The Essence of Life

The holidays, aside from the vulgar commercialism, can be spiritually uplifting. No matter your religion, or your beliefs or your spirituality, there is an essence of life for us all.

The ideas you are about to read are not my own - they are culled from history, ancient times, and the works of an incredible teacher whose identity you will come to learn.

I wish these ideas came from me alone, but they did not. I wish I could take credit for the well crafted sentences you're about to read, but I cannot.

Please note proper attributions at the end of this blog entry for further discovery.

Thank you for reading my blog and books this year. I wish you all a blessed and happy and merry holiday season. May your new year begin with old wisdom.

Here is, what I believe, the essence of life.  With Gratitude, Beth

Truth turns out to be nothing less than the amazing but undeniable fact that the whole outer world - whether it be the physical body, the common things of life, the winds and the rain, the clouds, the earth itself - is amenable to a man's thought, and that he has dominion over it when he knows it.

The outer world, far from being the prison of circumstances that it is commonly supposed to be, has actually no character whatsoever of its own, either good or bad. It has only the character that we give to it by our own thinking. 

For me, this is the key - our own thinking.

It is naturally plastic to our thought, and this is so , whether we know it or not, and whether we wish it or not.

All day long the thoughts that occupy your mind, your Secret Place, as Jesus calls it, are molding in your destiny for good or evil.

In fact, the truth is that the whole of our life's experience is but the outer expression of inner thought. Ah, there it is! The essence of life!

Now we can chose the sort of thoughts that we entertain. It will be a little difficult to break a bad habit of thought, but it can be done. We can choose how we shall think - in point of fact, we always do choose - and therefore our lives are just the result of the kind of thoughts we have chosen to hold; and therefore they are of our own ordering; and therefore there is perfect justice in the universe.

There it is again - the essence of life. In case you missed it: and therefore our lives are just the result of the kind of thoughts we have chosen to hold.

But what about the sin part? The guilt? The we-are-horrible-people-and-must-be punished-for-our-sins-part? The reason why so many of us turn away from the dogma and are turned off by the very word Religion.... If our lives then, are the direct result of the thoughts that we have chosen to hold, then....No suffering from another man's original sin, but the reaping of a harvest that ourselves have sown.

But what about free will you may ask? We have free will, but our free will lies in our choice of thought (thus aligning us with that age old question of "what is God's will for me?)... replace God with whatever Higher Power you chose to believe in. It makes sense to me if I think of it this way, We have free will, but our free will lies in our choice of thought. If our thoughts are pure in spirit they are aligned with the will of the God of our own understanding.


This is in essence what Jesus taught. It is THE underlying message of the whole Bible.

Which brings us to The Secret Truth or The Great Law of the Universe. What is it? This essence? As within, so without. What you think in your mind you will produce in your experience. 

Yes, it's that simple.

note: "What Did Jesus Teach?" Read more in Emmet Fox's The Key to Success in Life, 1934 (Analysis of The Sermon on the Mount).