Live as One Seamless, Sacred Self

“Integrity simply means not violating one’s own identity.”
— Erich Fromm

The March 2019 issue of Guide for Spiritual Living: Science of Mind magazine explores the theme “Demonstrate Integral Integrity.” In his feature article, “The Art of Spiritual Integrity,” Dr. Dennis Merritt Jones suggests that while we may each consider ourselves to be people of high integrity, “when we catch ourselves being different people at different times based on the ’where, when and who’ of the moment, we will see that we are, in truth, out of integrity with the one person who should matter the most: ourselves.”

Jones further says, “To live a whole life is to live with integral integrity, to allow our oneness with the whole of God to spill over equally into every part of our lives.” Rather than living a splintered life, then, Jones says that we merge who we are with what we are — seamlessly and consciously. And if the sacred Self is always present, then our task is to awaken to Its presence — and to stay awake.

“When we integrate our actions with divine discernment,” he writes, “we engender a sense of partnership with something much larger, much greater than ourselves — aligning us with that which is infinitely perfect, that which we can trust and rely upon morning, noon and night.”

As Lao Tzu said, “Why separate spiritual life and your practical life? To an integral being, there is no such distinction.”

Social Uplift Ministry

Curriculum Inspires Social Activism

The Association for Global New Thought offers a set of core beliefs that guides its actions. First among them is, “Love and the sacred are one. We are born blessed. Prayer is actively creative. The beloved community is our credo. Compassion heals, compassion unites.”

For 20 years, leading ministers from Centers for Spiritual Living, Unity World Headquarters, Unity Worldwide Ministries and Agape have worked together under the AGNT banner, inspiring congregations worldwide to participate in a mission of spiritually motivated social activism.

In keeping with its core beliefs and supporting the work of the last 20 years, AGNT created a program called “Spiritually Guided Social Uplift Ministry,” SUM for short. The curriculum offers modules in nine areas, four of which are the focus for 2019:

• Gun Responsibility and Healing Violence
• Religious Diversity and Inclusion
• Healing Racism and Upholding Ethnic Fairness
• Homelessness and Poverty

AGNT will facilitate the overall program, recognizing it as a collective effort of the New Thought movement. The SUM curriculum is free to AGNT members; details can be found at www.AGNT.Today/social-uplift-ministrites and in the March 2019 issue of Guide for Spiritual Living: Science of Mind magazine.

The SUM approach is simple but transformative, bringing together small groups of friends and colleagues to focus on issues that connect the congregation and the local community. Spiritually Guided SUM then becomes a home base from which we can engage with the world and return for reflection, discussion and renewal.

Join the conversation offered in this blog post: Click here.

CSL Diversity Inclusion Commission

Reveals and Bridges Gaps

The Centers for Spiritual Living (CSL) Diversity Inclusion Commission answers the commitment to “expand diversity and promote inclusion throughout our organization.” Established in November 2011, the commission looks to create more effective ways of welcoming people of all races, genders, ethnic backgrounds and sexual orientations into the CSL member communities.

You can take advantage of the commission’s diversity training in your community by reaching out to CSLDiversity@gmail.com. One of the professional diversity trainers will work with your center or church to identify and enhance the experience of being an inclusive community.

For videos, blogs, resources, training schedules and more, visit www.Diversity.CSL.org.

Eternal Progress, Mandated by Law

—by Dr. Ernest Holmes

Thought is creative, and the more emotional the thought, the more creative it is. It is not because we have contemplated and meditated and prayed and fasted; our thought is creative because that is its nature. Our nature is God, and the nature of God does not change.

No matter where you discover It, the only God you can ever know is the God you uncover in yourself, because no man can ever know anything outside of the intelligence within him whereby he knows anything. Then the only God he can know is through the intelligence of himself. …

How can we enter other than through our own nature? The Infinite, Eternal God is the impulse of man’s thought, the Spirit of his person, the Power back of everything he does. God is the power by which you and I think. Now God is not evolving, but we are evolving in experience, unfolding in personality and increasing in the capacity to understand ourselves, and there is a persistent, calm, unhurried, irresistible Power pushing us forward, which we call the principle of evolution.

We have to evolved; we cannot stay still. And when we can no longer evolve in this world, we can leave that thing which is no longer a fit instrument for our expression and go on, because eternal progress is the immutable mandate of an irresistible and a universal necessity that shall be expressed.

—Excerpted from “The Power of the I Am Presence", by Ernest Holmes, Science of Mind magazine, January 1939.