How to Use Spiritual Principles IRL
There is a lot happening in the world right now, and many of us feel it deeply. In moments like these, it’s easy to feel powerless, reactive, or overwhelmed.
The fourth chapter of the Science of Mind textbook, How to Use It, by Ernest Holmes meets us right here. Not with platitudes or spiritual bypass, but with a profound and practical invitation: we are always participating in the Creative Process, whether we are conscious of it or not.
The question is not whether life is shaping us—but how we are shaping life in return.
Stop Trying to Control the World
One of the most important clarifications Ernest Holmes makes in this chapter is that using the Law (the principle of cause and effect) is not about personal control. It’s not about forcing outcomes or manipulating conditions.
Spirit does the creating.
We direct the creative energy through our beliefs, intentions, emotional tone, and habitual responses.
Using the Creative Process is not about dominating life.
It’s about aligning with Principle.
Which means how we live matters just as much as what we say we believe.
How We Use It Shapes Who We Become
“How to Use It” is not simply about prayer formulas or affirmations. It’s about revealing our true selves and living as spiritual beings having a human experience.
Whatever consciousness we embody is what we offer the Law to work with.
- If we live reactively, the Law supports reaction.
- If we live with awareness, the Law supports coherence.
- If we live from love, the Law demonstrates as healing.
This is where Science of Mind moves beyond technique and into ethics—into how we live our values in real time.
Kindness as Strength
This week I was especially moved by a passage from The Pivot Year, where Brianna Wiest describes kindness not as softness, but as impenetrable strength.
“Kindness,” she writes, “is the ability to stay soft in a world that tries to harden us.
To absorb our own emotions without discharging them onto others.
To decide consciously what we will act on—and what we will not put back into the world, regardless of what the world has put us through.
From a Science of Mind perspective, kindness is not weakness.
It is mastery of consciousness.
Kindness requires awareness, emotional regulation, choice, and alignment with our true nature. In other words, kindness is what happens when we remember who we are before we react.
This is how a world that works for all begins—one regulated nervous system and one conscious choice at a time.
Using the Law When Our Hearts Are Breaking
There are moments—like the one we’re living in now—when our hearts are genuinely broken by what we see unfolding around us.
It’s important to say this clearly:
Using the Law does not mean suppressing grief or outrage. Holmes himself warns against denying suffering or pretending conditions aren’t real.
What he does ask is this:
What has creative authority?
Heartbreak enters the Creative Process whether we are conscious of it or not. The question is not whether we feel it—but how we hold it.
The Ship and the Rudder
When a storm hits at sea, the captain doesn’t argue with the waves. The wind doesn’t ask permission. The conditions are what they are.
But the most important part of navigating the storm is not the captain or the ship, it’s the rudder.
The rudder is small. It doesn’t stop the wind or silence the waves. But it determines direction.
If the rudder is locked in panic, the ship spins.
If the rudder is broken, the ship drifts.
But when the rudder is steady, the ship can move through the storm without becoming engulfed in it.
From a creative process perspective, this current moment in time is the storm and it is secondary cause, the wind and waves are conditions. They may be real. They may be painful. They may even break our hearts. But consciousness is the rudder.
If heartbreak is poured into the Law as despair, it multiplies despair.
If heartbreak is held inside First Cause, it becomes clarity, compassion, and coherence with our values.
The Law (cause and affect) doesn’t respond to our pain.
It responds to the meaning we assign to the pain.
What We Choose to Create Next
This is where the teaching becomes applied wisdom.
Do we let heartbreak harden us—or deepen us?
Do we let outrage escalate us—or clarify us?
Do we let fear steer the ship—or do we return to First Cause and set the rudder in Principle?
This doesn’t mean we stop caring or taking action.
It means we care and take action without losing our center.
Secondary causes may break our hearts—
but First Cause determines what we create next.
When we use this teaching consciously, we do not amplify violence with more violence. We do not meet dehumanization with contempt. We do not pour panic into the Law and call it prayer.
Instead, we pause and remember Principle.
We anchor ourselves in the inherent worth of every person, and grounded in principle, we respond accordingly.
A Simple Practice
Here’s a simple question to carry into your week:
What state of consciousness am I offering the Law right now?
Pause before you speak.
Pause before you post.
Pause before you act.
The inquiry is not, ‘What do I need to fix?’ but, ‘Who am I choosing to show up as?’
That question alone changes how we use the Creative Process.
“How to Use It” is not about getting more from life.
It’s about giving life our best self.
When we remain soft without being weak,
clear without being cruel,
and kind without being naïve,
we become conduits for the highest good.
And that is how this teaching fulfills its deepest promise:
a world that works for all.
