Who Was Ernest Holmes? 10 Ideas That Still Change Lives a Century Later
Ernest Holmes (1887-1960) was an American spiritual teacher, the author of The Science of Mind (1926), and the founder of the movement that became today’s Centers for Spiritual Living. He had almost no formal education and an enormous appetite for reading. Out of the world’s wisdom traditions, the New England Transcendentalists, and the young New Thought movement, he worked out a practical spiritual philosophy he called Science of Mind. Its whole foundation fits in one sentence of his: “there is a power for good in the universe, greater than you are, and you can use it.”
Who was Ernest Holmes?
Holmes was born in rural Maine in 1887, the youngest of nine boys. He left school at fifteen and finished his education on his own in public libraries, reading Emerson’s essays “like a man drinking water in a desert,” as he later put it. He studied Thomas Troward’s lectures on mental science, trained with Emma Curtis Hopkins, and read the scriptures of the world’s religions. By the 1920s he was filling theaters in Los Angeles. He published The Science of Mind in 1926, revised it in 1938, and spent the rest of his life teaching and writing while his students, somewhat against his wishes, built an organization around the teaching. He also founded Science of Mind magazine (opens in new tab), which is still in print. Through all of it he stayed modest about the enterprise. “I am just a student of Life,” he insisted, “trying to find out what makes it tick.”
That teaching is carried on today by Centers for Spiritual Living (opens in new tab) around the world, including our community here in San Jose. If you want the philosophy itself rather than the biography, start with What Is Science of Mind? A Plain-English Guide.
10 ideas from Ernest Holmes that still change lives
1. “Change your thinking, change your life.”
The best-known summary of the teaching, and the most misunderstood. Holmes did not mean positive thinking as a coat of paint. He meant that our deepest habitual beliefs act like seeds in receptive soil, and that we can plant something different.
2. “There is a power for good in the universe, greater than you are, and you can use it.”
This was Holmes’ one-sentence gospel. The Power is never earned. It is only accepted, the way a window does nothing to deserve the sunlight it lets in.
3. “Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it.”
Most of us spend years arguing with the mirror. Holmes suggests turning around and attending to what stands in front of it: our own consciousness.
4. “Principle is not bound by precedent.”
Your history does not get the final vote. A pattern may have run for decades; the creative Law still answers present conviction rather than past record.
5. “Never limit your view of life by any past experience.”
The practical side of idea four. Expectancy, in this teaching, is a discipline you practice, like scales on a piano.
6. “The universe is not against us; it is for us, but it can only do for us what it can do through us.”
Grace and responsibility in a single breath. The gift is already given. Consciousness is the vessel that receives it, and the vessel can be widened.
7. “Prayer is not an act of overcoming God’s reluctance, but of taking hold of God’s willingness.”
This is the heart of affirmative prayer. We do not plead with a reluctant deity. We line ourselves up with a willing one.
8. “We are all immersed in an infinite Intelligence, a Mind that knows all things.”
Intuition, guidance, and the idea that arrives in the shower are not luck. Holmes saw them as our native inheritance, and said we meet them most reliably in meditation and stillness. For a lot of us, that means the twenty quiet minutes before the Sunday band starts warming up.
9. “Love is the central flame of the universe.”
For all its talk of law and mind, the center of this teaching is warmth. Holmes taught that Love rules through Law. Love is the giver; Law is the way the gift is delivered.
10. “Find me one person who can get his own littleness out of the way, and he shall reveal the Power of God.”
In the end the spiritual life is subtraction. Less fear. Less self-condemnation. Less contraction. What remains, once those are gone, is the Life that was there the whole time.
Why does Ernest Holmes still matter?
Because the questions he spent his life on are the ones people still type into a search bar at midnight. Is there something more? Do my thoughts matter? Can a life actually change? A century of practitioners, now a worldwide movement, have tested his answer and found it holds: consciousness is causative, God is present, and any person can prove it in the laboratory of their own life.
What book is Ernest Holmes best known for?
The Science of Mind, first published in 1926 and revised in 1938. It is still the foundational textbook of the Science of Mind philosophy and of Centers for Spiritual Living.
Did Ernest Holmes found a religion?
Holmes founded a teaching and, somewhat reluctantly, an organization: the Institute of Religious Science, which grew into today’s Centers for Spiritual Living. He saw Science of Mind as a philosophy and a way of life open to people of every faith.
Where can I study Ernest Holmes’ teaching today?
Centers for Spiritual Living worldwide offer accredited classes in Science of Mind. The Center for Spiritual Living San Jose offers Sunday services, classes, and study groups in person and online.
You can study Holmes with other people at current classes and study groups at CSLSJ, or hear his ideas put to work on a real week at our Sunday services, 10:30 AM at 1195 Clark Street and online.
