Return to Index |
August, 2005
Now we have a freedom for all these things that belong to the nature of God. We have freedom to love. What is to stop me from loving you? Nothing but myself. It wouldn’t be any of my business whether you loved me; but if I loved you enough, you would. What is to stop me from being glad? It won’t hurt anybody. It won’t save anybody for me to be sad. Jesus said, “And I, if I be lifted up”—not dragged down—“will draw all men to me.” There is nothing to keep me from being glad. Nothing. What is to keep me from having peace of mind? Someone says, “There is so much confusion in the world that I can’t have peace of mind.” There has always been confusion in the world, and there will be in the world as long as I live; therefore shall I be confused? No! I want peace of mind. I can’t live without it.
I had to go away the last two weeks every day, sometimes for a couple of hours, to do what I call “putting myself back into myself.” I have to have equilibrium and joy and peace of mind and balance and poise inside of me or else I get dragged apart, or something. I don’t know what happens, but it isn’t good. It isn’t good for anybody either; you can shatter anything. Walt Whitman said he liked to take time to loaf and invite his soul, and we all ought to take time to loaf and invite our soul.
Here is the cause of all creation; here in you and in me is the possibility of all joy; here is the freedom we have been looking for—and we shall never find it outside. Never. Therefore if I love enough, I shall be loved. People say to me, “Isn’t it wonderful to be loved the way you are?” And I say, “Well, I love people, that is all.”
Love and you shall be loved. But we separate two or three people and say we love them; or love must come to us from this or that person. This is not love we are after. Nothing wrong about it; but there is nothing that can keep me from loving everyone. Nothing. I have this freedom. Do I have an equal freedom to hate everyone? No. I’ll tell you why. Emerson said, “Nature forevermore screens herself from the profane.”
The American psychiatrist Karl Menninger wrote a book called Love Against Hate: love is a principle in nature; hate is chaos. We can hate until it poisons us, destroys the liver, creates inaction, and kills us. Then we may get a fresh start, and that is all that death is—not to the soul, which lives forever. Browning said a man may desecrate that part, but he cannot lose it. So you see, I do not have an equal freedom to hate; I have the possibility of hating for a short time.
The more I hate, the worse I’ll be; the more I love, the better I’ll be: that is my freedom. That is why Tolstoy said we have freedom within the laws of inevitability, by which he meant we have freedom to be lined up with the laws of God. But how could we have freedom to destroy this Universe? The great fallacy of communism, fundamentally, is that in the name of liberty it is destroying freedom, and in the name of unity it is trying to create uniformity. [Robotization and uniformity:] Neither one of these things exist in nature. That is why it cannot stand. The trouble isn’t economic or political—that is bad enough for us; we wouldn’t like it—but fundamentally it is denying two of the great propositions in the universe: [first, that there is freedom, not robotization; second,] that there is unity but not uniformity—that all nature tends to individualize everything, and that the common denominator is in Spirit and not in a monotonous repetition of likeness (which is a great fallacy). Fundamentally, that is why it cannot exist beyond a certain time—I don’t know how long; but it can’t.
We have the freedom to be happy. Now why aren’t we? A few people we permit to rob us of our happiness. We say, unless love comes through them, we won’t get it. Then we are always projecting our inadequacy or morbidity, fear. And every time they think of us, they don’t like us—because they can’t; because they are getting the vibration of our relationship.
Everything works with mathematical accuracy. Love everybody. Be glad. “There is ever a song somewhere, my dear.” Let’s sing it. We have the freedom to be happy; we have the freedom to be at peace, to be poised, to be calm. Now we all “know” these things. Everybody says, “Well I follow you; I believe in what you say; that is right; but look at all the other things!”
Do we have the freedom to be well? Do we have a freedom to be prosperous? I think we do. I think freedom includes all these things. It is now known that the vast majority of disease—way above 75 percent—is emotional in its nature. That doesn’t mean it is unreal. It’s silly, to me, for people to say that sickness isn’t sickness—of course it is. But that doesn’t mean it has to be. I believe we have the freedom to be happy, to be well, and to be prosperous. Why shouldn’t we, in a Universe the nature of which is so extravagantly abundant and so abundantly extravagant?
We have the freedom to be happy. I don’t think there is anything worthwhile without happiness. If a person isn’t happy, what is worthwhile? We ought to be happy. But how are we going to be well, happy, prosperous, unless we believe in some fundamental things that we can prove, and prove them right here and now—not in the by-and-by, not when we have shucked off this mortal coil. Right now. Whatever is true, is true now. This is the time; we are the people; this is the day; you and I are the ones; here is the place. Right now.
Excerpted from Ideas of Power, by Ernest Holmes, compiled by George P. Bendall, published by DeVorss Publications. • |
|
