Gratefully Moving Into a New Era

By Editor & Creative Director Holli Sharp

The August 2023 issue of Guide for Spiritual Living: Science of Mind magazine is our last single issue in print, and it's packed with content carefully curated to meet you where you’re at on your spiritual path, the discovery and realization of your deepest dreams.

Ernest Holmes harnessed his passion and purpose, taking a leap of faith in October 1927 when he began this magazine. And where would we be today if Holmes had strayed from his ideas and decided they weren't good enough?

Countless people over the years have shared with me what this magazine means to them. Their mothers subscribed and it caught their attention as curious teens. They were ... subscribed and it caught their attention as curious teens. They were gifted a subscription while incarcerated and never saw life the same way. They cried when they realized they were free to be exactly who they are in this world. They dropped the guilt and shame of religious beliefs that no longer served them. Their hearts cracked open, and they understood God in a whole new way — their way.

You'll hear from many of them in this magazine. This month includes a diverse group of New Thought voices and perspectives, authors who have written for the publication for decades and a few who are new to these pages. …

Students of Holmes' perennial wisdom fill this issue, and we honor his legacy with an excerpt from a new book of his previously unpublished lectures from Religious Science retreats at Asilomar.

I am grateful for all our readers, the authors and our dedicated staff. We are facing change and taking a risk to create a more sustainable, prosperous future for this beloved publication. Faith in Spirit is our guiding light and constant assurance for what's next.

— Excerpted from the August 2023 Science of Mind magazine.

The Asilomar Talks:

Exaltation of the Presence

By Ernest Holmes

Our whole theme, as you know, for the week has been on practicing the Presence of God. I think one of the interesting things has been the many viewpoints presented of the meaning of the Divine Presence and the practice and the realization of the Divine Presence. It is good that it is that way, because the Religious Science movement is a new form of catholicity.

That means “of a universal religion,” and it will be, as time goes on and beyond my time, because art is long and time is fleeting. It will be, in my estimation, as I looked down the years yet unborn, in many ways. I believe it will take many forms. … I would say but there will be many different orders. We probably won't call them orders, but there will be many different avenues of expression in this great movement. I do not know what they will be, but it is inevitable that they shall be.

Just as in the Catholic church, where they have orders that pray without ceasing. Maybe we have been doing that here in treatment. That seems quite fitting to me, to one who likes a life of contemplation and meditation. I think I'm a little too active to do it. I'd probably get the heebie-jeebies about the third hour and jump up and run out, but there are people with greater patience. They will listen longer and more deeply, and if they do, they will hear more.

I think there will be orders where certain phases of this philosophy will be taught, and those particular groups will be noted for teaching certain things with deep appreciation. Now that seems to me a new catholicity, which I think we're forming, exactly what we should expect to happen and what ought to happen because we have only two fundamental propositions from which we shall never depart. Oh, I don't say “we shall never.” I never shall. I do not know what somebody else will do.

I am not particularly concerned what the future ages will do. The only age I know is the one that belongs to me, here and now, and here and now is the only age there will ever be. The ever present here, the eternal now and the only evidence you and I will ever have of it is our reaction to it. Somebody might say its reaction to us. That is eternal. Our reaction to it is our salvation, not from sin or future punishment, but our salvation from our own ignorance.

— Excerpted from the August 2023 Science of Mind magazine and the newly released “Ernest Holmes at Asilomar: Lectures and Classes from the 1950s”