Ernest Holmes - Its Up to You

Table of Contents

TITLES BY ERNEST HOLMES PUBLISHED BY TARCHER/PENGUIN

JEREMY P. TARCHER

What you experience in your everyday life is largely a matter of your own choice, whether or not you realize it. Sometimes that choice is specifically and consciously made; other times the choice is automatic, being a culmination of habitual patterns of thought and emotion.

However, whatever your lot may be there is always the potential for a greater experience of all those things that make living more worthwhile. The process of achieving an ever greater abundance of the good things of life lies not so much in outward efforts as in an inner process of thought.

It is in your own mind that you create and establish the causes, the patterns, of your daily experience. You may not fully agree with this, but it is nonetheless true. And you will prove it to be so as you come to learn to redirect your thoughts so that they are more affirmative than negative. As you do this every aspect of your experience will change for the better.

In the pages of this book you will find many ideas which will enable you to upgrade your thinking, permit you to discover the pathway to more abundant living, and discover a new joy and vitality in just being alive.

The ideas, the ways and means, are presented to you. What you do with them, how you use them, and what they will mean to you is a very personal matter. If you honestly and sincerely desire to make your life better, the way is open to you.

What you do about it is up to you!

WILLIS KINNEAR

It appears that every individual is afraid of something. Maybe it is only a fear of having people believe we have a fear. Maybe it is only a subjective holdover tendency from our religious forebears who devoutly believed that God must be feared. Maybe it is only the fear of what people will think about us: what we have, what we do, or how we look.

There are various sources from which people derive fear, and there are certain fundamental fears which practically all people have. Let us consider these fears, try to analyze them and see what is behind them, where they come from, and whether or not we shall be able to do anything about getting rid of them.

The fear of death is the Goliath which slays the multitudes. The reason this is such a great fear is not only because we cannot bear the thought of leaving behind the people we love, but because it involves an uncertainty of the future. And this fear of death involves all uncertainty and fear of lacklack of time, lack of friends, lack of health, and lack of economic security that is one of the greatest fears in the world today.

Where shall we go when we die? This is certainly one of the big questions in our mind. If today is the logical continuance of yesterday, then all the tomorrows that stretch down the vistas of eternity will be a continuity of experience and remembrance. We shall keep on keeping on. We shall continue in our own individual stream of consciousness, but forever and ever expanding. Not less but ever more; more, and still more.

Regardless of all we believe can be accomplished by man because of his oneness with God, I do not believe that any man can be happy unless he believes in the continuity of his own existence. I have come to believe that it is impossible for a man to be contented in this life unless he feels sure of the next one. I believe that the greatest single curative power known to the mind of man is a spiritual thought in the subjective mind. By spiritual thought I mean, here, an absolute inner conviction that one may trust in the integrity of the Universe and that sooner or later all things will be made right. Without that we have materialism, and a philosophy of materialism never yet created a great art, a great religion, a great philosopher, or a great anything.

Man spends the first third of his life in preparing himself for lifephysically, mentally, and financially. He is always expecting, hoping, progressing, expandingsomething big, something satisfying is going to happen. Consequently, his mind is open. He is happy. He is expressing. During the next third of his life, speaking of the average man, he marries, he has a family. His whole thought and emotion is spent here. But quite frequently, in the last third of his life he begins to meet with frustrations. When the time was that everyone believed in some kind of religion, he trusted to some kind of a future. Now this is more likely than not to be shaken. Dr. Jung, one of the worlds greatest psychologists, said: As a physician I am convinced that it is hygienicif I may use the wordto discover in death a goal towards which one can strive; and that shrinking away from it is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose. I therefore consider the religious teaching of a life hereafter consonant with the standpoint of psychic hygiene. And people who do not have it will miss something, because during that last third of life there will be little to which they can look forward. That is why we often see the last third of a mans life appear to decline when it should be another great experience and a subjective preparation for something even more sublime.

The soul longs, with its deepest intensity, for self-preservation. It is the spiritual conviction in that deep cryptic being of ours that we are born of eternal day and made in the image of God to traverse a heavenly way. It is the strongest emotion we have. Why is this true unless way back there, in the beginnings of creation, there was incarnated in us that deathless Principle of Life which of Itself knows no defeat? We may analyze ourselves all we want to, and get a certain satisfaction out of so doing, but there can never come lasting peace and happiness without spiritual conviction, the reason being that Spirit is Reality.

If a man knows that Life never began and will never end, he will be immediately fortified and inspired to begin the work of bringing out perfection in his daily life. When a man understands that God is incarnated in him; that he is a new creationan individual impartation of that which is Divinehe feels a new birth. When he grasps the fact that the Divine thing in him which longs to be, will always be, then will his intellect see it and his emotion respond to it and life can no longer frighten him.

There is another fear which is as great as the fear of death, and that is the fear of lifethe fear of people, the fear which comes from sensitiveness. In some respects this is the worst fear that can take hold of one. There is probably no way of weighing and measuring it as against other fears, but there is none greater than the fear of life.