Smart Hearts

In Unity, we say that life is consciousness. We often refer to God as Divine Mind. We tout the Law of Mind Action: thoughts held in mind produce after their kind. We sing charming children’s songs about how thoughts become things.

All this talk about thought can be misleading. The ordinary use of the term thought implies an abstract, intellectual idea. But Unity teaches that abstract ideas without emotional substance have little or no life force.

In Unity, we teach that to co-create more Good with Spirit, we must not just hold a thought in our brain-minds but in our heart-minds: For as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. -PROVERBS 23:7

As British Educator Thomas Trowd once said: Having seen and felt the end, you have willed the means to the realization of the end.

As many of us have experienced, however, it is not merely having feelings—even very powerful feelings—in relationship to an idea. It is about whether the feeling actually supports the idea.

Are you wanting a loving life partner but your idea of having such a life partner is filled with a sense of longing, lack, and want? Are you desiring respect, recognition, and ample compensation for your life’s work but that wanting is filled with bitterness or depression arising from the belief that “I am never recognized,” or “I can’t do anything right”?

In The Creative Life, Rev. Eric Butterworth reminds us:

No philosophy in the world can bring success to the person who is forever indulging his or her emotions with visions of inadequacy and limitation. To be ambitious for prosperity, yet to feel poor, to desire healing, yet always feel weak and afflicted, is like trying to reach east by traveling west. No matter how diligently you work, if you feel less than you desire yourself to be, that feeling is going to neutralize your efforts. The secret of achieving your dreams lies in so vividly imaging them that you literally exude the consciousness of them because you are vibrating with their reality. -Eric Butterworth, The Creative Life, p 56

The power of imagination is the power to join our thoughts and feelings so that one does not go east while the other heads west. The power of imagination is the power to direct our thoughts and feelings to join together in one magnificent movement that is the song and dance of the Good Life.

To live the Good life, we must exercise the fifth Basic Unity Principle, which pronounces that it is not enough to just know these Truth principles, we must live them.

To express the Truths that we have come to agree with intellectually, we must discipline the ego-mind, which wants to find depressing evidence everywhere of our old belief systems.
This is what it means to be “diligent for the Kingdom.”
We experience the Kingdom of God by making conscious decisions to see the Good everywhere, both within ourselves and without. That decision to see the Good, despite all appearances, is a decision to see with our “third” eye, our inner eye, our power of imagination.