The Lesson of Freedom

“The freedom to be whole means learning to see ourselves through nonjudgmental eyes, allowing us to love the totality of who we are as we are — warts, wrinkles and all — rather than just the parts that outwardly please us,” says Dr. Dennis Merritt Jones. “Embracing the parts of ourselves we don’t particularly like is a high calling. Loving ourselves in such an all-inclusive manner requires courage and a depth of consciousness that transcends our attachment to the five-sensory world where judgment reigns supreme.”

Terry Drew Karanen further explores creating a holistic life focused on finding a balance between you as an individual and the larger world. This, too, represents freedom. He says, “A true holistic expression of life provides freedom. Since we have freedom of choice, but not of consequence, it behooves us to make wise choices. Freedom is our right, but with freedom comes responsibility. If we fail to live up to our responsibilities, we risk losing our freedom.”

Karanen posits that there are five aspects of life that, together, create a matrix of successful living — of freedom. Those five aspects are health, wealth, love, career and spirit. These five, he says, “provide us with a holistic guide for our individual and perfect expression of life. By balancing these principles and qualities, we achieve freedom to live life in amazing, magnificent and satisfying ways.”

Jones adds, “Authentic wholeness requires a depth of love for ourselves that can only ascend from within, from the God of our being. We shall never actualize the freedom to be whole by looking outward to the world for its permission, validation or agreement — and especially for its love.” He quotes the Persian poet and Sufi mystic Rumi: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

— For more from Jones and Karanen, read their full articles in the July 2018 issue of Guide for Spiritual Living: Science of Mind magazine.

All of Life, In a Circle

“Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle,” said Lakota Sioux Elder Black Elk. “The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round.

 “Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves.”

Perhaps it is their circular nature that represents the creative abundance of mandalas. “The attempt to orient oneself in the world probably gave rise to the early mandalas that consist of a cross inside a circle,” explains CreatingMandalas.com. “We can imagine how this might have come about. As our ancestors took to the high ground for a clear view, they saw that the horizon line appears to be a circle with themselves at the center. In order to move safely about in large land areas, they would have devised ways to orient themselves within this vast circle. It would have been natural to use the center of the circle—one’s own body—as the point of beginning for a system of directions. The body offers a consistent focal point for organizing the space within the circle of the earth’s horizon.”

Author Kathy Rausch notes that the mandala is a mirror of life itself. “Your creation,” she says, “like that of nature, will be flawed, but that is what makes it unique and fully authentic in its perfection.

 “God created each and every one of us as a divine human spark of love that is free to create a life full of love, harmony, relationships, abundance, fun and community,” Rausch says. “We all have our purpose to discover and express.”

— Rausch’s book “Activate Divine Creativity” and more on mandala creation is available at MagicOfTheMandala.com. More about her life and work can be found in the July 2018 issue of Guide for Spiritual Living: Science of Mind magazine.

Freedom Bound by Supreme Unity

— by Dr. Ernest Holmes

True freedom — true liberty — has something cosmic behind it. If the time has come that modern science has proved that we cannot move a piece of paper without changing the balance of the entire physical universe; if we have come to the place where we know that the stuff of which our physical bodies are made is the same stuff of which the planets are made; if we have come to the place where such a profound unity is maintained that physicists believe there is no such thing as disunity in the physical world; then we can easily see what the great spiritual leaders of the ages meant when they told us of that greater unity in which we all live and move and have our being, and that the idea of freedom itself is tied up with the true concept of the unity of good.

If our nature is one, if God is one — and we know that God must be one, for the universe cannot be divided against itself — then we are all tied into an indivisible unity. We shall have to get back to this unity to find the meaning of freedom.

Nothing in any part of this cosmic whole could be considered freedom that would destroy the liberty of some other part of it.

As Jesus pointed out 2,000 years ago, that would be a kingdom divided against itself. The kingdom of God is one kingdom. So we know that true liberty must spring from true unity.

— Excerpted from a talk given by Dr. Ernest Holmes on July 4, 1937. For a full transcript, visit SoMArchives.org.