Ernest Holmes

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all The Science of Mind (1926, revised 1938) and Creative Mind (1919).

One Mind

Ernest Holmes begins from a single conviction: there is one Mind, one Spirit, one Life, and it is God. The universe is that Mind in expression, and every person lives and thinks within it. Nothing stands outside it to oppose it, so there is no second power and no rival force of evil; what people call evil is the misuse of the one power by those who do not understand it. Sin, in his teaching, is a mistake, and its only punishment is its consequence.

He calls his teaching Religious Science, and defines it as the bringing together of the laws of science, the opinions of philosophy and the revelations of religion, applied to human needs. Its claim is that the life of the spirit obeys law as surely as the physical world does, and so can be studied and practised as a science is.

Spirit, Soul and Body

The one Being has a threefold nature. Spirit is its conscious side, self-knowing and self-choosing: it knows itself and decides. Soul is its subjective side, which Holmes also calls the Law, the Creative Medium and Universal Subjective Mind: it does not choose, it receives. Body is the result, every form and thing the universe holds. Spirit knows, the Law does, and Body is what is done.

The Law, as he teaches it, is impersonal, neutral and creative. It accepts every idea given to it and works it out without argument, as soil takes any seed and grows what was sown. It knows nothing of good or bad, large or small; it acts on what it receives. So the same Law that heals, in his teaching, also binds those who give it ideas of limitation.

The person in the one Mind

A person repeats the same three on a small scale. The conscious mind is a person's share in Spirit, able to choose; the subjective mind is a person's use of the one Law; the body and the affairs of a life are the results. There is not one mind for each person and another for God: there is one Mind, which each person uses, and each is a centre in it through which the whole flows.

So the Law works through everyone, whether they know it or not. A person who thinks fear, lack and illness all day is using it as surely as one who thinks peace and wholeness, and the results follow the use. Holmes adds what he calls race suggestion, the great weight of belief the human race holds in common, in sickness, ageing, scarcity and death, which presses on every mind that does not consciously refuse it. The aim of practice is to think on purpose, from the truth of one's being, instead of drifting with that common belief.

Spiritual mind treatment

The practice of Religious Science is treatment, a prayer that affirms instead of asking. Holmes defines it as consciously inducing thought, within the mind of the one who treats, that sees the person treated as divine, spiritual and perfect. It is not willing, not concentration, not sending thoughts out to another and not suggestion: it is the practitioner clarifying their own thought until it knows what is true. Because there is only one Mind, a truth clearly known in the practitioner's mind is known in the Law, where the person treated also lives.

He describes two methods. The argumentative method is a reasoning in mind: the practitioner names the person and the trouble and argues, statement by statement, that the trouble has no place in the person's real nature, until the contrary belief gives way. The realisation method is the direct inner sense of the presence and perfection of Spirit, held without argument. Most treatments use both, moving from argument toward realisation.

A treatment ends in release. The practitioner gives thanks, lets the word go into the Law and does not keep reworking it. The outward result Holmes calls a demonstration. His church later taught treatment in five steps: recognition, unification, realisation, thanksgiving and release.

The mental equivalent

To have a thing, Holmes teaches, a person must first have its mental equivalent: a clear inner idea of it, embodied until it feels natural. A treatment for supply therefore does not picture money falling from the sky. It treats for the idea of right action, of useful activity and of abundance in the person's life, and leaves the form to the Law. The equivalent grows by daily practice, as the student turns the attention from what is lacking to what is wished for and accepted.

In his teaching treatment is never used to take from another or to bend another person's will; it is given for the good of all concerned, with no one's gain at another's cost.

Healing, and the doctor

Holmes teaches that treatment heals the body, because the body is the Law's working out of a person's ruling ideas, and that the practitioner heals by knowing the truth of the patient's spiritual perfection. He did not set his teaching against medicine. The house gives his teaching as the belief it is: no trial has shown that treatment cures illness, and prayer of any kind is a companion to medical care, never a reason to delay or refuse it.

The daily word

The practice he asks of his students is daily and quiet. In the books of his later years, This Thing Called You among them, he gives meditations in the first person, short statements of oneness with God, of peace and of wholeness, to be read slowly and dwelt on until the mind accepts them. The student begins each day by turning to the one Mind within, recognises that the life in them is God's life, and goes out into the day from that recognition. When a thought goes wrong, they do not condemn themselves or anyone else; they correct the thought and begin again.