It’s Time to Let Spirit Out of the Box

By Harv Bishop

New Thought adherents can get caught in a narrow spirituality based on “I want it to feel good all the time and I want to have what I want,” says Religious Scientist Rev. Chris Terry.

“There’s so much more to spirituality,” she says, “including ­­compassion, humility, grace, surrender, mystery, wonder. We’ve got to expand and let Spirit out of the box we’ve created, and find where we don’t have it all figured out.”

Terry, a minister at Heartspace Spiritual Center near Dallas, Texas, calls her new understanding of New Thought “New Thought 3.0.”

“’3.0′ alludes to the idea that we’re constantly evolving,” she says, “just as any good computer operating system is evolving. It also captures [Ken Wilber’s] Integral theory idea of ‘transcend and include,’ meaning that previous incarnations of New Thought are not wrong, but that all versions of spiritual truth teachings are partial.”

Wilber often uses this example for “transcend and include”: atoms transcend and include quarks, molecules transcend and include atoms and on up the physical evolutionary scale.  Each step depends on its essential but partial junior level, but each stage of development also expands what is possible. “Transcend and include” is also true of the developmental stages of human consciousness, Wilber says. Through learning to care for ourselves we learn to care for people like us, then all humanity and the planet; consciously realizing our Oneness with all that is.

“The days of completely individually focused empowerment are over,” says Terry. “For me, we must recognize the fundamental teaching of our philosophy: ­­we are all Spirit. Our lives and our wellbeing are interconnected, and this is true in an Absolute sense and a relative one. Our ‘job’ is to embody and demonstrate the absolute in the relative realm.

“From a theological perspective, I think we must confront the idea of Law as a principle that simply spits out what our consciousness feeds in,” says Terry.

Ernest Holmes (the founder of Religious Science), like other historic New Thought teachers, stressed an impartial Divine Law that creates the events of our lives from our thoughts and actions. Negativity begets negative events and positivity begets positive life events.

“Yikes!” says Terry. “This is dangerous territory for so much of what Holmes emphasized, especially in his early writings, was focused on Law and the use of Law as an automatic, vending machine purveyor of desires.

“I think we must move to a place where psychological and spiritual stage development is an essential part of our understanding of spirituality. Currently, we focus on temporary states of peak consciousness, not permanent, stable stages of consciousness that expand our circles of compassion and care for others. And our version of states of consciousness has been relegated to the ability to manifest. We have some awesome manifesters that are, quite frankly, psycho-­spiritual disaster zones ­­ meaning, they’ve never matured beyond an egoic ‘I want it to feel good all the time.’”

How else does New Thought 3.0 differ from earlier versions of New Thought?

“It depends on who’s earlier version we’re talking about,” says Terry. “As Mitch Horowitz (an author and historian) has beautifully laid out in his book ‘One Simple Idea,’ the philosophy is a tree with many branches and has already had a number of focuses. New Thought began as a healing movement, and then individual teachers — including Emma Curtis Hopkins and others for women, Marcus Garvey for Black Americans — were active in actualizing more progressive, inclusive views. Then, New Thought [in the 1920s] evolved yet again into a ‘get-­me­-some-­stuff’ prosperity teaching” in books such as Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich.”

Now Terry says it is time for New Thought to evolve once more.

“It’s all unfolding, dammit,” she said.  “You can’t build a house of [unquestioned] understanding when the ground and sky are expanding and the very nature of the Infinite is dependent upon an infinite unfolding expression.”

Find more from Rev. Chris in next week’s blog.