Q: If thoughts are things, and I truly believe a specific outcome will occur, and have no hidden resistance, how come things sometimes don’t go the way I’d envisioned?

A: Ernest Holmes, our founder, writes, “We do not teach that you can get what you want. If we could all get what we want, it might be disastrous, for it is certain that most of us would want things that would interfere with the wel…l-being of someone else.” So what *can* we get? Says Holmes, we can greatly influence our environment, its reaction to us, the situations we meet, and the conditions we contact. Elsewhere, he mentions that the Science of Mind is not a “get-rich-quick” scheme, but a lifelong study of spiritual principles acting through our apparently material lives. When things don’t go the way we envision, it’s because they are busy going some other way. The way they go is not ultimately the point. How we *feel* about that is the point. When you determine the quality of feeling in which you prefer to live (the combination of harmony, plenty, creativity, joy…), and then begin to feel those ways by affirming them and finding their representations in life as it is right now, then things change for the better.

Things change when the internal dynamic holding them in place changes. It still doesn’t mean that we can select, and then get, the precise experiences we imagine, because we live not in isolation but as part of an organic system of swirling, interacting life. Now, sometimes we do walk into pretty much the exact thing we’d hoped for and affirmed, and that’s because it was available in that moment to be free to be ours. Other times, the conditions we meet generally conform to what we envisioned. Still other times, they don’t look anything at *all* like what we had in mind, so we learn to grow past judging by appearances, convinced from experience that behind the appearances are forms conducive to our feeling well, loved, and at peace.

From the Q&A by Rev. Dr. Jesse Jennings, SOM 4/10.