I’ve had Discover the Power Within You on my to-be-read-list for decades. It was on my radar for two reasons. First, it is written by a pastor of the Unity church, which many compare to Christian Science. And secondly, Oprah widely endorses it as her favorite book.

As someone who is very familiar with Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, this book this book feels a bit like pablum. Because of that, I’m not exactly recommending it, and can only give it four stars.

However, I did highlight these bits that I appreciated, and I wanted to share them with you:

• “In the words of Tennyson, ‘Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, these three alone lead life to sovereign power.’ The time is ripe, and rotten-ripe, for a serious and concerted drive to educate people in self-knowledge, self-reverence, and self-control.”
• “We must carefully study and then emphatically reject our historical tendency to worship Jesus. When he becomes the object of our worship, He ceases to be the way-shower for our own self-realization and self-unfoldment.”
• “Jesus did not set the Christ standard– He simply followed it.”
• “We have been misled by the focus on His divinity. We have overlooked the fact that He focused on our divinity. He said in effect, ‘You can do what I do’ if you make the decision to accept the Christ in yourself.”
• “He healed and helped and transformed people by the power of their own higher nature, not by any special power of his own.”
• “The important goal for all is to find our unity with God. Achieve that unity and we will be doing as He did… Christ is.. the unitive relationship between God and man. Jesus became so conscious of this Christ relationship that eventually we could not tell where one began and the other left off… You and I can enter that state of consciousness.”
• “He who knows about depth knows about God.”
• “Prayer is not for God, but for you. You pray, not to change something in God-Mind, but in your own.”
• “Why is the mathematician so sure of his computations? …It never occurs to him to trace the errors of his ledger to the principle of mathematics. To him, it is the most unerring thing in the world. And so prayer was to Jesus.”
• “We must look for the Christ in ourselves, precisely as the man, Jesus, found the Christ in Himself.”
• “The child who is treated as if he is already what he should be, often begins to make the most startling progress to what he can be.”
• “You can overcome, you can succeed, you can be healed– if you believe in your divinity, bless it, act as if it were the real and true of you and keep on in the effort to ‘open out a way whence the imprisioned splendor may escape.'”
• “Agree with God only!… Jesus was the Master of the situation because He was Master of His own thoughts. He agreed with God always. He kept Himself in tune, in a state of spiritual unity with God.”
• “In a crisis, Jesus was prepared, because He was pre-prayered.”
• In answer to why the Quaker treated the unpleasant man well, he responded, “Why should I let him determine how I’m going to act?”
• “Jesus knew that when you do what is required of you and no more, you are a slave…The true compensation of joy and fulfillment in a job begins where duty leaves off.”
• “Prayer is a matter of consciousness, of concentrated, rightly directed, spiritually oriented positive thinking.”
• “The most important purpose of prayer is lifting ourselves to a high level of consciousness where we can be conditioned in mind and body with all the all-sufficient life, substance, and intelligence of God.”
• “God doesn’t have what you want or need. God is the substance of that need. You don’t have to ask God for life, for God is life. You are the projection of that life into visibility. The key to healing is to lift up your thought to the consciousness of the wholeness of life in you. You need not ask for it. God is that wholeness, but you must accept it into your mind which has been seeing in part.”
• “How do you ask the sun for sunlight? By getting out into the sun. How do you ask electricity for light for your lamp? By turning on the switch. How do you ‘ask’ God for what you want? By getting into the Spirit. It is not something God must do for you. It is what you must do for yourself to enable God to do for you what which it is His ceaseless longing to do.”
• “When we realize that evil is simply the concealment of good, then any person that is unloving, viscious or unjust is actually a person who is good but doesn’t know it.
• “To have more you must be more.”
• “Upgrade your desire and put it in spiritual terms in the form of an affirmation. Claim it and give thanks for it.”
• “Forgiveness  is the simplest way to lighten our burdens. The act of forgiveness constitutes a mental bath– letting go of something that can poison us from within.”

I don’t agree with everything in this book, but it has a more enlightened view of God than many you could read. Maybe the problem for me was this claims to be “a guide for the unexplored depths within,” and mine are quite well explored. If yours are not, reading this might be a good place to start.