLD ON ITS HEAD"!

THE 'SHOULDS'

We are filled with 'shoulds' that we picked up along the path. These are usually too numerous to ever do them all, but we carry them anyway, just so we can feel guilty about not doing them. Reverend Kim Fairrell has a good way to put it--she says the eleventh commandment is "Thou shalt not should on thyself", and I agree.

OUR POSSESSIONS

When Jesus said to the rich man, "Sell what you have, and give the money to the poor, and follow me" He wasn't prescribing that treatment for all the rich. The prescription was individual, as spiritual prescriptions tend to be. He knew this man was wedded to his wealth and possessions, and only be letting them go could he free himself. The man went away sad. the Bible says, because he couldn't bring himself to do that. The problem is not HAVING wealth. it is the feeling of fear of lack that causes us to hang on to it even when it is a burden to us.

SOMEDAY ISLE

Dr. Tom Costa says many of us live on "Someday Isle", where things are always going to happen but never do. "Someday I'll go back to school", "Someday I'll start that business", "Someday I'll be happy". 'Someday Isle' means sitting on the fence forever. Do it. do it, do it.

CONFUSION and UNCERTAINTY

Many of us would do something if only we knew what to do. Maybe we don't know how to listen for that still, small voice. Maybe we heard it but weren't sure we heard it. Maybe we heard it, but didn't like what we heard! That's pretty common. Then we choose to think maybe we didn't bear that quite right. I wonder if Albert Schweitzer ducked the first couple of times he heard "Drop your musical career, go to medical school, then get to Africa, quick march!" I could have been persuaded to stretch out my organ practice a bit!

Bob Newhart did the famous routine where Noah is going about his business, and God calls him up. God says, "I want you to build an ark" and Noah says "so what's an Ark?". God says. "I'm going to make it rain forty days and nights", and Noah says, "OK- so who is this, really?".

It must be a bit like that for some people. Others, though, know right away that they have found their joy, their reason for living. Watching these people can be a real delight.

How can you tune in? How do you reach the 'high place' where the still small voice can be beard? Many people confirm that prayer, contemplation, meditation, or combinations thereof can lead the way, but not if they are untargetted. Guided meditations are the stuff of retreats like the Vision Quest weekend described earlier.

LIFE AND THE LAW - TRANSFORMATION

2008-02-23T18:00:00.000-08:00

CHANGE AND TRANSFORMATION

The story of Dr. Albert Schweitzer is well known. This is a remarkable example of a man who caught a glimpse of his purpose, and changed the course of his life, and thousands of others. He was the most famous concert organist in Germany, making his living in the great cathedrals and concert halls of Europe. His music was legendary. The public was astounded, however, when he abandoned his career to go to medical school at middle age.

Graduating from medical school, Dr. Schweitzer announced that he would become a medical missionary to Africa. A concert tour was held to raise funds, and he set out with supplies, into the darkest unmapped centre of the African continent. At an isolated village called Lambarene'. he set up a clinic, then expanded it to a full hospital with later help. His international reputation drew funds and support, and volunteers, over a period of some thirty-five years. He died at a very old age, and is, I believe, buried in Africa.

Note that his initial concert career was not a wrong choice. His fame enabled him to attract the money and support to carry out this very ambitious venture. But what might have seemed like a lifetime career turned out to be nothing but a stepping stone to something far greater. Perhaps it did not seem as great in the clouded eyes of men, but it was surely far greater in the eyes of God. God surely must have spoken to and through Albert Schweitzer in those fateful days in the 1940's, when he determined to make that dramatic career change.

That doesn't mean that such a turnabout is in store for you. Yours may be not a change of career, but just a change of heart, not so visible perhaps, but perhaps even more important. What you hear froml your still, small voice may seem silly. it may frighten you, it may even seem dull. Dr. Bill Talliaferro notes; "The most frightening thing you may find when you search your heart is that the intended love of your life is the one you're already married to!".

LIFE AND THE LAW - PURPOSE

2008-02-22T12:09:00.000-08:00

YOUR LIFE PURPOSE

We may never achieve that state of full identification with this consciousness which is the ultimate achievement, as Jesus demonstrated long ago. But with effort, we may make periods of contact, like messages hurled over a wall. These messages can be life-changing.

The purpose for our life is known, at this level of consciousness. The problem for us is that our minds are not normally attuned to so high a plane. Whenever the Bible speaks about 'going to a high place', 'dwelling in high places', ' the place of the most high', it refers to a state of consciousness where the central core of our spirit is felt. This is where our mind touches that universal whole. This is where our purpose is known.

Your purpose is not "God's Will" from some distant, external Being. Your purpose is your choice, as a spiritual being in a human life span. You can find it by uncovering it.

Look for 'God's Will' right within yourself. Your own Spirit is God in action within you. When you open to the realization of your oneness with that Spirit, your will becomes God's will for you.

LIFE AND THE LAW - YOU

2008-02-21T12:43:00.001-08:00

YOU, YOUR BODY AND YOUR MIND

The 'you' at the centre of yourself, that still small Voice, knows that there is no lack of wisdom, power, health or wealth. The spiritual force at the centre of you, beneath your conscious mind, beneath the trash you have piled into your subconscious, knows only abundance, joy, love, and total adequacy.

This 'you' is neither your body, nor is it your mind, for it creates, supports and sustains these. Anything that you think of as 'yours' is not you - it is a thing you possess.

Whenever you think my body', you are revealing that your body is not you -the 'you' is that thing which possesses a body.

Whenever you think 'my mind', you reveal that deep down, you know your mind is not you-in fact it is the layer upon layer of built-up knowledge, including models of the world and how it works, patterns of the possible and the impossible. It is what computer data experts call a 'data structure', or set of data structures. It is the ego, that thinks it is you!

At the heart of all this, body and mind, is the spirit, which is the stuff of God the Universal, manifested as the individual human. It is your own personal, private piece of the greater Universe. And it has all the qualities we associate with that energy; full knowledge, full power, full joy.

It is this that Moses heard defined as 'I AM'. Being Universal, it simply is. It is this that 'owns' our mind, our body. This is the real us.

This is the Christ consciousness waiting to be found again in humanity.

LIFE AND THE LAW - EGO

2008-02-20T21:11:00.001-08:00

EGO AND INADEQUACY

To let yourself be driven altogether by others is an abandonment of your purpose on Earth. To drive yourself, on the other hand, is to let your human wants, and your imagined needs, take the place of that inner wisdom. To guide yourself in a calculated, conscious fashion is to let your ego play God in your own life, This appears to work for a great many people; these are the people who achieve great successes and then wonder why they are unhappy--why they still feel the need to search.

To be driven by your wants is to be driven out of a sense of inadequacy and lack. Wants grow out of a feeling of incompleteness, the sort of feeling that superficial conscious mental activity tends to generate.

We are very good at burying the still small voice, and feeling our lack of prosperity, we are driven to chase those bucks; or feeling a lack of love, we cling to one person after another, wondering why the bloom quickly fades. Feeling our inadequacy, we strive to excel at everything we do, and it never seems good enough. Feeling our lack of Joy, we chase after it from party to party, laughter to laughter, faking joy outwardly to make up for emptiness inside.

Can anyone here relate to that? I've been there. In some ways, I'm still there some of the time.

LIFE AND THE LAW - VISION QUEST

2008-02-19T23:01:00.000-08:00

VISION QUEST

This does not always mean we have to oppose the expectations of others. We can still do the things that represent social graces, duties and chores. But we do not have to LIVE for these things. Work to live, but do not live to work. Eat to live, but do not live to eat. Keep always before you, as your driving force, something that is derived from the God-force that wells up within you.

Our church once sponsored a seminar called 'VISION QUEST',which was held at the retreat of the Abbey at Muenster, in the heart of Saskatchewan farm belt.. Participant were led through some guided meditations, some structured prayers, to help them reach their inner source, the purpose being to get answers concerning their purpose in this world.

I am sure that everyone got their own answers, each uniquely, and each to the extent that they could reach and touch that still small voice within. This is the voice that the Course in Miracles calls the voice FOR God. It is the voice of that part of you as an individual, that touches and is merged with God as a Universal Principle. Where the individual touches the universal, problems are unknown, and only answers are found.

LIFE AND THE LAW - YOUR FINEST LIFE!

2008-02-17T13:08:00.000-08:00

LIVING YOUR FINEST LIFE

There can be no finer work of art than a life well lived.

That is the one creation that we all uniquely must do; and to live a life which is the creation of others, and not our own selves, is the greatest abandonment of our purpose that can be imagined.

Our purpose in this Earth is to add our very own unique notes to the song of Being; but to do so in such a way as to enhance harmony rather than detract from it.

"No finer work of art than a life well lived."

Those words come from a great writer and poet - Darrell Gudmundson. I know him well, but not as well as I would like to; some aspects of him elude me completely. Getting to know that poet, and introducing him to the world at large, might be one tiny part of my life's work. There are many other parts.

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Most of the life we live is the creation of others, not ourselves. We allow our life to be formed by our parents. by our employers, by our families, our friends. Some of us leave it at that, so that almost none of our art is drawn out of our own soul.

We are driven by a sense of need, to conform ourselves to the world we inhabit.

We crave love, security, approval, and to get it we do all the things we think people expect of us. That is how we fit in, and submerge our brilliance in a sea of mediocrity and sameness.

Jesus, when he was in the earth, referred to such people as "dead". In a sense, that is true, because people who have no driving force of their own, simply passively responsive to their world, are not truly alive. Being alive means making a difference, adding something to the world that is truly your own contribution.

LIFE AND THE LAW - PRAYER

2008-02-16T23:18:00.000-08:00

There is a neat little story about the country church that held a special meeting to pray for rain. And the pastor phoned around to make sure everyone came out. And sure enough, everyone came out. But before they began, the pastor called to a little girl, to come up to the front with him. And he said, “ I thank you for coming. But you didn’t come because you had faith it could rain. You came because I asked you, and I appreciate it. But this little girl is the only one of you who brought an umbrella!”

That’s the Feeling side of treatment – the emotion, the faith that the Lord, the Law, hears you always. That’s where the faith gets added to the intellectual side of life, and you will really feel the presence of God, with you.

Gregg Braden, in his excellent book "The Secrets of the Lost Mode of Prayer", writes about 'praying rain' rather than 'praying FOR rain'. The FEELING is the prayer, and words are only the tools to achieve the feeling.

Dr. Michael Beckwith, in his book The 40 Day Mind Fast Soul Feast, writes “By actively practicing the Presence of God, the compass of your mind develops the habit of continuously turning in the direction of the Spirit for intuitive guidance, comfort, security, wisdom, joy, peace, truth and love.”

LIFE AND THE LAW - INTELLECT AND EMOTION

2008-02-15T10:14:00.000-08:00

It has been said that the longest distance in the world is the 14 inches from the head to the heart.

Ernest Holmes taught that prayer treatment has two vital components… the intellectual process, where the words of the prayer constitute an argument that convinces you, that builds up your faith by a chain of logic and reason. That reason relies on your knowledge and understanding of the nature of yourself, and of God. This is where classes will build your mental database, giving you the building blocks of faith.

The second, vital component is sincere emotion, which flows from the faith, and which underscores your change of mind. It is the expression of your acceptance of Good, of gratitude, of joy, of understanding that God is infinitely giving. It is the sign that you have the faith to move whatever mountain is in front of you today.

When Jesus brought Lazarus out from the tomb, he uttered the simplest of all treatments. He said two key sentences; not exactly in the sequence that we teach, but who is going to argue with success?

He said, “Lord, I know that you hear me always.” He then said, “Lazarus, come out!” A pretty short treatment!

LIFE AND THE LAW - CHANGING YOUR THINKING

2008-02-13T14:33:00.000-08:00

We live in a funny world – an odd society. If you put up a sign that said “Experience Heaven - $300” You’d get a rush of curious people. They’d be looking for the drug you were selling, or the getaway condo in the mountains, or the pyramid scheme. They would pay $300, but if you say “Heaven on Earth – no charge – just change your thinking!” they’ll turn away muttering, and sooner or later someone will say, “I know it was too good to be true.” And if you asked for some commitment in return, you wouldn’t see the people for dust.

Our world – our society – is going to change. Just watch. Grassroots movements are building now in what is being called "The Shift".

So let’s say I want to be committed to Heaven on Earth. What do I need to do? Well, you have to change your thinking. Only your thinking stands in the way, right now. It is one of those things, like happiness, that if you think you have it, why then…. you have it!

The tool that New Thought offers you for changing your thinking is a method of prayer called Spiritual Mind Treatment. Developed (or rather discovered) by Ernest Holmes, Treatment is a type of prayer that contains certain steps for us to follow in moving our mind, from a consciousness of the world… to a consciousness of the Spirit of God.

We see treatment modeled for us in many places in the Bible. The form of treatment is obeyed in the Psalms of David; it is mirrored perfectly in the Lord’s prayer. In the words of Jesus, it is reflected many times. And yet it is never set down as a prescription; examples are many, but instructions are lacking. It is there, but with no explanation.

Ernest Holmes provided us with those instructions, in his textbook The Science of Mind. Courses in the Science of Mind take people through the theory, and the ‘formula’ for prayer. But you could get the basic information just by reading, as many people do.

Why isn't reading a book enough?

What you can’t get by reading is the group practice in doing treatment; the mutual support, the interactive learning that moves it from a neat, emotionless exercise to a process that you will undertake with deep conviction. Participating in classes moves it from your head to your heart, if you let it. It is one thing to follow a series of steps by rote; it is quite another to express your faith through feeling, and it is the feeling that represents a real change of mind and heart.

LIFE AND THE LAW - THE KINGDOM IS WITHIN

2008-02-12T20:21:00.000-08:00

No matter what you decide is your main mission in life, you will only fulfill it properly if you learn to practice the presence of God within you. I know most people would use the phrase “God at your side.” There is good too, but I think we need to bit the bullet and accept that we cannot run and we cannot hide from the truth….. God is too big to be kept out. God is IN. Like the sign on Lucy’s booth, in the Charlie Brown comic, the Doctor is IN.

Yes, the Doctor is definitely IN. But you need more than ten cents. You need to commit your life to a new realization. I know it sounds serious – but it’s not as bad as it sounds. The world is full of folks who never commit to anything if they can help it – then they wonder why their life is unfulfilled; why they think they’re poor, or sick, or unhappy.

Jesus taught that the Kingdom is within you. Not in the sky, out in the world – in YOU. This should appear to you as an opportunity. It’s funny how few really reach for it. Is it because we don't understand it, or because we don't believe it?

Eckhart Tolle's book "A New Earth" is about the conversion of consciousness- to reach a New Heaven within and A New Earth on the outside. Check it out, and read about it on Oprah.com.

LIFE AND THE LAW - HOW WILL YOU PLAY?

2008-02-11T20:37:00.000-08:00

So how are you going to play today?

To quote Mary Manin Morrissey;

Scripture says, "Behold, I place before you a day. Create with it what you will." The wonderful truth is that we co-create our lives by deciding how we will experience the circumstances of our lives. Today, choose to experience the joy of a life fully lived.

Live that life in the full consciousness of who and what you are…… don’t fall into the idea that you are small, or imperfect, or inadequate, or poor. How could you be?

Your most glorious life is lived by holding your mind steadily, continually, in the thought of God as your Innermost Reality, the Thing Itself, as Ernest Holmes called It, that which forms your very spark of life. Without it, you would be less than nothing…. But existence without it would simply not be possible. You have your life completely in God… and the life in you is God. In the words attributed to Jesus, “The Father and I are One.”

But, you say, the world keeps grabbing at my attention. I can’t spend my life being blissed out in the consciousness of God all the time! How would I get my work done! I’d be weird! I’d be some kind of ascetic monk, or a Gandhi, or……

Yeah……. So what?

You would be whatever God intended you to be. That’s already built into your makeup. God already had a Gandhi… one was enough. God is in the world, as you, because God needs a YOU! Whatever that is. All you need to do is…. notice how easy it is to say that…..All you need to do is…. Be yourself. But not a shrinking, cowering, shriveling, sniveling, groveling, simpering you. Who needs that? Your mission, should you accept it, is simply to be all that you can be – as you.

The world has seen some really great curmudgeons…. they are kind of neat in the way they can grump their way through life. Some people love them, and look forward to their good-natured crabbiness. You could be a great curmudgeon.

The world needs a good loudmouth. Sure we’ve got Bill O'Reilly, hist disciple Stephen Colbert, and Rush Limberger or whatever kind to cheese he thinks he is, but we could use one more – a different one. You could make a career as a loudmouth. I’ll time-share with you!

What we don’t need is a whole world full of identical, bland, goody two-shoes who are so busy being pious that they can’t stop to help, or won’t complain when they see something wrong going on. Oh we can take a few, but then the positions are filled.

We need skills. The world needs healers, educators, counselors, and leaders. The world needs not your wisdom, but God’s wisdom allowed to flow through you, into a world that can’t get too much of it. Hamid Karzai needs wisdom, in Afghanistan. All our leaders need a lot of wisdom.

LIFE AND THE LAW - IMMORTALITY!

2008-02-10T01:29:00.000-08:00

YOU ARE IMMORTAL

You have lived forever, and you will never die. Time means nothing to you.

Jesus said, “The Father and I are One.” Then, speaking as the Father within, he said, “Before Abraham was born, I AM.” Interesting translation. Do you suppose the translator thought about that, and was tempted to tinker with it? Both past and future tense used in reference to the same thing. Wouldn’t that make a translator too tense?

“Before Abraham was born, I AM.” This tells us that time is not relevant to the operation of God. God does not live forever; God lives only NOW, and NOW is eternal. Can you grasp that? Now is eternal. And that goes for your own NOW moment, too. You live NOW, and NOW is eternal.

Just stretch your own God-given imagination now and say with me, Before Abraham was, I AM.

This is a declaration of timeless immortality. This is a statement of eternality, of indestructibility, which brings to you the faith that you need to step out fearlessly into life.

Many people think of a soul that never dies, of an existence into infinity. But infinity cannot be single-ended. It extends both ways, to past and future. Life just IS. There is no such thing as half an infinity! Don't worry about how you will spend eternity - you are in eternity, NOW!

How can anything harm you, when you will always exist in this eternal now? The Spirit that is you ensures that. Oh, bodies come and bodies go; and souls may become feeble; but spirit is eternally the same, eternally new, and eternally one with Its creation throughout all space and time.

LIFE AND THE LAW - STEPPING OUT!

2008-02-08T20:33:00.000-08:00

STEPPING OUT INTO LIFE

What is the life that you have? You are a bundle of organic chemicals and minerals – you are a walking bag of water. All that you are would be nothing without the life that animates you.

And ordinary life is not enough. It’s not enough to be a mass of protoplasmic jelly that can manage to reproduce itself. What would you be without your awareness – your self-awareness, your point of view, and your opinions? What would you be without your precious memories, your learnings throughout your life?

And finally, what would you be without your hopes, your dreams, your drive, and your desires. What would you be without the Love that lives in you, and animates you?

This is your spirit. It is Spirit that drives you forward, that itches to be greater. It is not your soul. Your soul is the unconscious feeling in you – the feeling of simply being, along with the feelings of hunger, thirst, all the unconscious drives that we have.

A dog has a soul – but a dog never desires to be something it is not. A dog never desires to experience being more than a dog – or even other than a dog. No dog desires to try being a cat for awhile, just to see what it’s like. Yet if you could invent a machine that would let people be a dog, or a cat, or an eagle, for half an hour, you would have people lined up around the block, with twenty bucks gripped in every fist. People would go for that!

We have a spark that has existed since the dawn of time, and which now lives in us, yearning to experience Itself to the fullest extent possible through us and as us. We are the temples in which that Spirit dwells

You have that within you now, that has created the universe.

LIFE AND THE LAW - GENESIS SYMBOLISM

2008-02-07T12:48:00.000-08:00

Here is one symbolic interpretation of the beginning of Genesis:
Click on the graphic to see a larger version...

LIFE AND THE LAW - INTEGRITY

2008-02-06T09:57:00.000-08:00

INTEGRITY

The companion to individuality is integrity. Integrity is the ability to know yourself, and to remain true to yourself, even in the face of pressures to conform or to bend to everyday forces that would draw you away from your true nature, into conformity or mediocrity.

Have you given away your independence of thought to the media, to consumerism, to political parties, to authoritarianism in all its forms, in churches, or in society? There are a lot of ways in which you can give your individuality, your independence, away.

The teachings of New Thought are aimed at teaching people HOW to think, but not WHAT to think. They offer the freedom to search and seek your own answers to life. Please use these teachings as guides, and not their teachers as gurus. The essential character of New Thought is to respect your individuality.

So what have you done with the individuality you were given? Have you used it to build happiness, to cultivate joy? Have you used it to play amongst the beauty of the world? To create art? To uplift and harmonize with your fellow BE-ings?

Even if you have squandered this precious gift up to now, it’s not too late. It’s never too late, to grab hold of the reins of your life, and steer for greatness. Every instant holds the potential for a new start - NOW!

You can be a great individual right where you are. You can be a great neighbour. You can be a great parent, a great aunt or cousin. You can be a great writer, artist, or a great cook.

One thing is for sure – there is only one you. There is no one else like you, because the complexity of life sees to that.

Isn’t it amazing to think, that amongst the whole human race, our genetic code varies less than decimal zero two percent. And yet that point oh-two percent accounts for all the differences we see in the world!

Add to that the variation in our learning, in our experience, and we end up with uniqueness so profound that words cannot describe it. I salute your uniqueness!

I urge you to treasure your individuality – your freedom to think and to choose.

Remember it is the second gift ever given. Learn to use it well and wisely.

LIFE AND THE LAW - INDIVIDUALITY - AWAKENING

2008-02-05T22:16:00.000-08:00

INDIVIDUALITY

We exist to provide different points of view. Imagine a single universal entity, one great intelligence, undifferentiated. What is Its viewpoint? There is no viewpoint, because there is only one outlook, with nothing to look out upon – everything is within the One. There is only one thought, and it must be an unconscious thought, because consciousness requires an object to contemplate.

I’ll repeat that – consciousness requires an object to contemplate, something to dwell upon, to focus on. You cannot be conscious without being conscious OF something. Without that, thought can only be unconscious.

Genesis describes the awakening of Something, which we label God for lack of language, into consciousness, through the creation of multiple divisions of itself, made by the formation of physical barriers, forms, shapes, bodies, and the creation of multiple viewpoints through which God can observe Itself.

It should give you an appreciation for your own individuality.

LIFE AND THE LAW - LIGHT - THE FIRST GIFT

2008-02-04T12:08:00.000-08:00

Individuality is your second gift from God, after what?

After the light itself, the energy that makes you and I and everything. Light is used to describe intelligence. Wisdom is pure light; ignorance is darkness – that’s how it is traditionally described.

General MacArthur said, “I am a soldier who did his duty, as God gave him the light to see it”.

Jesus said, “I am the way, and the light”; and “I am the light of the world”.

We talk about shedding light on the subject. We say that someone lights up a room.

We bring our light with us wherever we go, and our light shines on all those around us – that is, our intelligence, our personality, our BE-ing, is like a light in the world. And our individuality keeps each light from the boredom of sameness.

Why individuality? Why is there each separate, individual one of us? Here is one of the mysteries of the ages. And we have the answer in the mirror!

There is a saying that if we all thought the same, there would only need to be one of us. That is your clue to the purpose of our being. To be ourselves, and not a shadow of someone else – not a shadow of our parents, our spouse, or our siblings.

LIFE AND THE LAW - INDIVIDUALITY, FORM AND EVOLUTION

2008-02-03T20:56:00.000-08:00

So what does Science tell us about individuality?

In an article from Stanford University, on individuality in quantum theory, Steven French points out that we think of individual things as being different from one another in form. But we could easily imagine two or more things that were the same – like duplicates or clones, they would still be individuals, because they are separate in space. So a separation in space is one way we recognize individuals.

But if I was in the same space now as you were in a moment ago, we would still be individual. So individuality means we are separate not only in space but also time.

Our FORM defines the space we occupy. You form is different from my form – likely not as wide, for one thing! So our form marks us as individuals. Forms are characterized by a beginning and an end, both in space, defining a shape, and in time, defining a duration.

The quantum physics people know that the stuff we’re made of is reducible to identical types of particles. There’s a list of particles only so long, and that’s it. All things are made of these. And these particles are each defined by little wiggly waves of energy called strings that are nothing more that wiggles in the fabric of space. So we are all made of exactly the same stuff – which in metaphysics we call SUBSTANCE.

So all created things are individual by their FORM, which includes their location in space and time, but things are all one by their SUBSTANCE, which is the same for all things, and which comes from the same creation event, the Big Bang.

But what causes our form? Where does our form come from? Well, form has evolved from the big bang. Substance was created in that first moment, but form evolves. And what causes it to evolve? The action of the Spirit within. That invisible essence that is the intelligence of the Universe that is within us, within all things has evolved in form.

Our individuality comes from the individualized Spirit within us, from which grows not only our form in the physical realm, but our personality in the mental realm as well.

So when you read Ernest Holmes, and you read that God is both Love and Law, the Love part is that creative spirit within you, and the Law is the whole ongoing unfoldment of the Big Bang, by which substance is continually being drawn into an infinite variety of forms, changing and shifting with the creative flow, the impulse of Spirit pressing outward to express Itself in countless ways.

The law has remained the same, but the Love, the impulse, the intelligence, the wisdom is still evolving - at least in the physical universe that we experience.

LIFE AND THE LAW - IIN THE BEGINNING

2008-02-02T19:58:00.000-08:00

GENESIS:

At the beginning of the Bible, in Genesis, it begins by describing the creation process in symbolic language.

It says that the first thing created was a division of the realm of the invisible, and a physical realm; heaven and earth. This is the separation between thought (heaven, the invisible realm) and things (the physical, visible realm of forms and objects).

The first thing brought forth was light, or pure energy ("Let there be Light"). Today we call it the Big Bang.

And then there was a division of the waters, it says, and water is a symbolic term for the substance of spirit, which is the stuff of the invisible realm.

And it says a firmament was created, which is a division or form, to separate those waters, that is, to appear to separate spirit from Itself. This is the formation of separate individuality, creating a apparent division of Spirit. Note; this is not a separation, but an apparent division.

And it says God called the firmament Heaven. It is the space between the waters, the space that the individual spirits inhabit.

And so, we are in it, right now…. We are those flowing waters of Spirit, held apart from one another by that firmament, which we call FORM, our bodies. In fact we can see that all things are separated by their forms, so that we name them, or describe them, as individual objects.

This is creation, as we know it. This is Heaven. Sorry to disappoint you!

Jesus said "The kingdom of Heaven is within you", and "The Kingdom is at hand." So if it is really available right now (at hand), then it must not require creation, it must simply require realization.

What, you say, my world doesn’t look like the Heaven I pictured? That’s because you have either not made a clear picture, or you haven’t built according to your picture.

Have you ever built a house? When you build a house, you start with an idea, like the idea we have of heaven. From that, you obtain or create a set of detailed plans. Then you track down the materials and the help you need. And if the help does it right, you have a nice house, one that matches your original idea.

Did you do that with your life? Most of us didn't. Most of us have an idea, but no plan. Or we have a scattered, rough sloppy plan with no detail. We get sidetracked and settle for poor materials. And most of all, we don’t want qualified help – we can go it alone, can’t we?
Then we wonder why our life doesn’t resemble our idea of heaven.

LIFE AND THE LAW - INDIVIDUALITY AND GOD

2008-02-01T22:04:00.000-08:00

Our individuality is the first and best gift that God has provided to us. It is the second thing that God is said to have created, right after "Let there be light".

First, what do we mean by God?

We mean the whole thing, both the initial energy of space from which all things have come, but the intelligence, the impulse, which caused the outward unfoldment of the complexity we see today. When you want to see God, look anywhere – it doesn’t matter where you look, and it doesn’t matter whether you look into the world of material, or into the world of ideas from which material is shaped.

Whatever there was before there was anything, that is God.

Before the earth and the stars were formed, our individuality was created, through the division of Spirit itself into the appearance of many parts. Without it, there could be no world, no universe, because without it, all things would still be together as one, a single undifferentiated point of energy.

LIFE AND THE LAW - MENTAL LAW

2008-01-31T00:54:00.000-08:00

MENTAL LAW IS NOT A CHOICE:

You do not choose to use Mental Law. It is the principle by which you live. It is the manner in which your intelligence lives life.

Like gravity, the Law of Mind is a universal principle, which acts everywhere whether it can be seen to act or not.

Thought is creative; thoughts are things, and it is done unto you as you believe.

Your only choice is HOW you will use it; deliberately, consciously and with orderly results, or randomly, unconciously and with chaotic random results.

Directing your conscious thought seems easy, but casual surface thought do not immediately create. Directing your inner belief takes more work.

Do you doubt that it's worth it?