Ernest Holmes on Spiritual Mind Healing

[Guest guest]

One of my early influences:

Spiritual Mind Healing

by Ernest Holmes

We believe in spiritual mind healing; it is part of our conviction and our practice. At the same time we do not disbelieve in any form of healing, whether it be medicine, surgery, psychiatry, diet, or exercise. Some people say to me they think that we should believe in only one. Every new discovery in medicine is just as much a useful tool for a specific purpose as any other new invention. There is the One Mind operating in all these channels. To deny this would be to rest our case on the basis of superstition, which is ignorance that can only lead to a new form of dogmatism.

In our field we are interested in spiritual mind healing. I do not consider this the most important thing we teach, but I think it is important that we should be relieved from suffering. The person who is in pain or fear naturally wishes to be released from it as quickly as possible. I do not believe that God has imposed suffering upon anyone to punish him or to teach him a lesson. To me this is stupidity and ignorance. Human beings seem to have assumed the prerogative of determining that God inflicts the suffering. When actually, man appears to be responsible for his suffering through ignorance of the Divine nature. We believe that spiritual mind healing is a complement to medicine, to psychology, and to every system of therapeutics. Some day these fields will all come together for mutual benefit and effectiveness. They are nearer together now than most people realize. I have not known one single physician who would not have been

glad to have had a spiritual practitioner working with his patient. I have had hundreds of them tell me this.

That is the way it ought to be, because one field does not interfere with the other. However, spiritual mind treatment, under right conditions, can and may transcend other methods. We shall have to recognize this if we believe that we are living in a spiritual system, because that is the way the Universe is organized and operates. It is a spiritual system of Intelligence acting as Law. There is One Mind and we use It. Our word is operated upon by an intelligent creativity superior to our own. Therefore, when it comes to the act of a spiritual treatment, it is a conscious declaration of our belief in a Presence whose Wisdom moves through our ideas and whose action as Law manifests them for definite purposes. There is nothing more specific than a definite spiritual mind treatment.

The simplicity of it is this: A Spiritual Mind Treatment is an atmosphere of feeling - followed by words consciously and definitely formulated, with a supposition that these words, acted upon by Law, are for the person with whom they are identified; and that what is implied in the treatment will transpire in the experience of the person being treated.

We always find this is one of the most difficult things to explain because of its simplicity. The first point I want to make clear is that we do not send out anything to the person we are treating. We believe, along with the great thinkers throughout the ages, that God is everywhere; therefore, all of God is wherever God is - what God knows is known everywhere, so to speak, and everything is present at all times. Modern physics is beginning to take this position, too. It is no longer strange to think of an unbroken unity of the whole. Nor should treatment be thought of as a concentration of anything. No one ever concentrated the principle of harmony or of mathematics or of beauty - he only used it.

Our treatment, then, begins with the recognition that there is One Life, that Life is God, that Life is Perfect, and is the life of the one we are treating, say, . He is a Divine being now, not by-and-by. He didn't make himself a Divine being, nor did we - any more than we made the world round. That is the way he inherently is, regardless of any appearance to the contrary. Now, according to what you and I mean when we say the word "God" there will be in our word an essence - that which we call the spirit of the treatment which is different from the letter. Both are necessary; one is the conviction of awareness, the other is the form or wording of that awareness.

What does it mean when you or I say that there is One Life, and that Life is God, and the life of now? It means that in reality there is nothing in this man's life different from God, other than God, separate or apart from God, and that there is nothing in the Universe that desires to harm or hurt this man.

But we all know that this concept is not accepted everywhere. However, psychology and psychiatry have made a tremendous contribution to our field. Let me say right here that wherever you can get any truth to add to what truth you have, grab it. Learn once and for all that sugar is sweet, whether you find it in the sugar bowl or the dustpan. Truth is truth whoever announces it, from whatever source it comes. You and I will learn more by putting together all true knowledge for a still greater synthesis than by rejecting ideas because we may not like the source from which they come.

Now, psychologists point out that a psychological repression, in conflict, is a group of highly emotionally charged thoughts, ideas, and feelings so deeply buried in the unconscious that it cannot be brought to the surface by an act of will or through the imagination. They tell us that seventy-five to eighty-five percent of all illnesses and accidents are the result of unconscious thoughts on the part of the people who have them to get away from the liability of living. At the core of a neurosis are always four constituent elements: rejection, guilt, insecurity, and anxiety. It is believed that every person has a neurosis because there is no one who has not made mistakes.

We believe it is scientific in our field to relieve people of their sense of guilt. A spiritual mind practitioner in talking to his patient and in treating him will relieve him of his neurotic liabilities. You may ask, "How will he do it?" Here is one of our basic principles: Thoughts are things; mental states in total become a mental impulsion to create and produce that which is like them. In a Spiritual Mind Treatment we incorporate those ideas which relieve the sense of isolation, the burden of guilt, and the condemnation of rejection; it relieves the tension of insecurity and anxiety and heals the neurosis in such degree as it goes deeper than the thoughts that gave rise to the neurosis.

For instance, most weariness we are now told is the result of a lack of enthusiastic joy in living. Therefore, Spiritual Mind Treatment must realize joy. must be awakened from apathy - that was first mental, then subjective, and finally physical.

Someone might ask, "How are you going to get this over to ?"

In our practice, what the practitioner silently realizes for in his own mind is known in the medium of the One Mind, which is also operating through the patient's mind and thus he rises to the same level of realization in his mind. Therefore, the person treating or praying for must have a deep feeling about God.

Let us continue our hypothetical treatment: "God is Love. There is only this One Love, and he is aware of It. He is aware that he is wanted, needed, and loved. He belongs to the Universe. God hasn't rejected him he does not reject himself. There is no condemnation or judgment operating through him. Every plant that the Divine Mind has not planted is rooted up and cast out. Whatever there is that does not belong is eliminated. He has a consciousness of belonging to Life, of feeling the Divine Presence, and now accepts his good. He has a complete sense of good health, of being unburdened and enters into the joy of living, which is reflected in every aspect of his experience. He has faith in himself. The perfect action of God casts out all unlike God and I give thanks that it is doing this right now for ."

Each person can speak out of his own consciousness of God and heal the discord within the life of another. Do you really love your fellow man, and in compassion wish him freedom as much as your own?

Declare it and decree it, and as surely as the day follows night, shall it dawn upon you through experience, out of practice, that there is a silent Power, actual and dynamic, that heals. You will know that the person you prayed for has been affected by the One Mind, whose compassion he felt, whose love restored his wholeness.