(This is Part 6 of a continuing series. Go back to Part 5.)
The mind looks out and sees dualities everywhere—good vs. bad, right vs. wrong, up vs. down, day vs. night, joy vs. suffering, light vs. darkness. And it wants to know why we can't cut off the "downside" and just keep the "upside." But perhaps existence can't exist except as what the mind perceives as dualities.
Can we create the concept of "up" without simultaneously creating the concept of "down"? No, because the one has no meaning without the other. Similarly, as soon as we create the concepts of "right" or "beauty," for example, we've also created at the very same time the concepts of "wrong" and "ugliness."
It's actually all a seamless whole with none of these distinctions, but to our minds it seems that way. We see "day" and "night" as two separate things, but those two things are actually one phenomenon—the spinning of the planet. In this context, "day" can't exist without "night."
We get in our car. It takes us where we want to go—something "good." Yet at the same time it also opens up the possibility that we could get in an accident and be hurt or killed—something "bad."
The thing to notice is that we can't have the possibility of this "good" without simultaneously having the possibility of this "bad." The two arrive together, a package deal, just like when an electron pops into existence it arrives with a positron, an "anti-electron." The two twins come into existence together.
Perhaps all the dualities in existence are this same way, necessary to each other. Perhaps existence, though actually One, cannot exist in physicality except as what appears to the mind as endless dualities, including the duality that we call "darkness" and "light."
And in this context, one reason that all of existence is good is because it is what it is, because what appears to us as the "fortunate/unfortunate" nature of reality is the very thing that allows material existence to exist.
More on this subject of existence as all-goodness later...
It should be mentioned that one of the distinguishing features of New Thought, as Mrs. Hopkins helps to demonstrate, is the prominent involvement of powerful women throughout its evolution. Indeed, historians say that this is more true of New Thought than any other spiritual movement in history.
Most personal-growth teachers in the last century and indeed up to the present moment owe a large debt, whether or not they are aware of it, to the seeds of consciousness that were nurtured and developed in the New Thought movement.
Beginning with teachers like Florence Scovel Shinn, Robert Collier and Claude Bristol in the first half of the 20th century and continuing up to today, the New Thought movement has greatly enriched the world's perspective on human fulfillment.
What follows is an attempt to distill the discovery or reality of heaven into a set of spiritual principles, perhaps as a scientist would attempt to put them down. It was inspired by New Thought but is not limited to it.
Rather, I've just tried to put down, as clearly as I could, the principles that appear to govern our interactions with existence on the spiritual level. I claim no accuracy for these laws or principles; just a sincere attempt:
(This is the end of Part 6. Go to Part 7.)
—jim sloman, 12.13.03 for Mar 7
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