The Beloved Community, by Dr. Jim Lockard

The concept of The Beloved Community as envisioned by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, Dr. Howard Thurman, and others forms the basis for the overall vision of A World That Works For Everyone. I see The Beloved Community as people on a spiritual pathway who seek a closer relationship with God (however named and defined) AND as people who will take their spiritual awareness into the world to be examples of love and compassion in action. The Beloved Community is about being truly dedicated to walking our talk – to being in full alignment with spiritual principles.

Dr. King envisioned a Universal Beloved Community, one consisting of all of humanity:

“The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the Beloved Community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opponents into friends. It is this type of understanding goodwill that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age. It is this love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of men.”

~ Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

He envisioned a world where all would work together to the best of their abilities to create a world of enough – enough to eat, enough peace, enough good will – to allow all to have the opportunity to live a fulfilling and abundant life.

 I my work with ministries, I seek to create a greater awareness of the role of the local spiritual community, its leadership, and every individual in the community to contribute to the realization of the Universal Beloved Community. This is done through the realization and practice of spiritual principles AND by the kind of self-development that leads to spiritual maturity.

Imagine a community where there is enlightened leadership for complex times and where there is a level of emotional maturity that allows for and encourages radically honest conversations. Where one can be criticized or corrected and not take offense but take the criticism under advisement to see if it is valid. Where one can accept or reject that criticism and continue the conversation with no one taking offense. Where there is an expectation of honesty and openness and a recognition that everyone isn’t the same in their experiences or personal development.

 Imagine spending the energy of the community in deep personal growth and in effective and compassionate engagement with the larger community. Where the focus is not on organizational maintenance (paying the bills), but on the actualization of a compelling and positive vision. Where people are too busy in creative service and activism to be engaging in gossip or ego defenses.

 The key to achieving this kind of spiritual community is in our willingness to be radically self-honest and to be fully accountable for our own reactions, beliefs, and emotions. As Ernest Holmes noted, the greatest obstacle to the successful use of the Science of Mind™ principles is a lack of self-honesty.

And being honest, the degree of development needed to actualize the kind of community I am writing about here is significant. As Dr. King wrote:

“Our goal is to create a beloved community, and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.”

~ Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Are we ready to make such a commitment? The world we live in is crying out for spiritually realized, accountable, and compassionate people. How will we answer that call?

-----------

Jim Lockard has a new book out, BEINGTHE BELOVED COMMUNITY – Spiritual Leadership to Master Change, on all Amazon sites.

NOW WHAT? By Dr. Jim Lockard

 

“In the majority of my cases, the resources of consciousness have been exhausted; the ordinary expression for this situation is: ‘I am stuck’. . . the theme of many a fairytale and myth.”

~ C.G. Jung

My dad had a lot of bad days. Many things irritated him, including a number of things that I did. He never hit me physically, but his emotional tirades were frightening when I was a child. One pattern that I remembered was his habit of always being on the lookout for something that was going wrong. If he had been irritated by something and something else happened – the telephone or doorbell rang, someone called to him – he would say, “NOW WHAT?” loudly

Later in life, I came to realize that his expectation of some new irritant or negative experience was self-created and self-sustaining. He was reinforcing that habit pattern within himself by the way he thought and reacted to the world around him. Realizing that fact helped me to have greater compassion for him.

Have you noticed how we set ourselves up in terms of our expectations of the world? My dad expected to be angered or irritated by most things. I can recall times when I expected to be irritated or let down by most things. What I learned later is that when I have such a pattern of expectation, I will actually control my perception so that I am let down or irritated. I may refuse to see something positive or misidentify it because of my self-created ego need to have a negative experience. How tragic!

Through learning the principles of the Science of Mind™ and some basic psychology, I have come to realize that life doesn’t have to be that way. I can use the same amount of thought and emotional energy to create positive expectations. It takes some determination, some humility, and some practice, but I can do it. And that means that you can do it also.

Today, when I react to something with a “NOW WHAT?” I am expecting something positive. And when it isn’t positive, I am better able to accept whatever it is and then decide from a healthy perspective about what, if anything, to do about it. That basic shift, from an expectation of negativity to one of positivity is within our capacity to make. So why not?

I easily create the expectation of good in my life. I know that I am creating my inner expectations and I know that I am connected to a Divine Source. I expect and deserve good in my life. 

Always Love. Always. By Dr. Jim Lockard

“To those who have given up on love, I say, ‘Trust life a little bit.’”

~ Maya Angelou

 

Living in this world will break your heart. That’s a guarantee. We humans are born half-baked and our development evolves for a lifetime. That is a recipe for difficulty, for challenge, for sadness, and for loss.

 

Of course, it is also a recipe for triumph, for success, for happiness, and for manifestation. It is recipe for the realization of a nature so immense and deep that we probably could not contain ourselves if we were born with that knowing. Our divine nature, it seems, must be realized – it can’t simply be explained to us. As children we may get glimpses of it, but we can’t truly understand it until we are more mature, and never completely, it seems. And the path to that understanding seems to be a double helix of love and suffering.

 

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”

~ Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

 

We are in very challenging times. War threatens, political upheaval, the pandemic. And we are seeing that our progress in realizing a more equitable society wasn’t really what we thought it was. We are in another round of book banning and pressure on school boards to limit what is taught in classrooms, of laws restricting some of our fellow citizens from being seen for who they authentically are. Fear and ignorance, the two greatest challenges to our human development, are clearly on the rise.

 

I see this as a personal call to learn our teaching more deeply and to practice it more fully. To develop my own realization of my divine nature to such a degree that I can more easily see through appearances to the deeper Truth, the love, which is ever present. This has always been the clarion call of the Science of Mind™ teaching. But for too long, this call has been seen as a focus on personal development alone, with no extension into actively supporting the development of compassionate community.

 

“I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to individual self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community.”

~ bell hooks

 

In Spiritual Leader Edward Viljoen’s important opening talk at the CSL Convention in January, he spoke of the need to move our focus beyond our personal development to a larger engagement. He said that were Dr. Ernest Holmes alive today, he would call for us to go beyond tolerance of others to embrace differences and celebrate the diversity within our human population. His message was that it is time to up our game and lay the foundation for what Centers for Spiritual Living will be in ten years.

 

Indeed, to do this properly we must have done our own work in developing our capacity for compassion and releasing tribal impulses. Spiritual growth means moving beyond seeing differences as a threat to realizing the expanded possibilities of a more diverse community at every level, from our spiritual communities to our nation and beyond.

 

The idea is not to stop focusing on “me” for the “we,” but to see my own development as a process of preparation to grow into someone more effective in influencing community for the better. I want to bring my best self to every community of which I am a part. The spiritual reality of perfection which is always awaiting my acceptance cannot be realized unless I become fully receptive to it. This means that I can come to see past appearances – not ignoring them but realizing that they can be changed. When I accept love as the base of my being I am more likely to realize it in my life.

 

So, “Always Love. Always.” will be my mantra and my intention. It will help to carry me through the suffering, sadness, and loss which are in front of me. It will move me toward an acceptance of the nature of the world as it is and lead me to find ways to influence it for the better. Once I achieve that consciousness of love, I will be of greater use to my community and a have a greater realization of my divine nature. In this way, I will express greater love and less fear, greater compassion and less separation.

 

"People must realize that no matter how infinite the Infinite may be, it can only become to them what it can become through them. We must look at ourselves with our own eyes. If we could open up, clean house mentally, and get out of ourselves everything that ails us, I don’t care what the poverty is or the misery is, everything would be allowed because the Infinite cannot refuse anything."

~ Ernest Holmes, Love and Law

You Are Tougher Than You Think, by Dr. Jim Lockard

"Nothing is so strong as gentleness, and nothing is so gentle as true strength."

~ Ralph W. Sockman

In the Cambridge English Dictionary, toughness is defined as the quality of being not easily defeated or made weaker or the quality of being determined or severe. We might identify toughness as the externalization of inner strength. True toughness is an authentic expression based on strength. Fake toughness, like intimidating or bullying, is a false expression based on fear.

In challenging times, we may feel that we lack strength, so we withdraw from living fully. Of course, it is never true that we lack strength, as we are always fully integrated with the Divine, and Power is ours to be realized. This Power brings us strength, which allows us to be tough – to stand up to and engage with life's challenges. This Power is part of the Love of Spirit, and it is our birthright. We are never without access to this Love and its Power, although sometimes we lose sight of our capabilities.

"Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word love here not merely in a personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace . . . in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth."

~ James Baldwin

True strength can be gentle, it is gentle by default, but that strength, coming from Love, can also be ferocious when defending what is of value. A mother defending her young with ferocity, something we see as so inherent in nature, is expressing a quality that is also in every human being. We have inner resources that, if called upon, are more than sufficient for any earthly situation in which we find ourselves.

Often, we learn this important lesson when we fail at something or are pushed to our limits. We find access to inner reserves that have not been called forth before. There is an opportunity for a greater realization of our inner strengths in every challenge we face, and the bigger the challenge, the bigger the opportunity.

"When looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You'll see that this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes."

~ Joseph Campbell

When things feel overwhelming, when we feel inadequate to what life is presenting to us, it is important that we remember who we are. Every time we stand up to what we fear, we build spiritual muscle for the next time. That spiritual muscle comes from the realization of our natural spiritual connection to something greater. Infinite Spirit has already provided whatever we need to call upon from within ourselves. Our job is to develop a greater realization of Spiritual Truth through our daily practices and learn from our challenges, stepping into them not fearlessly but courageously.

I encourage you to heed these powerful words of Ernest Holmes – build your confidence, realize your strength, and express your toughness with love and compassion, but also with firm boundaries.

"Developing confidence in ourselves, in our ability to meet and handle all undesirable situations, requires that we must have confidence in that Something which is greater than we are. Then we will have spiritual self-reliance. When this is done, the lesser must always submit to the greater. Weakness will give way to strength, despair will turn to hope, hate will become love, failure will become success, and sickness will dissolve into health. The action that takes place is not one of despotic or overruling harshness, but one that moves in harmony, love, beauty, warmth, and order, quietly transforming all that is unlike it."

~ Ernest Holmes

Evolutionary Spiritualy, by Dr. Jim Lockard

“The spiral of life is upward. Evolution carries us forward, not backward. Eternal and progressive expansion is its law, and there are no breaks in its continuity. It seems to me that our evolution is the result of an unfolding consciousness of that which already is, and needs but to be realized to become a fact of everyday life.”

~ Ernest Holmes, The Science of Mind 

You would be correct to understand evolution as the modus operandi of the Universe. Our incredible Universe, where things began with hydrogen, heat, and time, and where, from these basic elements, increasingly complex forms and structures, including life, have emerged. As Dr. Holmes notes above, evolution has led to an unfolding of consciousness via increasingly complex and intelligent forms in creation.

We are evolutionary beings in an evolutionary Universe. Our growth is developmental across several domains: biology, intellect, emotions, and spiritual realization. Our innate potentials emerge as we develop along these domains. What is next for us is always a new emergence of potential, which becomes available through evolutionary progress. In other words, we become more evolved channels for the actualization of potential as we develop.

What differentiates humans from other life forms on earth is that with us, the capacity to know this about ourselves has evolved. Thus, we can consciously and intentionally encourage our own development. Spiritually, this is accomplished through increased awareness and spiritual practices to embody that awareness. We begin with the basics and work our way to the more esoteric aspects of our teachings according to our own inclinations.

Interestingly, the mathematics of spiritual growth is more about subtraction than addition. We do need to add awareness, but much of the focus of our spiritual practices is to subtract beliefs that have accumulated and become inhibitors to further growth. As we dissolve these old beliefs and change old habits, the addition of new potentials happens more or less automatically as we clear the pathway for emergence from within.

The Science of Mind™ is a teaching of evolutionary spirituality. It teaches us about our evolutionary nature and how to be more authentic expressions of that nature. We design our consciousness, which becomes the vehicle of emergence for our inner potential – the love, wisdom, joy, and true potential that we are.

What could be better than that? 

Dr. Lockard received his Bachelor of Arts Degree from the University of Maryland, College Park, and his Master’s Degree in Public Administration from the University of Miami. He has served on the Joseph Campbell Foundation, on the Board of Directors of The Orphan Foundation, and on the Board of Advisors of the Foundation for Self-Esteem (Jack Canfield).

Prior to his entry into ministry, Dr. Lockard worked in law enforcement in Maryland and Florida. Highlights of his service include deputy-chief of the Ocean City, Maryland Police Department; commander of the Metro-Dade County Police Department’s police academy and of the Tourist-Oriented Police Program; and coordinator of stadium security for Super Bowl XXIX. He retired as a lieutenant from Metro-Dade in 1996.

He became a licensed Religious Science practitioner in 1993, Religious Science minister in 1995 and was ordained in 2000. He received a Doctorate of Religious Science in 2008.