Table of Contents
BOOKS BY ERNEST HOLMES
Can We Talk to God?
Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life
Creative Ideas
Creative Mind and Success
Effective Prayer
Good for You
How to Change Your Life
How to Use the Science of Mind
Ideas for Living
It Can Happen to You
Questions and Answers on the Science of Mind
The Beverly Hills Lectures
The Magic of the Mind
The Science of Mind
The Science of Mind Approach to Successful Living
The Voice Celestial
This Thing Called Life
This Thing Called You
What Religious Science Teaches
Words That Heal Today
PUBLISHERS NOTE
One of the earliest admonitions to humankind was: Know thyself. In attempting self-discovery, people became aware that thoughts are things, and this concept has been expressed in many ways. This idea and Jesus statement that as thou hast believed, so be it done unto thee are still lightly taken. Their full significance and importance in an individuals life is yet to be realized.
This book is an attempt to bring to the attention of the readers many of the varied aspects of their experience of life and the relationship of their thinking to what they experience.
Every thought has its consequence. And every experience has a causative thought behind it. Thoughts are things, and all the things in ones life have a thought that precedes them.
The material in this volume can be divided into two parts. The Challenge, which appears on the left-hand page illustrates the various problems, challenges and difficulties which everyone faces at one time or another.
The right-hand page is The Solution, from the writings of Ernest Holmes, which presents the solutions to them. Dr. Holmes was one of the great metaphysicians and religious philosophers of the twentieth century. His teaching, known as Science of Mind, has had a dramatic influence on contemporary spiritual thought. His technique for effective prayerspiritual mind treatmenthas opened the door to a new way of life for countless thousands of people.
The Challenge pages were written by Willis Kinnear, who was then Editor of Science of Mind Magazine and Director of Science of Mind Publishing.
FOREWORD
If you knew how, would you be willing to create happiness, wealth, health and success in your life? If I shared the knowledge about how to do just that, could you accept it? Would you use it?
Well, heres the secret Im thrilled to share with you: our thinking influences our every experiencethoughts are things. From the simplest things, say grocery lists, to the larger issues of life, love and happiness, what we say, write, believe, think... must become the circumstances of our living.
Thats why I love this book by Dr. Ernest Holmes; its so important to the spiritual freedom of every man, woman and child. Without preaching, it teaches us how to transform the personal challenges of fear, anger, jealousy and uncertainty into courage, acceptance, compassion and confidence. This book will lead you from chaos to harmony.
Ernest Holmes was one of the most important spiritual philosophers of this century. He melded the wisdom of the ages into a modern, practical, pragmatic approach to living life to the fullest. No bowing or scraping required here. Thinking our everyday practiceis the key to a full, rich, fulfilling, lavish life.
I invite you to take this book home with you, read it again and again, practice its valuable insights. You will be changed by your transformed thinking. Go ahead! You deserve it!
Rev. Kathianne Lewis
[EDITORS NOTE: Rev. Kathianne Lewis is Minister of the Center for Spiritual Living, a dynamic church for spiritual seekers in Seattle, Washington.]
Thoughts are things, so we find that different kinds of thoughts become different kinds of things.Thought is always creative; it must always create after its own type. It must always give form to something, and the something to which it gives form is not a thing of itself, because the thought that creates the form is a product of the thinker. The thinker comes first, then the thought, and then the form
ERNEST HOLMES
I
The World Around You
You are immersed in the immense activity of living. There is a continual challenge of securing from the world around you the things that make life worthwhile, and the incessant demands that your environment makes upon you.
This constant interplay can never be avoided, for it is the very essence of being alive. Whether it is a pleasurable experience or one of continual conflict is the ever-present decision constantly facing you.
Some individuals, in spite of the pressures and vicissitudes of the world about them, are able to master them and literally become masters of their own lives. Others seem to let life overwhelm them, seem to be as lost and helpless as a small rudderless craft in a storm-swept sea. The difference can be traced to a way of thinking.
Are you slave or master? Do you let external situations control you? Or do you control them? Through right well-directed patterns of thought, life can become a joyous daily challenge.
How Do You Think About Yourself?
Have you ever become the least bit concerned or interested in what you think about yourself? If not, it might be to your advantage to give your thinking a good going-over.
In a British medical journal, The Practitioner, an article specifically pointed out that doctors should be very careful about what they think about their patients, for there is a strong indication that in some way patients appear to react according to the doctors thoughts about them. If the doctor thinks that the patients will not get better, this seems to be transferred to the patients attitude, and they do not get better.
As for the relationship of this idea to our thinking, it cannot be overemphasized that if what another thinks about us has an effect on what we experience, then how much greater effect our own thought has on our experience! We live according to the patterns of thought that we maintain. If we find that our ideas are constantly dwelling on ill-health, failure and bad relationships, is it any wonder that we never seem to be able to get away from such experiences?
There is little we can do about what others think about us, but we can do a lot about what we think about ourselves. Can we possibly afford to think of ourselves other than in a manner that maintains a mental picture of the best possible experiences we could desire? We encounter enough difficulties in everyday living without going to the trouble of creating additional ones through the negative nature of our thought. If we want to be influential people we must start influencing ourselves. But be sure the influencing is in the right direction.
Identity
Your knowledge that the great I Am is ever available gives you an increasing capacity to draw upon It, and to become inwardly aware of the presence of Spirit within you. Through the quiet contemplation of the omniaction of Spirit, learn to look quietly and calmly upon every false condition, seeing through it to the invisible side of Reality which molds conditions and re-creates all of your affairs closer to a Divine pattern.
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