SACRED THINKING REVISITED – THE 7 BELIEFS: BELIEF 1 & 2

My first spiritual book, SACRED THINKING: Awakening to Your Own Power (LINK), was published in 2010. I am revisiting the book for a new writing project and I thought it would be helpful to blog about the 7 basic beliefs from the Introduction to that book. Over the next weeks, I will blog about these basic beliefs, and we will see where that leads us – to different beliefs, revised beliefs, more beliefs, or fewer? We shall see.

BELIEF ONE:

There is ONE Infinite Spirit. This One Spirit created the universe out of Itself, out of Its own infinite nature. It is the ground of all being and everything that exists is part of It. Being infinite, It can never be fully comprehended by any individual human being or all human beings as a collective. This Spirit, and aspects of It, has been given many names. If there are “lesser gods,” they are within the One Spirit. The simplest definition of this One Spirit is “Love.”

Sacred Thinking was an attempt to put the philosophy, theology, and practices associated with New Thought into a language available to anyone. It was my intention to reach out beyond our walls to others and to provide a different approach for New Thought teachers and students to understand what we believe and how to use practices to deepen and expand those beliefs.

“Spirit – God, within whom all spirits exist. The Self-Knowing One. The Conscious Universe. The Absolute. Spirit in man is that part of him which enables him to know himself. That which he really is. . . . We define Spirit as the First Cause or God; the Universal I AM. The Spirit is Self-Propelling, It is All; It is Self-Existent and has all life within Itself. It is the Word and the Word is volition. . . . It knows nothing outside Itself, and nothing different from Itself. Spirit is the Father-Mother God because It is the Principle of Unity back of all things. Spirit is all Life, Truth, Love, Being, Cause and Effect, and is the only Power in the Universe that knows Itself.”
~ Ernest Holmes, The Science of Mind, Glossary

The concept of Spirit as FIRST CAUSE is critical to our understanding. That which set all things in motion and became what it created. Creator and creation are one and the same. Nothing is apart from or separate from Spirit. This idea of Oneness is expressed in many spiritual traditions. One Power in and throughout all. Everything which expresses does so within this One Power. There is no power for good and a separate power for evil; both are expressions of the One Power. This paradox is central to our teaching.

If there is a devil, the power it expresses is the One Power. Just as the same electrical current can be used to light your home or power an electric chair, what we call evil is an unloving use of the One Power of Spirit. Our senses do a poor job of reflecting the Oneness inherent in the universe, therefore, we use spiritual practices like meditation to help us to understand it.

BELIEF TWO:

The universe, or cosmos, is the expression of the creative nature of the One Spirit. The universe that you know and any other universes which may exist are all part of the One Spirit. Because of the Infinite Nature of this One Spirit, nothing can exist outside it; nothing can exist apart from It. Everything that exists has its being within the One Spirit.

Again, paraphrasing Thomas Troward (LINK): Spirit, through some act of inner contemplation, creates out of Itself, and becomes what It creates. This means that Creator and creation are one and the same. Nothing in creation can be separate from the Creative Intelligence of the Universe or Spirit. Any ideas of a deity condemning you come from a belief in separation, which is a fundamental error in the understanding of reality.

I am the life of life,
I am that cat, this stone, no one…
I see and know all times and all worlds,
As one, one, always ONE…
Oneness always!
~ Rumi

Our first two core beliefs speak to the nature of Spirit and Its relationship to creation, a relationship of Oneness. On this there is a surprising amount of agreement among world faith traditions, in theory if not in practice.

“Stephen, strolling along the shore, is thinking of the relationship of visible things to their source—of a son to a father, of Hamlet to Shakespeare, of himself to the ground of his being—and he comes to the relationship of Jesus, the Son, to God the Father, which is a Christian problem. If Jesus is God, and his Father is God also, what then is the relationship? Jesus said, ‘I and my Father are one,’ and those words brought him to the cross. Sufi mystic al-Hallaj said the same thing, ‘I and my Beloved are one,’ and he too was crucified. This is the mystic realization: you and that divine immortal being of beings of which you are a particle, are one. The classical statement of the idea is ‘tat tvam asi,’ ‘you are that,’ and the famous formula in the Chāndogya Upanishad: ‘you are yourself the divine mystery you wish to know.’ ‘I and my father are one.’”
~ Joseph Campbell (commenting on a passage in James Joyce’s Ulysses),
from Mythic Worlds, Modern Words, p.71 (LINK)

The problem of the realization of Oneness in a world operating primarily in a belief in duality, is that you feel like an outsider; and you are. How then to live? Campbell writes that the mystic keeps to herself and does not flaunt her realization. So, you do not hide your light under a bushel basket, but neither do you insist that others see from your point of view, rather you seek to influence with love and compassion.

Copyright 2024 – Jim Lockard