The Enlightened Mind Book/Gift Store offers some 250 book titles selected to support you on your Spiritual Journey of awakening, and expressing a joyous, fulfilling life. It features books of Science of Mind founder Ernest Holmes, and leading New Thought authors; mystics, scholars, psychologists and principled men and women who have succeeded in business, finance, relationships and life! All of the titles are chosen to help you create a better way of living.
In addition to books, the store offers a full selection of wonderful, unique gifts and accessories for yourself or someone special. We have beautiful items for the home including imported pottery, exotic candles, and amazing decorator selections. You will also find gorgeous handbags, fabulous jewelry, photo albums, books and music on CD, cassette tapes of recent sermons by Reverend Arthur Chang, and discounted cassette tapes of previous Sundays to add to your listening library.  Be sure to visit our special sections for  children and for teens, as well as those "hard-to-find" great gift items for men. Finally, we offer a truly lovely assortment of personally selected greeting cards that you will rarely find elsewhere. 

Hours:
Tuesday to Thursday, 9:30 am -3:30 pm
Sunday 9:30 am - 12:45 pm.
Telephone: (213) 388-9733

The Enlightened Mind Bookstore Recommended Booklist

The following books are recommended by Rev. Arthur and Rev. Larry:

These books are available for purchase, please call (213) 388-9733 to order.

Discover Your Genius: How to Think Like History's Ten Most Revolutionary Minds
by Michael Gelb

Is it possible to not only learn from but emulate those figures in civilization's past who have dramatically impacted the course of history? Author Michael Gelb says yes and offers this book to show us how. The genius provides a perspective that ultimately proves so compelling that we can never see things in quite the same way again.

Gelb has selected 10 individuals for consideration. They are: Plato, Brunelleschi, Columbus, Copernicus, Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, Jefferson, Darwin, Gandhi, Einstein. He identifies an overriding principle used by each in accomplishing their mission in life. To whet your interest in this book, following are the principles they employed without saying to which individuals they are attached (for that you would need to acquire the book). The principles they used are: Expanding Your Perspective; Going Perpendicular: Strengthening Your Optimism, Vision, and Courage; Cultivating Your Emotional Intelligence; Revolutionizing Your Worldview; Wielding Your Power with Balance and Effectiveness; Celebrating Your Freedom in the Pursuit of Happiness; Developing Your Power of Observation and Opening Your Mind; Deepening Your Love of Wisdom; Applying the Principles of Spiritual Genius to Harmonize Spirit, Mind and Body; and Unleashing Your Imagination and Combinatory Play.

Gelb focuses on each historical figure by offering a short biographical sketch, some salient thoughts by that figure, a summary of their achievements, and a number of exercises designed to elicit from the reader a way of accessing the mindset of the subject toward the reader's own aspirations. For example, for Plato and his teacher, Socrates, the process of questioning is the key to deepening wisdom. Author Gelb suggests writing out in one sitting, in stream-of-consciousness style, 100 questions that are important to you. He also suggests, like Copernicus, identifying a commonly used procedure or system that you believe could be improved and then research how this could be accomplished. Make a list of your 10 favorite words. Why do you like them? What are the actual dictionary meanings for the words you have chosen?

"The individuals behind these revolutions of thought," writes Gelb, "live on in our collective memory as models for tackling the challenges that lie ahead. The difference between your mind and theirs is smaller than you think, and is less determined by inborn capacity than by passion, focus, and strategy-all of which are yours to develop."

In Discover Your Genius you'll learn how 10 of history's greatest geniuses gained the "lifting speed" they need to change the world. You'll see how they identified and embraced the "commanding images" that led them to the revolutionary ideas we now know so well.

Walking in This World
by Julia Cameron

Following on the heels of her classic book The Artist's Way, a book which sold two million copies, Julia Cameron gives us Walking in This World: The Practical Art of Creativity. Aimed primarily at aspiring and working artists, it is nonetheless amazingly applicable to any of us endeavoring to begin a project because creativity is required in just about everything.

Cameron shows us how to approach the world with our sense of wonder intact. "Great artists are actually great amateurs," she writes in the introduction. "They have learned to wriggle out of the seriousness of rigid categorization and allow themselves to pursue the Pied Piper of delight." The book is chock full of new strategies and techniques for breaking through difficult creative ground.

In the form of a 12-week program, she outlines steps and exercises to nourish the "artist within." She explains how creating a work, whether it's a novel or a nosegay, puts people deeply in touch with the Great Creator.
Cameron writes: "When we do not act in the direction of our dreams, we are only 'dreaming.' Dreams have a will-o'-the-wisp quality. Dreams coupled with the firm intention to manifest them take on a steely reality. Our dreams come true when we are true to them. Reality contains the word 'real.' We begin to 'reel' in our dreams when we toss out the baited hook of intention. When we shift our inner statement from 'I'd love to' to 'I'm going to,' we shift out of victim and into adventurer."

The author is quite clear in stating her belief that we are assisted and supported by the Spirit in all things. "The Great Creator," she says, "is an artist and he/she/it is an artist in partnership with other artists. The moment we open ourselves to making art, we simultaneously open ourselves to our maker. We are automatically partnered."

This help is not far off, she declares. "God is present everywhere. The act of making art is a direct path to contact with God, and we do not need to travel any geographic or psychic distance to experience the grace of creation in the grace of our own creating. Goethe told us, 'Whatever you think you can do, or believe you can do, begin it, because action has magic, grace and power in it.' This was no mere bromide. It was a report on spiritual experience-an experience that each of us can have whenever we surrender to being a beginner, whenever we dismantle our adult's aloof avoidance and actively seek the Great Creator's hand by reaching out our own to start anew."

Life Without Limits
by Lucinda Bassett

If you want a more promising career, satisfying relationships, or better control of your emotions, this book can help you.

The author is founder and CEO of one of the most successful self-help companies in the country. She works with clients to rid themselves of anxiety and depression, and how to eliminate the negative factors which get in the way of success.

Bassett writes that most of us start second-guessing ourselves because we didn't get supportive messages when we were growing up. Thus, we end up frustrated with ourselves and how our lives are going. Many of us end up surrendering by taking what we consider to be the easiest, most attainable path only to find it leads to frustration. "Instead of our decisions bringing us peace and satisfaction, we find discontent gnawing at our insides," writes Bassett.

In this book, Life Without Limits, the author provides us with practical tips on dealing with our fears. She offers seven simple steps for overcoming them. She also tackles that old nemesis, worry. "Life is certainly about challenge," she writes, "and most things of value take effort, but we don't have to be struggling constantly. Worry creates a sense of struggle. Worry and struggle are about swimming upstream against the current with no shoreline in sight." She goes on to define worry and dissect it in ways which help us understand how it sometimes gets the upper hand.

Bassett then shares with readers that the same refined skills we use for worry can be reversed and used in positive ways to help us achieve great things.

A particularly useful chapter in her book is "Positive, Productive, Power Thinking." She reminds us of ideas that are significantly compatible with the teaching of Science of Mind: That we can change someone's mood, possibly someone's entire day, or even entire life, by saying certain things in a positive, heartfelt way. Why, then, we must ask, do we hold back from giving this encouragement away to the people who would be so blessed with it? She explains all this in her book and much more.

The author also writes inspiringly about God and the power of prayer. She says that, "Prayer helps us to clarify our problems. It allows us the opportunity to open up and to ask for clarification." Prayer is also a way to connect with a higher power, she observes, a "connection with God and the universe." With knowing clarity she says that prayer isn't about fancy words or doing it right, it is about opening your heart and being sincere.

The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos: Humanity and the New Story
by Brian Swimme

One of the things that might be said about someone who is having some mental challenges is: that person is "not in touch with reality." In a considerably different context, it seems that could be said of most of us alive today according to a new book by Brian Swimme, who holds a Ph.D. in mathematical cosmology from the University of Oregon and is Director of the Center for the Story of the Universe.

His premise is that most of us are not aware of the new story which describes what it means to be human and to live on planet Earth, in the universe as it is now understood by emerging science. His slim, immensely readable 112-page book helps us to begin to understand our place in the cosmos. "Cosmology," says Swimme, "is a wisdom tradition drawing upon not just science but religion and art and philosophy. Its principal aim is not the gathering of facts and theories but the transformation of the human . . . embedding a human being in the numinous dynamics of our solar system."

"Though all of us now accept the fact," says Swimme, "that the Earth moves around the Sun, this truth has been actually appropriated in a bodily way by only a tiny segment of humanity." Each day we observe the Sun dropping below the dark horizon in our view. If we are moved to make a comment to a friend, it would likely be something like, "The Sun going down at dusk was a beautiful sight." If we were challenged to explain fully, we might hasten to add from our sparse knowledge of science, "Well, of course the Earth is turning so it makes it look like the Sun is going down."

Swimme remarks, "Any person who wishes to can transform her perceptual habits and can learn to see, in a direct experiential way, the Earth rotating away from the Sun." He goes on to suggest that we go out half an hour before "sunset" when Venus is low on the horizon. He tells us to review the basic facts: "Venus is 65 million miles from the Sun, about a third closer than the Earth, which is 93 million miles from the Sun. And there, higher up in my field of vision, is Jupiter, 480 million miles from the Sun. All three of us are moving in a single plane around the Sun." Venus is closest to the Sun, then Earth, then Jupiter, and all three move in a plane about the Sun.

Then, by bringing your attention to the experience and looking at it through the theoretical model of the solar system's form, Swimme observes "there comes a wonderful moment when you enter into it all at once; you feel in an experiential, imaginative, and direct way the Earth slowly turning away from the Sun. You will also feel, and perhaps for the first time in your life, the immensity of the Earth as it rolls away from the great Sun....you realize you are standing on the back of something like a cosmic whale, one that is slowly rotating its great bulk on the surface of an unseen ocean." It is impossible to walk through this simple "sunset" experiment and not have the feeling of some new burst of knowledge rising up within the molecules of your body and being.

Taking us a step further, Swimme offers us the opportunity of feeling the Earth swinging around the Sun. Returning to our scene at "sunset," he reminds us that the Sun is approximately a million times the size of the Earth. If we focus our mind on the Sun, we note that it can contain a million earths. In this way we can begin to feel the way in which the massiveness of the Sun "whips the Earth and all the other planets through their annual arcs. The crucial step is to awaken to the fact of the Sun's gravitational power. The Earth is one immense planet, and it is being whipped around the Sun by the power of the Sun. This is something the Sun is doing in every instant of every day." Again, a new awareness emerges within you, a sense that you are alive and in a direct relationship with that energy-bestowing ball of fire that is present every day in the sky. If you can allow yourself to open to this experience, Swimme notes that "you will become one of a very small number of humans who actually live in the solar system."

By virtue of thus centering ourselves in the universe we may find that we feel at home here in a new and strangely exciting way, and as we contemplate the great benevolence of the Sun we may realize in a vivid way that being "creatures of light" is far more than a timely metaphor.