How Would You Like to Go on a Spiritual ‘Advance’ with Ernest Holmes?
Seminar Lectures from the First Summer Conference in 1953
Maybe you are able to go to Asilomar this year…maybe you are not….
But wouldn’t you like to go back in time and go on a summer retreat (Holmes didn’t like the word, ‘retreat’, but, instead, he felt that they should be called spiritual advances) where Ernest Holmes is the featured speaker? Wouldn’t you like to jump into a time machine and be there in the early years of Religious Science and hear Ernest Holmes guide you and educate you in your teaching, your thinking, and your treatment work? You can do all of that and more by downloading (for $10) a transcription of Ernest Holmes’ lectures given at the very first summer conference in 1953 at Big Creek, California.
If you do, you open a door into a gathering where Holmes examines the Hermetic teachings, Plato is mentioned, and Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Robert Browning are quoted and discussed. Or how about participating in a discussion of New Thought ideas that ranges from the New Testament teachings to Meister Eckhart to Jewish philosophy to Bhagavad Gita to Sri Aruobindo to Carl Jung? Or, would you like to hear Holmes take you on a far-ranging discussion of how “the new physics” proves the main principles of Science of Mind? Holmes reviews Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Einstein’s famous equation E=Mc², and Heisenberg’s “Theory of Indeterminacy” and links these famous theories of physics with some key New Thought principles.
Holmes had been formulating his philosophy, interacting and reading the great thinkers of the 20th century, and letting his genius roam over the ideas of philosophy, science, and religion from every century and from every historical tradition for his sixty-six years when this first Religious Science summer conference took place. And his discussion of the ideas contained in these seminar notes takes your mind into Divine Connections and Cosmic Correlations—places to which you may not have traveled recently. These lectures are positive proof of the intellectual brilliance of Holmes and just exactly how “open at the top” was his ability to weave the great thinkers into a Divine Tapestry that illuminates ‘The Thing Itself’ in wondrous and mind-expanding ways.
Holmes’ lectures to those gathered don’t only feature intellectual brilliance. You will be treated to the anecdote of the hitchhiking Korean vet who Holmes picks up on the road and shocks when he asks the young soldier, “Do you always walk around with corpses tied to your back?” The young soldier almost fled the car until Holmes explained he was a minister. When the young soldier said Ernest didn’t sound like any minister he had ever heard of, Holmes admitted, “I didn’t like any of the religions I was acquainted with, so I went and made one up.” Read Chapter Three of The Seminar Lectures closely to understand the point Ernest was making to the young soldier, and you’ll realize that what was upsetting that soldier sixty years ago is the same thing that is making your life frustrating and unworkable at time.
Holmes provides some truly concrete guidance for some practitioners:
“Too often metaphysicians finally reach a point where they deny everything they do not like, and affirm everything they do like.”
Holmes uses the example of someone coming to him to “treat” so that he will win his legal case. Holmes explains that he might do treatment, but it is likely that the man might lose his case. The client asks, “Well, what good is that?” Holmes goes on to explain that he can “treat” so that the Truth is revealed, and cannot be denied… and that is proper treatment… using the Law of the Good and not subverting it. Holmes works with spiritual principles and truths—not just what a client wants or doesn’t want. The Law does not work that way!
Also, Holmes talks about how he “calls the bluff of practitioners that claim they like to do only one treatment” for a case or a client. He tells them about a client he has that he has been “treating” for nine months, and the client is a little worse than when Holmes started. Ernest asks the practitioner to come in and speak his one-time treatment and show Holmes how it is done!
“A spiritual treatment that tires one out is a bad treatment. A treatment in which we use ‘will’ is a bad treatment. A treatment that ‘sends’ anything out is a bad treatment. A treatment that limits itself to any existing circumstance is a bad treatment. When I say it is a bad treatment, I mean that it isn’t effective, that it isn’t what it should be.”
Holmes shares with you and those first attendees a discussion of his failures when he first tried to bring this teaching to others. He sat in an office for six months and only one man came in to see him, “And that man thought I was crazy!” Holmes knew that if this metaphysical teaching had any reality, he would prove it to himself by being his own demonstration. He gave up his office and got a job, but within two years of being invited to start his first study group, he was speaking each week in front of three thousand in a large auditorium! Holmes also discusses how he had to work through his own expectations and beliefs about money before his mind “opened” to make money as a practitioner. But, he also cautions against people in the movement who try to use spiritual mind treatment, “to think and grow rich.” Holmes advises practitioners to “treat” for the kinds of client that they wish to have—not for clients who want to use a practitioner’s abilities for their own personal and material gain.
Also, Holmes, in the true spirit of “always being open at the top,” describes, to the group of Religious Scientists gathered at that first summer retreat, an ongoing experiment he had been conducting with spiritual mind treatment that he made with fifty other practitioners —a scientific experiment. The first experiment was with patients at a mental hospital supervised by a fellow Religious Scientist, and the other was with some randomly selected alcoholics at a local Alcoholics Anonymous group. Holmes and these fifty practitioners did an experiment to prove the effectiveness of treatment—they treated for the recovery of the patients in the mental hospitals and they treated for the sobriety of the alcoholics. They saw an impressive recovery rate in both groups. Neither group requested treatment. Holmes explains that practitioners shouldn’t let “superstition” stand in their way of proving the principles of Religious Science.
So, if you want to hear Holmes sharing anecdotes from his own life, stories of clients for whom he treated, examples of how his own faith and understanding grew and expanded throughout all the years he guided Religious Science—if you want to hear Holmes talk to you as if you were intimately gathered with him in a beautiful mountain retreat—then download this eBookand go back in time and let Ernest Holmes be your teacher!
Click on the link below to download Ernest Holmes Seminar Lectures for only $10
http://www.scienceofmindarchives.org/component/k2/item/870-ernest-holmes-seminar-lectures