“Thought is the conscious activity of the one thinking, and … sets Law … in motion. This Law will work for us to the fullest extent of our belief and understanding of It.
A realization of the Presence of One Life is the most powerful healing agency known to the mind of each person.”
~ Ernest Holmes - The Science of Mind
Sandwiched between yesterday and tomorrow is the Present Moment, the point of Infinite Opportunity. Rarely do we reside in this place. Instead, our minds tend to float between regrets and worry, expectations and disappointments. Thinking runs amok on the timeline of our lives, as if dwelling on everything outside of the Present Moment will change things…. (It doesn’t).
I know this isn’t just my experience, so let me tell you about my hike last week. I was on the south side of John Hart Lake, determined to enjoy the moment with my dogs… so peaceful and beautiful it was, the sunny Fall day. Yet, I can’t even begin to tell you the number of times I became aware of my mind launching into the future and deciding what I could do to make events run more smoothly. This behaviour rides on the back of an old belief I sometimes fall into that tells me if I could just work a little harder, then life for me and everyone around me would be better. But, this old belief is a lie.
Let’s consider this quote from Ernest Holmes:
“Thoughts are things, they have the power to objectify themselves ( to manifest)… The word of each person is the law of their life, under the One Great Law of all Life. Thoughts of sickness can make a person sick, and thoughts of health and perfection can heal them.”
My thought, that my working hard will make the future better, is a belief that the future is lacking, somehow… even before it has already happened! Holding this idea in my mind creates all kinds of problems.
I get to choose, though. I can believe in a future that needs my help, or in a Perfect and Powerful Law of Life.
If you go back to the top of this article you will have noticed that I wrote Present Moment with capital letters. This is to aid us in discussion about the belief we have in “small ‘r’ reality”, even though it is really just our personal observation of the world around us and how it might work. “Capital ‘R’ Reality” involves the Infinite Universal Law of how Life really works (whether we recognize it or not). For example: Say I head out on another hike with a friend, up to the Campbell River Lookout. I love a good challenge, but maybe my friend doesn’t. The 3 km ascent has at least 5 short cliffs with climbing chains to assist. The going is steep. The path is rocky and unpredictable. I press on at a swift pace, on fire with the task at hand, oblivious to the mood of my friend. They, meanwhile, are miserable. Fear builds in them, and their muscles begin to seize up. Two very different experiences of the same hike.
Small ‘r’ reality is very different for each one of us. It is coloured by our biased perceptions of what is going on, and how we uniquely relate to the world. No one person’s experience is more ‘right’ or ‘wrong’; each is just different. On the Campbell River Lookout hike we are using as an example, my friend may think of me as callous and inconsiderate, and I may bemoan their dislike of our ‘adventure’. Capital ‘R’ Reality, however, is a constant. The mountain, the weather and the path are the same for both hikers. It is only our stories about the events we are experiencing that are different. Our stories are what we all get to experience in our lives. This is how the Law of Life works.
In the Present Moment, there is only One Thing happening… Infinite Potential. The minute I type the words, “Present Moment”, that moment has already passed and I am on to the next moment. If I can keep my attention focused singularly, fully experiencing what is actually available to me in the ‘right here and now’, I access the point of power in my life. (This is rare for any of us to do for any extended period of time, but the more we practice, the better we get at it). I may want to hold on, and control, and will my idea of how I think life should go to happen. This is dangerous - for my relationships, my happiness, my health, my experience of abundance…. Instead, when I surrender and really engage in my life with ‘presence’, a calm rushes over me, my body relaxes, and I float away into an ecstatic sense of my reality. (Yes, this is still my “small r” experience of reality, as we are humans aspiring toward and experience of true Oneness, but not yet fully inunderstanding of it). This relaxed state is much closer to the Truth of Life than anything I may be trying to engineer myself. It is here where life is experienced as ‘full and complete’.
Ask yourself, in this moment, are all your needs met? Are you warm, safe, full, secure…? YES! What we focus on expands. Focusing our thoughts on the present moment and on what we have, rather than on what we lack, interacts with the Law of Life to increase our experience of Good. The more we take care to nurture ourselves in this way, the more Good we can receive. In practicing in this way, we increase our experience of “the One Life” and all It has to offer. The result is, more experiences of Good in our lives… and on and on it goes… more and more Good.
I went swimming today at McIver Lake. I took a moment to stop, roll over on my back and let the lake consume me. All was blue sky, still waters, and the beat of my heart. I know that each day I allow myself the gift of dropping into the Present Moment, my life continues to be enriched.