What Is Ours to Reboot

Over the course of the coming year, CSL and Science of Mind magazine will explore the theme “Root and Reboot.” In the January magazine, writer Rev. Dr. Carol Carnes examines the roots of Science of Mind that are ours to reboot “in our awareness, reclaim as our truth and reorder as our constant perception.”

She lists six areas for our attention:

1. Consciousness precedes form and experience. Ideas take flight into things from the nucleus of our conviction. (Thomas Troward)
2. Mind is Cause, and Mind is cure (so concluded P.P. Quimby in the mid-1800s after hundreds of his patients were healed through the power of thought).
3. The universe and everything in it is the visible evidence of an incredible intelligence at work. (Ernest Holmes)
4. The One I am is being the I am that I am. (God is within, so said Jesus, referring to the “Father.”)
5. God makes everything out of Itself by becoming the thing It makes. (Holmes said this in a stunning reference to our true nature.)
6. The Divine is inherent in all life. Even the rocks and the trees hold the Presence within. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

She adds, “We are more than capable of initiating cause in the name of peace and plenty for ourselves and our world. We are not now, and have never been, the effect of an outer cause. We are the revealing, the representation, of the One forever becoming the many. You and I are greater than any experience we have ever had or will have. It is the root cause of overcoming any perceived obstacle. It is the reason we evolve, heal, forgive and move on.

“Our roots run deep.”

Divine in Action and Thought

By Rev. Dr. Jesse Jennings

Is the purpose of practicing New Thought teachings to manifest things or to know the self through the Divine?

Defining the purpose of New Thought entirely would be me overstepping. I suppose we'd have to get everybody together and take a vote. Really, the purpose of any group is subjective to whatever its participants make of it. With us, people get what they come for or they don't, and if they don't, maybe it's because they're not ready to apply the teachings or it's because there is a gaping hole in those teachings, and their needs and wants are seldom if ever addressed. Each person gets to decide which is true and what to do about it.

To me, manifestation is great and comes in handy, living as we do in a world that asks us to pay our way. Seriously, it needs to be taught, not so that wealthy persons can enlarge their domains (since they already know how to do that, and there's a vanishing line between extravagance and greed), but so the 700 million or more people experiencing extreme poverty right now can live better, as can the person next door who's getting by check to check.

Personal prosperity teaching that is unconnected to or willfully ignores the good of our whole human family should hastily exit our literature. It's both separation-based and unkind. Connection within the Divine Presence is our essential point: ourselves as the experience the Divine is having by means of us.

Now here's a curious thing. When people experience the Presence within and grow in their sense of union with It, a lot of the peripherals begin to clear themselves up. Needed “things” appear without fanfare, often as creative tools, opportunities and support. The musician feeling a song isn't handed money but an instrument to learn to play. Sometimes, too, the prior needs just evaporate. Why? Because the self has taken up its true inheritance in collaboration with its Source.

—Taken from the “Questions and Answers” column in the January 2023 Science of Mind magazine. Jennings also offers a collection of his columns in his book More Than We Seem, https://shop.csl.org/product/more-than-we-seem-the-book/.

Meditation

By Dr. Ernest Holmes

Today, I make a new venture in the realm of thought. I am determined to use my mind consciously and constructively to improve my health and my conditions. I resolve to banish every thought of anxiety and fear. I will believe there is a power in the universe that is available and trustworthy. I shall entertain no angry or envious thoughts.

I shall dwell only on “what is true, what is worthy, what is right, what is pure, what is amiable, what is kindly on everything that is excellent or praiseworthy.”

I believe these attitudes of mind, when persisted in, will bring to me greater peace, happiness and health. I believe that with an inflow of peace and health, my conditions will be improved. I am ready to prove this to myself, and I resolve to persist until my outer experiences are a duplication of my thoughts.

—Excerpted from Ernest Holmes’ “Extension Study Course,” as reprinted in the January 2023 Science of Mind magazine