The Paradox: No Mistakes

By Rev. Michael Gott, D.D.

A paradox: We all make mistakes all the time and no mistakes have been made. Holding these seemingly oppositional statements in mind at the same time requires something Rev. Dr. Petra Weldes calls “spiritual double vision.” We look at the human experience — we all make mistakes — and see through it to the deeper spiritual truth — everything is integrated into wholeness and perfection.

Now, there are many tragedies in human experience that we will never fully reconcile while we are still within this time-space-form continuum. But from an eternal perspective, if God is all that is, truly no mistakes can ever be made.

Our lives are like a tapestry. All our moments and experiences are part of the larger pattern of our story. The painful parts can be difficult to be with, but with perspective, we can see they are just a part of the whole. Everything fits. Everything belongs.

For many of us, coming to terms with our own choices and actions is the hardest thing to reconcile. When we have been selfish or have harmed others, it can be especially challenging to weave those threads into the pattern. But we can do it. Every seeming mistake can become the portal to our growth and our healing.

Affirmation: I welcome the healing of all regret and pain of the past. I walk unburdened into this brilliant new day, filled with possibility and promise.

— Daily Guide for March 22, reprinted from the March 2023 Science of Mind magazine.

The Nascent State: Authentically You

By Rev. Dr. Jesse Jennings

Being authentically yourself means being yourself by your own guiding lights and not retreating into conformity to what's expected of you (or implied or assumed to be expected of you) by anybody else. It means listening to your feelings, making your own choices, blazing your own trail and so forth. Authenticity is an ideal, similar to happiness and satisfaction. These are great states of being to aspire to, and yet they ebb and flow rather than arrive and stay. In human relationships, a person's authenticity, or self-sovereignty, has to work hand in hand with others' senses of self.

Mutually rewarding relationships require negotiation, compromise and the periodic relinquishing of power. But at the same time, you never entirely submerge your inner vision because sustaining a relationship requires you remain consciously present in it as a whole person, not just as a function of the relationship. It's about being open to changes, surprises and apparent setbacks, because you're convinced at a deep level that these are occurring within the context of your larger good.

Whenever you affirm a new set of conditions, to help pull yourself into them, you're not declaring something that you're not, just something you may not yet be manifesting outwardly. In other words, if your heart is really in your affirmation, then your word is drawing its power from a place in you that believes this new desired reality already exists.

You're in a nascent state, a stage of becoming. You have your own mental and emotional equivalent — your unique take — on what counts as successful manifestation for you. If you were utterly not already the thing you're affirming, it would not exist for you, and you'd be busy affirming something else. Authenticity does not preclude affirmation or compete with it at all.

It's a beautiful paradox: You are already enough just as you are, and still you seek out new ways to express and new scenery to explore.

— Reprinted from the March 2023 Science of Mind magazine.

Letting go of all previous mistakes,
I know that today I am free and unhindered.

— Ernest Holmes, “This Thing Called You”