51.
If you want to build a magnet, you can do so only by conforming to the law of magnetism. In other words, you surrender yourself, or yield to the law. In like manner, when you use the faculty of assumption, you are conforming to a law just as real as the law governing magnetism.
You can neither create nor change the law of assumption.
It is in this respect that you are impotent. You can only yield or conform, and since all of your experiences are the result of your assumptions, consciously or unconsciously, the value of consciously using the power of assumption surely must be obvious.
Willingly identify yourself with that which you most desire, knowing that it will find expression through you.
Yield to the feeling of the wish fulfilled and be consumed as its victim, then rise as the prophet of the law of assumption.
52.
“I can of Mine Own Self do
nothing… because
I seek not Mine Own Will, but
the Will of the
Father which hath sent Me.”
In this quotation, the Father obviously refers to God. In an earlier chapter, God is defined as I AM. Since creation is finished, the Father is never in a position of saying “I will be”.
In other words, everything exists, and the infinite I AM consciousness can speak only in the present tense.
“Not My Will, but Thine be done.”
“I will be” is a confession that “I AM not”.
The Father’s Will is always “I AM”.
Until you realize that you are the Father (there is only one I AM, and your infinite self is that I AM), your will is always “I will be”.
In the law of assumption, your consciousness of being is the Father’s will. The mere wish without this consciousness is the “my will”.
This great quotation, so little understood, is a perfect statement of the law of assumption.
It is impossible to do anything. You must be in order to do.
If you had a different concept of yourself, everything would be different. You are what you are, so everything is as it is. The events which you observe are determined by the concept you have of yourself. If you change your concept of yourself, the events ahead of you in time are altered, but, thus altered, they form again a deterministic sequence starting from the moment of this changed concept.
You are a being with powers of intervention, which enable you, by a change of consciousness, to alter the course of observed events, in fact, to change your future.
Deny the evidence of the senses, and assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled.
Inasmuch as your assumption is creative and forms an atmosphere, your assumption, if it be a noble one, increases your assurance and helps you to reach a higher level of being.
If, on the other hand, your assumption be an unlovely one, it hinders you and makes your downward way swifter. Just as the lovely assumptions create a harmonious atmosphere, so the hard and bitter feelings create a hard and bitter atmosphere.
“Whatsoever things are pure, just, lovely,
of good report, think on these things.”
This means to make your assumptions the highest, noblest, happiest concepts. There is no better time to start than now. The present moment is always the most opportune in which to eliminate all unlovely assumptions and to concentrate only on the good.
As well as yourself, claim for others their Divine inheritance. See only their good and the good in them. Stir the highest in others to confidence and self-assertion by your sincere assumption of their good, and you will be their prophet and their healer, for an inevitable fulfillment awaits all sustained assumptions.
You win by assumption what you can never win by force.
An assumption is a certain motion of consciousness. This motion, like all motion, exercises an influence on the surrounding substance causing it to take the shape of, echo, and reflect the assumption.
53.
“Prove Me now herewith, saith the Lord
of hosts, if I will not open you the windows
of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that
there shall not be room enough to receive it.”
The windows of heaven may not be opened and the treasures seized by a strong will, but they open of themselves and present their treasures as a free gift, a gift that comes when absorption reaches such a degree that it results in a feeling of complete acceptance.
The passage from your present state to the feeling of your wish fulfilled is not across a gap. There is continuity between the so-called real and unreal.
To cross from one state to the other, you simply extend your feelers, trust your touch and enter fully into the spirit of what you are doing.
“Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit,
saith the Lord of hosts.”
Assume the spirit, the feeling of the wish fulfilled, and you will have opened the windows to receive the blessing.
To assume a state is to get into the spirit of it. Your triumphs will be a surprise only to those who did not know your hidden passage from the state of longing to the assumption of the wish fulfilled.
The Lord of hosts will not respond to your wish until you have assumed the feeling of already being what you want to be, for acceptance is the channel of His action.
Acceptance is the Lord of hosts in action.
54.
I am not advocating philosophical indifference when I suggest that we should imagine ourselves as already that which we want to be, living in a mental atmosphere of greatness, rather than using physical means and arguments to bring about the desired change.
Everything we do, unaccompanied by a change of consciousness, is but futile readjustment of surfaces. However we toil or struggle, we can receive no more than our subconscious assumptions affirm.
To protest against anything which happens to us is to protest against the law of our being and our rulership over our own destiny.
The circumstances of my life are too closely related to my conception of myself not to have been launched by my own spirit from some magical storehouse of my being. If there is pain to me in these happenings, I should rook within myself for the cause, for I am moved here and there and made to live in a world in harmony with my concept of myself.
55.
The man who at will can assume whatever state he pleases has found the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven.
The keys are desire, imagination, and a steadily focused attention on the feeling of the wish fulfilled.
To such a man, any undesirable objective fact is no longer a reality and the ardent wish no longer a dream.