Dr. Holmes built the entire architecture of the Religious Science teaching on one claim: Divine Mind is the builder, and It builds exactly what It is shown, without editorializing, without checking whether a grievance is justified. Dr. Holmes wrote, “Too often, our minds are so burdened because of the mistakes we have made that we do not take the time to forgive ourselves and others and start over again.” Notice “start over again” — that phrase carries the operative power. But Dr. Holmes went further, distilling the entire process into a single line: “To forgive is to be for the givingness of God.” Read slowly, that is not a request for niceness. Givingness is what Source does constantly and without condition , it is the very nature of the Power Dr. Holmes spent his life describing. To forgive, then, is simply to stop standing between yourself and that Divine givingness. Every held grievance is a hand raised against your own supply; every act of genuine forgiveness lowers that hand. Once the old emotional charge is released, the givingness of Source is free to flow again in your journey, not as a reward for good behavior, but because the energetic emotional obstruction, which was never permanent to begin with, has simply been removed.
This is precisely the territory Colin Tipping mapped in is work Radical Forgiveness, where he writes, “Looked at from a spiritual standpoint, our discomfort in any given situation provides a signal that we are out of alignment with spiritual law and are being given an opportunity to heal something.” That reframe is worth sitting with. Discomfort is not proof that some individual has been singled out for punishment; it is feedback, the same way static on a radio dial signals that the tuning is off rather than evidence that the station stopped broadcasting. When a difficult situation resurfaces old pain, nothing has gone wrong; something is asking to be corrected. Once you catch this signal, you can stop treating a triggering situation as an injury to defend and start treating it as an instruction: precise coordinates pointing toward exactly what still needs to be forgiven. That shift — from “this happened to me” to “this is showing me where I’m out of alignment” — is most of the healing work Tipping describes, and it lines up exactly with Dr. Holmes’ claim that Divine Source builds according to the energy it is being offered.
The Hawaiian practice of Ho’oponopono offers a practical companion to these principles rather than a separate philosophy bolted on for flavor. Ho’oponopono operates on a premise that sounds extreme until it is actually tried: whatever shows up in a person’s experience, including what someone else did to that person, appears as data inside that same person’s own consciousness, and only that person holds the authority to clean it. The four-phrase practice — I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you, I love you — is not directed at whoever caused the offense. It is directed at the memory, the imprint, the old thoughtform still looping in the mind. This is not an apology for someone else’s behavior; it is you taking full ownership of the fact that a replay loop is running in your own system, and choosing to erase it. Dr. Holmes would call this changing your thought at the causative level rather than at the level of the effect. Ho’oponopono simply hands you a portable, repeatable phrase-set for doing that in real time — in a waiting room, in traffic, at three in the morning when an old scene starts looping again.
Put these principles together, and a genuinely usable practice emerges. Consider someone still replaying a business deal that went wrong, or a parent who was not able to show up the way it was needed at the time, or — hardest of all — an old decision a person cannot stop re-litigating in their own mind. As a student of Spiritual Principle, you would write a spiritual mind treatment: you declare, in present tense, that the situation is already resolved in Divine Mind, that the person involved is a spiritual being incapable of ultimately limiting you, and that you are free. Then, the moment the old scene tries to replay itself, you run Ho’oponopono on it — I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you, I love you — until the emotional charge measurably drops. Do this daily, the way an instrument is tuned before every performance rather than once and filed away. Practiced consistently, it keeps the channel open between you and the Source Energy Dr. Holmes insisted was always available, always willing, and always present the moment the static of an old, unforgiven idea stops competing for the flow of spiritual energy. Nothing about the past needs to be resolved with anyone else, and no apology from another person is required. What is required is a decision made on purpose and made again tomorrow, that the flow of Source through your journey matters more than the grievance ever did.
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