Excerpts from

 
How to Develop the
FAITH THAT HEALS
by Fenwicke L. Holmes




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Book Description
Out of all the various attributes and qualities of mind that an individual can develop, none is more important, more needed in the world today generally, than FAITH. It is to show how faith can be acquired by the same law as health itself that this book has been written. In it, the author has 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 some law to demonstrate faith itself.

Book Contents

PART 1: THE LAW AND HOW TO USE IT

1 - The New Consciousness

2 -  Cosmic Consciousness

3 -  Personal and Impersonal Consciousness

4 -  The Law of Consciousness Stated

5 -  The Law of Consciousness Outlined

6 -  Sub­jective Consciousness Defined…

7 -  Practical Use of  Vision: Visualizing Prosperity

8 -  On Visualizing Success and Keeping the Law

9 -  Visualizing Health

10 - Organic Disease—The Cure of "Incur­ables".

PART 2: HOW TO DEVELOP FAITH THROUGH USE OF THE LAW

1 - The New Healing and Prosperity Con­sciousness...

2 - The Law and God—Faith in the Con­trol of Natural Forces

3 -  How to Demonstrate Faith

4 -  How to Develop the New Faith in Faith

5 -  Developing Faith Through Feeling

6 -  How to Have Faith in Your Healing Word

7 -  Faith in the Great Within—One Day At A Time..

8 -  Faith in Yourself—How to Develop Self-Confidence

9 -  How to Develop Faith in Happiness

10 - Keeping Your Faith in the World

11 - Pray As You Run—Everyday Faith

12 - Wearing Other People's Clothes— Showing the Need of Faith in Freedom­…

13 - I Am That Big Deed Now—Faith in “The Big Thing”

14 - Faith in Your Unity with God

15 - Faith in the Continuity of Life

16 - Faith in God

17 - What Do You Expect—Conclusion



Chapter
1

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 arid things by which we are surrounded. And unless our thoughts arc 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 conscious-ness 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 worth while? Is there a purpose which this life fulfils or is intended to fulfil? 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 2 

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 indestructibility 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 another so-called funda-mental 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 con-sciousness 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

Is there any advantage in using this other term for God or our Father? Only that it may bring home to us a new meaning and confidence. What­ever our earlier experience may have found in God, whatever peace, poise, faith, hope, and companionship there has been for us in the God of our earlier faith, can only be beautified and intensified by a deeper knowledge of His nature. And we can say with a greater intimacy of knowledge, "I know him in whom I have believed." The Cosmic Consciousness is the Infinite Spirit of Intelligence that "made and rules the summer flowers and all the worlds that people starry space." A mystery of being? Yes, but no more a mystery than we find on every hand. We explain physical action and reactions as due to chem­ical affinity, capillary action, attraction of gravity, and so on, and think we have explained; but have we? What are these forces? What is force? Can any materialist among the scientists tell us? Only a true recognition of the mental nature of the uni­verse can answer this question. This, at least, the mental scientist can say: If we are to judge by the way they act, force and thought are the same thing. There is no distinction between what we call force and what we call thought, for force is Mind at work; and Mind at work is thought.

It is plain then that the Cosmic Consciousness is Intelli-gence: for it acts by thought; it is Life, for all life is derived from it: it is Wisdom, for wisdom is harmonious action; and Spirit, as One, cannot know friction from another Will: it is therefore Harmony: It is Beauty, for beauty is merely the orderly arrange­ment of parts: It is Love, for love is the unity of kindred things: It is all that man calls "good." And yet we must not confound this good with any idea of contrast as over against anything that we call bad, for that introduces two forces into the universe, God and a Devil, and to admit a Devil is to admit not a unitary universe, but a dualistic; and we have just seen that the universe is one. Jesus himself called attention to this as of the first importance. The greatest and first saying of the Mosaic law, said he, is this, "Hear O Israel, the Lord, thy God, the Lord is one, and beside Me there is no other."

Accordingly by Good, we mean that which is real or true and that God as the Real and the True is the author of all that makes life beautiful, happy, and satisfying. And by the same token, we must per­ceive that what we call "bad" is merely failure to work in harmony with the law of the Good. Evil, then, is wrong thinking, the thing of a day. Truth is harmonious action, the thing of eternity. The one passes away, the other endures.

The Cosmic Consciousness is therefore everything that is true, eternal, enduring. And thinking of God in these terms of intelligence and bigness, ready to become to us just what we ask or think, we dare to launch our desire into the infinite, knowing that our vessel will return laden with the cargo which our faith has collected.


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