What’s Next for New Thought

BY JIM LOCKARD

“It takes a great deal of change to keep things the same.”

~ Nora Bateson, Small Arcs of Larger Circles

I choose to see New Thought as a set of spiritual principles and practices which relate to those principles. The principles are eternal (the language used to convey them changes over time), the practices are forms, and all forms are subject to change. One might ask why is our New Thought Movement having such difficulty changing and adapting to the rapidly-emerging world around us? One of the things I like about Harv Bishop’s blog is that he is willing to ask the challenging questions.

Ultimately, our future is always out of reach. We are eternally in the present moment, and it is the only place from which we can think and act. This basic truth powerfully reveals to us our place in the order of things. We are powerful in the now, and our future is determined by what we do in that now moment. It is easy to become enraptured with the past, especially a version of the past which serves us well; but that can blind us to the need to accept the change necessary to move into a very different future.

So, a question is, what is emerging from our collective consciousness that is becoming the next expression of New Thought?

According to our principles, what is next is the natural result of what we are thinking now. What we are thinking now is either from our reactions to what has already happened, or it contains new thinking. Thomas Troward called this thinking from the relative or the Absolute. When we think from the relative, we are in a reactive mode to our interpretations of past events in the material world; when we think in the Absolute, we tap into the infinite field of possibility from a more open place.

“The error of the extreme idealist is in endeavoring to realize the absolute without the relative, and the error of the extreme materialist is in endeavoring to realize the relative without the absolute. On the one side the mistake is in trying to realize an inside without an outside, and on the other in trying to realize an outside without an inside; both are necessary to the formation of a substantial entity.”

~ Thomas Troward from The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science

Today, the work of MIT social scientist C. Otto Scharmer (Theory U) mirrors Troward’s work – Scharmer writes about moving deeper in our thought process to get to Source, where, instead of leading from our understanding of the past, we are leading from an emerging future. To do this, one moves into the silence to open the mind, heart, and will.

The very term New Thought contains within it the seed of an idea that what we are thinking is NEW – not simply a revisiting of what has come before. The world around us is changing –our culture is in a period of very rapid change. Our evolutionary design as human beings includes the capacity to adapt to change, but adaptation to such a fast pace of change is difficult. Yet if New Thought is to be effective as leading-edge spiritual philosophies, we must learn to adapt more rapidly. Too often, we cling to forms of the past and are slow to adapt new models of ministry and spiritual community. How to we learn to adapt more quickly and effectively? I suggest that we use our principles and practices more rigorously and diligently:

“If thought power is good for anything it is good for everything. If it can produce one thing it can produce all things. For what is to hinder it? Nothing can stop us from thinking. We can think what we please, and if to think is to form, then we can form what we please.”

~ Thomas Troward

I am very purposely using a New Thought “old-timer” to illustrate ways forward in times very different from his, and indeed from the times of the other founders of the New Thought movement. Our principles do not need to change – but the forms in which we teach and practice those principles must change. The confusion of one with the other is often the cause of our problems in New Thought. We need to evolve as change agents of positive spiritual principles.

“Change agent: someone who helps others navigate through changes with wisdom and compassion.”

~ Cindy Wigglesworth, SQ21

Over the coming decades, New Thought organizations and spiritual communities will change form, probably many times and in many ways. Resistance to this, as they say in Star Trek, is futile (if natural). However, as the spiritual masters of all time have taught us, we can use our minds to come into harmony with the flow of life. And the flow of life is very different as we move toward the middle section of the 21st Century.

“Leadership for this era is not a role or a set of traits; it is a zone of interrelational process. Step in, step out.”

~ Nora Bateson, Small Arcs of Larger Circles

The leadership needed now and going forward include more conscious, evolutionary leaders who are intuitively wise and deeply compassionate, and unattached to form. Why is leadership so important? Because some cherished forms are going to have to be released, and some newly emerging forms are going to have to be embraced – and we may not all be willing to go out onto the skinny branches of transformative change. We will need leaders to inspire and empower us as necessary.

No one knows what new models will emerge, but we must become effective conduits for their emergence. I advise my coaching and consulting clients to take on new things, but to label everything as a “pilot project.” If it works, continue it, if it does not, release it. I also suggest having innovation and transparency as core values of spiritual organization and community. To truly value the essential nature of the changing world in which we find ourselves – change must be welcomed and there can be no secrets. Our path forward is one of transformation, which is deep and abiding change, the kind of change which requires letting go of great swaths of the past and moving through discomfort.

“Every transformation demands as its precondition ‘the ending of a world’ – the collapse of an old philosophy of life.”

~ C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols

The good news is that you cannot be better equipped to enter this emerging future. New Thought principles and practices are more than sufficient to the task. The question is, how many of us will use them effectively to allow us to thrive through the coming transformations and beyond?

Copyright 2018 – Jim Lockard

****Dr. Jim Lockard is a minister, teacher, speaker, author, blogger, coach, consultant and thought leader. He was a Centers for Spiritual Living (Religious Science) minister in California, Maryland and Florida. He and his wife, Dorianne Cotter-Lockard, PhD, are currently living in Lyon, France. They are frequent presenters at international conferences in the spiritual, business, and academic fields. He writes the popular New Thought Evolutionary blog and his most recent book Creating the Beloved Community: a Handbook for Spirtual Leadership is available at Amazon.***