Creative Mind was Ernest Holmes' first published book, written long before he was a celebrity preacher with a massive following. It's a nice little book which, considering how early along in his career he wrote it, stands as a surprisingly good (and wonderfully concise) introduction to Holmes' philosophy. Interestingly, it is said that Norman Vincent Peale read this book when he was a young man, and that it had a profound influence on him.
The book is an extended discussion of the New Thought idea of the creative mind - that Divine Mind which is innately creative and to which we are all (or at least should be) connected to. God - or Mind - is constantly creative, and this creation moves in an upward direction. We are all evolving into better beings and it is through our connection to Creative Mind that this happens.
In many ways this book sticks much more closely to a Christian Science idea of the Universe, which is not surprising because it was around this period that Holmes was studying with Emma Curtis Hopkins, the grandmother of New Thought and a woman who had once been Mary Baker Eddy's closest associate.
For the early Holmes the Universe was all spirit, and nothing material was reality - a notion familiar to anyone who has studied Christian Science. He says:
"There is no physical explanation for anything in the universe; all causation is Spirit and all effect spiritual. We are not living in a physical world but in a spiritual world peopled with spiritual ideas."
This is, of course, a reasonably complex and sophisticated theological vision, and one that is, if anything, even more difficult to grasp in our inherently materialist age than it would have been in 1918. In the book Holmes is radically anti-clerical as well, insisting that the path to realisation was available to us all, with absolutely no intermediary force required. He actually retained this hostility to religious organisation and institutonalisation all his life, though a huge church somehow managed to build itself up around him.
Holmes despised dogma, and he particularly despised the dogmatic churchmen of his day, who he saw as wilfuly misinterpreting scripture and trying to stop people from having a real and dynamic connection with God. He saw himself more as a man of science, and his method as genuinely scientific - hence calling his philosophy The Science of Mind. As he saw it, the metaphysician was dealing with immutable laws and principles, not the arbitrary judgements and positions more characteristic of conventional religion. He saw God as a complete reality, one who would ultimately be discovered by science. Holmes was the perfectly modern man, in love with the new ideas of his age. Science, he said, could never destroy true religion, because it "is man's true experience of Reality" (Living the Science of Mind, p. 40). Religion might peddle its false dualities and its childish fears, but ultimately science would expose us all to the truth of God.
Healing, too, is presented in this book as the ultimate outcome of a genuine understanding of God. For in our illness we are merely allowing ourselves to dwell in error, to grasp onto a false premise. The laws of the Universe must always be productive of good, and so once we abide by these laws we are healed as a matter of course. Health is our primal state of being.
Anyone familiar with The Secret will also find much in this old book that is familiar. Holmes sets out the Law of Attraction, and assures readers that what is needed is to speak into the Universe all that we require, and it will be supplied to us. Proving, of course, that The Secret is a very old idea indeed, with a substantial literature and religious culture behind it.
