New Thought Ancient Wisdom at Your Fingertips
By Dr. John Waterhouse
President, Centers for Spiritual Living
It won’t be too many more years before the Science of Mind and Spirit philosophy will be celebrating its first hundred years of existence. We’ll let someone else identify exactly when that is to happen. My point is that our way of life, based in ancient wisdom and part of what is called the New Thought Movement is approaching its own historical milestone. This means we have crossed generations of culture, communication styles and technologies all of which call us to be adaptable as we seek deeper understanding and application of our foundational principles.
As time passes, we as human beings change the way we learn and communicate. The technologies of Dr. Holmes’ time were by means of hand written and typed letters, and arduously typeset books. Today we communicate largely through electronic means such as emails and instant messaging. Many of us read books on devices, and we keep the vast majority of our information on clouds. It’s a different world this way.
We also use language a bit differently than the way people spoke and wrote a hundred years ago. Not so differently, but enough that when we go into our archives, we find that the way Thomas Troward, Emma Curtis Hopkins and even Ernest Holmes expressed themselves is not as familiar and easy to consume as are most writers today.
This is nothing compared to reading Beowulf, but it takes a little extra effort to be completely comfortable with the writing styles of these early teachers. Some words were spelled differently, some phrases need a little extra effort to fully understand and the word he is used to represent people in a non-gender specific way.
Nonetheless, the teachings in Truth offered by these pioneers of modern day metaphysics remain as true today as the day they were written. For example, you can find a posting under the FREE Ebooks/Audio tab entitled “The Hidden Power and other papers on Mental Science.” written by Thomas Troward.
In it Troward writes, “There is an inner and an outer side to everything; and the quality of the superficial mind which causes it to fail in the attainment of Truth is its willingness to rest content with the outside only. So long as this is the case it is impossible for a man to grasp the import of his own relation to the universal, and it is this relation which constitutes all that is signified by the word ‘Truth.’ So long as a man fixes his attention only on the superficial it is impossible for him to make any progress in knowledge. He is denying that principle of ‘Growth’ which is the root of all life, whether spiritual, intellectual, or material, for he does not stop to reflect that all which he sees as the outer side of things can result only from some germinal principle hidden deep in the centre of their being.”
I would have never said it this way, but the message is brilliant; we must look past the surface of the situations we face to find the higher reality of Truth where all things fit together perfectly. When we apply this principle to every aspect of our lives, we have risen above mystery to the attainment of meaning. What a gift!