By Fenwicke Holmes.
During the influenza epidemic a friend of mine suddenly found herself caught in the tornado of chaotic thinking and the symptoms made their appearance. She told us about it the next day. “Yesterday my head and back ached, my throat was sore and I could not keep my feet warm,” and seeing our expression of concern she added, “Otherwise I was all right.” – “What was all right?” I asked, laughing. – “My mind,” she answered calmly.
One who knew the truth less and lived more to the law of fear might have felt alarmed, but not she. She recognized that she had left an opening in her mind for the entrance of the disease-thought and she calmly went to work to cast it out again, and to realize the presence of all-perfect life. “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on Thee,” says the Psalmist.
One should never be frightened in the presence of negative thoughts and conditions. Simply recognize that they have only as much power as your thought gives to them, as darkness exists only so long as the light remains away from it. Your positive thought is the light and fear and disease are the darkness. You have only to bring in a good thought and the darkness will disappear.
“Have this mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus, our Lord,” said Paul. That is to say, we” must come to that knowledge of self and God and the universe which Christ had. We must have His mind and understanding before we can come to His character and “be therefore perfect, even as our Father in heaven is perfect.”
To acquire this “mind”, we must learn to discern all things spiritually, we must perceive the real behind the seeming, and we must deny all that is contrary to a perfect spiritual creation. We must know that man innately is perfect ; the true self is divine, for so only would it be possible to attain the outer perfection which Jesus demands. Knowing this truth, we shall be made free from all the ills of human thought and experience.
This is a deep truth but not a mystery. The enlightened soul knows this to be an elementary truth of metaphysics. The awakening soul must constantly and consciously seek and demand of himself the true and the real. When pain or adversity or melancholy or fear appear to manifest themselves, he must say, “This is not mine. I will not accept it. I will know only the good and the true.”
Sometimes this will appear very hard, but if we constantly repress wrong thinking and encourage good, which is the result of right thinking, we shall gradually grow into the sure knowledge of that truth which is to make us free.
REALIZATION
When you feel yourself caught in the grasp of the negative thought, calmly seek the “place of repose.” This is in the quiet contemplation of spirit and spiritual reality. I am spirit. I am life. I am in the Divine Mind. Nothing exists but God. No evil can fall upon spirit and the spiritual mind. My mind is right.
My heart rests in the peace of this confidence. “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee.”
Fenwicke Holmes – Excerpt from the book “The Law of Mind in Action”