The Faith That Heals E-Book

Fenwicke L. Holmes

• Herausgeber: Andura Publishing
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Experience the life-changing power of Fenwicke L. Holmes with this unforgettable book.

Leseprobe

The Faith That Heals

Fenwicke L. Holmes

Contents

INTRODUCTION

NEW world dawns for us every morning. Everything in it is fresh and unknown. To the hopeful and daring soul, each day is a thrilling adventure. What it will bring, he does not know. That it will be good, he can but believe. This belief is his faith. We all live by faith for we are always on the borderland of the future. Each act is an act of faith—a feeling beforehand that the thing we are doing will bring results of some sort and usually of the kind that we expect. And the deeper this feeling is, the more certain are the results. This is especially true in the work of healing and acquiring success through the avenue of faith. No one today doubts that there is a faith that heals. What we all want is more of

THE HEALING CONSCIOUSNESS We desire not merely to know that such a faith is possible, but to have the faith. It will, I feel sure, be an inspiration to my readers to know that it is possible to use the law of mind not only to secure what we desire, but also to develop the faith by which we speak the word that heals. How many of us have shared the experience of the father who said to the Master Healer, ” If thou canst do anything, have compassion on us and help us.” “If thou canst!” echoes the astonished Healer. “Why, all things are possible to him that believeth!” “Yes,” thinks the despairing father, “to him that believes, but how shall I get this faith?” Then he cries out, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.” What he really meant was what you and I mean, “I know it is possible. Help me to know it will be done.”

It is to show how faith can be acquired by the same law as health itself that this book has been written. In it, I have told as simply as possible the law of the healing consciousness, showing it to be in perfect harmony with true knowledge and the science of nature and of mind; showing how results are secured by simply knowing the truth or the law, and how we may use the same law to demonstrate faith itself. It comes out of my own heart and experience, and if it enters helpfully into yours, I shall be glad. What we are all after is not intellectual persuasion tut spiritual realization. “If any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God who giveth to all men freely and upbraideth not.”

Fenwicke Lindsay Holmes,

Los Angeles, Cal., October 15, 1919

(It should be noted that, In this book, “consciousness” Is used in two ways. First it means the knower or personal self; and second, it means that self in the act of knowing or being aware of anything. Healing consciousness, for example, would be knowing health. Says Calkins in “Persistent Problems of Philosophy,” page 407, “Consciousness, the personal idealist insists, is a conscious self or person, that is, a unique ‘real’ which is conscious and which may be regarded as including ideas, but which is more permanent than ideas are, and independent of them. . . . With Descartes, Berkeley, Leibniz, and Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, Lotze and Renouvier, Bergson and Eucken, Howison, Ward, and Royce, and a great company of philosophers, the writer finds that consciousness Is not mere ideas or series of ideas, but that it is the unique subject of Ideas.”)

The Law and How to Use It

Chapter I.

THE NEW CONSCIOUSNESS

IT is easier to meet the situations of life, if we understand. It is ignorance that keeps us in fear. It is the unknown that haunts us and lays its ghostly fingers upon us. For life to be at all livable, we must know something about it, since thought affects not only our immediate mental states but also the people and things by which we are surrounded. And unless our thoughts are right, our world cannot be right. There are, then, certain questions upon which we must have decisive convictions if we are to be happy in the fullest way. There is little pleasure in an uphill trail if we do not know from whence we came, whither we are going, nor why we are on our way.

I feel sure that, for all of us who are thoughtful, all these questions are related to what we believe or do not believe about the nature of the self and God. Most of us feel that to be able to relate ourselves with an Unseen but not Unknown Presence will go far to put us on the pathway of understanding and so of peace and attainment.

To understand God and his way of working, is to understand our own self, since we are firmly enveloped in the Cosmic Consciousness from which our own consciousness springs, as we shall see. Or we may turn this about and say, that, to know the self in its truest and widest nature will bring us into a clearer knowledge of God. Then to know God and the self will help us to answer these big questions which confront the thoughtful heart: Is life worthwhile? Is there a purpose which this life fulfils or is intended to fulfill? What power have I to control the conditions of my body and environment? Is there magic in the realm of thought? Whither do I go? Can I extract joy out of existence? Can I have health when I seek it: prosperity aside from mere chance: and happiness independent of rare good luck? In short, is there a law of life?

THE SELF AND CONSCIOUSNESS

When we speak of consciousness, we mean the power to think; we mean the ability to be aware of the self and of that which occurs in relation to the self. The word “conscious” comes from the Latin words, cum or with, and scio, to know or have knowledge. When we say one is conscious of a thing we mean that he is “with knowledge of that thing,” at least to the extent of his being aware that it is. And the “consciousness’ of a person is the “knower,” or that which, within him, knows. The knower is the self, the “I am.” There is neither any proof that there is an “I am,” nor any knowledge of what it is in its ultimate nature. Yet, if I know anything at all, I know that I am; and I must either say that I do not know anything at all, or else say that what I know can only be known because I, the knower, exist before that which I know. How could anything be known unless there were an “I,” that is, a self to know it? This may seem very involved; but it is also very important because it shows us that “consciousness” or the knowing self exists before the body. Before the physical Jesus was the spiritual self, forever existent; the Master himself said, “Before Abraham was, I am.” It is true that scientists once said that consciousness is a product of the brain, and that physical reactions in the brain cause us to think. They have claimed this because some kind of action does occur in the brain when we think. For example, if I hurt my feet, the nerve telegraph wires carry a vibration to the brain; and the message is recorded in a certain area by a little cell-shock or explosion. Then I say, “It hurts” and withdraw my feet. Now, my thought about the hurt and the cell action in the brain occurred at the same time; but that does not prove that my brain produced the thought. “I,” the self, the consciousness, simply noted it; that is all. But again scientists said, “We know that it is the brain that produces consciousness because, when anything happens to any portion of the brain, we cannot think the things which that particular part of the brain is accustomed to think.” In other words, we lose our consciousness to that extent. For example, they said, “Suppose I injure the brain center in which my hearing is recorded. My ear may remain as perfect; but I have lost that part of ‘me’ or the consciousness which hears because that part of the brain is injured. So that, if I continue to lose parts of the brain, the ‘I’ would disappear little by little until it would be lost altogether.”

On the contrary, other scientists call attention to the fact that the brain is merely the instrument of the consciousness and that whatever happens to it merely affects the power of the instrument but not of the consciousness. For example, if my eye is injured, the self can no longer use it as an instrument; but the self is not injured. If I break the lens of my binoculars, I cannot see through them; but I am still a” seer.” And that the self still exists after an injury to the brain, with its hearing and seeing consciousness intact, is shown by the fact that often the brain and cell life learn to use other agencies than the eye and ear to do the work that “I,” the conscious self, wants done. Take, for illustration, the finer sense of touch which the blind man develops. It enables him to read, to get messages through his fingers from your lips, and to find his way about. He did not lose his seeing consciousness. He merely lost one of its instruments ; his consciousness immediately set to work to find another.

The fact is that we are safe in saying that, if we cannot prove just what the consciousness is in its essence, we can say that it is, and how it works. And the greatest of the scientists today are assisting us in showing a pre-existent self or consciousness.

We find, too, that the search for the self or consciousness is not to be ended by concluding that it has taken up a temporary habitation in the body any more than we can say that a man is inseparable from his house merely because he is at home. To find what the nature of the self is, we must look beyond the body; and our study will necessarily lead us into an investigation of the universe in which consciousness finds one of its fields of expression. What is the nature of the world in which we live? Are we related to it organically only or in some higher way? Is there a consciousness back of it? If so, what is its nature? In short, what is the Cosmic Consciousness?

Chapter II.

COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS

PHYSICAL science is making enormous advances today; no student of life can afford to be ignorant of the marvelous discoveries of the present hour. All the old landmarks are being swept away; a new spirit and a new order is at hand. Take, for example, the once fundamental law of physics,—the indestructability of matter. Today we know that matter can be resolved into energy so completely that the energy will not again come back into form.

Photographs can be taken of the atoms of which material substance is composed. Yet these atoms are merely vibration. The experiments of Le Bon, the French scientist, go further than this. They show that another so-called fundamental law of physics must go by the board,—the conservation of energy. This law claimed that even when substances are entirely changed in their nature by corrosion, decay, or fire, the energy in them still exists, simply having been converted from one form into another. But Le Bon states that energy can be entirely devitalized and returned into nothingness. This means that it is no longer in shape to be perceived by the physical senses. But this “nothingness” may go under any name we wish to call it,—” The Unknown,” the ether, the imponderable. Physical science thus shows us that the universe appears and disappears, evolving from and dissolving into a silent sea of an immaterial somewhat.

What is this “immaterial somewhat”? Science says it is ether, everywhere existing, without bounds, continuous, homogeneous, never dissociated in parts in which one mass of ether would be separate from another. Out of this ether, the visible universe is evolved through some activity of energy. Whence this energy and how it acts are questions which can be answered, not by physics but by metaphysics.

THE UNIVERSE CREATED BY  AN ACT OF WILL

Metaphysics is in harmony with the postulates of science when it says that energy is produced by the action of a Will; but it goes still further and says that to will is to think, that thinking is an act of mind, and that the ether of science is, therefore, better termed “Mind.” For Mind, too, is spaceless, timeless, continuous, homogeneous, never dissociated in parts. In other words, it is as eternally ONE as is the ether.

Then the act of will which produces energy is the act of Mind; or, in other words, energy is the action of thought. Mind creates energy by thinking; and energy forms the substance of the visible universe. That is why we can say that the universe is “alive” for it is made by Intelligence out of Itself. No less prominent a scientist than a former president of the American association, Edward Drinker Cope, affirms that we live in a “conscious universe” and that “energy can be conscious.” And he further says that “we are not necessarily bound to the hypothesis that protoplasm is the only substance capable of supporting consciousness.” In other words, he perceives that consciousness and intelligence are not bound up in a physical universe or a physical body. Consciousness exists apart from all that we can examine with the five senses. It exists before creation and after.

It is not going too far to say, then, that creation is the body of God. Yet, as it would be absurd to say that the powers of man’s mind are confined to his body, so is it absurd to say that all there is of God is bound up in the physical and visible universe. As all the forces of my mind can be converged to one intense point of interest, so can all the powers of the Divine Mind be brought to apply to any task which It may seek to perform. Perceiving that there is a universal intelligence apart from all limitations of time and space, we must conclude that Divine Mind can and does act, with limitless or infinite power, on its own thought. For since physical energy is but the emergence into expression of the Divine thought, for God to think is to act. When Mind acts, it is with limitless intelligence, since it is the All Mind: It acts with limitless freedom since, as the Universal, It can have nothing outside Itself to constrain it to act contrary to its own desire. Being the homogeneous, non-dissociable, limitless One, It can have no rivals; and there is no place in the Universe for any spirit or Being contrary to Its Nature. “If God be for us, who can be against us?” Thus, when we speak of the “Cosmic Consciousness,” we are speaking of the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent One, whom we call God.

THE NAMES OF GOD