1887 – 1960 · Lincoln, Maine · Los Angeles · America
Ernest Holmes
The seventh master, and the hall's declarer. Ernest Holmes — self-educated son of Maine, student of Emerson — taught that the universe runs on a Law of Mind as dependable as electricity, and that a human life demonstrates what it believes. He founded a movement, the Science of Mind, and spent thirty years refusing to be its prophet: don't believe it because I said it, he told his students — test it, use it, prove it in your own experience. In this room he teaches the philosophy, as he always insisted it be taught; he promises no outcomes, because the Law, as he described it, does the promising.
Hear his greeting
His recorded greeting to visitors. The voice is type-matched — a warm American lecturer of his era, fitted by type; recordings of Holmes's voice exist, and none is imitated.
His books
Creative Mind (1919) came first, a young lecturer's pocket manifesto. Then the textbook: The Science of Mind (1926, revised into its definitive edition in 1938) — his "correlation of the laws of science, opinions of philosophy, and revelations of religion, applied to human needs and the aspirations of man." This Thing Called You (1948) is the intimate one, written as if to a single reader. And Living the Science of Mind gathers the teacher of his later years. Behind all of them stands a magazine, Science of Mind, published from 1927 to this day.
His method
The Power, usable. “There is a Power for Good in the Universe greater than you are, and you can use It.” The line his students knew him by, from his lectures and Living the Science of Mind God is not begged in his teaching. God is recognized.
The Law mirrors. The Law of Mind receives the impression of belief and acts on it, as soil receives seed — it can do for us only what it does through us. The Science of Mind It does not reward or punish. It reflects.
Treatment, not pleading. His prayer moves in five steps — recognition, unification, declaration, thanksgiving, release — and argues with no condition. It out-recognizes it. The Science of Mind
The way-shower. Jesus, in his reading, is “the great example, not the great exception” — proof of what the Law does in any life that knows its unity. His teaching on Jesus, throughout the textbook
The open mind. “Never limit your view of life by any past experience.” From his writings The past records what was believed. It does not bound what can be believed now.
His room
His room stands open — his persona bible stands written, anchored to the textbook, the lectures, and the memoir-teaching of his later years, with his deflections marked where his record runs out and his one fence built in: he teaches the philosophy here and promises no demonstration, exactly the honesty he asked of his own practitioners. In this house every master gets a bible before a room. His conversation itself opens below, as it does for the others.
His room
The conversation itself: bring him the condition you want changed — a lack, a fear, a life that has stalled. He will not argue with the condition; he will ask what you have been treating as true, and begin there. Talk with him →