Ernest Holmes - This Thing Called You

Y ou, like all others, are seeking the joy of living. You wish to be needed, to be loved, to be included in the great drama of life. This urge is in every individual. It is in everything. The rose exists to express beauty. Root and branch conspire with nature to give birth to blossom. An artist will starve in his garret that he may chisel an angelic form from a slab of marble, compelling the unyielding substance to accept his breath of creation.

Not only human beings, but everything in nature is endowed with this creative urge. When moisture is precipitated the desert receives it with gladness and breaks forth into a song of creation. Making the most of its brief season, it blossoms in joy, storing within its bosom the seed of a future flowering. It is impossible to escape this creative urge. Everything must find fulfillment or perish.

No man willed this so. Evolution is proof of an irresistible urge which pushes everything onward and upward. Man did not create life, he is something that lives in, from, and by it. He cannot escape life or the necessity of giving expression to it through living.

In some way which you know not of, through some process which never reveals its face, Life has entered into you and with it the irresistible impulse to create. Divine Intelligence has willed it so, nor you, nor any other person, nor all the wit, science or philosophy of man, nor the inspiration of saints or sages, can change one bit of it any more than man can arrest the eternal circuits of time, the revolutions of the planets or the desire of the fledgling to leave its nest, to soar and sing.

Create or perish is the eternal mandate of nature. Be constructive or become frustrated, is an equal demand. You cannot escape the conclusion that whatever this thing is which is seeking expression through everything, it can find satisfactory outlet only through constructive and life-giving creativeness. You may call this process good or evil, right or wrong, God or the devil, heaven or hell. Would it not be more simple to say that finally things work out for the best only when they are life-giving.

We are all some part of a universal order. The very urge for personal gratification is incomplete until it finds a universal outlet. This is the cause back of all upheavals in human history. The pattern is trying to fit the pieces into greater and greater units as though it could not accomplish its purpose through anything other than a democracy of Spirit, a union of all. This union, however, does not mean sameness, for while unity requires conformity to principles, unity never means uniformity. Every blade of grass, every crystal, every drop of water, like every individual, is a little different from any other one of its species.

Humanity is made up of innumerable individuals, no two alike, and yet society is a composite whole moving gradually toward some ultimate goal. What could this goal be other than that everyone, while remaining individual, shall find a more complete expression in and among all other individuals? This has been the dream of the ages, that the lion shall lie down with the lamb, and a little child shall lead them. As Jesus said, that they may be one, even as we are one.

You belong to the universe in which you live, you are one with the Creative Genius back of this vast array of ceaseless motion, this original flow of life. You are as much a part of it as the sun, the earth and the air. There is something in you telling you thislike a voice echoing from some mountain top of inward vision, like a light whose origin no man has seen, like an impulse welling up from an invisible source.

Your soul belongs to the universe. Your mind is an outlet through which the Creative Intelligence of the universe seeks fulfillment.

This is your starting point for investigating the meaning of those impulses, longings and desires which accompany you through life. You may accept that the source through which they come is real. You may accept that the universe is filled with a Divine and Infinite Presence, perhaps the infinite of yourself. Not the infinite of your limited self, but the infinite of the Divine Self you must be. There must be a pattern of yourself in this invisible.

The greatest minds of the ages have accepted that such a pattern exists. Socrates called it his spirit, Jesus his Father in Heaven. Some ancient mystics called it Atman. Why dont you call it just you, your complete self? For surely this is what they all have meant.

Just try to catch the larger vision and realize that there have been and are people, many of them, who have wooed and wed some invisible Presence until Its atmosphere and essence have become woven into the fabric of their own existence. Every man is a doorway, as Emerson said, through which the Infinite passes into the finite, through which God becomes man, through which the Universal becomes individual.