Contents
1. Eternal Youth, a Choice and a Privilege
2. God-Consciousness From the Beginning
3. The Long Pilgrimage
4. You Live on Atomic Energy
5. You are an Instrument of the Creative Impulse
6. Your Creative Tools of Ascension
7. Desire, the Flame and Glory
8. Thinking, the Invincible Master-Planner
9. Imagination, the Kingly Faculty
10. How to Develop Your More and More Life Plan
Foreword
This book is dedicated to all who struggle to understand what life is all about, who desire to know from where they came, why they are here and where they are going. It is dedicated to their discovery of an answer that gives them what they truly seek — an identity with the Source of Power to which they may turn for comfort, and advice that will help them to bring forth all the potential powers they brought with them in the beginning and still waiting to be expressed.
This book is not about diets or exercise, except to outline the need for both if you are to have anything approximating health and freedom from pain and tears. The time and effort required in dieting and exercising appalls most people. Just the act of contemplation keeps them from starting either program.
Others are too busy pursuing the goddess of success most evenings, and are too tired in the mornings to go through the great ritual. Usually, you continue putting off dieting and exercise until something physical hits, and diet and exercise become critical and essential.
We include the reasons for dieting and some uncomplicated exercises as simple charts or schedules to follow. They are the minimum essentials if you are to have 100 percent efficient physical equipment for daily living.
Authors have written thousands of books on psychology and metaphysics, and countless others on diets and exercise. Each has something good to offer, and some are better than others. Still, the beginner may be greatly confused when dealing with them and deciding which to follow.
The only way to avoid confusion is to take the best from each. Work at it until you find the right combination of foods and exercises to suit your individual needs and schedule. Then hold to using that schedule, breaking the routine only often enough to make life just a bit more spicy. Nothing works unless you follow it continuously.
1. Eternal Youth, a Choice and a Privilege
“Why are you writing another book?” Well, we need to cover all the different phases of living and their impact on each another in one book. It seems people need more real effort to live life based on its interrelationships instead of by unrelated broken-off bits of this and that. Without integration, you cannot organize and fit all life’s phases together to form a smoothly working whole.
This book seeks first to give you an identity with your Source: “Where did I come from?” Next, it seeks to establish your contact with that Source: “Why did God create me, then leave me out here all alone?”
After establishing a perfect original, completely natural contact, you move on to answer the next question: “How can I know that I am making this contact?” Then the final question, “When do I make this contact?” The answer is now and it is always now. Now is an escalator in time and space carrying you away from eternity on one hand and into eternity on the other hand. It is always now.
You Are a Fourfold Being
This book attempts to explain man’s fourfold being — physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. You must obey laws on each of four levels to be strong, healthy and happy. If you omit one level, you are bound to be lopsided in your living and unbalanced in some way. All illness stems from an imbalance somewhere in your fourfold relation to life.
Laws govern you from the spiritual to the mental life, through the emotions and so on into the visible portion called the physical life of the body. The outer physical portion of your being is only a machine on which life registers itself for you to see through physical eyes.
A Textbook for Life
The universal basis for this book is found in the Bible, a book on life covering every phase of your expression. Stripped of all nonessential and controversial matters, it is just a textbook on how to live perfectly. Everyone can find a character in real life to fit the worst and the best of Bible characters. They were only people trying to get along under hard conditions in difficult situations.
The New Testament is the greatest book ever written on psychiatry. The great Teacher, Jesus the Christ, knew everything that is to be known about the silly weaknesses and failures of men.
Jesus trained twelve men the whole way in little more than three years. They were ordinary, almost uneducated men who hadn’t much to offer him but their love and loyalty.
Two thousand years ago, the twelve covered everything that needs digging out in man now.They knew what would cause dry rot of the mind and heart, and wrote about it. You can find every how-not-to-do-it for today in what they wrote then.
So, though you may reject the Bible in part or totally, though you may repudiate Jesus as a Messiah, you will find that you need to accept both as the way for perfect living. Beyond its beauty and poetry, the Bible is a practical textbook, when sought and used as such. It provides an “easy” way to learn how to live properly, without sagging at the seams or dragging your heels in the dust.
Think about living life in joy and being more alive every year. If these words should help give you a reason for accepting fourfold life as the whole of life, we will have accomplished its purpose. The world will be one step nearer to becoming the “deathless, ageless, abiding” life that is immortal and Eternal Youth right now.
2. God-Consciousness From the Beginning
Memories from childhood are still as clear in my mind as when they happened, even after eighty years of living and all manners of experience. They are the reason and basis for the material in this book.
With many old daily experiences faded or wiped out entirely, with all the people involved long since gone, these episodes have lived on. Each has a bearing on the direction of my search and how I found the material in this book. These episodes set the keynote of my life. They opened a door, swinging wide, which nothing that ever happened could close.
I have spent eighty wonderful years living the life more abundant, a life of asking, seeking, knocking and always finding the right answer at the right time. Not always at my right time but at God’s right time.
The First Memory – Four Years
The first mental image, still vivid, was of being lifted high enough in gentle, loving arms to look down the length of a narrow, peculiar bed. I fully remember thinking that here lay the Sleeping Beauty of the fairy tale. The shining white satin gown and the red rose held between the fingers of the woman’s lovely, crossed hands impressed me. My feeling of fascination never faded for the beautiful Titian hair and exquisite features of the sleeping lady.
My beautiful mother’s voice lingers a lifetime later, telling the small child I was that this was my Aunt Lenora wearing the gown she was to have worn as Marguerite in Faust. I was not consciousness of anything else, not the room, traveling there or home again, but fully aware of a brilliant white light covering the “sleeping” lady and her beauty.
Above all, a memory is still alive at eighty of a very childish vow, followed and fulfilled years later, to grow up to be like Aunt Lenora and sing while dressed in a white satin gown.
The Second Memory – Six Years
Picture a small girl sitting with her back against a high board fence, looking out over a sea of tall grasses waving in the light breeze blowing across the prairie. She could see just above the heads of the grasses, so the view appeared as the colorful picture in the book she held.
Jean d’Arc, sword held high, sat on her white horse at the head of her army. The child’s vision encompassed a vast, vague host of angelic beings, all marching on some indistinct pilgrimage, but most definitely led by the six-year-old.
The Third Memory – Eight Years
Inside the house behind the high board fence, a mature eight-year-old is caring for a small two-year-old sister on a dark, snowy afternoon in midwinter. Their parents are attending a communion Sunday at their church. The community is on the outskirts of a city, with only twice-a-day one-car steam engine service for transportation. The afternoon train will arrive at the crossroads at 5:30 p.m. on this dark day, with early twilight coming around 4:00 p.m.
The child is responsible for and quite able to keep a wood fire going in the stove, though not allowed to light a kerosene lamp. At dusk, she heats milk on the range and makes toast from bread already cut. Their fruit and pudding are waiting for them on the table.
The children undress and go to bed as dusk falls, although the room is not dark because of the snow blanketing everything. A coyote awakens them, howling at the edge of the forest beyond the high board fence. The older child shivers from fear but remembers to call on the Lord Jesus whom her parents have taught her to love and trust. She really knows nothing of how to pray beyond, “Now I lay me down to sleep.”
Nevertheless, she looks around for Jesus and there he is. Just as mother and grandmother had told her he would be. A pearly-rosy light filled the whole room, and he stands there on a cloud just at eye level with his shepherd’s crook, the angels ’round him, smiling as they should.
Here is born her lifelong vision of Jesus, alive and available just as he has promised. Her lasting, lifelong freedom from fear stems from this memory. His presence was not due to any dream state of consciousness. It was real. He spoke no special words but he was there. Nothing could touch or take from her that shining, beautiful presence. Afterward she always knew.
The Fourth Memory – Ten Years
A young girl is just becoming conscious of her identity as an individual. Her mother has been healed of a severe stomach disorder and joined a small church that believes in healing. The church is founded on the revelations of a twelve-year-old girl.
The vision of Jean d’Arc revives in her heart and mind, slowly growing to the point of remembering early visions. Desire is reborn also to become a girl-leader and to write a book of inspired revelations. The visions are still vague and indefinite but desire is becoming stronger each day.
She engages in much pondering and rereading of the book by the girl-prophetess, also pondering the required daily chapter of the Bible. Her sense of consecrated dedication is growing and expanding.
The Fifth Memory – Twelve Years
As a twelve-year-old, she finally decides to be baptized by immersion. Her dedication and consecration are very real, making deeply binding vows. It was a winter baptism in an icy cold stream. The minister’s alpaca robe floated atop the stream as he led her, one of many, into the water.
When she recovers from the complete blackout and illness caused by swallowing part of the icy stream, she has no memory of anything except the crowd singing, watching the immersions, and a picture of the minister’s long legs covered with lambs’ wool to the ankles, and the shivering cold.
The feeling of consecration is gone entirely. She has no high exhilaration or sense of ecstasy caused by feeling closer to God — all of which they had promised. She had no desire left to become a prophetess or a Jean d’Arc, no sense of fulfillment or long-anticipated glory.
Instead, she has a feeling of being let down in some way, yet also a real sense of relief. Feeling so relieved confuses her, and the sense of having completed something necessary, of having finished something that “had to be done.”
The Sixth Memory – Fourteen Years
“Common sense” buries dedicated vision beneath its practical ways of the world in school and social life. A very critical attitude replaces her consecration as she sees smug, self-righteous faces under heavy sermons about death and what happens after they put the body in the ground.
A deeper resentment against those who teach and believe that God could leave some of His creations out of His heaven. The years between twelve and fourteen build a full resentment against being treated in such ways after being created by an all-powerful God.
Finally, she completely repudiates both ideas, especially about burial, and begins building the presumptuous idea that any worthwhile God must be tired of looking down on faces so grim and self-satisfied. A desire grows to do something about it, but she does not know what to do or how to go about it.
3. The Long Pilgrimage
I have lived eighty years! Every year is a challenge to seek more life, to learn more about life, to grow more in grace. Years are a challenge to live. I mean live, not loitering along half-alive, not seeking to escape from life, not hiding when life’s blows hit hard, not blaming God or man when no one offers shelter or sympathy, not wearing a robe of self-pity because “no one ever understands.”
I started this journey nearly seventy years ago, ignorant of psychology. I had no idea of what the laws of life meant or that such special laws even existed. All I had was my pride, which as it turned out, has served me well. Had I known in the beginning of my pilgrimage to eighty just where my desire for knowing would take me, I might have grown discouraged just thinking about it. I might never have taken that necessary first step on the highway to Eternal Youth.
My pride demanded that I face whatever came along each day and take it with my chin up and a smile, making the world believe I liked it, and had been waiting for it my whole life as the frosting on my cake. I spent those first decades living day by day, growing into maturity, belonging to an old-fashioned family and marrying in my seventeenth year. I had been raised in a church, sang in the church choir and loved the church with its ritual.
I recovered from a twelve-year-old’s disillusionment to a renewed sense of consecration and devotion, not to a church, not to a minister, but to the teachings Jesus gave in the Sermon on the Mount. Early vows compelled me to the determination to follow faithfully every law he had taught.
Added to the Sermon on the Mount were six words I found in the Bible, which represented exactly the kind of God I wanted to worship, a God who is “deathless, ageless and abiding” and the same “yesterday, today and forever.”
Since my one desire was to live life and not leave it, I was determined to keep my body as “ageless” as possible. With this goal in mind, I began to search for laws that would help me to live the right way and to keep my body as perfect as possible. I bravely started to discover for myself what law meant and to “work out my own salvation.”
The answers did not come all at once. I had to learn hard lessons, and year after year found me still searching. Two decades later a library opened where I lived. Although it was limited, I discovered some ancient teachings on law, and staying youthful as part of honoring the body as a “Temple of the Living God.”
Laws for Living
Looking back toward this humble beginning, it seems almost impossible that all the laws incorporated in this book have been unfolded to me. I have tried them all in my eagerness to learn and to know. Very soon after starting, they first began to teach me temporary self-control and then the eternal beauties of soul-conquering.
My first self-made law was to show God a smiling face. This worked wonders for me in the world of sales, which circumstances forced me to enter. I had to provide for two small boys.
Joining salesmanship classes, and self-interest, gave me the second law and both worked for me as laws of self-discipline and self-control. If I were to have salary increases to meet my growing needs, I must please everybody. To do this, I decided I must never miss an opportunity. Nothing must get by me, so I learned one of the greatest of all laws of success, never miss attending to a detail.
Nothing is too small to be overlooked. This led me to see where others were neglecting details and I began to collect every detail left undone around me. It not only paid me great dividends in salary and promotions but made me alive and alert in mind and body.
Like many people, I am better-looking when my face is animated. Because I felt sorry for God having to look on such homeliness, I learned to smile and laugh. Because I needed salary increases, I learned to pay attention to details. This has given me wide-open eyes and a quickened brain capacity. How it worked.
Through picking up the details others neglected, you might naturally feel that you had become a doormat. Well, you might if you labor under self-pity. However, here pride of identity comes in: A smile is perfect armor to protect you from becoming a “worm” or a “doormat.” Something about taking everything with a smile frustrates those who love to use others as foot-scrapers or carpets.
To see so-called enemies foiled also kept me from feeling hurt or humiliated. I learned positively to enjoy seeing them unable to understand what had happened to them. In this way I learned a third law, to mind my own business and forget the other fellow and his indoor sports.
This Is Good
I do not know how or when I stumbled onto the next law, which became the most important in my step from mere self-control to soul-conquering. Suddenly, there it was. Others had given me much literature on right living, and I was discovering how many negative traits and thoughts I had to overcome. The fact that I was to become “as perfect as my Father in Heaven is perfect” bothered me.
In pondering this, I discovered my next step: I must stand and declare, “This is good,” no matter what it looked like on the outside. Not always could I mean the words when I said them, but my devotion gave me one virtue. I realized that I had to try to do it, though I could not see how.
Conquering self is a slow business at best and your ability fluctuates with what the hours bring. That fire-spitting, hydra-headed dragon and monster of self-pity would creep in at times and seek to take control. Through this very process, I saw the truth clearly.
When I stood and prayed with all my heart and soul for the love of God to possess me, for that instant I was as perfect as my Father in heaven, though I fell from grace in the next hour. Finally I began to know that when I declared everything good, problems had a chance to work themselves out for good, without any apparent help from me.
This new and perfect law came to me when I was losing my vision. I must stand, or fall by everything I had ever believed. I had always been absolutely certain of God’s Presence and Power in my life. Now my living intensified itself in devotion, and I could act as if God had already restored my eyes.
Under such a test, self-interest peaks until it fades. You have an outer, positive confirmation that there is a Power that lifts and transcends beyond anything earth can present as an obstacle. You also finally gain comprehension above any previous knowing.
You must make the call for more life earnestly and in deep devotion. Then God answers your call in every way, and for anything you require. It may hurt to stand and say, “This is good,” when everything on the outer is conspiring to make things look impossible. You must ignore the interferences that are contrary to your desires, and keep making the declarations.
My eyes did not return to perfect vision all at once. No instantaneous miracle was mine, but a building for strong, steady growth, which is sometimes much better than a speedy recovery. It took two years of continued declaring each day for my sight to grow stronger, until one day I forgot all about my eyes. There they were, perfect as they still are at eighty. I use them as much as I desire, without glasses of any kind.
Being Lifted, I Lift Others
With this healing experience, I added another law to my list of daily “musts”: And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me. – John 12:32. To me this meant “I shall lift everyone who contacts me by silently declaring them perfect.”
These laws took me through a heavy “trial by fire.” My vocal cords were torn loose in an accident. I awakened in the hospital to hear someone telling my son that I would never talk again. I earned my living through my voice, using it every day. Instantly I declared that what God had created in the beginning, He could recreate for me now, since I could not do it for myself nor could the doctors help.
The pain was tremendous as I kept forcing air through the vocal box. Still, I used the hoarse croak I had instead of a voice, persistently declaring it perfect a thousand times a day. It worked.
No trace remains in my speaking voice and my singing voice is returning. Not an old voice either. God’s Voice is youthful and beautiful and can never grow old. My vocal cords are not my voice. The voice is a soul power, a vibration direct from the Source. All I could do was exercise and use what I had, still declaring and knowing that God can recreate anything He once created, for the mold still exists in the Creative Mind of the Source.
The soul’s great pilgrimage that started so long ago shall go on through all eternity, for you can never comprehend all that you think you know now. Every law you obey builds a new step in your personal escalator of life that can only go up, never down.
When you live today in the most beautiful way you can imagine, all your tomorrows will be ever more wonderful. You will grow more youthful and beautiful because God works.
4. You Live on Atomic Energy
Beloved, now are we children of God, and it does not yet appear what we shall be. – 1 John 3:2.To live is to breathe. To breathe is to live. No one can stop breathing and live. From the inanimate through the whole animate world, everything on earth must use two factors in common, breathing and the freedom to do so twenty-fours each day. From atom to man, breathing is the only way to be alive.
I found no short cut to eighty years. Life must be lived year by year and all the days between. Once born, you cannot escape from life. To become ill or unconscious does not stop life in any way. The hours, days and years keep right on rolling, piling up for every soul on earth, whatever his station in life, conditions or circumstances behind his problems.
You have only two ways to follow, two choices to make in meeting life — either cowering behind something real or fancied while forever seeking escape, or head-on and unafraid.
Life’s hazards are the same for everyone, although the situations may be different. People may have different temperaments, but the need to live and breathe hour by hour is the same. It makes no difference that most pain and suffering are self-inflicted. Any failure to conform to life causes you to break laws, which always reacts detrimentally on you and your body.
Conforming to Life as It Is
Life never conforms to any individual. Everyone, to live smoothly, must conform to life. The greatest present lesson to learn is how to adjust to life and conform to time. The most depleting of all inner conflict comes from the inability to measure time correctly.
While you can easily adjust to the use of new time and labor-saving machines, you may find it difficult to adjust to new hours of leisure, because your emotional life is involved. You worry about wasting leisure hours and allow new time to slip by without using it for anything constructive. You must redeem time if you are to get enough good living out of twenty-four hours each day.
Opinions, prejudices and manmade laws to the contrary, you cannot change or set aside life’s hard realities to suit anyone’s whims or convenience. To seek escape from the physical body while shouting that there is no life after death proves nothing.
Any ordinary use of common sense should convince everyone of one inevitable fact: No one has conclusively proven nothingness instead of an afterlife. So, stacking up a few handy credits for use “over there” while waiting for the final reckoning might be better than awakening in some distant time and place to find that you need credits.
What pays you the greatest dividends? To accept life as you find it and to conform to the laws as given, especially that of measuring time.
To spend your life agreeing and disagreeing, adjusting and fighting, always adds more fuel to the inner conflicts. Never conquering your selfish demands that life conforms to whatever “poor little me” desires, is living life the hard way.
Inner conflicts rage consciously or unconsciously in your submerged portion of mind, the subconscious. You can liken it to an iceberg with only the smallest tip rearing its head from the water. Only the smallest portion of your fourfold being shows above the surface, that portion known as the outer sheath. The physical body, on which the reactions of the other three portions register, is all that the world sees or knows about you.
From your first cry as an infant to the last breath taken when you leave your earth body, you must breathe. You inhaled yourself into your body at birth and will exhale yourself from it at transition, or what we call death.
Experience begins with that first breath of the newborn, and ends only when you take your last earth breath. The time you spend between these two climactic experiences is called living.
The whole expression of your life depends on your breathing, what you think about breathing, how you breathe, and what emotions you send forth with each exhalation. What you send out must return to you — as Grandma always said, the “chickens come home to roost!”
What Grandma did not know is that what you send out collects other “spirits” like unto itself and returns to you with everything it attracted on its travels around the world — everything like unto itself. This is why you repudiate lessons when they hit you; you feel you do not deserve such blows. Perhaps the thought going out on your breath was small, but now it has a family.
Science is a form of revelation. Science combines all the same old substances that have always been here on earth waiting until we reach that point in development where we understand how to use them.
You apply scientific principles to recombine old substances into new materials for construction and for daily living. All the new labor-saving devices make for easier living, but with them come the added responsibilities for handling the emotional complexities they have produced.
Science has now expanded from the physical, mechanical realm to study the submerged portion of life with its hidden mysteries. Science is uncovering vast inner realms of mind.
The still unexplored subconscious holds the reasons for all of your limitations. Science is becoming more concerned with the relationships between those submerged portions, which you cannot see with physical eyes but do exist. The unseen portions show themselves in the outer portion, in the physical body, speech and actions. Scientists know that what we knew as truth yesterday is not good enough for today’s living.
Your Source of All Power
Most of the world’s present unrest, uncertainty and limitations stem from one outstanding fact: Man has lost contact with and awareness of a Source of Power greater than himself. You must have a conscious identity with an established Source of Power to lean on, ready to draw on whenever you need something greater than self.
In refuting the old idea of a personal God, man broke himself into unidentified fragments. Then, because of the soul’s inner urge to have a Source of Power, man actually exalted himself into the place left empty in consciousness when he repudiated God. He then proceeded to exalt himself into insecurity because he had nothing left to depend on beyond the self.
Man will never be complete, happy or even satisfied with only self to worship. This is the reason man, in his search for something greater than itself, follows demagogues and evil ideas.
Life itself fills you with an undying urge to follow something with devotion, something to which you may cling with faithfulness. Therefore, you come to the place where this compelling urge causes you to accept new ideas. You turn to today’s psychological findings and metaphysical principles to achieve a solid background and needed foundation for your life.
You soon discover that by study and practice you can establish a certain secure identity with a Source that is immutable, invincible, unchangeable and immovable. The Source is always there to be called on; it fills all the emptiness, all the loneliness. Security takes their places, confidence and trust take over, holding you more securely than hope. An inner knowing fills your life with new peace and joy.
For a long time, science refused to accept either psychology or metaphysics as exact sciences. Metaphysics deals entirely with that which is unseen, invisible. Psychology deals largely with the submerged world of subconscious mind.
Until recently, we rejected what science could not “see” because we had no machines with which we could measure the “invisible” world. All this has changed because science itself is now proving what the practicing metaphysician has always known.
With machines of its own construction, science is now measuring the whole of the submerged portion of man. Scientific researchers are now producing technology and machines to prove wholesale what men in the past have proven individually for themselves through their own experiences.
All scientific calculations, after geometry, are based on a metaphysically postulated dot, which you extend into a line to form a plane. The little dot and line are not there, except by the grace of metaphysics in action.
There is no good reason why you, as an individual, may not postulate for yourself an unseen Source of All Life, a Source from which you came and on which you may draw for your life while you are “in the flesh” of an earthly body.
You Are Not Your Body
I am a spiritual, mental, emotional being dwelling in a physical body. The body is not I.
Einstein led the way in proving that mass, energy and light are one substance existing in different rates of vibration. Therefore, you should find no difficulty in relating your being to your physical body or to the Source from which you came.
Light lowered in vibration finally becomes the mass of which all material things are formed, including the physical body, which you can see with your eyes. Just as steam can be lowered in vibration into ice, so does law work to give you any heavy material substance.
You breathe Light with every breath you inhale. One declaration of, “Let there be Light,” and Light inflates the atoms in your physical body, which, when combined with the food you use for fuel, produces the visible outer body.
Metaphysicians have declared that there is but one God or Being who expresses as all Mind, all Power, and all Substance everywhere and in all things, animate or inanimate. This brings you automatically to the fact that the most important portion of your fourfold being, must be the high spiritual portion. It is the Source of All, the beginning of your breathing all the potentialities, the attributes and qualities of the one God.
The Source is only Godlike in expression as you when you allow that the spiritual portion to govern your whole life. An individual is no more God than a thimble full of ocean water is the ocean. Yet, you can become anything you can envision for yourself because you are not a broken-off fragment, but have permanence as part of the whole.
Breath is your contact with the Source. God gave you breathing as your instant and constant contact with all the life in the universe. Breathing is personal, no one can breathe for another. No one can take the Source from you. From this concept of a Source of All Life comes such an assurance for daily living that man has never devised anything comparable.
Whether you call this postulated Source of All Life God, Being, Mind or principle does not alter the fact of its existence. You can prove it by the same use of logic and reasoning that you apply to all science, but not wholesale.
You are fourfold, a spiritual, mental and emotional being with a body to dwell in. Each is a distinct individual, each different from all others. Each must prove every law of life for himself or herself, individually and alone.
No one can prove God or Spirit for another. Your many choices about the path you must follow and the laws you must accept determine your method of proving. You build your present decisions on all your past choices, the experience and knowledge you have gathered through years of living.
Some knowledge you may have received from teachers, some from experience but all is available when you must decide. It needs no persuasion to convince the most hardened agnostic that every man has a mind of his own and is more than able to use it when choosing his own path and way of life.
You are fourfold in your universal nature: Spiritual, mental, emotional and physical. You must unfold on all four levels of being and consciousness simultaneously, if you are to avoid the outer world’s law of “decline,” maintain perfect balance, and hold to Eternal Youth.
To unfold on one level at the expense of the other three causes an imbalance or illness — spiritual, mental, emotional or physical — sometimes on just one level but often on all four levels at once. It should immediately be evident that if you leave out the spiritual portion, the other three levels will suffer from a life deficiency, the inevitable result of which is slow decline into old age.
If breathing is the only contact you have with the Source of All Life, then the highest spiritual breath must feed the other three levels. You must consciously and deeply breathe this Breath of Life to have it permeate every portion of the body. The Breath of Life is the inflowing Spirit of God as the Source of All Life, lifting, vitalizing, quickening, and purifying your whole being.
The Breath of Life moves through the mental life, down through the emotional life and into the actual body sheath. Deep, high breathing is the only possible way to keep the inner atomic sheath within the physical cells inflated with energy.
This is the Power of God, Light transformed into immediately available physical energy through the act of your breathing. Your life itself, all your actions, whether mental, emotional or physical, depend on this God-given natural gift and ability to transform pure Light into Energy through your breathing.
Only high, deep breathing that consciously contacts the Source can furnish you with enough potential atomic power for your daily living. It is this potential energy held within the atoms of the cells in the physical body that you transform by explosion into the kinetic energy you use in every action of life, whether spiritual, mental, emotional or physical.
You can and do, by one consciously taken deep breath, transform this spiritual Light into the energy you need to run your life on all four levels of consciousness, especially the body in which you dwell.
So far, the air you breathe is free. Everything else requires an expenditure beyond just plain effort. Air is limitless, powerful in energy for your use and waiting for you to draw on it for life. If you need more life, you need more conscious deep breathing.
Your Source of All Life
Life is not found in creeds, dogmas or in rituals. They are man-formed means of seeking contact with your Source of All Life. All your thinking about God, repeating creeds, faith in dogmas, even kneeling for rituals cannot provide Power from your Source, although they may comfort and give you a feeling of peace.
One deep, high breath, taken with gratitude for the gift of Light added to a sense of being lifted, will flood the whole body with Light and a feeling of strength. This Light-into-Energy feeling is youth itself in expression. It is Eternal Youth here and now, alive and alight with the Life of God.
Oriental philosophies emphasize the importance of breathing but fail to emphasize that you must obey laws on all four levels. So, although breathing is life itself, much confusion has taken root about the law and about living.
If ordinary physical breathing were the whole answer, fewer people would grow old and lose their physical equipment through decline. The answer is not found with those who practice deep, conscious breathing just to stay young. Thousands of truth-seekers have done just that and lost their bodies from some malfunction at the very time when they could have been reaching their peak of usefulness and productiveness.
Breathing is the first necessity for life and should take first place in your consciousness.However, you must also follow faithfully other definite, important laws on the other three levels. This is the only way to keep pace with the vitalizing Power released to the outer body, the only way to take advantage of your heritage of Eternal Youth.
With conscious, deep breathing, the right kind of food, and the right use of rest and exercise,your brain is capable and equipped to care for the physical metabolism completely and produce perfect health. It does, except where mental or emotional conflicts create interference with the body’s natural rhythms.
Your metabolism continues while you sleep. It can rebuild the physical body at night only under complete freedom from the weight the mental and emotional stresses you indulged in and imposed on it throughout the day.
If you do not believe in the spiritual portion of your being, your breathing cannot reach high enough to supply the condensed Light you need. The watered-down portion that enters the body is not great enough for the day’s energy consumption. The explosion that takes place within the atoms is in exact accord with the quality of energy released when you transform Light through breath.
An athlete may or may not believe in the spiritual part of his being when he breathes. Still, his joy of life in his love for the sport contacts the Source of All Life. He builds a beautiful physical body because of this contact. He touches on the two great and necessary laws of the mental-spiritual levels: Joy and love, and how he uses these laws makes the high contact for him.
However, unless he has some spiritual realization, even the greatest athlete finally is subject to the old age idea. Not because he wore out his body or used it too much and too hard, but because he believes in the inevitability of earth’s laws of emergence, maturity, and decline.
Everyone is born under these earth laws of emergence, maturity and decline, but each has a choice along the way. You can either succumb to opinions, prejudices and self-indulgence, or accept the laws of the spiritual life as your Source of Power and life and live in Eternal Youth. Then the earth laws of emergence, maturity and decline become the spiritual laws of emergence, maturity and ascension.
Feeling weak or old means your lack of conscious deep breathing has drained your atomic body of the Light of life. The only way to replenish this atomic energy is by deliberate and constant deep breathing. Depleted and collapsed atoms within the cells of the physical body cause old age. This is why you hear “old age is creeping up on me!” The whole body starves a little at a time as your breathing becomes shallower.
Real energy and youthfulness come when you permeate every cell with the full Light of the Source made possible through every deep, high breath from the live wire of omnipotence. You make such contact when you are glad to be alive and thankful for a new day to meet and live. Laughter fills your heart just because God is. You accept and know that you can glorify God in and through your body. When you know that you dwell in the “Temple of the Living God,” then you have found Eternal Youth.
5. You are an Instrument of the Creative Impulse
In the beginning God created. – Genesis 1:1. God desired to create, and a universe was born. The Mind that is God inhaled under this original all-compelling Creative Impulse until an inevitable explosion followed.
Under many such explosions, Light condensed itself into a pool of Mind, Substance and Power that we call the Source. This Source contained everything, all that God would need for the creation of universes, angels or men.
Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it. – Ecclesiastes 12:6-7. God created you with a brain surrounded and protected by the golden bowl, the skull.
The brain is a built-in computer so great that we have explored only a very small portion of it. It is so intricate that no matter how complex a mechanical computer we build, we can touch but the fringes of the brain’s capacity. This perfect machine is all ready to develop. We have been slow in awakening the cells and vitalizing the already strung nerve “wires.”
God created man’s perfect brain for Divine Mind to use in functioning through His creations. Also, it provides the latent powers for your expression of free will and choice. As you vitalized the nerve wiring in your computer through using them, you also learned how to control your life and conquer your future life on earth.
The Mind of God endows you with a direct line to contact this pool of Light, Power and Substance at the Source. Mind has so arranged it that through breathing you could condense Light into energy and then into mass to meet the needs for every level of your expression on earth.
This makes you a creator in your own right, and it also makes you responsible for every one of your own creations. This Creative Impulse is the Mind of God in action. It is the servant of Mind, and has no power or ability to act without Mind. The Creative Impulse cannot act, except to be or to become.
Great creative Mind thought the Creative Impulse into the form of man, created in God’s “image and likeness.” Mind can think the Creative Impulse into every form you need for your expression in living. This is the Mind that was in Christ Jesus that you contact whenever you ask for help.
When Mind acts and gives the answer, then Mind also sends the Creative Impulse that does the work. When you receive a new idea, it brings all the Power and Substance needed for its fulfillment.
The Creative Impulse, which is behind all creation, is the life of Man. This is your glory, your creative power, your foundation. It can also be your downfall and is when you deliberately repudiate its existence on any of your four levels of expression.
This great Creative Impulse is the fire of enthusiasm behind everything that you decide to do. The Creative Impulse causes you to aspire and move toward what you desire. Mind, acting on the great Creative Impulse through your breathing, transforms Light direct from the Source into both the energy to act, and the substance to fill your molds of desire.
God sets no limit on your ability to call on this Power and Substance for your creations. The Creative Impulse exists always. The Creative Impulse is.
Universal Mind operates throughout all creation, inanimate or animate, in all things unconscious and as all things conscious. From the lowest creature on earth to the highest intelligence produced, only one Creative Impulse rules life.
The lowest stage of the creature kingdom uses an unconscious instinctive intelligence and desire. From the formation of its first brain cells, gathering experience is the most important thing in the creature’s life. Without experience, life has no possibility of conscious growth.
You apply your experience to what you do in life. This is how you awaken your mental faculties and develop them by constantly choosing to use them. Evolution, from the creature’s instinctive intelligence and desire to the use of fully conscious intelligence and desire, is a long, slow process in growth. Conscious intelligence only begins when the creature, who is to be endowed with a human brain, first emerges into outer expression through evolutionary processes.
You are the highest manifestation of God’s creation. Your power of conscious choice operates on each of your fourfold levels of consciousness. All your difficulties arise from the choices you make on your climb from the lowest creature state to attain the full stature of a superman, a creator.
6. Your Creative Tools of Ascension
The following material contains vital and necessary laws that you must apply and obey for fourfold health. These laws form a regular daily program for Eternal Youth. Nothing about the use of these laws is optional; no possible choice is involved. They are essential if you are ever to become a creator.
You must obey five sets of laws on the outer physical level of expression, and three sets of laws govern the submerged inner life. Five outer laws deal with the mundane phase of life, your physical body. Three sets of inner laws are a trinity of life dealing with the soul’s expression.
Five outer laws cover breathing, water, diet, rest and exercise. Three inner laws cover desire, thinking and imagination.
All eight sets of laws are important, though the inner laws are critical, since they maintain your contact with your Source of All Life. Through them life descends to be used when you obey the five outer laws of expression. This is the Three (Mind, Substance and Power) falling into the fourfold man.
How to Focus on the Goal
Breathing the Creative Impulse brings forth all great ideas from the universal Mind, which the individual at once appropriates to his needs and desires. Each is a creator in his or her own right.
However, once you decide to accomplish a certain thing, you must remain steadfast and constant to that new idea. Imagination, thinking, and desire must cooperate to achieve the goal you choose. They must follow your determined course as one, with no wavering.
Creative Mind must be in control, and you must ignore all outside enticements. You have no time to explore bypaths of self-indulgence, no time out to chase rainbows or butterflies, no leaving the path to pick flowers. Dalliance does not turn back the clock of life.
Time does not wait for anyone. Experience teaches that wasting time is foolish, for someday you will suffer a rude awakening. Then you find that retracing steps so carelessly taken is hard.
You are usually your own delay. You allow yourself to grow lukewarm just when you need to turn on the heat of desire to reach your goal.
Since the universe has only one Creative Impulse, it must operate on each level of your fourfold life. It permeates your whole being: Soul with its three parts, and the body. The Creative Impulse gives identity and assurance through the spiritual life.
Through the mental life, the Creative Impulse contacts new ideas and executes the many activities of the mental world. The Creative Impulse takes care of every desire and every outer relationship through the emotional life.
The Creative Impulse is the power behind all activity on each level. The outer level of physical love is as important as any other because the great universal Creative Impulse expresses itself as all three expressions here. However used, it is the only Creative Impulse. Usually it operates on only one level at a time, although it is forever moving through the four levels, seeking to keep them in balance, one with the other.
The “More and More” Life Plan
The Creative Impulse has no high or low; it manifests according to what you think about. What you make of it is your life. It is good on every level.
Only the “more and more” life plan can bring Eternal Youth of mind, heart, body and affairs. Imagination must build new pictures of “more and more” life for youth, and your deep breathing will bring more life.
Allow no interference by the old subconscious or past “less and less” life ideas. If old patterns break in, or if something from the outer disturbs you, causing you to falter in any way from your new plan of life, watch out. Something on the outside is riding you with a whip and spurs, something delighting in calling itself your master.
With every high, deep breath, new life flows through, renewing you in a never-ending cycle of living. The Creative Impulse is free, and it follows everyone to give them life. You cannot run far enough to escape it, and you have no place to hide. It is like sunshine, sharing itself with all, belonging to everyone alike.
Each is free to choose either the sunshine or the shadows. The sun shines on above all the clouds. It is a matter of choice. You can settle for the shadows or insist on looking through the clouds to stand mentally in the sunshine. No one can stop you, no one can cloud your mental sky or cut off your high sunshine by talking or pushing.
How you live and what you want as your guiding star is your choice. Each is free to breathe the Creative Impulse from the universal Source and live with it gloriously. Each is free to repudiate the Creative Impulse and live ingloriously in the shadows cast by earth. This leads to old age and the decline into uselessness. Choose and live.
7. Desire, the Flame and Glory
Get wisdom and get understanding. – Proverbs 4:5. Since all new ideas come through Mind, Creation is still unfolding. The advances in science prove this more than in humanity itself. Civilization is having a hard time keeping up with what science is unfolding from an inner world of invisible substance.
In 1915, a metaphysician had to explain what the term “vibration” meant. Now the world is full of all kinds of vibrations and no one questions them. If a vibration can penetrate a concrete wall, it certainly can penetrate the physical body for healing purposes.
Everyone knows that the power in the world today is greater than it was two thousand years ago. From the camel and horse to jet aircraft is great progress. Science is already doing the “greater works.” It is no wonder that we, as individuals, are not yet accustomed to so much power. We do not thoroughly apply new atomic energy to the body to make it youthful.
God created you with the wonderful ability to draw your energy from the Source. Yet, people are still seeking a mechanical way to draw energy direct from the sun. Your life equipment allows you to take a deep breath and draw pure Light as a vibration direct from the great Source universal. You can transform Light into energy without cost or great effort.
Desire Fuels the Creative Impulse
God had to have a desire to create before He could create a universe. You must have desire in you before you can create, before any action can take place. The Creative Impulse is powered by desire, both above and below.
You must accept your creative heritage as a fact: The Source endowed you with desire in the very beginning of creation. Then you know that the Source has empowered you to step out and achieve anything you can envision for yourself.
With acceptance, desire becomes the motive power behind all your actions. Without the use of desire, you have no life in you and no will to do anything. Of course, desire does not do the work, you have to get up and do it.
Desire, once fanned into a flame, becomes the deathless faculty that sends you on to do the most impossible things and win. A burning desire grips you and holds you so you cannot stop or let go until you find a way to win.
Wisdom and Love are Desire and Will: The Creative Impulse functions under many great principles. All scientific principles and formulas function under the great principle of Wisdom. All the humanities function under the principle of Love. The principle of Wisdom is considered the aggressive masculine principle, while Love is the gentler compassionate feminine principle.
Wisdom and Love are always recognizable, although they divide themselves into multiple lesser principles and laws. You can trace everything back to one or the other of these two. Love functions as desire. Wisdom functions as will, and when they move together as one, everything works together for good in your life.
Finding anything on the periphery of God’s Creation that does not originate at the Source of the universe is impossible. Personality is the outer expression of the inner aspects of God as both feminine and masculine, as Love and Wisdom. This is carried out in all nature with positive and negative vibrations.
Love Is a Choice
Because God has endowed you with the power of choice (free will), you do not always function as the principle of love on the positive side. When you use love on the lesser negative side, you misuse and allow desire to die down to a mere flicker. Thus, you let negative, not positive virtues, take over your live. When you let the subconscious mind rule, you run into snags, depressions or illnesses.
Some say that hate is the opposite of love, a questionable assumption. As love descends into even a mild modification of hate (indifference, for instance), the “little self” takes over. Self perverts the nature of love. Then you live by demands, expecting life and other people to do all the giving, all the adjusting, all the agreeing. The attitude is, “I want other people to be good so I can be happy.”
Hurt and disappointment follow when you make demands that others cannot meet. The result of this demanding, expecting attitude is always self-pity, which in turn makes the physical body a miserable hovel of aches and pains.
When you allow doubts and fears, opinions, prejudices, pride and arrogance, resentment and intolerance to possess you, even in a very small way, you are bound to be unhappy. Traces of mental, emotional or physical disturbance appear as blocked nerves and other limitations. This is why you must dig out and erase all old inherited patterns from your consciousness, and let go of the ones you have made for yourself.
Negative emotions are why wrinkles come and you have other minor illnesses. Practicing the following formula can erase them: “I shall make myself good and leave all others to be happy in their own way.”
Fate or the Path of Destiny
God sends you to earth with a “fate line” to be imposed in case you forget who you are and from where you came. This is God’s wise precaution to keep you from destroying yourself completely.
God needs everyone to make up the whole of Creation. God does not want to lose any of His Creations. He wants every son and daughter to come home when earth school is over. If an individual repudiates God, the fate line sends him out of his body before he has squandered all his soul substance.
You have free choice. Life experiences always expose you to truth and to the laws that automatically set you above the fate line onto your Path of Destiny. Here you can draw on all the Mind, Substance and Power you can ever need.
A burning desire for something better literally shoves you into a new place. Life may also shove you out of your old place without your choice or consent. This is how your soul’s choices move you from the old fate line onto the creative Path of Destiny.
The Creative Impulse presents you with every opportunity to use all your creative abilities — provided you accept and do your best in the new place without whining or complaints. Something inside always silently tells you to accept and praise God for what you have, and others on the outside always declare that “things will get better.”
To refuse new opportunities is a decision to stay with the fate line, the way of least resistance and very alluring at first. Fate usually presents things in a way that appeals to “poor me,” the little self. Fate makes the subconscious self feel wanted and better than anyone has ever noticed on the outer.
When left to follow the fate line, the subconscious always has a whole encyclopedia of excuses, waiting and ready to present to the conscious mind, excuses for tears, for a semiconscious state of indifference and self-indulgence. Living by the fate line creates a state of praise-seeking. The little self wants pats on the shoulder for simply doing your duty, virtuously accepted even when given only to escape self’s whining bids for sympathy.
On this negative vibration, the self-pole of the fate line, you expect others to overlook all your shortcomings. So your fate is to be loved in spite of instead of because you are agreeable, wonderful, understanding companions.
The further danger is of not being loved at all, spending your final years just being tolerated for what you might have been. Or because you are a relative and cannot be sent back or exchanged for a newer model.
Destiny Is Hard Work
You are bound to discover that the Path of Destiny seldom is alluring. It is always the time-consuming way of harder work. Usually the family wants the increased salary and benefits from a change. Yet the very ones for whom you make the sacrifice are the first to find fault and criticize you for lack of attention to their wants and needs.
Any new position presents challenges, obstacles to overcome, and barriers to burn away through hard work. The Path of Destiny tests the soul for courage and endurance. It is very narrow and offers no place where you can turn around and go back.
Once you step out on the Path of Destiny, you sign a contract with the Source of Power, and something beyond explanation takes place. No matter what misunderstandings you encounter, no matter how much it hurts, a deathless desire takes over and you cannot quit. “To do and to endure” becomes the motto you follow.
If you feel that fate is to blame for what has happened in your life, if you feel that no one understands you, now is the time to stop and take stock. It is time to make a change. It is time to investigate the idea of a Path of Destiny and find out exactly what it can do for you. This is the only way to set aside the “old age” pattern for the new plan of Eternal Youth.
Fate only wears you out while you wait for something to happen. Destiny moves forth under the Creative Impulse of desire and makes something happen. The price? You must cast off the old patterns seeking to ensnare you and dig out the young dreams you’ve buried under the ice of disappointments.
When you reheat those dreams and start seeking new ways to make them come true, every old wish or want or hope adds itself to your new flame of desire. You even receive dividends on your past delays.
Taking the line of least resistance allows your desire to die down until you bury it in the cold gray ashes of self-pity. If you dig long enough and hard enough, you will break through the layers of life and find that tiny spark of youthful desire for achieving. It is always there. Desire is a gift of the Eternal Source and you cannot kill it, though you may let it die down to the smallest possible spark.
It Takes Burning Desire
Burning desire is part of the universal Creative Impulse and the Source of All Flame. It must serve you no matter how you have neglected it in the past.
When found, fan the spark of desire until it becomes a tiny flame. Nurture and watch the flame of desire tenderly, ignoring weariness and delays. One day your desire will burn so high that no obstacles of earth can prevent it from reaching whatever goal you have set.
What a joy it is to shed doubts and fears forever. You may walk the ways of life without whining or passing out alibis that are no longer popular or in good taste. It takes no “brains” or intellect to whine or complain at life or fly into a rage over delays, any two-celled creature can do as much. It does take a fully awakened desire to overcome before you can accomplish something worthwhile.
Desire causes you to move up and out of the old grooves you created by seeking to hide from life, to escape from all responsibility for your actions. To hide isn’t to be safe. To be safe isn’t living. To exist in a small mud puddle made of your tears, while you dance up and down in the same spot for years, will earn no rewards.
When you have no belief in a Source of Power that you can contact, you give less and less importance to the act of breathing. Your live-wire of breathing thins like an old frayed light cord ready to short-circuit. You cut the supply of life too low to satisfy or to keep you youthful.
You begin to decline when you run on an insufficient basis of Light transformed into energy from the Source. First, your mental life lags (your memory slips), then your emotions take over the physical until you deplete it, sometimes beyond repair.
To sit beside fate and take things easy may be peaceful, even satisfying most of the time, but it is a sure way to allow the atomic body cells to collapse. You can only keep them fully inflated and energized by deep-breathing contact with the Source of All Life.
Everyone must obey the law of certain hours of rest for physical recuperation. Yet when rest goes beyond need and becomes a sedative taken to avoid living and to escape responsibility, it is fatal. The fires burn lower and lower.
The general attitude toward the idea of having more and more life is usually pessimistic. If the life you have already hurts so much, why seek any more?
When your arm or foot “goes to sleep” it hurts until life flows back into it. The process of going to sleep occurs when you deflate the atomic cells. They inflate themselves again through movement.
When you deplete atoms from too many hours of service or from necessary work, you fill them again with energy from just one deep high breath. Stretch with your arms high above your head. (This is the “reaching for the stars” exercise).
Atoms collapse from malnutrition, a failure to breathe deeply, and misuse of your emotions. Depletion can continue until the atoms you so collapsed are completely crystallized and have no feeling in them at all, a state of paralysis. Any type of paralysis, mental, emotional, physical or in your affairs, means that your atoms have collapsed and your desire has faded to a tiny glow in the subconscious mind.
Falling back onto the fate line from indifference or lukewarmness causes old age symptoms to begin to manifest, until you return to walk your Path of Destiny boldly with eagerness. You must fan the flame of desire constantly until it becomes a burning, flaming, and consuming fire in your life. Only then can you fully enjoy that active, youthful state of mind and consciousness you must hold always through all the tests and trials of the world.
Avoiding Decline
Eternal Youth is first a state of mind that will manifest more rapidly when you hold the attitude of youth. It will hasten the transformation from partial old age to youthful beauty. To aid desire, you must assume a joyous attitude twenty-four hours a day, and then be sure to hang up your face at night! Usually, you hang up your clothes and then leave your face on the floor at bedtime.
Beauty has to be earned. You must hold it as a sacred birthright. Beauty is desire flaming until it shows on the outside. When desire flames high enough it consumes everything less than itself. Any form of illness gets discouraged when ignored, and it moves out!
Eternal Youth in expression is acceptance of your identity with the universal Source of All Life, of your breathing the great Creative Impulse. This maintains your contact with all Life while allowing it to permeate every part of your being until its Eternal Flame lifts your own gift of desire ever higher. You then reach the place of Oneness with the Source where there is no chance that you can ever falter or waver again in your allegiance to the Light.
You have joined the “deathless, ageless and abiding” ones. Your physical vehicle becomes the tool of the soul. The soul is as immortal now as it can ever be. The soul only needs your full cooperation to let it show through the outer sheath as health, strength, and eternal youth and beauty.
8. Thinking, the Invincible Master-Planner
Thinking establishes you on your chosen Path of Destiny, which is whatever you have already decided you want to do. The only change from the fate line is that you have a firmer hold on the goal and a more intense desire to achieve it. You are ready to become creators of life, your own life. After accepting your identity and higher destiny, you must take control of your thinking because your life will go as your thinking dictates.
You must have a new plan to follow, one that includes new laws for all four levels of expression. Without a plan of life to guide you, you float as a rudderless ship with the currents and tides of life, at the mercy of every wind that blows.
You wake up and find yourself the victim of situations thrust on you because you lack direction and control of your life. Only by following a definite fourfold plan can you hope to have perfect creations and a perfect, youthful body.
Universal Mind uses the frontal lobes of the brain, where the faculties reign. The lower portion of the brain is the seat of propensities, where self and emotions hold sway. This upper portion, used by universal Mind, is the higher creative center, through which the Creative Impulse is constantly flowing. universal Mind uses your faculties of logic and reason.
God created you for the power of universal Mind to use. When you think He created you to use Mind power for yourself, you create conflict and malformations. The only Mind you can call your own is that portion you can tap. You may appropriate all you can use, but you can never own or possess all of universal Mind.
Once you tap an idea, you can never lose it. The first time that an idea is lightly touched it may not hold. Rest assured that on another cyclic round it will register the whole of whatever you need to go with your plan.
Invincible Thinking
When thinking is the instrument of universal Mind, it becomes strong enough to stand invincible before the world, holding both imagination and desire to its plan. You must sharpen your thinking until it is the wonderful precision instrument God provided for you and intended it to be when He created you. You do this under your use of the faculties of logic and reason.
Unless you base your thinking on logic and reason, you just think that you think. This usually happens when you allow thinking to become involved with sentiment instead of compassion.
Sentimental emotional involvement ruins the chance of balanced thinking and inner conflicts blind the reason. When you hold thinking true and balanced, compassion can move in for any situation and yet stand objectively, without sympathetic conflicts to cloud the issue.
Love and Wisdom can lift and hold your thinking steadfast through logic and reason. With just one deep breath, you instantly contact the Source of All Power, which can then overcome any adverse condition.
To hold thinking to continuity of thought, to persist with its training by logic and reason, leads imagination and dominating emotions (desire) to constructive creating. Thinking stands between the emotions and the high faculty of imagination. Thinking must be the balance wheel that keeps emotions and imagination poised and moving in the same direction.
When thinking wavers or runs wild, it can lead you into treacherous ways of life, betraying you into weaknesses of all kind. It can take you downhill into everything that you really do not want in your life. Or thinking can and will, under control, lift the aims of desire to follow your highest goals.
Soul easily entices imagination into building constructive pictures instead of the old blueprints of wavering depression and despair. With thinking held firmly to the new ideal-goal, with imagination and desire working together as teammates, the power of enthusiasm is born.
Enthusiasm moves forth on waves of Creative Mind into the world and your affairs, and you may contact your Guards (Guardians Angels). The power of enthusiasm opens doors before you, sends you into the right place at the right time. The fire of desire becomes a magnet of attraction, calling and drawing to you your own.
Controlled thinking is the first necessity toward establishing Eternal Youth either in your body or in your affairs. Eternal Youth is but one name for vigorous action and vitality. It is guaranteed to renew youth if you pay the right price. It depends on the choice you make.
What do you want? Do you want to be too tired at the end of a day to enjoy the evening hours? Do you plan to spend the weekend in bed to rest up? Do you end the day planning to feel worse tomorrow, to be half-alive all day, wherever you go or whatever you do? Many plan such things. Are you such a planner? If you are up later than usual and disturb your sleep routine, do you go to bed saying, “I’ll be dead all day tomorrow”?
Your Thinking Shapes Your Plan
You must have a life plan. You either think all day long how wonderful the evening will be, or think and plan how weary, how tired you will feel. You either wonder how you can ever manage to hold out until five o’clock, or are so happy you are alive, well and able to work that you forget to watch the clock.
Which attitude do you have in the morning? Do you stand up straight, reaching for the stars while thinking what a glorious day is before you? Or do you leave your bed reluctantly and regretfully, thinking how long and boring the day is going to be, and how many hours it will be before you can climb back into bed again? Do you put yourself to bed every afternoon, getting weaker and weaker until time to leave the office?
The instant you begin to think of resting and “bed,” the atomic body cells let go and slow down. You allow your breathing to get shallower, yawning your way through the last two hours of business. Unless you begin to plan for more life as the day lengthens, unless you plan to rest up in Light all the way home, you are going the way of decline.
One thought plan builds the body, while the other tears it down. It takes about the same amount of energy for either choice. One breeds greater energy, while the other depletes the body of the little energy you have left to use.
You can limp through life half-awake, half-alive, unhappy and pitying yourself, or change your thinking. You can revolutionize your whole life by thinking and declaring exactly what your new plan demands. You can draw on the Power to be or to do anything that you desire with enough flame under it to hold you to the plan. There is no set formula for conquering. Just start, and conquer.
You can easily change your thinking once the desire is born. First you decide to act, then choose the action to follow. It takes a bit more time to change old habits of illness, lacks, doubts and fears. They are tied to old habit patterns that you must lift, to allow desire to follow the new plan of thinking.
Declare and decree for strength, health and wealth. Declare for a body that will answer any demand you desire to make on it. Plan to be more and more active, to do more in one evening than you can accomplish during a day.
Breathe deeply and declare that you are drawing vitality and life from above. Banish all “rest” ideas from your mind. Know that when you do rest, new energy is filling you to overflowing. Most people in the world are resting themselves to death, when the only thing they need is more life.
When your thoughts wander, bring them back in focus. Take a deep, high breath, declaring that you are now transforming sufficient universal Light into atomic energy for your every need. Light now restores every atom in your body to full power and revitalizes you. Allow no thought of weakness or weariness to decrease your intake of atomic Power.
Once you make the choice for a strong body, you must hold to it constantly. Train yourself to take time to breathe deeply and consciously every hour on the hour, and your choice must be an hourly commitment. Unless you do this, you unconsciously slip into old habits. This consumes time, but pay no attention to the falling back. Dig yourself out and start again.
Step by step, a glorious victory comes. Your body responds almost at once with a sense of lightness and a youthful feeling. Eternal Youth is nothing but the Universal Bank of Creation’s answer to your call for enough power and life for courageous living.
Right thinking is your magic wand. As you wave it over your life, it absorbs every limitation.
Always call on God’s Light when you need extra strength or when something unexpected happens. Although you may start drained of energy, enough strength surges to answer the call for help. Sometimes you may feel more vitalized after you have used your strength than before you started.
Making the call before you get to such a depleted state is easy. Making your conscious breath reach the Source as you call on the universal Power is simple. It is your choice. How do you want to live your life? Half-dead or all-alive?
Faith-Based Thinking Is Best
To be constantly effective, you must base your thinking on principle, under the great Creative Impulse. Principle is unchangeable and forever the same. To make principle usable, you must modify it into laws to suit individual intelligence. You do not change principles; you only dilute them so you can obey them.
To have the lasting quality of stability, your plan must operate within the framework of faith. Thinking, with faith as its foundation, will have Power behind it and miracles will be the outer result.
Only the great principles of faith and love can fulfill your plan. To abandon faith cuts off the high vibration just as definitely as if you reached out the window and cut the power line.
You move from faith in God, an old idea, into living by the faith of God, a new idea. Love for God changes to the love of God. If you love enough, Light will fill your molds. If you have faith enough, you shall not waver.
Age exists only in your thinking. From the cradle to the grave, you live in an atmosphere of growing old. Someone is always nearby who feels that old age is inevitable. Eternal Youth has no age limit, and you can put thinking into reverse anytime you choose.
God has so equipped you that you can remake, recreate your life by allowing the highest invisible part of you to penetrate and permeate the mental, emotional and physical parts. The change to a new plan will show and “bear witness” through the visible physical body.
The world can know and judge you only through hearing you speak and by the gestures you make. The world judges the whole “you” by the smallest audible and visible parts. When imagination, thinking and desire, the emotions, work together in perfect harmony, the world can make a true judgment.
God gave you superconscious, conscious and subconscious phases of mind for your thinking expression. When they work in perfect agreement, you can stand upright, looking straight into the vision of your soul. Then your desire grows to become something special, to do something special with your life. It is enough to know that the Source is and to know that you are.
This soul experience can come to anyone any time, from birth to the last breath on earth. While thinking is in the driver’s seat, guiding the reins of your life, your declarations hold steady and you reap the rewards of a youthful appearance.
Being born with a clear idea of what your goal of life must be is glorious. Anyone can establish a goal any time, at any age. The trick is to accept it as possible to achieve once it is found.
When the soul names the desired goal, the thinking will hold steady. When the soul reaches up and makes a call on the universal creative Power from the Eternal Source, it receives the pattern for a youthful body. Although you may sometimes falter, breathing of the universal Mind will bring you back from the ends of the earth to the original goal-idea.
The infinite ability still slumbers, waiting to be called forth again to fulfill itself. Creation itself demands that this flame of desire burst forth. The bursting may come at the most inconvenient times, in the most unexpected places. It interrupts indifference and lukewarmness with a shattering force that sends you out to accomplish something toward the goal.
You grow older and older by looking into the past. To do nothing but think longingly of past activities, without hope or planning for more life today, invites old age and weakness to move in and keep house with you. All the cells of the body will crystallize from the effort of walking forward while you strain the eyes from looking into some past forever gone.
You can’t live time over; it dims the eyes to look backward. Let go of that hold on the world that is slowly turning into a “pillar of salt.” Here comes the future, fresh and new, ready to be lived now.
Think youth. Feel youth. Though you might be unable to physically dance, no law exists against imagining dancing on a cloud. Dancing is a part of youth. To imagine dancing helps erase the old age pattern of stiffness. You fill your heart with youthful things. Take your old dreams out of the mothballs and air them.
It takes dauntless courage to discard the old ways of thinking, but youthful thinking is essential because it registers on the physical body at once. When you walk with a spring in your mental step, your knees will respond.
Take your mind out for a walk on a leash while thinking about the golden years just ahead of you. Exercise your thinking. Control it. Conquer every old pattern to attain immortality and Eternal Youth now.
9. Imagination, the Kingly Faculty
Philosophers have named imagination the kingly faculty of man. We could also call it the most important of all the faculties, if any single faculty can be more important than another. If it were not for imagination, there would be no fantasies, fairy tales, fables or allegories — and surely no lies or fabrications in your life or in the world.
Even the earliest stream of consciousness “thinking” of a creature moving up from unconscious instinctive intelligence into conscious intelligence is but a series of images mistakenly called thinking. Impressions, imposed on the unborn soul during gestation through to mature adulthood, form the submerged portion of mind called the subconscious.
Subconscious mind has a screen so fine that nothing passes through without being recorded on the memory cells. It has taken thousands of pictures, lasting negatives of all experiences, and can produce a full-blown composite of any one of them at a second’s notice.
For instance, take the psychological example of a physical blow to the little finger. The blow’s impulse runs at light speed along the nerves from the hand to the brain. The message triggers the memory cells that hold the photographic negatives of all past blows. The subconscious sorts them all, makes a composite picture and registers it on the brain cells used by the conscious mind. Simultaneously, it sends a return impulse to the little finger of the recorded answer, either pleasure or pain. This occurs in seconds if the your reactions are speedy.
During this short period, imagination scans every picture in memory, mind analyzes, makes deductions and produces an answer. This is why, in all healing through Mind, you know that there is only one small window of opportunity.
How Imagination Works
You have only the shortest period in which to set aside all past ideas or pain patterns, make new declarations and impose new pictures of perfection on the memory cells. Declare that “Spirit” (Light) cannot be cut, bruised or burned, but forever remains the same under all conditions. This works.
This declaration bypasses all old patterns and installs a new pattern for the subconscious to follow in the future. It works as a miracle when you hold a conscious conviction of its truth to back up the declaration.
It cannot set bones or perform operations, but it can create a vibration for healing. Doctors call this “nature” doing the work. What does the name matter if the work of healing is being done?
As you continue to declare perfection, you finally erase every old picture pattern from the subconscious mind and memory cells. With the cleansing goes all fear about this one thing. Fear always sets up a conflict with right thinking. The declaration, “This is good,” replaces old subconscious fear habits, and instant healing results.
Everyone has heard of or read about a person who reviewed his whole life in a flash when his life was endangered or he was under great stress. If no images were retained in the memory cells or records in the subconscious, you could not review them under any conditions.
These old images form all the “blocks” from the past, which psychiatrists help to uncover when analyzing a patient. They also form all limitations, which hold you in thrall and keep you from becoming as great as your potential and vision.
You tangle with past images and patterns whenever you seek to conquer habits, from the lowest of the outer physical habits to the highest and most spiritual expressions. Every time you indulge a habit, you superimpose another picture on the hundreds already there.
Old habits are hard to break because of the “multiple exposures” piled on through the years. The same old emotion, indulged in literally thousands of times, causes imagination to build pictures. You build them, one on top of another, until you so deeply engrave the composite that the outer result is illness, mental, emotional or physical.
A mental block is like a photographic negative that is stored in a darkroom, which symbolizes the subconscious mind. Every emotional upset written on the pages of your life, from infancy, has a corresponding negative stored in your darkroom. They can pile up until you need an expert to handle them for you.
Unlike a real darkroom, you cannot just reach in, haul out and destroy the old negatives or patterns. You cannot erase records from the brain cells as you can a photographic image by exposing the film to light. You need real Light and plenty of mental elbow grease.
You often think you have erased an old habit record completely only to have it break out, burst into expression when you least expect it, when it will hinder you most. This is why it takes so long for soul to conquer self.
Unless you are persistent and steadfast in holding to your new patterns for life, you delay healing and success. It is so much easier to slip into old patterns, excusing yourself with the sophistry, “It won’t matter, just this once,” but it does.
The world is seemingly full of good reasons why you should take it easy, start it tomorrow or put it off. The subconscious mind loves to hear these words, which are a plausible put-it-off companion. You must select the right setting for your dial of life if you are ever to live fully in Eternal Youth. Set your dial for the stars.
If you have allowed imagination to build pictures of living on a “less and less plan,” if you believe in old age and decline as inevitable, then it takes longer to erase the old habit patterns from your subconscious. To move from a “less and less plan” is to move from the old fate line onto the Path of Destiny, which is always the “more and more plan.” The problem is not moving up, but staying up after the move.
If the physical body has begun to show the strain of past wrong thinking about life, the struggle is bound to take longer and require more strength and determination. You will find no easy way to conquer old habits.
The “less and less plan” takes from life. You waste time seeking more life on the outside. The “more and more plan” is giving of yourself instead of feeling that you can’t give as much because you are growing old.
First, give up the idea of wanting someone to love you. Then go on, giving lavishly of your inner love and compassion to the whole world, sharing thoughts of love and joy just to see if they work. You find that it opens the door to new friends and companions while it starts the vibration of return: “Give and you shall receive.”
There is no law of “Get and ye shall be given.” The return for trying to “get first” is to find yourself kicked or pushed out.
Even if the physical body has reached the stage of “decline,” you can rejuvenate it. Of course, you must pay a price: You must desire change with all your mind and heart. You pay that price by breathing Light from the Source.
Light first becomes physical energy. Then under desire and thinking, Light further condenses into “mass” or the physical cells of the body. This energy also melts, dissolves and absorbs any crystallization in the outer cells, it replaces the old with newly created cells.
Imagination sets the actual patterns for subconscious processes of the physical body. Subconscious mind can carry out anything you give it as a pattern. Changing patterns begins when you open your old darkroom to make it into a Lightroom. You can bring the body back to youth. It can be done. Try it!
If law is to work for you, you must follow breathing from the Source with imagination, building right pictures in full constancy and consciousness. Power from above enters, and strength begins to operate through you. Why? Because you have established a new habit of depending on breathing, which allows universal Mind to work as the coordinator in your life.
Without imagination to build the blueprint of your desire, you cannot create a mold for Light to be condensed into outer form. First you must decide to create something you value in your life, especially in your physical well-being and affairs. Then imagination takes over, makes the blueprint, and gives invisible form to what you want.
Holding fast to this original blueprint keeps the mental prayer mold steady and unwavering while your breathing furnishes substance condensed to fill the mold. Wavering in your faithfulness causes lopsided molds, which means that when your miracle appears, it may not be as complete as you really wanted.
The Law of Nonresistance
As imagination takes over in your creating, you automatically move into obedience to the law of nonresistance, the greatest of all laws ever given to the world. For centuries people have misunderstood this most powerful, most commanding law in the universe.
Nothing about nonresistance is weak or passive. It is nonaggressive as earth knows aggression. It is a law of perfect peace, the only real peace, yet it is all-powerful. Your use of the law of nonresistance makes you a king or queen in your own right, not a weak worm in the dirt or a doormat. Nor are you like a tumbleweed, being tossed about by every dust-laden wind that blows from the world deserts.
When you enter the sanctuary of this law, you stand straight and tall before the world, arms crossed, silently waiting on the law to take care of you. Acceptance of the law of nonresistance is possible only when one has gained an identity with the Source of Creation.
Identity with your Source is the place of conscious knowing that anything is possible under the great Creative Impulse of Mind which does the work. This is the place where the things men try to do are impossible, where the “possibles” of God take over.
The law of nonresistance is not earth-aggressive, just immovable. It stands against all powers of darkness and very quietly “lets” true Power do the work.
“Letting” is not being passive or pushed around. It starts with deep breathing, which creates poise in fourfold man, a poise that nothing on the outer can disturb. Poise moves up on a breath to mate with Power, and the offspring of this mating are the twins, peace and patience.
To spend time just working for peace and patience is quite futile. The harder you work for them, the more delays enter your life to call for peace and patience. It becomes a regular merry-go-round to see which will win, patience or impatience. Holding peace and patience as your goalonly invites life to send more situations on which to exercise peace and patience.
An attitude that works for “perfect peace” deters you from exercising nonresistance as a way of life. Nonresistance stands and knows. Nonresistance is a creative attitude that becomes its own protection from the snares of the world. It even opens the door to a “second sight,” which is also a protection from darkness.
Why should you try to conquer? Because you are a creator in your own right, if you acceptyour creator role. Of course, the world is full of obstacles and snares for the unwary, but it is also full of beauty and glory, and your inheritance is to be eternally youthful. Your Source eternally renews you.
When your cry in the morning becomes, “Lord, don’t let me miss an opportunity today,” you will see all your dreams come true. Once you get the “feel” of living in the Light, you miss it, and know instantly when you slip into an old mental darkroom still waiting to be cleansed.
Once you touch the realm of golden silence, your old imagination turns upward to become high soul vision. Soon you can see farther into the future. You begin to see around corners and know exactly what you must do.
Imagination teams up with intuition. Together they know what is coming and you are prepared for it, always ready to conquer.
The old subconscious, once so full of photographic negatives, is now only your body builder. It tells you to turn out the lights, go back and get your keys, to take your purse or umbrella.
Subconscious mind is now free to mind its own business, to do what God intended it in the first place. He did not mean it to be your ruler, but your “red light” of warning and watchfulness.
Eternal Youth is nothing more than enough life to rebuild the body every day, and maintain it in its original image and likeness of the Beginning. Plan your new picture gallery now. Renovate your old darkroom into a room of Light. This is your pearl of great price, your fountain of youth. How many of your old negatives are you willing to sell to make room for your new gallery?
Imagination becomes your servant when you pay a high enough salary to keep it working day and night. The salary is moving into the golden silence, the higher creative center, so you can “dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
It’s Never Too Late
Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. – Hebrews 11:1. It is never too late, just too soon if your dreams have not yet taken form. Think of the riches of the years, all the experience they have brought. Each experience is an added bit of wealth.
Consider all the planting you have done, now waiting to be harvested. Stop living on a starvation diet just because you count years instead of achievements. Now is the time to start harvesting those fields of waiting dream-substance.
If you have not collected yet, remember that every prayer, every declaration you have ever made has released the substance of faith, of which all things are made. Faith is waiting to come home to you, to fill all your molds to overflowing.
Every declaration carries its own promissory note for fulfillment. Each must be honored at the Bank Universal, but you must know that it will be made good when you present it.
Now is the time to collect all the efforts of a lifetime. Since experience begins with birth, it has no time limit for “young” or “old” in collecting all you have earned.
All experience comes to steel the soul to meet life as a conqueror. You can hope to gain the necessary endurance to prepare and enable you to meet life’s demands only by accepting the experience the years bring for soul-strengthening. Only experience empowers the soul to express those qualities that stand the tests of time.
Experience builds desire into that burning, flaming courageous quality, which holds fast to obedience when there seems no reason for the tests and trials by fire. Often, without this stressing of soul qualities, you may have forfeited hard earned goals through foolishness and failure to apply the wisdom gained by accepting your experiences.
You find many ways to delay reaping your rich harvest. Sometimes stubbornness causes you to repudiate an experience that you did not enjoy. You then proceed to find someone or something to blame instead of accepting it as your own, an incident bringing you a needed lesson.
Prompt acceptance of whatever comes to you, whether you feel it deserved or not, will pay the largest of all dividends. Acceptance saves the necessity of having to meet the same situation repeatedly until you learn the lesson.
Sometimes experiences seem repetitious, and you ask, “Why does this always happen to me?” Rest assured, you have refused to seek the hidden lesson sent for your soul’s good and its strengthening. Life will repeat any repudiated lesson until you accept it as having some message for you.
Inner Conflict Causes Aging
Every time you repudiate an earth lesson, it builds new conflicts in the submerged portion of memory. All these conflicts cause the indications of old age, which show themselves in your body, especially your face.
Your work doesn’t make you show age, but what you think about your work adds itself to inner conflicts, and causes the physical body to wear out. Such inner conflicts as arguing with yourself and hating the world, use more energy than one day’s supply of breathing and food can furnish.
These futile inner escapes and repudiation of responsibility for your own life cause more illness than all the germs and viruses. They destroy your immunity to disease. The white blood corpuscles cannot reproduce themselves under such mental confusion and conflicts between the spiritual, mental and emotional parts of you.
You must consciously direct and control your life under obedience to law. Only through conscious obedience to natural laws of conduct on each of the four levels of consciousness — spiritual, mental, emotional and physical — can you conquer and gain freedom of Spirit.
Life is a school with many grades, each with new lessons to be learned, new understanding of laws to be obeyed on each new level of consciousness. It is high time you faced this fact and passed the examinations for the same old grade you have been flunking year after year.
You must move along to the next higher grade without dragging along old books, chairs or teachers. Take nothing of the past but the precious pearls of wisdom gained there. Give up old patterns, mistakes and misunderstandings that kept you in a state of bondage, inner confusion and conflict. This is how to make room in the brain to store new knowledge. This is the only way faith and love can ever move forth to their own place in your creations.
Love, with faith and praise, becomes the magnet drawing to you what you need for your life. Praise enough will cover you with a patina of glory that nothing else on earth can give. It is an added gift given to you for your devotion to the Source.
You cannot buy glory. You cannot solicit it in any way, but must earn soul glory by expressing honor, loyalty and integrity.
Live by the motto, “Honor above all things.” Loyalty to principle is next in line. Integrity of soul is your guiding star forever. Only your high, deep breathing holds your contact with these beauties of life inviolate.
The body is a tool of the soul, a “temple of the living God.” When you know this, you realize that you must bring it to perfection by following laws as you learn of them, day by day.
You know that you must allow the great creative faculties — desire, thinking and imagination — to do their perfect work without any interference from each other or from your own selfishness. Royal imagination, creative thinking and the magic of desire can fan the spark of life into a vivid, glorious flame.
You can fulfill your long earth pilgrimage and receive payment for all the sacrifices you have made to life and others in only one way. You must let love go forth to collect your dividends.Love, the universal magnet of attraction, is the only quality of the soul that when undiluted is potent enough to find and touch with its magic power every tiny life spark you have ever released and bring them home to you.
Love, released and sent forth, is like a purifying river sent through a polluted stream. As it flows, the stream is cleansed and made pure. So love cleanses every old picture, thought, or emotional conflict from the submerged “little me”— all the taints so treacherous to the soul.
Send out lifting love into the world to absorb evil wherever it may be, to free everyone you have ever contacted of “me.” When you free others of the pressure of your past thoughts about them, you reclaim your own misused soul substance. It is returned to you cleansed, and you grow into a sense of completeness.
Love released, on its return, fills in all the old places where wrinkles have been. Every critical, blaming thought engraves a line somewhere — first in the soul, then on the face and body.
A face lift can be free. Just add enough love to your deep, high breathing instead of lukewarmness, such as, “I have to do this breathing exercise, but it is such a bore and takes so much time.” With enough love, the results will soon be apparent to the whole world.
It is good to reach the sum of whatever your calendar tells you your age is with everything intact. your body should be a joy to dwell in. your brain should respond easily, quickly, with an eagerness to know.
You can love, with compassion for everyone, no matter what grade they occupy. When you do not expect understanding beyond the present grade of an individual, that person is happy. You do not have to pay any debts for demanding what they do not have to give. Stop wasting time and drawing blanks from life.
This is the right use of the faith of God. When you can “loose” the other fellow and “let him go” to find his own way back to God, it means that you are at last possessed by the love of God forever. This is the way to immortality and Eternal Youth here and now.
Life continues with each added year. Life does not have to begin again. You just continue living.
10. How to Develop Your More and More Life Plan
The following material contains vital and necessary laws that you must apply and obey for fourfold health. These laws form a regular daily program for Eternal Youth. Nothing about the use of these laws is optional; no possible choice is involved. They are essential if you are ever to become a creator.
You must obey five sets of laws on the outer physical level of expression, and three sets of laws govern the submerged inner life. Five outer laws deal with the mundane phase of life, your physical body. Three sets of inner laws are a trinity of life dealing with the soul’s expression.
Five outer laws cover breathing, water, diet, rest and exercise. Three inner laws cover desire, thinking and imagination.
All eight sets of laws are important, though the inner laws are critical, since they maintain your contact with your Source of All Life. Through them life descends to be used when you obey the five outer laws of expression. This is the Three (Mind, Substance and Power) falling into the fourfold man.
Breathing, the First Basic Law for Living
No one can deny that breathing is the first law of life. There is no life in the physical body without breath.
All ancient schools and many modern ones teach correct breathing as the foundation for a youthful body. Many Asians, who appear to be around thirty-five, report that they are nearer 100, and declare that their youth comes through breathing alone.
Breathing is essential for health. Breath is the body’s main poison remover. One deep breath that completely fills the lungs will remove the toxins found in a heartbeat’s worth of blood sent through the lungs for purification.
Ancient wisdom teaches that you must synchronize heartbeat and breath for health. You do this only when you fill the lungs to capacity with each inhalation. The lungs are behind the heart and stomach, and reach almost to the waistline in the back.
How to Monitor and Increase Your Capacity: To find out if you are filling your lungs, sit in a straight chair (one that fits your knees without any strain on the legs) with your feet flat on the floor. Fold your arms, bend all the way forward, and rest your folded arms squarely on your knees while exhaling every bit of air.
This exercise will expand the rib cage: Breathe in very slowly and feel the air moving down to the very tips of the lungs in the back. Never mind the upper lungs, concentrate on feeling air all the way to the bottom of the lungs in the back. Exhale very slowly.
Repeat this exercise at least five times every day, and three times at night just before going to bed. Use this exercise to check any time during the day whether you are filling your lungs to capacity.
Most people have collapsed atoms in their lungs caused by lack of deep breathing. Collapsed atoms are the primary cause of all lung diseases. Breathing is the only way to restore natural body rhythm, and depth of breathing regulates this rhythm.
Shallow breathing allows atoms to deflate, and you must reinflate them slowly. Lung cells are quite delicate, and any kind of violence in breathing can ruptured them. So go slowly and easily with your breathing.
Breathing Exercises
The tamping and the cleansing breaths are among the most important of the types of breathing taught today.
The tamping breath, also called the “sipping breath,” helps to deepen your breathing and restore its natural rhythm. To exercise this breath, take one sip of air at a time until you completely fill your lungs. Inhale every sip slowly. Exhalation is also very slow. Two or three of these breaths are enough any time.
The cleansing breath is more violent than the tamping breath, and should be used no more than once a day. Begin by sipping to inhale. The cleansing breath expels all the breath at once. Bend from the hips with some force and blow out the breath as fast as possible.
Once a day is sufficient for the cleansing breath, unless you are exposed to heavy dust. Then, three cleansing breaths, taken at five minute intervals, will not be harmful because nature responds to breath and the need for it.
Alternate nostril breathing is interesting and not harmful. It may be used for both breathing exercise and for mental control, so it serves two purposes: To fill your lungs and train your concentration.
Alternate nostril breathing fills one lung at a time. Use your right hand for the right side and your left hand for the left. To fill the left lung, place your right index finger against your left nostril. Make sure you allow no air to penetrate, then fill the left lung from your right nostril. Place your left index finger on your right nostril to fill your right lung from the left nostril.
Do this until you can feel the air penetrating the lung opposite to the nostril you close with your finger. Go slowly, and one day, after much practice, you’ll discover you can fill one lung at a time without holding your opposite nostril closed.
The rhythmic breath is the most important of all breathing exercises. It is called rhythmic because you always do it on an even count for its four different actions: Exhale, wait, inhale, hold. The beginner should start on a count of four.
This sounds very simple, but is not, for the lungs are delicate and precious and must be treated with respect. Whenever you feel the slightest sign of strain in breathing, stop instantly. The strain is your red light. Your breathing must be steady, even and smooth, with no jerks or strain. To practice the rhythmic breath, you:
Exhale on a count of four,
Wait on a count of four,
Inhale on a count of four, and
Hold on a count of four.
Hold four slow counts for each step. At first, take two rhythmic breaths and then two ordinary lung-filling breaths. When you feel no strain from doing this, increase it to three rhythmic breaths, then to five. When you can hold on a count of four for five minutes, without the least strain, you can move to a rhythmic count of five.
Five minutes at a time, three times a day is enough for rhythmic breathing at first. Rhythmic breathing strengthens your capacity. Later, you will be able to breathe rhythmically for as many five minute intervals a day as you like. Increase the count by four until you reach twelve. When you can breathe five minutes on a count of twelve three times a day, you are ready for the spiritual breath.
The spiritual breath is called the uneven breath. Hold the count indefinitely at twelve for both the wait and the hold. For inhalation and exhalation, increase the count slowly from twelve to as high as you want and can go. Wait for twelve, inhale on thirteen, hold on twelve, exhale on thirteen. Gradually increase the odd count.
Breathing is the Source of All Life. Breath is Life itself. It is your Power for living. It begins to pay us dividends only when you do it consciously. Every breath should be deep and high, but to hold the breath, you also need formal counting.
The spiritual, uneven breath done alone, without any preparation, can lead to mental disorders, even in an emotionally balanced individual. If you follow the rules, you need fear no danger from breathing.
Deep breathing, between formal counted breathing, will strengthen the lungs more speedily. Use caution in building up the rhythmic breathing from the count of four, and no harm can result. A glorious sense of well being and energy will be yours for the effort it takes.
Life-Giving Water
The body is mostly water, which fills the interstices of the organs just as liquid fills the spaces in a jar of peas. All organs float in it, are cushioned by it, and the cells are filled with water, too.
The lymph substance that flows through the lymph glands is primarily water. Water also serves as the body’s heating and cooling system. When you sweat, it’s your cooling system at work, producing a film of moisture between the body and outer heat. A fluid state of body means that it is malleable. Everything about the physical reactions becomes more alert.
The brain uses the subconscious mind to distribute the water intake, but it must have enough water to distribute. It knows where to distribute water and the proper proportions, but it must have sufficient water to send. When saliva grows thick and syrup-like, it is the red light of danger.
When you provide the body insufficient water, it impairs the operation of the venous, arterial and capillary systems. These body cleansing systems cannot work on a deficiency basis and successfully carry off toxins filtered out by other body systems.
When the tear ducts dry up, it is a sign that the lymph system is deficient in its water intake. Tear ducts react to the lack first, being the outermost lymph function. When the lymph system is operating with a natural fluid thickness, cells never gather in any of the glands to form lumps.
The liquid system of the body forms an auxiliary system for expelling toxins, poisons formed by fatigue, food, and emotional upsets, etc. If you have not expelled these toxins through the natural systems of elimination, they settle somewhere in the body to cause trouble later. An overly thick (like glue) lymph system is a natural breeding ground for any kind of disease.
The Body’s Need for Water: In the past you needed two quarts of water daily just to maintain body functions. Eight glasses of water per day horrified most persons, who decided that other liquids could make up the two quarts.
Now, with atomic radiation and pollution in the atmosphere, you need more than two quarts per day to do the work required. This quantity of water inside, with baths on the outside, means perfect health and long life for anyone.
Extra liquids taken are sufficient for digestive tract elimination, but the lymph system needs pure water to function properly. The body must filter through the liver and convert other liquids into needed water. Surely one day science will discover that sufficient water will eliminate disease when you obey all other physical laws.
Breathing deeply will eliminate the pollutants created today. Yet only enough pure water can break down the crystallization found in almost every part of the physical body, and fulfill today’s needs also. Look around, and you see that half the world is shrinking from nothing but internal drought. Dry skin, rough skin textures, dry mucous membranes in the sinuses, dry throats — all with plenty of water available.
You need water for digesting your food intake. That lump-like feeling in the stomach after a meal means just that — a solid lump of food is in the stomach, since all the liquid has been drawn out by the stomach and inducted into the bloodstream.
After half an hour, sip half a glass of water, and in another thirty minutes sip another half glass. At least you need plenty of water to digest a full meal, to liquify the food so that you can absorb it.
Many complain about getting up in the night when they drink water after six o’clock. Be grateful when awakened to eliminate body toxins, instead of having them settle in different organs to cause difficulties later.
If you do not supply the daily water requirement, then that amount must be drawn from fluid available within the body, creating a deficiency. Why allow a dislike of drinking water to dry the body out until old age shrinkage takes place? Drink! Drink! Drink water!
The Theory of Diet
Diet begins with the eyes. Many people chooe their meals because they appeal to the eye. Therefore, the first law of diet to observe is control of imagination concerning food, for desire follows imagination every time, even while the conscious mind is thinking rightly.
Some people think, “I shouldn’t eat this or I’ll suffer for it tomorrow,” or similar thoughts, while forcing food into the stomach with as little regard for what happens in the stomach as if they were pouring it into a garbage can. Do not repudiate your responsibility for toxins formed from eating poor foods. You know that’s the case when you hear someone say, “I must need it, my body seems to be calling for it,” as they eat something appealing.
All self indulgence calls for the same thing: Intoxicants, sedatives and other harmful, habit-forming substances. After a certain point the body does call for the wrong thing because any habit finally creates an intolerance for anything except itself. It takes will power, channeled as determination to the brain centers in charge, to hold to a selected goal of perfect functioning for the physical body.
Diet is always an individual matter. Not one diet is good for everyone. What satisfies one disturbs another. Each individual must find the right combinations of food for their particular metabolism, then work out the right quantities and proportions for health.
Choice and Combinations of Foods: How will you know when you have found the right diet? The answer is simple. The body will be functioning happily.
Until you reach that point, you need to exercise more selective choice in foods, the many combinations and the proper timing. Some thrive on one food in the morning, but others have better results with the same food in the evening.
The next step in diet is accepting the fact that your body is a delicate precision instrument and must function with almost perfect harmony. You must refuel it daily with the proper fuel to keep the body functioning perfectly.
Remember, the nerve synapses relay what is happening in the stomach to the brain, what it dislikes or cannot handle with gusto. The brain has great powers of rejection and makes its dislikes known.
You must supply your body with all the essential chemical elements it needs for sufficient nourishment. (Researchers discover more combinations of essential chemical elements all the time.) For instance, one food substance used to help produce a cure for a physical ailment is fine, if other necessary foodstuffs have balanced it.
The whole body needs nourishment in its every part each day. This is why long fasts are harmful, body functions must continue, and the body consumes many cells through just plain living day by day. With insufficient food, the subconscious mind tells the brain where to tear down body cells for functioning and added energy.
Unlike a manufactured machine, the body can handle a great number and variety of complicated foods, but you must combine them in the right proportions. Proper food combinations enable the natural secretions of the body, enzymes, etc., to act on them readily for distribution throughout the body.
Not only does the food you eat contribute to illness or health, but the combinations and proportions, too. Nothing may be wrong with the food itself, but each person’s metabolism is different, requiring different proportions or combinations. With any diet, you must experiment with the combinations and quantities until you satisfy your particular metabolism.
Digestion: When you consider the brain’s magnificent ability to instruct the subconscious mind in the activities of body functioning, then to order the right distribution of your food intake, it becomes breathtaking. Select the right foods in the proper combinations and amounts, then leave the rest to the brain’s direction and control. All you need to do is to apply your own Creative Tools to the problem and then to faithful to your selected diet.
The physical process of digestion begins with the teeth, mastication. In the early 1900s, a man named Del Fletcher, taught a process he called “Fletcherizing,” which was to masticate food 100 times a minute before swallowing. What a sight that was! Everyone silently chewing each mouthful the full number of times. The fad lasted about two weeks, but it left a lasting impression on the brain cells.
The last chemical held in the mouth from the last meal triggers the secretion of the salivary glands, three on each side of the jaw. Full and perfect digestion demands that the salivary glands spray each new mouthful of food with the secretion.
Microscopic ducts feed a tiny sample of the food being masticated into the glands, mixing it with the original secretion and then spraying a new secretion on the mouthful of food as you are swallowing it. This is the first phase of digestion and only these glands are suitable to this work. Lack of sufficient water slows their functioning.
The brain telegraphs to the stomach what food is on its way, and orders the right amount and type of stomach secretions to meet and digest the new food. So wonderfully are we created, why should you be less than perfect physically? Why should you neglect to do your share in caring for this wonderful body?
The bile and pancreatic secretions are only auxiliaries to the real digestion, which starts with the teeth in the mouth. As digestion continues, the liver selects what it needs for its factory from the body toxins, transforming these very poisons into the various secretions that take care of all the glandular work in the body.
The liver collects all excess body toxins and sends them to the gall bladder to become bile. The gall bladder is always willing to help, even when its own supply is brimming. So it overflows, often into the stomach, causing much physical distress.
All these difficulties arise because the digestive process didn’t have time to begin properly in the mouth, and because the breathing was too shallow to remove sufficient toxins. Insufficient mastication can potentially upset every organic function of the body.
The teeth set the pattern for what will happens in the colon. You can trace any problem in the colon’s end of the digestive tract back to the mouth. The colon is an effect, not a cause.
Choosing a Diet: Literally thousands of diets are available, all of them good, some better than others, but still the choice must be left to the individual. You do not need to be rigid, blind followers of any diet. You are supposed to work out your own salvation, and not be gullible. Be choosy! Be difficult to persuade, and try everything out for yourself. Above all things, never make a wholesale change.
If you choose a change in diet, let go of the old one a tablespoon at a time, taking on the new one in the same proportion. You cannot change your body metabolism all at once. The result would be a blowout somewhere before the end. The stomach is bound to react. Walk softly and go slowly to make a full diet change.
You have no excuse for ignorance in this age. Enough books, health programs and lectures are available so that anyone can learn common sense facts about diet.
Remember, whether you have worked out your diet, or your doctor has given you one, it is no good unless you follow it faithfully 365 days a year. No diet does any good unless you apply it with all the other laws of living. No diet will work unless your mind accepts it, unless your thinking goes along with it, without your declaration that “This is good!”
Life-Restoring Rest
Rest includes sleep, diversion and recreation. The realm of sleep is the one place where you must exercise perfect control and conquering by the creative faculties. Without this control, your use of your fourfold powers works against you in no uncertain way.
Unless you are in charge consciously, you allow the highest spiritual breathing from the Source of All Life to be diverted, to be taken over by your mental, emotional and even physical body. The physical body becomes a dictator, telling you — through weakness, tense nerves, weary muscles — that your life-expression is to be in bed!
The world places all emphasis on sleep, but it is only a third right. Sleep is essential if the metabolism is to be perfect. Sleep is the time of recuperation, storing energy, filling the body’s reservoir by inflating every atom in the atomic body.
You must direct and control thinking and imagination, or the result is senile old age. When does senility start? When thinking is concerned with being too tired, too weary, too overworked — “I’m dying on my feet!” When imagination builds pictures of beaches, overstuffed chairs, front porches and patios all day, all waiting to receive the body when it goes down.
People mistakenly call lazy thinking and imagination running wild “letting go,” but this is only a “letting down” so far that you go to bed for a “little death” of eight hours. When all this sounds satisfying, it’s time to arise and begin a new physical vibration of life.
“Letting down” is a detrimental use of all your creative tools. It is the right idea turned upside down, applied in the wrong way. It leads to less and less energy and less desire to do.
Relax to Rest: Full, restful sleep does not arrive when nerves are strung tight. Sleep cannot come with every cell in the body protesting against being overworked and pushed beyond its ability to serve.
Just to aim for resting the body, without first preparing the mind for relaxation, doesn’t release the nerves, but just acts as a sedative and dulls them for a time. To have every nerve going into action in the same way, and at the same place it left off the night before, does nothing to solve the problem.
Getting ready for real sleep begins when you turn from the day’s heavy activities, leaving the office or preparing the evening meal. The whole mental attitude must change. Do not begin by thinking “it can’t be done” — it can.
You must invoke the creative tool of desire. Begin to build up the body’s atomic energy by thinking of interesting, beautiful things, different and far from the day’s activities.
Soar Like an Eagle: Take a few moments for stretching out and making yourself into an eagle with spread wings, ready to soar high above all the problems of earth. This is the first step toward a good night’s sleep. Stretching out on the floor is really the best way. Your body will respond at once, every part of it.
This soaring eagle exercise involves the three great creative faculties of imagination, thinking and desire in the problem, taking control of the mental, emotional and physical body trouble areas.
If you have time to sit and relax, hold onto the soaring eagle image. Don’t sink down into zombie consciousness or semi-oblivion to get away from living. Don’t press the chair into the floor! You rest by sitting lightly, as if strings upheld your shoulders.
This attitude and these postures, controlled by you, the real you, allow your breathing to refill and recharge your body atoms with new energy. Instead of going to your dinner with a half-dead or dying stomach, it will be alive, active and ready for its needed food-fuel. This is real rest; not to have less life, but to let real life take over and lift you up in ascension.
If you read, or in another way relax before going to bed, remember not to “sink” from your soaring eagle image. Whatever your diversion and recreation, don’t let down. Keep growing in an exalted feeling and mood. This will ensure your sleep to be refreshing and rebuilding, and enable you to see the sun shining above any clouds earth can produce.
Like a Rag Doll: Before bed, stand with your arms straight out from your shoulders, as if they were spread wings. Tense your muscles tightly, slowly relaxing them. Allow your body to swing forward from the hips with the head and neck letting go, arms and neck limp until the head and arms swing like a pendulum. They must swing completely uncontrolled and free.
Keep at this until your head might even roll off across the floor. If you’ve ever lifted a rag doll by the middle, you’ll know what “limp” means, not placed by any muscle control. Do this exercise two or three times and you are ready for sleep.
In the morning, take a deep breath as you first stand on your feet by the bed, and reach for the stars. Using your own name, speak to yourself, telling yourself, “Move back into your body, right down to the toes, and take charge of it. Move in now.” Breathe in as you speak.
You have slept and been away from your body, giving it a rest from you and your thoughts and any negativity. Move into your body anew and start your day with the soaring eagle image uppermost in your mind. Now you are free to do!
Exercise
Walking, as an exercise, fulfills only half the body’s exercise needs. It starts a life vibration in the nerves of the whole body, for the sciatic nerves in the legs connect with all the nerves of the spine. Walking starts a vibration in the spinal cord, almost as if you were shaking it. However, a vibration is not enough to free the muscles and ligaments from the nerves. Walking is the easiest exercise, something everyone must do.
In exercise, as in diet, you must choose from the hundreds of methods available, and settle on those which give you the best results. Some prefer yoga methods, but even these are inadequate unless you accompany them with the strictest obedience to the mental laws (mind over matter). When you use yoga methods in all their beauty and with full concentration, they render the body youthful and graceful.
Right Mental Attitude: For youth and long life, you must follow every law, neglecting none. Some would rather lose their earth bodies than obey laws for health, and a few go as far as to pay for advice they never follow!
Start by making a chart for each of the five laws pertaining to the physical body. Work out a definite plan to include each of them during a twenty-four-hour day. Otherwise, left to chance, or a poor memory for details, you comply with some of them in an indefinite, haphazard way.
Exercise should never be violent, but should be deliberate and strongly done. The more poise you use during exercise, the better the results. Nothing results from exercising with an agitated, confused mind, or nerves and muscles held tight and stiff. You cannot perform your exercise ritual in the morning with your mind already running for the train or bus.
Thought must be tranquil and the emotions held poised. Missing a day’s exercises is better than to do them with tense nerves, which is a complete waste of time. Tension in nerves and muscles during forced exercise sets up a conflict, and obstinate muscles work in the opposite direction, resisting the exercise. Exercise, done as a dry duty, gives a poor result when compared with your body’s response under a spirit of joy.
Exercising Your Spine: Whatever exercise program you work out, it should contain exercises similar to the following six for the spine and the eyes.
Old age has set in when your knees sag while walking. People mentally slump before their knees respond with a slight bend while walking or standing. You can conquer this mental “letting go” of life by watching yourself. Watch yourself as you walk, large store windows give a perfect view. It’s a surprise to see how queer you look with bent knees and sagging back, and it makes you feel a thousand years old.
The subconscious automatically responds mentally to straight shoulders, back and knees. Beginning your exercise program with a straight-thinking mind is the first step. Straight thinking reroutes your mind from the past. It also aids in conquering a wandering mind or straying imagination.
Look beyond your present body in the mirror and see the perfect ageless and beautiful body you really desire. This is the first exercise to keep the body from sagging at the seams. Exercising before a mirror is good because it keeps your attention focused and makes the exercise process mean something more to the subconscious mind.
Select a comfortable stance with the feet positioned for balance. Place your hands, with fingertips touching, at the base of the head. This is the correct posture for all spinal exercises.
Next, remove all ideal of bending from the mind. The goal of these spinal exercises is to stretch the cartilage between the vertebrae (bones of the spine), and to stretch the vertebrae themselves as far apart as possible. Stand with your feet spread slightly apart; do not move the legs, knees or feet, hold them steady.
The first spinal exercise is the Twist. Rotate your entire torso first to the right, then to the left. Begin at the hips. The idea is to feel as though each spinal bone is turning alone, taking its turn.
Twist each, all the way to the base of the skull, as far as it will comfortably go. Do not strain. When you reach the last bone, let the spine rest a few seconds before you begin again at the base of the spine, and stretch it to the other side.
Your ultimate goal is ten twists, but begin with two only. Overworking protesting muscles is harmful, so take care to begin with two of each exercise, no more.
When all soreness and stiffness are gone, add another and do three each. Keep adding until you reach ten. Do not arouse muscles until they repudiate and fight back. Go easily and they will respond by making your body over in a new pattern.
The next exercise, the Side to Side, is also a stretching one, but from side to side. Assume the same stance as for the twist, with hands at the base of the skull.
Begin at the base of the spine and lean slowly to the right, stretching each bone. Stretch in the same way to the left. Eventually, you will be able to lean sideways and touch the elbow to the leg just above the knee on both sides. Go slowly, beginning with two and adding until you achieve ten side-to-sides.
Forward and Backward: The third spinal exercise stretches the spine forward and backward. The stance is the same as for the first two exercises. You can also call this the “snail” exercise.
Begin at the base of the skull and move down to the hips. Imagine you are curling your spine into a snail’s spiral. Curl forward, then raise up for the backward movement from the hips to the neck.
You may not actually look like a snail, but holding the mental image and thinking “snail,” does something extra for the exercise that the physical act alone cannot accomplish. This is where you combine yoga with what you are doing, mind over matter.
When you are finally limber enough, you will be able to tuck your head between your ankles. By bending the knees slightly as you go backward, you can curve the spine a bit more. You may feel stiffness if you have never done such exercises before. Just keep at it, two at a time, until all soreness is gone.
Exercising Your Eyes: Dr. Bates’ exercises for the eyes have been available for many years. You can easily combine them with the spinal exercises, thus saving time in your busy schedule.
For the Twist, let the eyes follow the body around all the way to the right. Then encourage them to move farther, as far as they can go. You will be able to see almost directly behind you once you release the eyeballs from their static position of bondage in the eye sockets. Do not force, not ever.
Unless you are already using the Bates exercises, begin with only two, working up to ten. The more gently you proceed, the sooner and the better your results will be.
For the second set of eye exercises, the Side to Side, let the eyes roll upward as you lean to the right, and then upward as you lean to the left.
For the Forward and Backward exercise, roll the eyes straight upward as you lean forward, and roll them downward as you lean backward.
Remember, the wrinkles are in your thinking before they show up on your face. The most visible wrinkles come from thinking in terms of old age or self-pity. Self-pity always produces tears that form a mist about the soul indulging in this negative emotion. The mist grows thicker with time and you can spend years wandering in a mist-filled valley of tears without finding the way out.
So, open a new account in the Bank Universal, and begin to draw on it now. All you need for an initial deposit is to start singing praises for what you have right now. With each new breath, you reach higher, and your faith expands.
Faith contacts Power, and the resulting explosion fills you with a flaming ability to know that nothing is impossible to those who believe. Mentally reach out with your arms of Light to find strength and Power.
This is your call on the great Creative Impulse to move through you for your creations of Eternal Youth, knowing that “He holds the worlds in the hollow of His hands.”