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"There
is a great difference whether or not you believe God to be within you or
outside you. For if God is outside you, how are you going to reach
this God, who, not being some part of you, must be separated from you?
How can you hope to unite things which are different from each other?
But the God who IS ALREADY WITHIN YOU, being forever perfect and
complete, needs no reunion with anyone and you no reunion with this God,
because this God already is in your every act, every thought, every
movement, in your every plan, purpose and performance. The God
within you creates every circumstance and situation you have ever
experienced. You have called these circumstances and situations
things in themselves, but they never have been. They have always
been the fruition of your thought, and your thought has always been
dominated by your belief in God, that is, every since you have had a
self-conscious life.
Ever since you have had
self-conscious thought, you have, by your use of the law of liberty,
created bondage. Not that bondage really existed, but the
possibility of using freedom in a limited way existed. You really
never BOUND freedom, you merely used it in a RESTRICTED way. The
restriction was not in the Principle, but in your use of It. There
is a difference whether you believe in actual limitation, or merely in a
restricted use of freedom. If limitation were a THING IN ITSELF
you could not change it, but since it is merely an outline of
experience, why not use your imagination to enlarge your experience.
When you do this you will find the Life Principle within you responds
just as quickly to a broader outline. The old outline was
IMAGINARY only, NEVER REAL. It was like the horizon where the
earth and sky appear to meet, but as we travel toward this apparent dead
end, we find that it disappears.
Whatever you mentally see and
spiritually comprehend, you may objectively experience, for the God
within you is not limited to any one experience. It is the Creator
of all experience." - Dr. Ernest Holmes,
Your Invisible Power
I am a practical person
and that is why I was attracted to the Science of Mind in the beginning.
The Science of Mind does not give us lovely and sympathetic phraseology
to smooth over our feelings about the conditions and circumstances that
we may face in life ... it gives us practical methods to move through
experiences and benefit from them.
As I read the news reports about
the people whose lives were changed so tragically by hurricane Katrina,
I could not help but think of the feelings of despair that so many of
them must be experiencing. And sadly, I know that for many of
them, telling them that God was Present with them, offers little solace.
It is part of the human experience to see God separate and apart from
ourselves ... religion has maintained this false concept throughout
history ... and our culture supports this through the media, literature,
movies and television. Our religious dramas that have touched our
hearts and souls have mesmerized us into believing that God will
intervene ... that God will somehow "save us" from our
circumstances ... separate and apart from us. But, even though the
Master Mind Jesus taught, "the kingdom of heaven is within
you" and "don't you know that you are gods?" ... the
masses of us continue to look to others to tell us "about" God
rather than "realizing" the Presence of God in our very own
consciousness.
Am I saying
that people who recognize that God In-dwells them will never experience
tragedy or misery ... no, I am not saying that. What I want to
convey here is that when we learn to practice the Presence of God in our
lives, we will go through the tragedies and miseries knowing that we
will move through them to a Greater Good ... we will experience little,
if any, feelings of despair and helplessness ... and in the midst of
what may seemingly appear to be hopeless circumstances and conditions
... we will continue to maintain faith and hope in our hearts and minds
... for these come from a soul that is conditioned to the In-dwelling
Presence of God ... for as we "separate" God from us, we are
never living from certainty, always a maybe ... not realizing that
"He is closer to us than breathing" ... and this realization
is our only relief from disaster.
And
So It Is!
Letting
Love Use Me In Its Own Good Way,
Rev.
Bates
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