There is a God-power at the Center

Paraphrasing Ernest Holmes in the October SOM Magazine:

“There is a God-power at the center of [everyone and everything.] A Presence that knows neither lack, limitation, or fear, nor sickness, disquiet, or imperfection.” Oh, boy, do I want to believe this! I love the idea! It’s what I practice to know in my day-to-day.

“But because everyone is an individual, [they] can build a wall of negative thought between [themselves] and this perfection.” What Emerson called our “bloated nothingness” advising us to get it “out of the way of the divine circuits.”

“The wall which keeps [me] from the greater good [not just for myself, but for everyone and everything] is built of mental blocks, cemented together by fear and unbelief, mixed in the mortar of negative experience.” Isn’t this true? Haven’t you felt it in your own experience? I have.

Spiritual practice in the form of gratitude, forgiveness, compassion, cooperation, open-mindedness, mindfulness, acceptance of personal responsibility and the cessation of victimhood, blaming and demonizing are the way I, and you, tear down this wall, one brick at a time. It’s a never ending process requiring willingness, faith, courage and discipline. But, as we remove the mental blocks, we are rewarded and reinforced with glimpses of what the wall hid – the love, joy, peace and gladness, that was always, always there waiting to be revealed.

We realize the sun never really stopped shining and the river of life flows within us naturally, unimpeded, forever. We come to understand that each person’s experience is an attempt to merge their own being with this eternal river, not to the loss of their identity, but to the discovery of that Self which has never wholly left its heaven.