The Subtle Illusion

TODAY’S READING:
48.4-50.2

Today’s reading has a phrase which struck me when I first read it, and provides a powerful concept to consider. Should we entertain hope? Ernest Holmes doesn’t think so. He wrote, “Hope is good; it is better than despair, but it is a subtle illusion and and unconscious compromise, and has no part in an effective mental treatment.”

Let’s not worry about the jargon-y use of the words, “mental treatment,” and allow ourselves to look at all the places in our mind where we cling to hope. Mental treatment is a formalized use of mind, yet our mind is working 24/7. The lives we create are the out-picturing of our mind’s work. So any place where we have hope for a desired outcome is a place where we do not have assurance. I think it is time to change that.

When I was living in New York City in the late 1990s, and long before I ever knew of the Science of Mind philosophy I was in a bad relationship. I was living with a guy that I should never have started dating to begin with. We were just not good for each other—and our relationship was toxic. I remember so frequently hoping that I could find an easy way out of the relationship. I was so unhappy, but also felt guilty about not honoring the commitment I had made to be with him.

I should have simply taken charge of my mind and my circumstances and said to him, “this relationship needs to end.” I was living in hope, though, and my mind would consistently find a way to compromise. That is until I found a loophole…or so I thought.

One day I proudly returned home from my job (whatever it was, I was working as an office temp mostly those days) and told him that I had decided that New York was not working for me and that I was going to move to Los Angeles. Phew! I did it! I found the escape path from the relationship and I didn’t have to hurt anyone in the process. He would certainly understand my desire to move, right! Of course. And him being such a die hard New Yorker, he would definitely continue to live in The City and not follow me to California.

“That’s great!” he would respond, “I’ll come with you!”

What?

No.

That isn’t what was supposed to happen.

But that is what did happen. He moved with me to California, and because I was in a place of hope rather than requirement I didn’t have the capacity at that time to say to him, “no.”

See what hope can do? It can keep our good at bay. I stayed in that relationship another nine months following our move until I had developed the courage to leave it. It was not an easy change for me, but to this day I am grateful to have left.

Where in your place might you be living in hope? Are you able to step up in the understanding now of how the mind works and state your specific, definite, claim unto the law of creation? That is how we begin to change our lives, by requiring more of ourselves.

Let’s reject the subtle illusion of hope and the thought that it will do anything for us. Let’s live in the definite.

The flower doesn’t hope to bloom, it blooms.