Living a Fascinating Life
01-21-01
Readings:
Dare
to speak and to know that what you speak is the law unto the thing spoken.
One, alone in consciousness with the Infinite, constitutes a complete
majority.
Knowing
this in your own thought, work in perfect peace and calm; always expect; have
enthusiasm; and have a consciousness of love; that is, a radiant feeling
flowing through the personality at all times. If one hasn't this he should
treat himself until he does have it; for without it, he is diseased in mind.
Treat until you feel an inner sense of Unity with the all Good. There is One
Mind, and the moving impulse of this Mind is Love. [i]
New
Eyes
I
chanced on a wonderful book by Marius von Senden, called Space and Sight.
. . . For the newly sighted, vision is pure sensation unencumbered by meaning:
"The girl went through the experience that we all go through and forget,
the moment we are born. She saw, but it did not mean anything but a lot of
different kinds of brightness." . . . In general the newly sighted see the
world as a dazzle of color-patches. They are pleased by the sensation of color,
and learn quickly to name the colors, but the rest of seeing is tormentingly
difficult. . . . The mental effort involved . . . proves overwhelming for many
patients. It oppresses them to realize, if they ever do at all, the tremendous
size of the world, which they had previously conceived of as something
touchingly manageable. . . . A disheartening number of them refuse to use their
new vision, continuing to go over objects with their tongues, and lapsing into
apathy and despair. . . . On the other hand, many newly sighted people speak
well of the world, and teach us how dull is our own vision. [ii]
PSALMS
57:5
"Awake
up, my glory, awake, psaltery and harp: I myself will awake early.”
Living
a Fascinating Life
Good
Morning! Anybody here just hate to
be bored? I remember being so bored
once when I was fourteen years old that I slept about one hour for each year I
had been alive. After sleeping for
fourteen or fifteen hours, I woke up still tired – and still bored.
I wonder even now how life could have been so awful, and how I could have
been so disinterested in its quality. I
couldn’t think of a thing to do.
Remember
the deep boredom we used to experience as children coming home after school with
nothing to do? Remember the restlessness, and anxiety about having nothing
to do? I wonder if it is not this
discomfort that would lead us to do something, anything,
call a friend, go outdoors, play ball, build doll furniture with toy hammers and
saws, just to make that uncomfortable feeling go away.
Well,
I haven’t been bored in years. In
fact, I can’t remember being bored since that time as a teenager. I suppose at the time I somehow came to the conclusion that
there was little or no value in boredom and so I would just do something to
escape the discomfort. This may
have been a half-baked idea, because there is something about that idea of
“nothing to do” that says something loud and clear about who we are
being. Are we
choosing to be connected to the lives that we are given?
Are we looking out there, away from ourselves, for something to do?
Could this be yet another way that we experience what Ernest Holmes
called Divine Discontent?
It
seems there are at least two distinct states.
One in which we view ourselves and the lives we are given as insufficient
to hold our interest, and another, when for a moment, what we have been doing
comes up short and we experience a vast emptiness, and allowing ourselves to be
with this divine condition, we find ourselves in a sacred creative moment when
we move the Law into action.
Looking
back on childhood, we can view that time of boredom, of “nothing to do,” as
the hollow place in us out of which our creative action springs. Remembering
this state, of being alone with one self, bored, it seems we ride to the bottom
of our feelings, letting things slip to their lowest ebb, and then we take
charge of our life once again. Not wanting to stay in that discontented place,
we begin to think and to act, creatively. We experience ourselves in motion,
brimming with creative ideas, moving once again into action.
In
All About Prosperity And How You Can Prosper, by Jack Addington
said:
"Consciousness
is the only reality, and both poverty and prosperity are states of mind...The
Law of Life is impersonal. It does not care what you choose - success or
failure. You can have it either way."
Boredom
surely is an impoverished state which we can decline to choose! The Law of Mind
produces whatever we choose to think about and it is up to us to think about
that which will make our lives fascinating, if this is what we want.
Knowing
this, how can we create a life that fascinates us? I imagine each and every one of us here is interested in
living a successful life, and by that I mean that we desire for our lives to be
of interest, to be of use in some way, for our lives to demonstrate some
vitality. The good news is that we
don’t really get bored if our life fascinates us.
There
is always something that interests me, and I think that is really the first key:
To be interested in life, to be curiosity itself, is to be fascinated by Life.
Ernest
Holmes shares with us:
Man
is created and left to discover himself, and on the road to this
self-discovery he experiences the creations of his own imaginations which
ultimately show him the Truth and lead to real freedom.
There
is an interesting myth in regard to the creating of man which may serve to
point out this fact. It is said that when the gods decided to make man, and
make him a Divine Being, they held a long discussion as to where would be
the best place to hide his Divinity. Some of the gods suggested that it be
hidden in the earth, but others argued that some day man would penetrate the
earth and so discover himself; it was then suggested that it be hidden in
the depths of the sea, but this idea was rejected, for man would go under
the sea and there discover his true nature; it was next suggested that his
real nature should be deposited somewhere in the air, but this also was
rejected, for he would surely fly through the air and find himself. After a
long discussion it was finally agreed that the best place to hide man's
Divinity would be IN THE INNERMOST NATURE OF MAN HIMSELF-this being the last
place he would look to find it! [iii]
So how does
this relate to boredom? When I was
searching the Science of Mind for what Holmes had to say about boredom, there
was not one word! Now if I looked
for the word “interesting” OR “interested” I found that Holmes used
these words many, many times. I
suppose Holmes would have said that boredom is one possible use you could employ
the Law for, but why would you? With Divinity hid within our innermost
nature, we have a infinite resource with which to fascinate ourselves.
We
are reminded that we need only declare the “fact” of a negative condition
when we want to reject it, to transform the quality of our
experience. When we contradict an unwanted condition and deny it acreage in our
thinking, we render the unwanted condition powerless and such an idea cannot
then claim a space in consciousness to go about building itself upon. Universal
mind does not recognize imperfection, therefore to transform an undesirable
situation, there is a need to be specific not about the problem
but in clearly stating what we want. If
you are bored at work you can affirm, “I am now receiving good, interesting
work that perfectly expresses my self and pays me at a level that supports each
and every one of my interests! I
deny and completely release all need to express myself in ways that undermine
this fulfillment and I affirm that God is good and that this good is expressed
perfectly and generously in me.”
Here
is something thought provoking from the author Walker Percy:
Why
is it that no other species but man gets bored? Under the circumstances in
which a man gets bored, a dog goes to sleep.
Thought
Experiment: Imagine that you are a member of a tour visiting
Greece. The group goes to the Parthenon. It is a bore. Few people even bother
to look--it looked better in the brochure. So people take half a look, mostly
take pictures, remark on the serious erosion by acid rain. You are puzzled.
Why should one of the glories and fonts of Western civilization, viewed under
pleasant conditions--good weather, good hotel room, good food, good guide--be
a bore?
Now
imagine under what set of circumstances a viewing of the Parthenon would not
be a bore. For example, you are a NATO colonel defending Greece against a
Soviet assault. You are in a bunker in downtown Athens, binoculars propped on
sandbags. It is dawn. A medium-range missile attack is under way. Half a
million Greeks are dead. Two missiles bracket the Parthenon. The next will
surely be a hit. Between columns of smoke, a ray of golden light catches the
portico.
And
then he goes on to ask us “Are you bored? Can you see the Parthenon?
Explain.” Clearly, another
thing that we must release is the need to create melodrama.
Bernard
Loomer's father was a sea captain. He was acquainted with his small place in
an uncontrollable nature. In a talk in 1974 Loomer described his father's
instructions about the uses of a baseball glove. The father had just overheard
his son's sandlot complaints about the thinness of a glove inherited from his
older brothers. When his father asked him what a baseball glove was for, young
Loomer had said that it was to protect the hand. In the words of Bernard
Loomer in his sixties, his father replied:
Son,
I never have played baseball, but it seems to me you ought to be able to catch
the ball bare-handed. The way I look at it, you use a glove not to protect
your hand, but to give you a bigger hand to help catch balls that are more
difficult to reach. I assume that in this as in all walks of life there are
tricks to the trade. I suggest you learn how to catch with that glove for two
reasons. First, because you are not going to get another one, and second,
because you don't need protection from life. You need a glove to give you a
bigger hand to catch baseballs you might otherwise miss.
As
the decade of the 1970s progressed, Loomer reflected increasingly on the fact
that what you might otherwise miss [in theology] was irrational, even evil,
but [that it] must be caught anyway. Loomer grew increasingly dissatisfied
with those who seemed to restrict their reach—even Whitehead was faulted.
And increasingly it appeared that Christian theology was the theology Loomer
had—that he was not going to get another one—and so, although it was thin
in places, he attempted to use the one theology he had, to catch all he could.
[This]
suggests the meaning of Loomer's special term, "size." Size
signifies "the volume of life you can take into your being and still
maintain your integrity."[iv]
While
Holmes would say there is not big nor little in God, I think that William Dean
is sharing something with us that is profoundly important.
To take into your being such a volume of life is to recognize ones
absolute connection to the whole of life and to know oneself as the significant
and integral portion of the Divine that one truly is.
To experience this size, as he calls it, is to see this Divinity in all.
How could one be bored when all is divine? How could life be anything less than fascinating when there
is nothing but God to see? Our
spiritual practices are very similar to the baseball glove, they give us a
bigger hand with which to catch the fascinating color and form of life, a way to
feel its warmth and texture. A way
to gain a new vision and extend ourselves into the allness that is natural to
us. When you leave here today, notice the details as you leave. Notice the beauty of nature when you get outdoors.
It isn’t just grass, consider what created that grass and what a joy it
is to trod upon it. Look at the flowers, the trees, the sky.
Marvel at the buildings and the planning and work that went into them.
This very building has been standing here for over thirty years.
It survived the Loma Prieta earthquake.
There are 123 apartments here with at least 1 or two fascinating people
in each apartment!
One of my childhood heroes is former first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt.
She said: “I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to
endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.” Curosity is
a natural gift, because life is innately interesting. If you look at the studies of the great people we study, you
will see that where they lived was strewn with books and examples of the things
that expressed their great curiosity. The
great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas writes simply, “Somebody's boring me. I
think it's me.”
Ernest
Holmes used to begin his radio talks by starting with the statement which I
leave you with today: “There is a power for good in the universe, and you can
use it.”
Thank
you for being here today.
[i]
THE SCIENCE OF MIND
A
Complete Course of Lessons in
the
Science of Mind and Spirit
By
ERNEST SHURTLEFF HOLMES
COPYRIGHT,
1926.
[ii]
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
[iii]
Ibid, THE SCIENCE OF MIND
[iv]
William Dean, The Size of God, 1987
Emerson
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