Book Description
This Thing Called You is an intimate guide through which readers will learn the important lesson of how they are an immutable part of the flow of life, and how they may fulfill the longing, within all of us, to live more fully. The book details methods of meditation used for healing, improving mind and body, and reaching one's divine self. Included are numerous inspirations, meditations, and prayers that individuals can apply to their life, which reveal the unlimited potential of the spiritual psychology that Holmes founded.

Originally published in the first half of the twentieth century, these meditative, concise volumes have never previously appeared in paperback or ebook form before. Whether a newcomer to the philosophy Holmes founded or a veteran reader, you will find great power and practicality in the words that render Holmes one of the most celebrated and beloved mystical teachers of the past hundred years.

Chapter I

YOU, LIKE all others, are seeking the joy of liv­ing. You wish to be needed, to be loved to be in­cluded in the great drama of life. This urge is in every individual. It is in everything. The rose exists to ex­press beauty. Root and branch conspire with nature to give birth to blossom. An artist will starve in his garret that he may chisel an angelic form from a slab of marble, compelling the unyielding substance to ac­cept his breath of creation.

Not only human beings, but everything in nature is endowed with this creative urge. When moisture is precipitated the desert receives it with gladness and breaks forth into a song of creation. Making the most of its brief season, it blossoms in joy, storing within its bosom the seed of a future flowering. It is impossible to escape this creative urge. Everything must find fulfillment or perish.

No man willed this so. Evolution is proof of an irresistible urge which pushes everything onward and upward. Man did not create life, he is something that lives in, from, and by it. He cannot escape life or the necessity of giving expression to it through living.

In some way which you know not of, through some process which never reveals its face, Life has entered into you and with it the irresistible impulse to create. Divine Intelligence has willed it so, nor you, nor any other person, nor all the wit, science or philosophy of man, nor the inspiration of saints or sages, can change one bit of it any more than man can arrest the eternal circuits of time, the revolutions of the planets or the desire of the fledgling to leave its nest, to soar and sing.

Create or perish is the eternal mandate of na­ture. Be constructive or become frustrated, is an equal demand. You cannot escape the conclusion that whatever this thing is which is seeking expres­sion through everything, it can find satisfactory out­let only through constructive and life-giving creative-ness. You may call this process good or evil, right or wrong, God or the devil, heaven or hell. Would it not be more simple to say that finally things work out for the best only when they are life-giving.

We are all some part of a universal order. The very urge for personal gratification is incomplete un­til it finds a universal outlet. This is the cause back of all upheavals in human history. The pattern is trying to fit the pieces into greater and greater units as though it could not accomplish its purpose through anything other than a democracy of Spirit, a union of all. This union, however, does not mean same­ness, for while unity requires conformity to principles, unity never means uniformity. Every blade of grass, every crystal, every drop of water, like every individual, is a little different from any other one of its species.

Humanity is made up of innumerable indi­viduals, no two alike, and yet society is a composite whole moving gradually toward some ultimate goal. What could this goal be other than that everyone, while remaining individual, shall find a more com­plete expression in and among all other individuals? This has been the dream of the ages, that the lion shall lie down with the lamb, and "a little child shall lead them." As Jesus said, ". . . that they may be one, even as we are one."

You belong to the universe in which you live, you are one with the Creative Genius back of this vast array of ceaseless motion, this original flow of life. You are as much a part of it as the sun, the earth and the air. There is something in you telling you this—like a voice echoing from some mountain top of inward vision, like a light whose origin no man has seen, like an impulse welling up from an invisible source.

Your soul belongs to the universe. Your mind is an outlet through which the Creative Intelligence of the universe seeks fulfillment.

This is your starting point for investigating the meaning of those impulses, longings and desires which accompany you through life. You may accept that the source through which they come is real. You may accept that the universe is filled with a Divine and Infinite Presence, perhaps the infinite of yourself. Not the infinite of your limited self, but the infinite of the Divine Self you must be. There must be a pattern of yourself in this invisible.

The greatest minds of the ages have accepted that such a pattern exists. Socrates called it his spirit, Jesus his Father in Heaven. Some ancient mystics called it Atman. Why don't you call it just you, your complete self? For surely this is what they all have meant.

Just try to catch the larger vision and realize that there have been and are people, many of them, who have wooed and wed some invisible Presence until Its atmosphere and essence have become wo­ven into the fabric of their own existence. Every man is a doorway, as Emerson said, through which the Infinite passes into the finite, through which God becomes man, through which the Universal becomes individual.

You are to believe with utmost simplicity and with complete faith that there is a pattern of your be­ing, or a real spirit of you, which is as eternal as God, as indestructible as Reality, and as changeless as Truth. This pattern is seeking to manifest through you. Back of it is all the will and purpose of the uni­verse, all the irresistible laws of being.  Finally it will win.

It is because it is there that you have these irre­sistible urges—the longing to live more fully, the feeling that life belongs to you. There is something within you beyond all doubt and fear, something which has never been limited by your acts or de­stroyed by your feeling. This is the only something that can make you whole.

Chapter II

WHY, THEN, if these things are true, is the world still impoverished, mentally and physically ill and apparently unable to become unified? This is the great question—Why, and Why, and Why? Unless this question is adequately answered and its mean­ing increasingly applied to human conduct, there is danger that the world may destroy its vast system of misconceptions and be compelled to begin over again.

It seems as though a persistent purpose were being carried out, that anything which does not comply with this purpose must become submerged in the backwash of evolution, that that which is more nearly right may come forward. The world has reached a dramatic climax in its history. It has un-locked so much of the physical resources of the universe that unless this enormous power is used constructively it can well destroy it. The world stands on the brink of a great abyss, a terrific regression, or, if it choose, faces the horizon of a glorious day, a new age.

But you may ask, "Why would an Almighty Power and a Divine Intelligence permit such pos­sible disaster?" This is something that you and I have no control over. God, or the Creative Genius of the universe, has placed this prerogative in the mind of man through giving him volition and choice. God Himself could not will it otherwise. For, if there is to be a valid choice, it must be accompanied by the possibility of more than one thing to choose.

This is what Moses meant when he said that the word is in your own mouth—a blessing or a curse according to the way you use it. Jesus reiterated this when he said that the Father worketh until now, but now the son works; that "whatsoever things the son seeth the Father do, that doeth the son also, that the Father may be glorified in the son."

Now, you are this son and you wish the Father to be glorified through you. You want Life to live through you. You want joy to express itself in you. You desire peace of mind and happiness, success, health, radiant living. How could you desire these things unless they already exist as possibilities? Is there not an echo within you, as though it came from some invisible source—a deep feeling, an intui­tive something? You cannot quite put it into words, yet there it is, definite as your life.

Do not be afraid of this urging. All nature obeys it blindly. The culminating and triumphant result of evolution has placed in you the possibility of ac­cepting or rejecting. In wonder and awe before the grandeur of this possibility the mind stands still, the imagination is staggered, but that hope which springs perennial in man's consciousness, says, "Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet ap­pear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is."

You already are a spiritual being. When the mind understands this and embodies its essence, that which you are in the invisible will become more ap­parent in the visible. You have concluded that this is true. You are reinforced by the wisdom of the ages and are rapidly becoming further reinforced through scientific investigation. Let us see if we can­not discover what blocks the way. We shall not dis­cover any block in Reality Itself, but in our attitude toward It. Now that man has reached the stage of self-choice he can temporarily, but not permanently, block the Divine intention.

Browning said that man can desecrate but never lose the divine spark. It is always there. "I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." Let us suppose that you are spirit, soul and body, as the Bible states; that your spirit already is perfect, an individualized center in the consciousness of God. God has made you out of Himself. The only mate­rial He had was the Substance of His own being. The only mind He had to implant in you was His Mind. The only spirit He had to impart was His own Spirit. "What is man, that thou art mindful of him? or the son of man, that thou visitest him? Thou madest him a little lower than the angels; thou crownedst him with glory and honour, and didst set him over the works of thy hands."

You are a living being by virtue of the fact that through some process which no man knows, needs to know, or can know, Life is incarnated in you, op­erating through you this moment. This is the gift of Life. This is the Son forever begotten in the bosom of the Father.

But you are an individual, like all other individ­uals gradually awakening to the greater possibility. If Life made you out of Itself, which It most certainly did, and if you are an individual just a little different from all other individuals who ever lived, then Life not only created you as an independent being, It also implanted a unique something within you. It will never be duplicated. The spirit that ac­companies you through your life is just a little dif­ferent from the spirit of any other person—not dif­ferent in that it is isolated, because all are rooted in one being, but different in that it is individual.

Suppose you were to think of it this way: there is a spirit in me and this spirit is God as His own son. Whether or not I understand it, there is a real Myself which forever exists in pure Spirit. I had nothing to do with this. I merely awoke and dis­covered it. I did not give it to myself, and I cannot withdraw myself from it. I can only accept it

Since you are an individual you can either ac­cept or reject your own spirit. Of course, no one can take it away from you. Somewhere along the line you will be compelled to accept it. However, you can procrastinate, you can divert, you can side­step or delay this divine event. If you knew beyond question that this is true, your greatest search would be after your own spirit. Well, you do know this. Every desire you have for betterment in life is some echo from that deep within which forevermore pro­claims, "Behold, I make all things new."

It is because your mind has the prerogative of accepting or rejecting that the Bible states: "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: If any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in and sup with him, and he with me." Suppose, with utmost simplicity, you accept the spirit that is in you—not in the mountain, not at Jerusalem, not even in the temple, although it is there also, but in you—the spirit of yourself. Standing between this spirit, your physical body and external affairs, there is the sum total of your thinking, believing, feeling.

Perhaps, more than anyone understands or be­lieves, the sum total of every man's thought is a mi­rage of the ages. It would be well to think of it this way that you may not condemn yourself. You are like everyone else, "an infant crying in the night"—something trying to be made whole, something with a deep yearning for security, a deep and un­speakable longing for love, for protection and for peace.

But the mind is filled with the accumulated doubts of the ages, as though a vast abyss of doubt, fear and uncertainty were standing between you and your desires. Here is where Science of Mind can aid you, where your intellect may reach through to unite with your inspiration, where the conscious use of the laws of mind may break down the barriers which hide the face of love from the fact of unloveliness.

If God created you after His own nature (and there is nothing else He could have made you out of) then the thing you are after is already here, within you. The only things that stand between you and it are the accumulated thoughts, beliefs and emotions of the ages. But there is nothing there that has not been put there either by yourself or the race. What has been put there can be removed. These unbeliefs are thought patterns laid down throughout the ages and accentuated by your own experience, by your inherited tendencies and environment. There is no use wasting time speculating as to what avenue they came through. Your job is to reject them.

Your intellect has now accepted that you can do this. Are you not, then, like one who has started on a journey to a beautiful city which he knows ex­ists? What if he has to climb a few mountains, make a certain number of detours and cross a desert or ford a stream. Everything that is worth attaining is worth striving toward. It is the goal you are after. You have a vision and you are going to follow it.

You may not reach your city of good in a single day, but its image out there in your desert is not a mirage. There was never a counterfeit without a reality back of it. Fortunately, your destiny is not external. If it were you could not reach your goal. One by one, without frenzy or impatience, you are going to remove the mental blocks that stand be­tween you and your destiny. What thought has done, thought can undo. The mental patterns laid down in your subconscious throughout the ages can be consciously removed.

This great thing within you, which is called will or choice, can decide your destiny. It can remove every obstruction and gradually implant new pat­terns in your mind.

Suppose you look at the proposition from another viewpoint. Suppose you place your physical envi­ronment, including your body and your conscious mind, at one end of a line. At the other end place your spiritual being, God and infinite possibility. At this end of the line everything is already perfect. Jesus called this the Kingdom of Heaven which ought to come on earth. It should make its advent in your experience. It wants to. "The Spirit seeketh such."

This end of the line is the Kingdom which has been promised. This Spirit is happy, whole, free, filled with joy, eternal in Its existence, and can pro­vide you with everlasting expansion. All your high­est hopes and dreams have come from It. The echo of Its being is in your intellect, the voice of Its un­spoken word is in your mind, the feeling of Its light and life is in your heart, the emotion of Its imagina­tion is in your soul.

At the other end of the line is your physical en­vironment, including your body, most of your con­scious thoughts, your daily hopes and aspirations, fears and failures. All apparently isolated, wander­ing in a desert of despair, climbing endless moun­tains, at times lost in interminable forests through which light does not break, fording rushing streams in the turmoil of life—searching, wondering, hop­ing, longing, yearning toward that other half of its being which alone can make it whole.

Don't you think this is a good description of your attitudes and experiences? One-half of you in heaven, the other half on a dense earth. The heav­enly willing to come forward and answer your every need, the earthly half striving toward the heavenly—and the apparent barrier. If you knew, as you know that you live, that this barrier were only a thing of thought or belief, the first half of your journey would be accomplished. You would know that you have the tools to cut down the forests, level the mountains, bridge the streams and cause the desert to bloom.

If you listen to yourself long enough you will know this. With hope and enthusiasm you will start on your journey. You will never become discouraged or disheartened. Your vision will be on this city of good and your feet, your mind, your intellect, your will, will travel toward this city and you shall surely enter its gates.

Let us use another illustration. Let us think of a tunnel, one end of which is out in the open where there are fertile valleys, glorious sunshine, verdant vegetation. There is song, laughter, happiness, peace and joy. Let us call this the Valley of Contentment. Let us also call it the Kingdom of God.

You are at the other end of this tunnel in a deep, dark cavern, overlooking a desert through which no refreshing streams flow. Somehow your attention has been drawn to the open end of this tunnel. With a curiosity that you did not put in your mind, you wish to investigate where this tunnel leads, what is at the other end of it. You peer into the tunnel. At first it seems dark, but occasionally a shaft of light shines through it and you catch a vision of the other side.

You have a great longing to walk through this tunnel, to leave behind the dismal scene of discontent and unhappiness, and to enter into the joy that your brief glimpse has promised. For in this glimpse you have seemed to see yourself standing at the other end of the tunnel. Perhaps, in this momentary vision you seem to have seen your own spirit. It seems as though something says, "Yes, this is myself. How am I going to unite myself with myself?" Then darkness closes in. Your vision has vanished. It must have been an illusion.

Now there are two voices that seem to be talking to you. One voice says, "You are following a mirage, an illusion. There is nothing real but this end of the tunnel. Accept things as they are. Make the best of them. Be as happy as you can, but do not hope." This is the voice of despair. The other voice is saying, "Do not be afraid. Your vision is true. Enter the tun­nel and walk through. There is nothing solid in it. That which obstructs your passage is vapor, the vapor of unbelief. It is dense only with the denseness of doubt. It is filled with the thoughts of the ages. There is a lamp within you already lighted. As you walk through the tunnel the darkness will disappear because of this light. You will find that other half of yourself and you will discover that this tunnel is your own mind."

This is a picture of yourself—your efforts, your hopes and longings, your inspirations and doubts, your fears and faiths.

The barriers between you and your greater good are not barriers in themselves. They are things of thought. It is because of this that all things are possible to faith. Jesus summed up the whole proposition when he said, "It is done unto you as you believe." In interpreting this saying, however, you must pause after the word as. Think about its meaning and you will discover that he was saying that he saying that life not only re­sponds to your belief, it responds after the manner of your believing, as you believe. It is a mirror re­flecting the image of your belief.

While the laws of mind, like all laws of nature, are neutral, good must finally overcome evil. Evil is a negation. Good is positive. Like light and darkness—darkness cannot overcome light, but light can neu­tralize darkness. This is why Jesus said if you seek the Kingdom first everything else will be added, and in this "everything else" is included all things in this life that make for full livingness and joy, peace and happiness, health and harmony, and the success that rightfully belongs to a Divine Being.

The only warning Jesus made against the use of this highest law of your being was that it should not be used destructively. ". . . for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword." The Kingdom of God contains everything that is or could be desirable. This everything already exists as a potential some­thing to be drawn upon. You may use this potential for any good purpose, not only with certainty of success but with safety. It is only when we use nat­ural forces wrongly that they can destroy, and it is ordained that this destruction be of a temporary na­ture.

You wish to use the laws of your being in such a way that they cannot bring evil to yourself or others. Therefore, you must be certain that your desire is toward more life for everyone, including yourself. If you follow this rule you cannot use the law wrongly.

There is a law of faith and belief which is just as definite as any other law in nature. This law uti­lizes the Creative Principle of Life in such a way that all lesser uses of It become submerged. This is the triumph of Spirit.