A Spiritual Philosophy of the Fine Art of Being Well
Contents
Foreword
Chapter 1. The Life Within
Chapter 2. The Shining Pathway
Chapter 3. The Good Medicine
Chapter 4. The Pronoun of Power
Chapter 5. The Man on Crutches
Chapter 6. The Path of Least Resistance
Chapter 7. The Parable of the Christmas Tree
Chapter 8. The Last Thing in the World
Chapter 9. The Christ Light in Us
Chapter 10. The Spiritual Basis of Health
Chapter 11. The “Word” for Well-Being
Chapter 12. The Law of Suggestion
Chapter 13. The Material Accessories to Health
Chapter 14. A New Generation
Chapter 15. Emotional Chemistry
Chapter 16. Formulas and Affirmations for Self Help
Foreword
This book’s purpose is to furnish a statement of the Spiritual Philosophy of Life with special reference to physical health. We make no claim for the originality of any ideas here expressed. The author has given the substance of these chapters in lectures, to his classes, and to his patients. They have proved their helpfulness, and people have made many urgent requests to have them put into more permanent and available form.
We send these chapters forth in the hope that they may bring help to a steadily increasing company of people. The purpose is to interpret the truth in the language of modern thought so that these good people may see that every blessing of the good God, both temporal and spiritual, is available right where they are, without forsaking religion for self-appointed vendors of vagaries, and without depriving themselves of the advice of trained physicians, which they often need.
Many medical professions are using the agencies of mental and spiritual powers. Their contributions to the advance of sound mental therapeutics are known to anyone who cares to know, although a conservatism has usually marked it, born probably of an instinctive distrust of illogical statement and unreasoning enthusiasm. If we serve these purposes, the author will feel amply repaid for the effort.
Chapter 1. The Life Within
Love of life is the primal impulse. Self preservation is the first law of nature. To love your neighbor “as thyself” is the final test of our noblest impulse – love.
The record of Earth’s greatest example of altruism displays the fact that it was “for the joy that was set before him” that “he endured the cross.” Existence is sweet, and if we consent to its limitation in one sphere, it is with the distinct understanding that it will have proportionally larger action in another sphere, for the abundant life is the flying goal toward which we move.
This instinct for complete life is constitutional with us. We cannot deny it any more than we can deny ourselves. The pilgrim across the world of sense and sensation voices only one cry – “life.”
What is life? The answer varies according to one’s experience of living. “It is a vapor,” answers one. “It is the response to environment,” says another. “It is to know God,” is the response of still another. “It is the gratification of every impulse.” “It is only good morning, good night, and good bye,” are other answers.
“Life is a mode of motion,” says my scientific friend. What is motion? “A manifestation of force.” What is force? “Active energy.” And that? “The unseen potentiality that fills and constitutes all things – a universal substance out of which all material things appear, and back into which they disappear as unseen elements of energy that defy analysis. Of this infinitely extended substance all things are made, and by it they consist.”
This view harmonizes with the statement of that ancient theologian and philosopher who said, “The things which are seen were not made of things which do appear,” and “The things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.” We attribute personality to this Infinite Substance, acting with beneficent purpose and intelligent procedure, and say, “of Him are all things.”
Call it Infinite Substance, Mind, or Spirit, it is the Source and the Goal of existence. We came from it. We return to it. In this excursion from it we find all the elements of a drama, ranging from the comic to the tragic, accordingly as we take life’s shifting scenes too lightly or too seriously.
It takes most people a lifetime to discover that, to our senses, things stand in an inverse ratio to their reality and value. To our sense-perception, matter and its associated sensations of ease, pain, pleasure, etc., are the dominant things.
To mental and spiritual perceptions, mind with its attendant products of thought and truth, are the supreme facts. Matter is changing and transient, but Substance or Spirit is unchanging and eternal.
This Infinite Substance, Spirit, Mind, Life, the Source and content of all things, is One. It exhibits itself in myriad forms – star, stone, herb, bird or human – but it is one life, one substance.
The ocean, whose substance fills every gulf, bay, cove and strait, leaves each its individuality and relative importance, according to the volume of ocean it expresses, yet retains its claim on each as part of the whole. Infinite Substance finds form and expression in innumerable individual cases, each important according to the degree of the Infinite Life finding expression, yet each a part of the One Life.
The law of expressing the Infinite Life divides individuals into many varieties of being. For example, the living rock obeys one part of the law of expression, and it has inertia or rest. The worm obeys two parts of the law, and adds motion to its expression of life. The bird obeys three parts of the law and adds flight and song.
The more complex the organism, the greater number of laws it can obey, the higher is the order of life, because the larger and richer is the expression and experience of the Infinite Life.
Now humanity, the most complex of all material organisms, can respond to more of these laws, and so most completely expresses the Infinite Life. For above the animal kind, God adds reason, judgment, imagination, faith, hope, love, and other attributes and qualities of the Divine Life, unknown, save in elemental forms to the lower orders of existence.
These faculties make up the image of the Creator within us. These moral and spiritual qualities are concrete expressions of the Divine Character in us, which otherwise remains a dreamy abstraction.
We received everything in us from the Infinite Source, “the Father of the spirits of all flesh.” Nothing has nor will evolve in us that was not involved in the first living cell. Our entire equipment for expressing the Divine Life, with “the power both to will and to do,” is of that Infinite Substance whose image we are.
Yet because of the condition of birth, the influence of heredity, or other causes, few of us express it in equal degree. We must confess that one person manifests more of the Divine Life than another, because he furnishes, consciously or otherwise, a better channel through which the Divine Life may flow. He has more avenues of expression, can keep them open, and so is a better medium through which the Divine Life may speak.
The amperage and voltage, referring to the volume and to the intensity of the electric current, determine the action and results of that subtle energy. So in a life of great endowment, of many gifts of “ten talents,” the amperage is large, and the possibilities for expressing the Divine Life are many.
Yet if the voltage is low, the sense of duty blunted, the estimate of privilege small, the aim of life ignoble, then the will’s dynamics are inoperative, and the results are small. If the amperage is small, the capacity limited, the gifts few, yet the voltage is high, sense of duty exalted, ideals noble, purposes inflexible, then his will’s dynamics enable him to blaze and burn his way through the world like the live wire of omnipotence that he is.
Such persons accomplish more, manifest more of the Divine Life than the large amperage, low voltage people. Yet, if the large amperage, ten-talent person has correspondingly high voltage, he expresses the Divine Life as a genius.
We bring our endowments, our native qualifications into life with us, but we set the potency of our life for results within ourselves. The sovereignty of our own will contains mastery of the world forces about us – our development of our gifts to their utmost capacity, our cultivation of nobility of purpose, concentrating our energies to the chosen tasks, all that means the mastery of self.
We are unconcerned with the amperage of life, but we fully concerned with its voltage. We can do anything that we want to do and believe that we can do. The very fact that we feel the impulse to do is the sure sign that the life within us inspires the desire, and simultaneously promises the power of fulfillment.
We can be anything we desire, for desire is the longing of the Infinite Life to find expression through us in that special way. We have only to call out the powers of the life within and set them to the task, knowing that “faithful is He who has promised, who also will do it.”
Herein lies the solution to the riddle of existence: To take a part of the Infinite Life, give it an individuality by incarnating it in human flesh, multiplying and projecting it through human personality, polishing and refining it through the vicissitudes of material environment, until it expresses so much of the Infinite Character that to have seen it is to have seen God.
We must hold as a cardinal principle that the capacity to express life is an expansive thing, as surely as the power to do so is cumulative. The latent possibilities of divinity are in us awaiting the task of development. They are unlimited, so that though we do not know what we shall be, if we accept our task and do it, we shall be like God.
“All Life is One. I am an expression of that One Life. I am One with Infinite Life. Infinite Life dwells in me and fills me with health, peace and plenty.”
Chapter 2. The Shining Pathway
Life is not stationary, nor can be. The living body is forever changing by the ceaseless vibrations of the life within. The thoughts that flow from them, the truth they discover, and that reacts upon them have forever built up or depleted the mental powers. The tides of the Divine Life with its Truth and Power move forever onward through human life. They tarry not.
Certain by-products abide, which make up character, and even character is a progressive thing. To build up and preserve the body, we use the material forms that are compounds of the Infinite Substance. In the using, it yields up certain elements of life that keep the body living. The food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe, all are yielding up their life to us. This is everywhere true.
The living rock yields up its life to the soil, the soil yields up its life to vegetation, vegetation in turn to the animal, the animal yields up its life to humankind, and we yield up our life to and for our fellow man. This illustrates the method by which the Infinite Life ministers to us of its boundless store, and expresses itself in our body, revealing a shining pathway up which we move to God, for the mental and spiritual life is ministered after the same principle.
The human race was a Divine Thought before it begat thinkers. We continue to feed our growing mental life on the living truths that others have discovered, for which they have laid down their lives, and on those that we discover by responding to the vibrations of that Infinite Life within him, and for which we are ready to lay down our life.
All our emotions, finer feelings, aspirations, and longing, and the more spiritual activities are responses to the stimulus of the Divine Character finding expression in us. We are ready to quote, with the assurance of its meaning and truth, the apostle’s saying, “In God we live and move and have our being.”
We live out our life in the Life of God, and we cannot live apart from Him. Our business in the world is to express the human life in the terms of God. That is our task, although we may make sorry work of it. We may turn our divinity to a diabolism, but we can never successfully deny our birthright, nor permanently quench the flame of the Divine Life.
God cannot die, neither can we stifle nor eradicate these divine attributes. They will rise again to struggle for mastery, and at last find perfect expression. We are living out our lives in the Life of God. Now the converse of this is also true. God lives out His Life in the world’s life and all things therein, His highest expression being humanity.
As the mountain is worn down by erosion until the granite becomes the valley soil, clothed with vegetation, radiant with color, fragrant with odors and golden with fruit, so does the material expression of divinity move up into its highest form, humanity. The Divine Life plays on and through humanity until animalism, crudities and credulities are smoothed out, human consciousness blooms into God-consciousness, and the fruits of the Living Spirit are manifest.
It may sound easy, but the process is difficult. God is not having a good time. It has taken heat and cold, earthquakes and aeons of time to get the earth ready to manifest humankind, and He has been a long time trying to wrestle up our species. Although the task is slow, the end is sure. In every age someone has attained it, such as Enoch, who walked with God, Abraham, who was a friend of God, and Jacob, who was a prince of God.
To emphasize the thought, the Old Testament says at least three times that “God clothed himself” with human form. In each case, He did so for a specific purpose, to show their generation, and us, what He can do for us when we realize our own Divine Nature, and allows the Infinite Life of God to have full expression in us.
The tragedy is that few of us accept our birthright in all that it means, and fewer still are bold enough to claim our heritage of God dwelling in us. For in truth, He lives out His Life in the life of the world and humanity. He lives and moves and has His Being in us. It is in us that the Divine Life finds perfect expression in the terms of humanity.
Divine Love, compassion, and all other similar qualities are, and must remain, unknown quantities to us save as we see and know them in the lives of those with whom God clothes Himself. The great teacher, Jesus of Nazareth, kept the secret of that life, so simple and so marvelous in its power, before his disciples by repeatedly declaring that his words and the works were not his, but his Father’s.
As God clothed Himself with that man of Nazareth, and made him to manifest the oneness of the human and the Divine Life, so Jesus prayed that his disciples might realize their oneness with God as he realized it. Yet with all the perversity of human misunderstanding, we misread the words.
We try to foster a oneness with our fellows, which is impossible until we first realize our oneness with God, which to Jesus was supremely important. This alone could enable them to do the work that he did, and even greater works than he did, so the burden of his most wonderful recorded prayer was for the realization of this oneness.
Here, then, is an enigma in the mathematics of spiritual life, that one plus one make one, never more, never less. He is the One, or you are the one, as you have the boldness to claim it. This is a flying goal.
Of all those qualities of character that place the stamp of the Divine Character upon us, such as love, joy, peace, patience, etc., few of us bring more than one or two to any degree of perfection. Only one, two or three at most of all our forty and more faculties reach any degree of perfection or fruition in one existence. Yet we see enough to know what we shall be, when we realize and manifested perfect oneness, when every Divine Quality shall find perfect expression.
Every faculty shall reach its zenith, manifesting the power that works in us, for it shows a shining pathway of attainment that shall share here and hereafter the throne of the Divine Power. Here, because the consciousness of this divine dignity begins here, “Beloved now are we the Sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that we shall be like him when he shall appear.”
Now this appearance is not some flaming apparition in the sky, appealing to the optic nerve. It is a subjective apprehension by the person who believes God to be the Supreme Good, and honestly desires to know Him, so that he may carry out His perfect Will. Jesus said of such, “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.”
Seeing God, we see everything else in its true proportions. We see in ourselves the image of God. We know that our character, our purposes, and our whole life are at one with God. We see that divine image in everyone. Loving God, we must love His image. Hatred can no longer have a place in us. Fear is cast out by a perfect love. Now are we the children of God.
A Sunday school teacher described the character of Jesus of Nazareth, without saying his name, and asked her class who it was. She was surprised when one little hand went up and one little voice said, “That’s my mamma! It sounds just like her.” The child was right, for her mother was “the express image of God’s person.” The child’s pure mind could see no difference between the love of God exhibited in her mother and the love of God in Jesus of Nazareth, for the simple reason that there is no difference.
“It doth not appear what we shall be.” The perfect manifestation is here in its inception, and from now on in its completeness. We must bring all of our faculties to completeness. All the years of time and the aeons of eternity are God’s and ours.
All the worlds now and to be, all the potencies now at work and yet to unfold, are for this one thing, to bring us to full Godlikeness. We have entered a way of progress that never limits our advance, a shining pathway through the earth and heaven. Our path moves onward and upward to the throne of God, and the Perfect Day.
“I live out my life in the Life of God. God lies out His Life in me. I shall now manifest the Life of God in perfect health, peace and plenty.”
Chapter 3. The Good Medicine
A man, who had lost sight of his parentage, lived for years as an orphan. One day Divine Joy invaded him when he learned that his father, a wealthy and benevolent man, still lived and yearned for his son that he might bestow upon him the things that were his by right.
The dawn of this truth of the indwelling Life of God, the inherent oneness of all life in Him, brings a joy that “does good like a medicine,” and ushers in the full day of a heritage that is adequate to meet the demands of the life within us. Having accepted the fact of our Divine Heritage, and having fully satisfied ourselves as to our title, we begin to inventory its content.
The first of these is that God is love, truth, health, peace, power, plenty, and that hatred, fear, falsehood, sickness, disease, weakness, and poverty can have no place in the perfectly manifested life of the Infinite God. Apart from His material forms of expression, God is not sick, has neither pain, disease, nor any such thing.
Concerning this process of working out the Infinite Life into material expression, we must accept the patent fact of pain and disease of the body and mind. We cannot deny the fact of them any more than we can deny the reality of earthquakes, mountain-building, or the reality of time wearing down those mountains into fertile valleys, ready for rich harvests.
We may turn an intellectual somersault and deny the reality of pain, by denying the reality of the material forms in which we feel pain. While the “seen” things are temporal, it does not alter the fact that they are forms of expression of the Infinite Substance or Life. We cannot question their reality though their forms change or disappear.
Even if our philosophy could persuade us of the non-reality of pain, our experiences of toothache, flu, or food poisoning are sufficient to smash our ideal philosophy, unless we have lost the rational faculties.
We have to accept pain, etc., as inevitable attendants upon the transformation going on in the material Life of God about us and in us. This fact immediately becomes an interpreter of our experiences and a challenge to us to accept our heritage. This was evidently the view of Paul when he said, “For we know that the whole creation groans and travails together in pain till now . . . waiting for the manifestation of the Sons of God.”
The challenge everywhere is to move up to higher expression of Divine Life, and pain always attends that movement. The seed you plant in the springtime in the soft, warm loam is a life bound up by a shell, narrow and limited.
Sun, rain, and earth’s influences move upon it. The life within the seed hears the call to rise into higher life expression, and at last it can be no longer bound. The pain of a new birth comes, the seed splits its little, narrow shell and comes forth to a larger expression of life in beauty, fragrance, and fruit. So life within a bird’s egg moves up from a shell into the larger expression of life in song and flight – but the agony of a birth attends it.
We are creatures of time, of the senses, and of animalism. Our experiences are mostly of our material life. One day the truth that makes us free begins to play upon the life within us through a song, a prayer, a beautiful service, or a good life. We hear the call of the Divine Life and the hour of decision comes, the agony of a new birth, and we become a citizen of eternity, conscious of the indwelling God.
Pain is an attendant fact at every step of moving upward into larger life, from seed to human. The seed or bird or human could well say, “Thank you pain. By you I have come into higher, larger life.”
Pain and diseases may be results, but they are not punishments. Instead we shall think of them as signals announcing wrong conditions and challenging us to move up out of them. They are things we have received from our ancestors, have inherited from past years of wrong thinking and wrong living, or violations of the laws of life, consciously or otherwise.
The penalties of pain and disease stay with us because we did not learn their meaning, till they have become enthroned in us and obsessed us. Having some psychic quality, they refuse to “go out into the deep” without a struggle, or a mighty, authoritative command.
Accepting the heritage of your oneness with the Infinite Life, talk with yourself, “Why pain? God who dwells in me has no pain, nor is He sick, nor has He disease. Pain is the infallible symptom that the Infinite Life is leading up to some higher expression of itself, which does not yet fully manifest within me.
“Some obstruction in heart, mind, will, or imagination impedes the full tides of the Infinite Life with its irresistible health and perfect peace. It is a call to prepare for a fuller invasion of the Divine Life.
“I must find the obstruction and remove it. It may be error of thought or action, one or both. I set myself now to the task of setting to right the inner recesses of my life, to be in perfect harmony with the Divine Life, and so, perfect health.”
In opening the channels to the flow of the Infinite Life, we have as much to unlearn as to learn. A good memory is invaluable, while a good forgettery is above the price of rubies. The trouble is that we forget the things we should remember, and vice versa.
Let us now unlearn some things. We have learned most of our ideas of right and wrong under the tutelage of “Thou shalt not.” If we live under this negative motive, we invite fear and worry and the whole brood of attendant ills. Under the reign of fear, the things we fear eventually come upon us. Our fear invites them to come in and stay.
We need to shift our point of view, the motiving of our acts over to the positive side of things. “Thou shalt” is Divine Law’s positive, constructive side, which makes love the motive, not fear, and this is the highest expression of the Divine Life within you – “God is Love.”
Dwelling here in the motive of Love, you can stand at the gates of the City of Soul with such calmness and assurance of the presence of Infinite Love and Peace and Power that all such visitors as fear and worry will vanish and leave you in peace.
This impelling power of love is not a passing spasm of emotional joy, but a glorious joy of service, a sense of divine right and place in the world. The commonest task becomes clothed with the character of a sacrament, work will have a new dignity, sleep a sublime renewing, eating will be no longer a bolting of food, or for mere gustatory pleasure, but a process whose thoroughness measures an impartation of the Divine Life.
Keeping the laws of life will not win a perfunctory door prize or get you “home to heaven.” The spontaneous action of love finds obedience to the law is the only means of perfectly expressing the Divine Life in us.
Prepare then for this invasion of love, health, peace, and power. Open every avenue of life for the flood tides of the Infinite Being. Put away fear, worry, doubt, tradition, negatives and self-limitations of every kind. Replace them with positives. Do it now.
You may have accepted the fact of your oneness with the Infinite Life, yet do not realize the experience of its perfect peace and power and health. Do not try to force these any more than you would try to force darkness from a room.
Calmly hold before your mind this perfect ideal as yours by right and choice, seven times a day. It must be yours by realization if you earnestly desire, fully believe, and firmly will it so to be.
Just as sunlight presses upon the world to replace the darkness, so does the Infinite press upon you from every side. It moves through every avenue to banish pain, disease, gloom, fear and worry, by filling you with ease, peace, joy, hope, and cheerfulness. Just “clean the darkened windows” – darkened by fear and doubt and error – “and let the blessed sunlight in.”
The truth is, most people who fail to realize oneness with the Infinite do so because they have been too busy looking for some imaginary line to cross that divides the human from the Divine. No line in fact exists.
Let anyone calmly accept the fact, claim the fact, declare it, and he will inevitably pass out of human-consciousness into God-consciousness, enter the mastery of all conditions of his life, and so begin to fulfill the command, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” God wants you to be well and strong and good. He wants to send out a whole person.
“I now move up into a higher expression of the Divine Life. I accept pain as a growing pain, calling me up to a higher manifestation of life. I am one with love that casts out fear.”
Chapter 4. The Pronoun of Power
This is the age of egoism gone to seed – the assertion of the ego as the most important thing in the world, the adjustment of all facts to the self, the converging of all the lines of perspective to find a common point in the self. No one has yet determined just what this self is. It refuses to go under the microscope, or submit to chemical analysis or mental solution.
However, self does like to be talked about, and so pleasant is that experience, that it talks about itself. Hearing a neurasthenic dwell upon his woes, ills and troubles, real or imaginary, mostly the latter, is ludicrous. One might smile if the havoc wrought were not so pathetic. Yet egotism, this thing of dwelling so much on oneself, is a common fault with a multitude no one classes as “nervous.”
Nothing bores any of us so much as to have someone insist on talking about himself, when we want to talk about ourselves. Egotism reaches the limit of sufferance when it takes on an air of mock humility and the language of pious cant, and talks in public and private of “poor unworthy me,” and “I’m poor, and weak.” They tell the truth, and since they think and talk that way, they will stay that way.
Egoism may also pave the way to your real part and place in the world. Lift up your head, put out your chest, walk a little heavier on your heels, accept your nature, character, and destiny as divine. Let your egoism find vent in union with the Infinite Ego. Take your place in the world as a child of God, as one in whose flesh and life God walks among men.
Does it seem very different from what you actually realize and manifest of this incarnate life, to what the ideal is, to what you may be? It is only a seeming. The distance is a creation of your own thought. The earthliness of your humanity makes such a racket that you cannot hear the voice, or realize the nearness and reality of your divinity.
It took the impetuous, fiery Moses, forty years at the onerous and lonesome task of herding sheep, before he could get himself still enough to hear the voice of the “I AM THAT I AM” within him. While egoism, the “I am” of Moses, was the limit of his progress in consciousness, he was still, and only, the “son of Pharaoh’s daughter.”
When, after long years in the solitudes, his self-consciousness became merged into the consciousness of God, and he could hear the voice within him saying, “I AM THAT I AM,” he ceased to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. He had become the mouthpiece, the incarnated presence and power of Jehovah’s personality, ready and commissioned to deliver Israel.
From that hour, in every time of perplexity, he had only to call upon this Infinite Life within himself, to realize that Infinite resources were ready to divide a sea, to feed a multitude, or to shake a kingdom.
The only safety valve for this exaggerated self-consciousness which today possesses the world, is to merge it into God-consciousness, to let the egoism, the “I am,” be lost in the Infinite Ego, the “I AM THAT I AM.” Why should you wait forty years for the fiery passions of life to die out, or even for forty days, to realize the “I AM THAT I AM” within you?
You need not seek the desert silence, nor cloistered seclusion. Follow the directions of the Master who taught us the secret of oneness with the Father. “Enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door.” You will not hear this great Voice of the Spirit at first, save in the solitude.
You must find a time daily alone. You may not take your dearest earthly friend into this aloneness. After a while you will learn to hear the voice within in the midst of any tumult, but at first you must enter and shut the door. Wherever you are, as you read this, enter now this great within, close the eyes, ears, and all the doors of sense. You can do it.
Have you not had your attention so engrossed on some magnificent scene, or some work of art, that you did not hear your friend speak? Have you not been “thinking” and passed your friend on the street, looking straight at him with no sign of recognition, and “come to” with a start after you had passed? So abstract your mind away from the things of time and sense, enter this silent house, insulated, and isolated, and be still!
Contemplate your divine birthright, to realize and manifest the fullness of the Infinite Life. Climb the path trod by prophets and seers in every age, “take off thy shoes from thy feet.” Let your approach be so reverent and trustful that it needs give no warning of approach.
Walk up and stand before God. Bathe your spirit in His Infinite Life and Peace and Love and Health. See your own true self in Him, as in a mirror.
Settle for yourself that old conflict that nearly rent the early Christian church: Is this living God, before whom you stand, the same substance of which He has made you, or just like it but different?
In Greek there is but an “iota’s” difference in expressing it, but to you it means the difference of being a son or an alien. (Homoousion, meaning “like substance,” or Homoiousion, meaning “one substance.”)
Tarry here until you lose individual “I AM” in the greater “I AM THAT I AM.” Then with your oneness assured, return to your earthly round, in full possession of all the resources for health and wealth, for power and service, for “thy Father who sees in secret shall reward thee openly.”
From now on the works that you do are not yours, but “thy Father’s.” These vast resources are not yours, nor for your sake. God has given them for the perfect manifestation of the Infinite Life for your own and for others’ welfare. This is the first degree of the Abundant Life, and its password is “I AM THAT I AM.”
Jesus “spoke as one having authority.” He didn’t argue, or try to prove anything. No intellectual heat is apparent in the tremendous truths he uttered. He didn’t seem to discover any new truth by logical process, but he did speak what he himself was, and having announced the truth, he let men do what they would with it. The potency of his words lay in the fact that they were the Father’s, who sent him. They were not what he thought, but what he was.
With his consciousness of his oneness with God came the sense of authority to speak, and “it was done,” to command, and “it stood fast.” Deaf ears heard at his touch, blind eyes opened at his word, the lame man leaped, and the mute spoke. Even the elements obeyed his command. Never a moment’s hesitation delayed his consciousness of oneness. “Take up thy bed and walk” – “I will, be thou clean.”
The omnipotent “I can,” had its seat of authority in him, because God dwelt in him, and he knew and asserted it with all that it meant. Just when this oneness became a fact is not as important as when he became conscious of the fact. That is the supreme moment to us all. Inevitably the time comes when we accept our Divine Heritage, and see something of what lies before us.
We break with bigotry and narrowness, and go forth to a world of divine humanity. However, most of the human race does not know it, will not receive it, and like swine, on whose level they live, will turn and rend you when you have cast this pearl of truth before them. Facing such a career, more than one person has said, “Mine hour is not yet come.”
Yet the hour arrives when the perplexed appeals to you, when you must feed the hungry, give the thirsty drink, help the needy, set free the diseased, pain-ridden and obsessed. You will face the great question, “Can I manifest the Divine ‘I AM’ in this case?”
Your hour has come, and the “I AM THAT I AM” of Infinite Potentiality becomes the “I can” of achievement. Pain will depart at your touch, sorrow will flee at your word of comfort, your hand shall wipe away the tears, and devils of psychic obsessions will depart at your word of command. You will so manifest the Power of God that you will realize that you have entered the second degree of the Life More Abundant, whose password is “I can.”
Pause here for a moment. Enter the chamber of reflection. Ponder the meaning of the resources that are yours. Imagination cannot sound the height and depth of the “I AM THAT I AM” and “I can” to which you have attained.
Here a Voice will speak to you and say, “If this is true, if you are the Son of God, if you have a Divine Gift, if the fulness of Divine Life dwells in you, you can command that these stones be made bread. Sell out this gift for bread. Business is business, and you can make money from this power.”
Will you sell out, or will you answer, “I cannot live by bread alone. Other things are as important, and these I should lose if I sold out for bread.” Before you answer, recall that “all things are yours, and you are Christ’s and Christ is God’s.” Why should you barter this Divine Gift for something that is potentially yours already, but the complete and full possession of which might prove an obstacle to higher service?
Again a voice will say to you, “If Divine Power is in you, if you have a gift of God, make a display of it. Set the multitudes agape with the wonders you can show them, make a show of yourself. It doesn’t matter what you do. You cannot fail.”
Be careful here. Remember that one who “did not many mighty works” in a certain place, “because of their unbelief.” All results are conditioned on something. Even God might fail if He violated the operation of His own Laws. Spectacular as some works of Jesus were, he ever met the demand for him to do them for “show” with the answer, “There shall no sign be given.”
The tempter will say again, “Granted that you are a Son of God, that you and God are one, that the Infinite ‘I AM’ dwells in you, is you – call it by another name, fall down and worship past traditions, the accepted order of things. Why should you choose the cross of persecution that the pharisees of sectarianism will lay upon you? Why court the derision of the doctors of medicine by presuming to live in health, or even to die without their assistance? Choose an easier way.”
Here then is your final test. Will you claim your birthright and call it by its right name, and go forth to manifest its Power in that name? Look at your motive.
Do you desire perfect health, so that you may fully manifest the Infinite health, and that you may serve in full vigor, ministering health to others? Do you desire the Peace of God, so that dwelling in perfect peace, you may speak the word of peace to the troubled ones of earth? Do you desire wealth, so that you may have leisure to serve and means to lighten the load of the heavy-laden?
Do these motives seem worthy of one who can say, “I AM THAT I AM?” If so, then speak that word that spoke worlds into existence, bringing order out of chaos, and humanity out of dust – the word upon which pivots your whole future destiny – “I do” – and enter the third degree of the most Abundant Life, of which “I do” is the password.
Let these words, “I am, I can, I do,” be the one triune potentiality before which you bow and say, “Whose I am, and whom I serve.” These are the words that marshal all the Godlike powers, and cause them to move out with irresistible pressure to assault the gates of pain, poverty, fear, disease, and death, and to end them with the challenge: “Oh pain, sin, death, where is thy sting or thy victory?”
Avoid two mistakes, one of which is to wait until you realize the Divine Power’s fullness before claiming it and beginning to manifest it. Instead, respond to the first call that will surely head your way. Speak to it in the name of the “I AM THAT I AM,” and you will marvel at the result. Each successive use will enlarge your manifesting power.
Beware the mistake of thinking that you can keep unused this Infinite Life. The Dead Sea is dead because it gathers but never gives, except by evaporation: You are not an evaporator, you are a channel. As you freely pour out of this life, the flood tides of Infinite Life will pour in, “pressed down, shaken together, running over.”
The pronoun of power, “I am,” opens the flood gates of the Abundant Life, so that the speech is resonant with Power, the eye glows with Light, the fingertips tingle with healing energy, the whole body vibrates with an irresistible Power for health. Your very shadow, like that of Peter, blesses those upon whom it unconsciously falls.
“I identify my life now with the Life of God. I am One with God. I can do all things through Christ. I now manifest divine peace, health, and plenty.”
Chapter 5. The Man on Crutches
At a first glimpse, humanity is materialistic. We see things as material objects. We think in material forms, we speak in material terms, and live most of our life in a very material way. These material things are the crutches upon which our living spirit limps until it finds itself and learns to walk alone. The consciousness of material things is evident in all our thoughts and actions.
We may assume some lofty philosophy and deny the reality of material things. Nevertheless, we still have a very material sort of hunger that must feed on material food. We write material books on which we secure material copyrights and for which we insist on receiving some very material dollars.
Yet when we meet the business end of a bee, we give material evidence of feeling material pain. So our materialism ever plays havoc with our philosophy. It is a part of humanity’s inheritance from the various stages of our evolution.
Debating whether our material form came from a monkey or a clod is needless. The real question is how far have we gotten away from the monkey or the clod on our journey up toward the angels and toward God. Materialism clings, and we cannot more shake it off in a moment, any more than we can shake our shadow when the sun shines upon us.
Not one in a thousand can think of God as the Universal Spiritual Substance, without body or parts. We think of God as a human. Every race among humanity does the same. We project the material terms and forms of our ideas, and clothe God with them, thus creating God in our own image, and reversing the original order of our being made in His image.
Now we have clothed this God with such Infinite Power that the thought of comparing ourselves with Him awes us. The ancient psalmist, answering his own question – “What is man?” – exclaimed, “Thou hast made him a little less than God.”
The translators were afraid to give humanity its true dignity, so they made it read, “a little lower than the angels.” That mistranslation is typical. God made us with all created things under our feet, but we promptly reversed the order and put them all over our head. We have been trying to climb out from under them ever since.
In the record of those glimpses of the Infinite Life, God is spoken of as a man, speaks as a man, feels as a man, and so strong is this materialistic notion of God that people in all ages have wanted to see God, and instead of that vision have worshiped the sun, moon, stars, the bull, the ram, natural forces, our reproductive powers, in fact every form in which the Divine Creative Energy has been manifest. These were substitutes for the Reality.
In the wilderness journey, when Israel had lost sight of Moses in the mount, they said to Aaron, “Make us gods that shall go before us, for, as for this Moses we know not what has become of him.” They wanted gods that they could see. A brazen calf in sight was better than a wonder-working person out of sight. This is ever the human heart’s cry – to see God.
The Infinite, in trying to find itself in material expression, sets about to answer the demand, which it has created. God has appeared in dreams and visions, by Urim and Thummin, by prophets and seers, by subjective voice and by objective providence, until He came in that one perfect manifestation of the Divine Life, Jesus of Nazareth, who said truly, “He who has seen me has seen the Father also.” Even his most spiritual disciples exulted in the fact that they had seen and touched the Word of Life.
The human materialist’s long quest ends here. We may lay aside our crutches. God is no longer in some far off heaven, but on earth, no longer round about us, but in us, of us – us.
Just as truly as in the miracle of the loaves and fishes, none could tell where the natural bread and fish ended and the supernatural bread and fish began for the simple reason that there was no difference, being of One Substance. No one can tell just where the purely human life ends and the Infinite Life begins, because they are one, with no difference.
As Jesus said, when we minister unto the least of these, we minister unto him. As he questioned Saul of Tarsus, “Why do you persecute me,” when he was actually persecuting Christ’s followers.
Yet after all these object lessons, we are only slowly accepting the fact that God does indeed dwell in flesh upon the earth. When it comes to some inevitable results of that truth, our materialism still asserts itself.
We are still on crutches. For like Moses, who was slow of speech and had to call in Aaron to be a mouthpiece, a crutch to lean upon, we have developed a whole system of crutches through whose mediation God ministers the Divine Life.
For keep in mind that the Infinite Life adapts itself to our stage of development, as he did with Moses and the people of that day. They said, “Speak thou to God for us, and let him speak to thee, and thou to us, but let not God speak to us lest we die.”
Five-sixths of humanity must still have a minister of religion, a priest, to speak to God for them, and speak to them for God. So be it. Let not the other sixth feel called upon to knock away the crutch of the masses and drop them into the mire, simply because the one-sixth can walk alone, can walk and talk with God.
We use rich and beautiful liturgies to help us to present our feelings and thoughts toward this Formless Spirit, which takes form in us. We feel the need of some symbol of the Divine Presence, by which God imparts the Infinite Life to us.
If we believe that we receive the Divine Life only in the moment we receive the material elements of the Eucharist, we make a great mistake. We choose to mistake the crutch for the living thing it symbolizes.
We need some material aid to help us in cleansing the soul of its earthliness, the residuum of past actions and passions in our lives. In the symbol of baptism, we have an illustration of how the Divine Life’s incoming tides purify the soul, and restore it to its pristine beauty.
Many of our ills disappear at the word of authority of the life within us, but some may not. Then we turn to the physician for a crutch to lean upon. Why should we apologize, for is not the Infinite Life constantly ministered to us in food, and drink, and air? Do I dishonor the Infinite Life within me by eating bread when I am hungry, drinking water when I am thirsty, or breathing deeply to oxygenate the blood, and by these and other means renew my flagging energies?
If not, do I deny the Infinite Life when I take medicine to eradicate malaria instead of giving it large doses of mental suggestion? Is the energy in a bean or a grain of wheat, any more divine than the energy in the bark of the cinchona tree?
When we overeat and miss-eat, and most of us do this, do we quit eating permanently, or do we reform our diet and habits? Then when we have over-doctored and mis-doctored, shall we abstain or reform?
We may conceive of a time when men will learn to live without eating, but the time is not yet. We may conceive a time when men shall live the perfect Life of God on earth, and will not need medicine.
Some have already learned it. Yet it is a long process to bring a world of individuals, such as those in our world, to such a state of perfectly manifesting the Divine Life that “none of the inhabitants shall say I am sick.”
Until that time, happily for us, God has planted “a tree of life, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations,” in each soul, and corresponding to it in this material world is a materia medica with proven potencies. One may gaze in rapt contemplation on his spiritual tree of Infinite Life and Energy, and by a sort of autosuggestion appropriate its healing potency, and live in health.
Another may be still on crutches and compelled to turn to the material tree or herb, and make a powder of its leaves to swallow, and by its energy find the way to health. Do not throw stones at him for it. Presumably he is doing the best he knows. At least it is what most people do and will continue to do for a long time to come.
Humanity can’t get off its crutches in a day. Jesus did not heal all the sick people in the world when he was here. Yet the company of those who have progressed in the Divine Life far enough to manifest it in perfect health without the use of material form is increasing, and they are the prophecies of the future.
You can be anything you want to be, anything you believe you can be, anything you will to be.
“I believe in One God, the Infinite Spirit. The Life of the Spirit is imparted to me every moment. I accept every material thing as an expression of the Spirit in material form. My body receives life from the Spirit’s Life in material forms.”
Chapter 6. The Path of Least Resistance
The traveler making the ascent of Mt. Hood has the choice of two routes, the shorter and more precipitous one from the north, or the longer and more gradual one from the south. In one case, the movement is in an opposite direction from what it would be in the other, but both reach the same goal.
He who would find the summit of self-mastery where peace, health, power, plenty, and the reality of the glorious vision of a perfect or whole life abide, will find two seemingly opposite movements operating, yet each leads to the coveted goal.
Ego asserts itself in positive aggressiveness, which says, “I am, I can, and I do master all things in my life.” Following this, you move steadily forward to condition all the circumstances of his life.
Say to Poverty, “All the potencies of Infinite Abundance dwell here. I am swinging wide the door of my life, and opening every avenue of action for plenty to come in. Infinite plenty is seeking me, wants to make me its instrument of expression, and its agent for others. I am content to be its incarnation in any degree. Plenty will come to me just as fast as I can give it adequate and divine expression. I have conquered poverty, for I am plenty and prosperity. I hold before me the vision of myself as surrounded with plenty, comfort and usefulness.”
Say to Fear and Worry, “The Infinite Life, whose perfect expression is love, fills me to the exclusion of all else. I am made perfect and complete in this love that casts out fear and leaves no room for it. Why should I fear a shadow that is cast by no substance in me, which has no reality in the presence of Infinite Love?
“Why should I dishonor this Infinite Love by fearing that it cannot keep me in all my ways? Why should I worry over something that seems to threaten me when I have the assurance of this Infinite Love that ‘no evil shall befall me?’ When my life is sorely beset, this Infinite Love assures me that ‘All things work together for good’ for me.
“This affliction shall work out a greater weight of Joy for me. It is but the advance agent of some greater blessing for which it is preparing the way, and that could not have come but for this cultivator that pulverizes the clods and prepares the way of the Lord. So if it comes, I shall say, ‘Thank you. What message, what good are you leading my way?’ I shall overcome evil with good.”
Say to Pain and Disease, “You no longer have dominion over me, usurp a place in this Divine Life of mine, or obsess me with sensory images of pain, weakness and despondency. You shall give room to the mighty tides of Infinite Health now surging within me. You have no substance, no meaning, save to announce the passing of my life up into larger expression and ease and usefulness.
“You are a ‘growing pain,’ which I shall cast off as a troubled dream. For I am health, ease, and power. My vision of myself is not of pain and disease, but virile strength and health. I behold myself dwelling in the Life of God, filled and clothed with the expression of perfect health.”
Thus in this direct, positive way, we challenge the right of every obstacle that would hinder perfect expression of the Divine Life, and by the irresistible impact of this sheer determination, sweep them out of the way. This may seem to picture life as a very strenuous affair.
A life that is worth anything is strenuous. The Master in calling men and women to follow him, did not hide from them the difficulties they must meet.
The “survival of the fittest” principle is still in operation. Many, by temperament and character, are so equipped to go forth in this militant, direct way to resist all the forms in which evil meets them, and find that it flees from them, and obsessions disappear.
Even those of a strong nature occasionally find mountains too high for them to scale. While they can dispose of nineteen visitations of adversity, fear, or disease, the twentieth one will stick and refuse to budge. It will neither go nor be forgotten.
Two things are possible to do. One is to augment our own abilities by annexing those of a friend, and so fulfill the conditions of a marvelous increase of power. “If two of you shall agree as touching anything, it shall be done” – not may be, or can be, but shall be done. Here two wills agree, and because of that agreement, God gives unlimited Power.
Suppose that this other person, healer, or friend, is not available, then the other general law of procedure remains, redirection of attention. Many will find this at first to be the most and only successful way they can continue.
Disease, pain, fear, or worry, or another idea, which may or may not have taken form, fixates the mind and so obsesses it that the mind cannot shake it off. Each effort only finds it seated the more firmly in its place. Turn now to the method of redirection of attention. Choose another idea and place it beside the obsessing one.
Holding the mind on this new and rival thought may be difficult at first, but by a little persistence it will become stronger as attention to it waxes. Yet the old idea will become dim as attention to it wanes.
Often, in an incredibly short time, the new thought has entirely displaced the undesirable one. The process resolves itself into the will power to direct attention to any idea to eventually exclude other ideas that assume undue mental prominence.
We often do it half unconsciously, at the seaside for instance. You sit and gaze upon the ocean’s heaving expanse, tossing its fathomless depths up toward the sky, and tremble to think of getting within the range of its power.
While you meditate, the ocean becomes vocal through the unconscious, and begins to sing its song of power: “In me are gathered the immensity of mighty powers. The wildest storms of earth have fallen to sleep on my bosom. The raging torrents of earth’s rivers have gathered into my depths. The roar of the tempest, the flash of lightning, the roll of thunder, have been but the time beat of an earthly song that I have heard from creation’s hour. Yet if thou will know my law, and boldly commit thyself to my bosom, I become a highway of pleasure to bring together the ends of the earth and carry blessings to the farthest habitation of man.”
The unconscious absorbs the strength and power from this embodiment of Power as health and strength.
In the mountains and forests you see countless tons of vegetation pushing upward in the face of the laws of gravity, yet not a sigh or groan. Soon you feel the living vitality of that unseen Power of which these are the images, raising you despite of earth’s drag.
You behold a wild flower blooming in some secluded spot. It gaily tosses its head to the breeze, without worry about whether it shall rain or shine, whether frost shall spoil its beauty, whether any eye shall see its beauty, or any delight in its fragrance.
As you consider how this flower grows without worry or care, but simply keeping still in the conditions of its life, and finding itself clothed with glory that Solomon could not even have dreamed of, the sense of rest in the place where you are, takes hold, and joy and gladness is yours. You have, by keeping still in the presence of Infinite Strength, found your strength renewed.
The secret path of nonresistance remains. It is sometimes better to bend than to break, better to walk round the mountain than to scale its heights.
A stream starting down the mountain side and finding a rock in the way, doesn’t try to batter its way through the rock, but finds the way of least resistance, and so makes a channel along which it can move, and gradually wear away that very rock. Many a person is trying to batter down temperamental barriers, or hammer through the rock of some hereditary limitations instead of finding the way of least resistance.
Here’s a man trying to sell goods when all the time he has no inner contentment. He ought to be farming, teaching, practicing law, healing the sick, or preaching some gospel of peace. His intuitive sense always says that he is doing the wrong thing, an inner longing to do something else.
This dissatisfaction is the voice of his Divine Life prophesying what he may be or ought to be. However, he has started in the wrong vocation and he’s afraid to experiment by changing, so he batters away at the intangible yet ever-present obstacles of discontent and drags through life in dissatisfaction.
Yet, one day he chooses the way of least resistance, no matter if it seems a step upward or downward, and lo! He finds peace, and the sense that he is moving in the most open channel to the Infinite Life.
These maladjustments of life furnish most of its tragedies. Many people chose their parents’ profession, or one their friends suggest, and for every other reason than that of aptitude.
Country living may best suit the city-bred. The small town youth might flourish best in urban life. Neither the opinions of our friends, the desire of our parents, nor our own judgment is the infallible guide in choosing our life’s work.
That inner voice, which clamors for action in its own chosen way, holds before us what we ought to be, plays an anvil chorus on the soul’s front door, making such a din that we cannot do our task in comfort.
This voice is the soul as prophet, voicing the Will of the Infinite Life, which would find fullest expression in us, leading us into a state without inner friction, and keeping us in the experience of perfect peace. It seems to stand at the opening of our real place of service and say, “This is the way, walk ye in it.”
Records of those who have patiently borne life’s ills, believing that the way would emerge into view, fill human history. They have eventually become the world’s leaders. They have looked back on the school of adversity, from which they graduated with full honors, as a great accomplishment, because it led them to the full realization of the Divine Life.
Any of these ways, direct, indirect or the way of least resistance, may become royal highways of life along which the soul may mount up to its own.
“I am health, peace, power, plenty. I shall dispel fear with love. Weakness shall flee before the idea of power. I shall forget my troubles by helping others. I am made in the image of God. I love because the Divine Nature in me is love. I love the image of God in others. Therefore, I shall not fear others. I love the image of God in myself. Therefore, I shall not fear myself. The image of God in me is perfect love, health and strength. I now express that divine image and all its qualities in my life. Because God lives in my life, I am now perfect health, love and peace.”
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Chapter 7. The Parable of the Christmas Tree
We must reckon with personal traits of character and variations in temperament, for they help or hinder our realization of this Divine Life within us. Our early training and environment are large factors we must deal with while solving the problem of perfectly manifesting the Divine Life.
Heredity pours in a stream of influences that sometimes threatens to engulf us and blot out the consciousness of our divine nature, dignity, and destiny. The Infinite Life within and about us stands in the face of these impediments, ready to work with or in spite of them, waiting only on the action of our own choice.
That factor of human personality called the will controls the floodgates of the Infinite Life, which will pour in, recreating environments, overhauling temperaments, and transforming the evil tendencies of heredity into engines of good.
We can be anything we want to be, and do anything we want to do, if we go at it intelligently and with determination. Nothing is out of our reach. Believing in this unlimited life that dwells in us, and in our right and power to call upon it, all things are possible. We laugh at impossibilities and cry, “It shall be done.”
Whether one travels by the old beaten paths of evangelical trust, or by the new road of philosophical idealism, the means and the end are alike and the result is assured. The conditions of realization are the full acceptance of the atonement with God, and the truth of the soul’s inherent powers to partake and manifest the Divine Nature.
One person realizes this with seemingly little effort of faith or will, while another attains to it only after long and painful effort. The influences of heredity may explain it as giving us varying physical constitution and mental temperament.
A more familiar and satisfactory answer to many will be found in two scriptural quotations and a modern parable. 1 Corinthians, 12th Chapter, enumerates the gifts of the Spirit, while Galatians, 5th Chapter, lists the fruits of the Spirit.
Faith, the power to believe things seen or unseen, is both a gift and a fruit, the difference between them being like the difference between a Christmas tree and a fruit tree. In the one case, the products on the tree are the result of action outside the tree and its processes of growth. In the other, an inward process of the tree-life itself produces the fruits.
Faith as a fruit is the result of right thinking, careful training, and correct observation of our experience and others’. Faith is confidence founded on knowledge of its object. Its three great fields of action in our material life are in the operation of the laws of nature, and of cause and effect, and in our fellow-man.
Just as our faith in the laws of nature, or those of cause and effect, is based upon their known and uniform action, so is our faith in our fellow determined by our knowledge of his character and resources. We may have no confidence in a total stranger, but if he bears a certificate of worth from our intimate friend who knows him, that changes it and we trust it and we trust him because of our friend’s knowledge of him.
Our faith in God is confidence based on our knowledge of his character and resources as they are manifested to or in us, or our friends. This fruit of faith, the result of a process going on within us, is an ever increasing quality. The prophecy of the Infinite Life is “It shall come to pass.” The history of human experience is “It came to pass.”
Upon these two facts faith moves forward to full fruition. It remains true that the fruits of faith rapidly grow in one person, while the process is painful and slow in another. One requires a sign “to cast a rod on the floor and let it become a serpent,” which is enough for him. Another seeks after wisdom. He had to be “shown,” to have it all reasoned out.
We find that some may tamper with the facts in evidence and the laws of belief, until they find themselves unable to believe anything. Their life is henceforth barren.
As we turn to faith as a gift, we find people believing in things for which they have no adequate reason. Yet thus believing, they endure, triumph, attain “as seeing the invisible,” and inevitably realize it in visible form. A person stands in the presence of an impossible task and with no earthly knowledge of ways or means, calmly affirms, “It shall be done” – and it is.
We meet some who are utter strangers, yet by some intuitive sense we perceive their worth and trust them to the uttermost, a faith that has no material or objective warrant. Some souls, without conscious preparation or known process, seem to step into absolute confidence in the Infinite God, and appropriate His unlimited Power to themselves for their needs. They have no struggle to realize the truth. They believe, act upon that belief, and the thing is done.
Thus, one person without seeming effort, grasps the peace, the plenty, the health, the power of the Infinite Life. Another halts, hesitates and stumbles over the truth, and even when he sees it, finds it difficult of realization.
Let him not falter nor covet a gift that he may not have, for there is a more excellent way – the faith that works by love. For while gifts of all sorts may fail, the fruit of patient persistence in well-doing, prompted by love, can never fail.
Love sends us to minister to someone more unfortunate than we are, and in the presence of his greater affliction, our own seems as nothing. Centering our attention on helping him, we forget our own troubles for the time. If we could keep busy long enough so that we permanently turn our attention to other things, most of our ills would die of simple neglect.
The vast majority of nervous people are so busy thinking and talking about themselves, that the first step in their relief is to get them thinking about, talking of, and working for something or somebody else. Altruism acts as the witty Frenchman said of medicine, “It entertains the patient while nature cures him.”
Altruism is born of love whose very language is giving. God loved and gave – we love and give, and are doubly blest in doing so, bringing benefit to others, and health to ourselves.
The exercise of faith conditions all mental and spiritual results, and indirectly all physical benefits. “According to your faith” is the divinely appointed measure of success.
We proclaim and really think that we have little faith, until someone with the note of attainment and certainty in his voice comes to us. The glow of health in his eyes and face, the air of conscious mastery in his whole bearing causes our latent faith leaps into activity at his word or touch, and we shed our ills as a miracle.
If we do not meet these masters of the powers of life, we settle down to the humdrum of dead level existence. Yet one day in our reading or meditations, the Voice Eternal speaks within us saying, “All things are yours, and ye are Christ’s and Christ is God’s.”
“Ye are dead and your life is hid with Christ in God.” We begin to see how our own ego has been living a life separate, apart from the eternal springs of existence, and it is indeed a limited, miserable and a dead affair. We behold our ego, our self, passing up into the divine ego, the Infinite Being, where our lives are merged into His, hid in Him. Here we abide in the fulness of life, health, plenty.
No plant that He hath not planted shall prosper. We behold our ills, the untimely fruits of our erring, doubting, fearing mortal thinking, having no place nor part in the full life into which we have entered, drop from us. Those fruits of peace, joy, hope, and rightness, which issue only into health and wholeness, the visible proofs that indeed we see God, and live in Him now clothe us.
“The limitless Life of God is in me. I shall trust and not be afraid. I shall be well, happy, and prosperous. God is the fountainhead of my life’s resources. Faith sets every Divine Power into action. In the hour of adversity, I shall believe in the Lord to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. All things are possible to me, for I believe. I believe where I cannot see the way. The powers that are for me are mightier than those against me. Because God is with me, all things shall work out for good. I can accomplish the work given me to do.”
Chapter 8. The Last Thing in the World
Hope, which springs immortal in the human breast, has almost incalculable value as a preventive agency. One of the three cardinal virtues that abide, hope is the last thing in the world, since it remains when all else is gone.
As an anchor, hope holds the drifting soul because it grasps the Mysteries of God beyond the veil of seen things. We call it “a living hope,” into which God has begotten us, because it is born of our trust in the reality of the visions of the eternal future.
Hope’s place is equally prominent in philosophy, which delving into the economies of existence and formulating them into practical terms, finds a place for hope as a bright star in the van of human progress.
What tangled skeins has hope not unwound? What disasters has it not illuminated? Through what wildernesses of ignorance, superstition, and failure has it not led? What depths has it not sounded? What heights has it not scaled?
Science, focusing its inquiring gaze upon the processes and problems of world-making and world-destiny, discovers grounds upon which to base a rational hope in “a far-off divine event, toward which the whole creation moves,” a fruition of the ages-long struggle of material existence, glorious beyond the power of words to describe, or the human mind to conceive.
Science, with unveiled vision, beholds a vast evolutionary process, stretching up from the first biological cell to the complex organism of humankind. By an almost infinite series of stages, each of which is the foundation of a further and upward movement, the human has arisen from creature nature – an animal, yet more – an intelligent, affectionate being.
In this process, science discovers a dynamic agent working under conditions that involve relative failure, and apparent experiments, groping toward better types of life. It is as if some Being were slowly yet surely perfecting His expression through progressive achievement, developing His skill by mastering the difficulties attendant upon such growing material expression, and finding an ever larger self-realization in the progressive development of the life of the material universe.
Hardships, suffering, misery, struggle, and death in the world are incidental to the difficulties of His task, bound up with the adverse conditions that universally attend the raising of low, potential forms of energy up to ever higher forms.
These problems of earthly existence are necessary factors in all upward progress. As we leave them behind when they serve their purpose, science predicts, with the solution of the problem of existence, the elimination of every form of evil. Science beholds humanity as the crown of this evolutionary process, using this stage of development to project into still higher form the life within him.
Prompted by some deep instinct, some deathless impulse, we constantly reach out to join hands and cooperate with this dynamic agent, the Infinite Life. In so conditioning and expressing life as to lessen suffering, disease, and death, we shall finally eliminate them, and produce in this world, at last, a civilization with no moral nor disease death rate.
Physical humanity has its day of brawn and animalism until the intellect crowds to the front. The mental humanity has its day of brilliance and enlargement, which a day of spiritual activity, of inspiration, and glory follows, when the dynamic drive finding perfect self-knowledge and expression in human flesh reveals patience, love, faith and kindness.
Thus is God evolved in human form because God was involved in the antecedents of human existence. Our hope is secure, for if “God only hath immortality,” we who partake of the life of God from which we are inseparable, are also partakers of his immortality.
We reject some scientific hypotheses about the relation between the physical and mental life: (1) that consciousness and brain, mind and body act one upon the other as two distinct beings or substances, (2) that the mind is only a product of the body, a variant form of bodily action in which the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile, and (3) that the body is only a form or product of one or several mental beings.
We accept the hypothesis that we have evolved mind and body, consciousness and brain as different forms of expression of the same being, who is essentially spiritual, whose activities are always manifested in parallel lines, sometimes reporting first as mental, sometimes as physical, but always eventually in both.
Now while science knows only these two forms of life, the mental and physical, it does not deny that others exist. In fact its findings demand a yet unfound innermost essence of existence to which the mental or subjective life stands nearest, and from which both mental and physical life proceed.
Thus we see our double ancestry, (1) that of the flesh and its mind and (2) the ancestry of the Spirit, which makes God our Father, and enables us to affirm “My Father and I are one.” We sweep back past birthdays and say, “before Abraham was, I am.”
Now the whole economy of human existence hinges on the conflict between these two ancestries, as to supremacy. For the struggle is as old as the human race and as new as the last-born babe.
Recognizing that life can never reach the heights of freedom until the spirit gains the ascendancy, Jesus said, “Unless one is born of the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” Unless we live in the Spirit, where the motives and ideals of the spiritual life are in the position of mastery, we cannot know the “righteousness, peace, and joy” that life is intended to have as its daily atmosphere.
We are apt to dwell too much on the fact of the mind influencing the body, and the body in turn influencing the mind. Trying to heal the one by healing the other, we fail to emphasize the Spiritual Source of Life. We fail to carry the governing center of life into the spiritual I AM, whose infinite peace and health and ease will express itself in a parallel manifestation in mind and body.
This does not mean that life has no conflicts from now on. The battle will not be over until they fire the sunset gun, but we can say, “Thanks be to God who gives me the victory.”
While science can discover grounds for such a hope as this, theology beholds God dwelling in the flesh, and manifesting the divine character in such a way that to see such a one is to see the Father. Theology calls that combination the “Son of God,” and says, “Beloved now are we the Sons of God.” It bids us to come to that place of spiritual supremacy where we can say “I live, and yet not I live, but Christ lives in me,” and its proof is that we go about doing good.
They say of Martin Luther that someone called at his gate and asked, “Does Martin Luther live here?” and the answer of the sturdy reformer was, “No, but Jesus Christ lives here.” He was nearer the truth than many of his followers, for this oneness with God was the truth that Jesus Christ lived, and the boon, which he prayed that each of his disciples and all men might possess.
Our quest ends here. Whatever field of knowledge we choose, all paths lead to our divine birthright, the privilege of living the life of God in the world, of manifesting all those qualities of the divine character that men can know only as they see them incarnate in human life, and eventually to realize the completeness of the Divine Life in us.
When faith has fought its last battle, and love has run its last merciful errand of service, hope, the ultimate thing in the world, will still tower over the wrecks of time. Hope will stretch out expectant hands to receive the perfect fruition of God dwelling in the flesh. Something in us answers to our own.
“Dwelt there no divineness in us, how could God’s divineness win us?” Follow then this Voice Eternal along the highways of peace, plenty, health, and power until your kingdom is perfected, until the “fearful,” the “unbelieving,” and all “liars” are cast out, and you can “surrender it to God, who shall be all in all.”
“I believe in Love Almighty, maker of heaven on earth. My hope is in God who dwells in me. I steadfastly trust to the end.”
Chapter 9. The Christ Light in Us
To gain the full significance of this truth of the indwelling God, see revealed the most beautiful and influential conception of the spiritual ideal embodied in the gospel message, in such verses as: “I live, and yet not I, but Christ lives in me.” “Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.” “Till Christ be formed in you.”
This is the heart of the gospel, the key to its storehouse of life, health, love, and power. It brings out the mystical phase of the Christ-life so prominently that one is likely to ask what place it can have in a scientific, and philosophical religious movement.
The answer is simple: The power of a suggestion, concerning a person or a supposed truth, depends on our conception of the scope of the truth, or the character and power of the person in whose hands we place our welfare.
For instance, we are much more apt to trust fully an experienced physician with a great reputation, than we are to call in a young doctor just out of the medical school.
If a mere novice in knowledge suggests any mental and spiritual healing practice, his suggestions will have little influence on us. If we esteem him as a master or an adept in such wisdom, then he speaks with the voice of authority, and we expect results at his word.
Likewise, if we conceive a partial and limited truth when we are giving ourselves suggestions, our results will be meager. Yet if we conceive the truth to take on the character of a Universal Law, we will greatly magnify our results in health and welfare.
If we think of ourselves as “poor and weak,” we greatly weaken or counteract our self-suggestions. If we face our ills with the thought that “I can do all things through Christ that strengthens me,” our suggestions will have in them the authority of the Son of God and they cannot fail.
The place of the Christ in any scheme for moral, social or physical betterment is secure, for the highest authority that we can give to a movement is to quote him as its leader. For a person to have truly found the Christ Light within, is to have started on the pathway of wisdom that will at last unfold and solve every problem of life. Yet let us be sure that we have found him in the true sense of the term.
Jesus said, “Of myself I can do nothing. The Father that dwells in me, He does the works.” The human Jesus could not do those mighty works, but the Divine Christ in him could and did.
We must recognize Jesus’ essential humanity, but also his divinity because he so often spoke and acted like a divine person. The human Jesus was weary with long journeys, arduous toils, and ceaseless vigils. He fainted on the last journey and died on the cross.
The Divine Christ opened the eyes of the blind, cast out devils, raised the dead, healed the lepers, and said to the tired world, “Come unto me and find rest.”
That same dual nature is consciously in everyone. The purely human with its ills, aches, sorrows and troubles, stumbling through life so self-centered and engrossed that we never catch a glimpse of the Divine Nature of which we are partakers – and a Christing, an anointing that abides so that “we need not that any man teach us” as John says.
Acting as mere humans, we utterly fail to call on the Christ Power within us that will banish all our ills, diseases, and troubles, and enable us to live in the fulness of peace, health, love, and power. It was not to the human Jesus who said, “Come unto me,” but the Divine Christ, the Life of God that dwelt within him.
He worked always to get those who came to him to look to the Father who was abiding in him, whose words he spoke, whose works he did, and of whom he could say, “I and the Father are one,” that they might realize their oneness with the Father as he had realized it.
Finally he told his disciples that it was better for them that he should go away, else the comforter would not come – they would never enter the fullness of their inheritance while they had him to depend on. He was trying to get them to see that the Father is the object of all seeking. The Father was waiting to become the Christ, the anointed, the Light in them, as He is waiting to illumine us.
The disciples were so busy clinging to Jesus’ mortal self, for the loaves and the fishes, the evidence of the senses, that they would continue looking to his personality. Unless he went away, they would never know that the same mighty Spirit of Truth was waiting to manifest His Power in them when they recognized their oneness with Him.
The Infinite Power, which had previously had but one power station, was from then on to have a station in everyone who accepted their divine heritage. Each soul who chooses the Divine shall manifest those same marvelous virtues that wrought the blessings of peace and health at the touch and word of the Master. “Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.”
To teach men, and to lead them into these privileges, the Master left certain symbolic forms, representing the entry into and manifestation of the Christ-life. Paul said that when one is “baptized into Christ” he “puts on Christ.”
In other words, attending the outward form of every religious element is a spiritual content, an inner substance, which is nothing less than the conscious recognition that the Christ of God is in us as He was in Jesus of Nazareth.
For instance, the act of Confirmation directs the believer’s attention to the sevenfold gifts of the Holy Spirit, which now abides in him waiting to be called on that he may show forth the power. The consecrated elements of Communion feed the body, and suggest how God constantly imparts His Life to the life within us.
A Christian life consists in following after the example of Christ, submitting to his ordinances, imitating his good works and seeking to obey a Christ and a God who are outside, apart from and above us somewhere, who may be persuaded to hear our petitions and forgive our sins and at last get home to heaven.
The Christ-life is looking to the Christ Light, and letting it manifest the Divine Presence and Power as the Son of God within us, a state of conscious oneness with God that enables its possessor to say, “All things are mine, and mine is Christ’s and Christ is God’s.”
The story of Jesus, asleep on the fishing boat in the midst of a raging storm, illustrates the meaning of the Christ-life. His Divine Presence did not keep the wind from blowing, the boat from rocking, nor the disciples from feeling terrified.
However, when they awakened him, he arose and at once manifested the Divine Life: He rebuked the wind and the sea and a great calm followed. Life has rocked our boat with disease, sorrow, poverty, worry, and what not, simply because we do not awaken the Christ Light in us and call upon it to manifest in us the hope of glory.
“Beloved now are we the sons of God . . . and we shall be like him when He shall appear.” In other words, when we manifest the Christ Light, we will be like Jesus of Nazareth, in whom all fullness of love, of life, of power, of joy, of all good dwelt. When we are complete in this Christ-life, we can boldly say, “In Christ all things are mine.”
“I can do all things through Christ which strengthens me.” If you are manifesting sickness, your attention is fixed upon the circumference of life.
Turn to the center of your Being where the Infinite dwells and say, “Christ is my life. Christ is my health. Christ is my strength. Christ is perfect. I now manifest Christ.” Say it with the certainty that it is the truth of all truths, and you will feel the fountain of your life bubble over with a strange new Power that radiates through sickness, disease and pain, and displaces them by manifesting the health that was in Jesus.
Suppose that you need, not want, but actually need money. We can cash this cashier’s check every day of our lives, and unlike all other checks, will be as good as ever the next day. It is “My God shall supply all your need according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus” – Philippians 4:19.
Now read it intelligently. “My God” – that’s the banker’s name – “shall supply” – that is His promise to pay – “all your need” – that’s the size of the check – “according to His riches” – that’s the bank’s capital – “in glory” – that’s the bank’s location – “by Christ Jesus” – that’s the cashier’s name.
Why should you think poverty, and manifest poverty, when your Father is rich in houses and lands, and holds the wealth of the worlds in His hands?
Say to yourself, “Christ is my abundant supply. He is here in me now and greatly desires to manifest himself as my supply. His desires are fulfilled now and I am filled full of all needed things.”
Don’t begin to ask how he is going to do this. It will probably be the very way that you would never think about. Just hold to the thought that he is your abundant supply, and that he will honor your faith a hundredfold.
You have only to choose to have him do this for you, and having once put the matter in his hands, let it rest with him who longs to be the abundance of all things that you need. Never try to take it back, but say to yourself, “It is done; God hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ.” You need only to wait in perfect faith for the manifestation of that which you have asked.
Trusting the Christ Light in us for all things when we first begin is not easy. Such a habit is not spontaneous, it comes only after repeated effort and repeated proof that it is the royal highway to peace, plenty, and power. We begin by trusting him with small things, but by and by we come to trust him for all things.
No scholar, historian or theologian has ever satisfactorily answered the question of what was Jesus doing before he came working his wonders. Yet when someone works the miracle works of Jesus, we know that he did not reach this faith in a moment.
He has held fast to the Christ Light within, trusting where he could not see, until he found himself manifesting “the faith of the Son of God.” Begin by thinking and acting these things and you will come to know the Christ, the Spirit of Truth. The keyword to all this attainment is now.
God knows but one time, the eternal now. Saying or believing that salvation for the soul or health for the body are somewhere in the future always sets them just beyond our grasp. Now is the accepted time for all forward movements for our personal welfare. God’s work is finished in us now, the moment we believe.
The Christ Light may lead us to walk in ways that we would not have chosen. Yet the voice of the Christ as the Light within us, will direct us unerringly where God wants us to go.
Abraham followed the inner voice, not knowing where he went, from one act of faith to another, until God said to him, “Because thou hast done this I will both bless thee and make thee a blessing.”
Let’s consider some practical help. Why should we worry about tomorrow? We cannot live it till it arrives, and then only a moment at a time. Fill the present now, the day and hour with hope, trust, praise and service.
Why worry for tomorrow, sufficient for the day is the evil thereof, and for that matter the good of it. When the worry fog begins to darken the soul, shine all the optimism of faith in the Christ on it.
Say to yourself, “Every worry thought only weakens me for the conflict when it comes. It may never come, so I will not concern myself until it arrives. Then I shall have conserved all my powers to meet it in triumph.”
The second idea always to hold in mind is, that the Christ that was in Jesus must always be doing good, must be pointing out to others the secret that deliverance from every ill of this life. The truth of the Father is in you and patiently waiting and working till you awaken to this understanding of life.
Have you grasped the truth? Pass it on. Does Christ, dwelling in you, become the dominant, triumphant factor in your life? Pass it on, with all the tact and patience of Jesus, telling one to go and show the health authorities, and another to tell no one. Go about doing good. Help to awaken the sleeping passenger on board so many storm-tossed lives.
“Christ is all in all to me. Christ is health, strength, peace, plenty. Christ dwells in me. I now manifest Christ.”
Chapter 10. The Spiritual Basis of Health
“Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit saith the Lord,” tells us in so many words that all Power, in its last analysis, is spiritual. In all earthly things, first is that which is natural, then that which is spiritual.
All material things are the expression of profoundly spiritual things. By the study of the spiritual dimension of material things, we come to a correct view.
Paul says, “For the invisible things of God, even His eternal Power and Godhead, are clearly seen through the creation of the world, being understood by the things that are made.” God has built the universe, and made humanity in His image. We make the first great step toward the knowledge of God when we have mastered the knowledge of ourselves.
We have a material body, and dwelling in it and coextensive with it, a spiritual body with organs of similar character and function. In stages we develop the conscious mind as a function of this union of a spiritual and material being. With its various methods of reasoning, it is fitted to exercise the office of a monitor in this world of truth and error.
The superconscious is the real immortal, spiritual part of us, with which we identify and are inseparably joined with the Infinite Spirit. Spirit manifests through the superconscious as flesh and blood.
We develop the elements of the divine character here. The objective argues with subjective and points out a better way. All the tides of the Infinite Life move into us from the subjective side, and are guided and used under the direction of the objective side.
Every age has had its method of contacting this Infinite Life and using its powers and energies. A life devoted to meditation, prayer, and good works will manifest more of that Spirit than one that does not so exercise itself.
People under great emotional stress growing out of personal perils, or that of a loved one, or danger to country, will do prodigies of valor. Under such conditions the eyes will flash, the face will glow and a new and strange energy will fill the body.
A weak and fragile body will seem to be indued with tireless strength, and the devout soul will realize that God helps him, and will say, “I could not have done it myself, God helped me.” The Bible, the supreme authority on the spiritual experiences of humanity, abounds in illustrations of this fact.
What we accomplish under the pressure of some great crisis, in which we contact God, may be as truly and fully achieved under the conditions of normal life. We can do this by knowing and applying the laws of the spiritual life, in accepting and affirming our oneness with the Spirit with all that it means, and so letting God augment our strength, by identifying with Him.
We find the measure of our power in the sort of instrument we furnish the Spirit to work in and through. No essential difference exists between the power that is manifest in the normal life when we speak the healing word, or touch with the hand that gives health – actions born out of an abiding sense of the Infinite, and the power that manifests in the word or touch when done under the sense of a mighty tide of spiritual emotion or inspiration.
Whatever the difference is, it consists of quantity or volume and not of quality. It is all of God. Yet we must always to refer things to their Divine Source, as when our Lord attributed his miracle working power to the Father. “The works that I do, I do not of myself, but the Father that dwells in me, He does the works.” So he referred his words of wisdom to the same source. “The words that I speak unto you they are spirit and they are life.” “I will, be thou clean.” “Take up thy bed and walk.”
Similarly, life is always emphasizing our absolute dependence on the Spirit. “Without me ye can do nothing” is the true statement that we derive all our power to do anything, whether the smallest duty, or the epoch-making acts in our own or others’ lives. Therefore, we must refer the whole question of Power to God.
“I have read once, yea twice, that power belongs to God.” On the other hand, such words as, “Ye shall ask what ye will” and “Be it unto thee even as thou wilt,” seem to place the conditioning of that power within ourselves. In a word, God works Power in as we work it out. It is merely a question of how to let that Divine Power find expression in anyone.
In the transmission of electric power, the two main factors are insulation and carrying capacity, or the size and quality of the wire. No matter with what rapidity the armature may sweep over the magnetic field unless these two conditions are favorable, little or no power will be transmitted. It is certain that unless these same conditions are present in spiritual activities, no reception or transmission of spiritual energy will result.
The limitless Power of the Living God is pressing for expression, about us and in us. We release it in such exercises as prayer, religious meditation, patience under great affliction, heroic fidelity to great ideals and principles, loving service, and other activities in which most church people engage.
Some, who have been most effective instruments for the Spirit, have had no other thought of how they could attain, except by ceaseless vigils, fasting, and importunate prayer. Our Lord himself found it necessary to go apart into mountain and desert places where he might commune with his Father, and he and his disciples recuperated their depleted vitality.
We have never improved on this practice of being alone with God, although the method of its practice may differ. We may by practice hold our objective faculties in a passive state, inhibit all conscious thought and subconscious prompting, and so open wide the channel of the superconscious.
The limitless Power of God flows through superconscious mind to accomplish any purpose toward which it may be directed. So that “he may ask what he will and it shall be done.”
The faculty of will determines the volume of Power that shall be manifested. When we have insulated against the world, we can say with a sense of perfect authority, “I will, be thou healed,” and know that it shall be done.
It is well therefore to study the methods of focusing the will power, insulating it against conflicting desires. Then, in life’s emergencies we may draw all the supplies we need at will, as calmly as we do in the ordinary duties of life without clenching our fists, or setting our jaw, or knitting our brow.
The perfect illustration of this idea is a trolley car, running along with its outstretched arm reaching for power, without which it cannot run. That sense of utter dependence on the Spirit’s Power keeps the inner eye forever on the Source of Power, and the subjective arm reaching up to touch the live wire of omnipotence.
From this comes the confidence to say to a sick friend, “You are going to be better, and you will return to perfect health,” and know that it will be as you have said. Until you are consciously in touch with the Spirit, you will lack positive certainty when you speak the healing word. Establish this and you will contact all energy so that you may live with a minimum of ills and a maximum of comfort in serving yourself and others.
Probably not one in a hundred of us had the advantage of a good start in the world. Upon our arrival, besides hereditary impediments, we found the ignorance, superstition, and general blundering of those in charge of us, responsible for many bad kinks.
Most of us started with a large assortment of abnormal conditions, then we have the blunders and follies of youth, and the mistakes that grow out of early bigotry and ignorance. We must outlive and undo them before we can begin living a normal life.
We often enter some career, from which we find it difficult or impossible to extricate ourselves, before we have unloaded this baggage. Some want to enter some mission of service, yet they cannot impart to others what they do not possess.
Our first great problem is the mastery of us. The discovery of a vast unused reservoir of power within us, awaiting our exploitation is the challenge to begin a campaign of self-knowledge and of the use of these powers to undo the ravages of disease, break the power of bad mental and physical habits, and get up to the plane of normal living.
Self mastery requires, first, the conviction that the powers within you and next to you are sufficient for all your needs, and all possible needs are anticipated and provided for in this spiritual endowment.
Second, these powers are under your control if you choose to have them be so, they will do anything you set them to do, and they have no right to do anything else than what you set them to do. If they are manifesting sickness, pain, or ill-fortune, they are acting without your authority, and as the master of the house you must command them to manifest just what you want, nothing else.
You must not raise the question of who is running the house for a moment. Assert this with all the will power you can command – “I AM the Master.”
Then you must face two very important factors: First, progress will often be slow. You cannot reconstruct yourself in a day. You must face the proposition that an assault may not be enough to take the stronghold that requires a siege. So you must have patience and let your soul abide in the peace of God within you, knowing that you cannot fail.
Second, sometimes you will feel worse than better after the first attempt. This may be due to the chemical changes that occur because of the new thought powers you have set in motion. It may arise out of the conflicting thoughts you are sending to your subconscious mind.
For instance, you suggest to you that your ills or troubles will end, a doubt arises in your mind, which is stronger than your health suggestion, and as a result, you are worse than you were at first. You must be prepared to meet these two difficulties. They do not always arise, but often they do. It is well to provide against a lapse of faith, due to a temporary failure.
One thing becomes very apparent as we practice this divine science. The human element is always cropping out, so that we must forever use terms that apply to human activity. Yet always we sense something beyond the range of the purely human, so that we cannot avoid using the terms that belong only to things divine.
Nothing in this life is purely human, and nothing is purely divine. These are terms of accommodation. No one can tell where one ends and the other begins. They are in fact one.
However boundless the subconscious resources may seem, it grows from the fact that it is merged into the Infinite Spirit of which it is an individual expression. This power is of God the Infinite Spirit, and that it is essentially spiritual.
True, we may use methods that seem very human, such as mixing clay with spittle to anoint a blind man’s eyes, yet only the method is human. The powers themselves are divine, and the results are equally divine.
When we are soothing a wounded spirit with words of comfort, driving out some mental obsession by sheer power of personality, quieting an aching member of the human frame by manipulation, using some material remedy of proven potency, or employing the surgeon’s knife to remove some abnormal tissue, we are doing the works of God. We are God’s agents in that particular service.
Though we may not use any outward form of prayer or religious exercise, the patient’s very assumption that it is of God and in harmony with his faith, is of immense help. Religious faith is the one peerless dynamic in this world. It has built every civilization of history, and when perverted or allowed to become a stationary, it has been the destroyer instead of an evolutionary force.
The fact that God wills our undertaking makes it irresistible. We have the greatest sense of authority over disease and pain when we are the most conscious of in-tune-ness with the Infinite. This grows not only from the suggestion, but from the fact.
Take your stand on the foundation fact of your oneness with God, then become passive and receptive to every intimation of the Spirit. Believe that because you have God dwelling in you, nothing limits what you may have or do. Then, with unshaken purpose of will, determine to manifest the power of God, and your knowledge of God will multiply your health, happiness, peace and power.
“All power is given me by the Spirit. He who has seen me has seen the Father. The Spirit manifests the things of Christ in me.”
Chapter 11. The “Word” for Well-Being
No book is so rich in healing suggestion as the Bible. Its psychology is always correct. Beginning with the childhood of humanity, it deals largely with the motive of fear because fear is the most elemental and powerful of emotions in undeveloped humankind. Slowly it moves out to other motives as the rule of action.
Like all true history, the Bible deals with the facts in the special realm it undertakes to chronicle. From its beginning to its close, its one theme is life, with all that pertains to it. The Old Testament is the history of the childhood of humanity, while the New Testament is the history of humanity coming into its maturity. In the one, Fear holds a large place, while in the other, Love holds the place of the supreme motive.
The first question of the Old Testament is, “Where art thou?” – picturing an offended deity seeking a fearing, sinful soul to inflict upon it a merited punishment. The first question of the New Testament is “Where is he?” – featuring a needy and devout soul seeking to find the God of love to worship Him.
Now while these are the characteristics of the parts of the Bible, it is true that in that far off age all an enraptured spirit caught glimpses of a better day, and a better way of serving the Lord. The sweet singer of Israel comforted his soul with that wonderful thought, so that even at the entrance of the shadow of death, “I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.”
For the same reason he would not “fear the terror by day, nor the arrow that flies by night, nor the pestilence that walks in darkness, nor the destruction that wastes at noonday.” Because he had made the Most High his habitation, no evil should befall him, neither any plague come nigh his dwelling!
As we enter the New Testament teaching, we replace Fear of God’s anger with confidence in God’s Love. We pass out of the negative realm of “Thou shalt not” into the positive realm of “Thou shalt” The first word of the angel to Joseph was, “Fear not, Joseph.”
The first word to Mary was, “Fear not, Mary.” The word of the Master so often was “Fear not – be not afraid – peace be with you” because the whole trend of the gospels is toward love as the supreme motive of action. He condensed the negative forms of the law of fear into two great positive constructive sentences, so that forever afterward Love should, be the fulfilling of the law.
True, the Ten Commandments will be essential to human welfare while the nature of humanity continues in its present stage of existence and development, but when will one arise who shall reach such heights of inspiration as to be able to put these laws into constructive and correct psychological form, with Love as their motive?
To make the thought clearer the following is suggested as a stepping stone in the right direction:
1. I am the God of Love.
2. Worship me in Spirit and in Truth.
3. Revere the name of God.
4. Keep all days holy and rest one day in Seven.
5. Honor thy parents and so add years to thy life.
6. Hold sacred the life of God that is in you.
7. Let thy love for all things be with a pure heart.
8. Be honest.
9. Speak the truth.
10. Desire earnestly the best things.
Yet we need not wait for such a form to become authoritative with the sanction of the church. That will come along in good time.
Meanwhile these words and others rich in devotion and ripe with ages of testing form an arsenal of spiritual weapons of offense and defense against every ill that besets us in wrong thought forms. We formulate some of these under proper headings for use in meditation and affirmation when we must meet the evils that may assail us from the mental and spiritual sides of our life.
For the hour when fear and worry are our foes, open the treasury of God’s Word as we have worked it out in human experience and read: I will fear no evil for Thou art with me.
Fear not for I am with thee, be not dismayed for I am thy God. I will strengthen thee; I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness.
Be strong and of good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed, for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.
That we being delivered from the hand of our enemies might serve him without fear all the days of our life.
I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed to him against that day.
Perfect love casts out fear.
For the day when we are weak: In the Lord God is everlasting strength. I can do all things through Christ which strengthens me.
They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength.
He is able to do exceeding, abundantly above all that we ask or think.
Be strong and of good courage . . . the Lord thy God goeth with thee; He will not fail nor forsake thee.
When poverty comes as an armed robber: My God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus.
And hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
In my Father’s house are many mansions. I go to prepare a place for thee.
Thou shalt remember the Lord thy God; for it is He that giveth thee power to get wealth.
Thou shalt not borrow, but thou shalt lend to many nations.
Diligent in business, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord.
He feeds the ravens; shall He not much more care for you?
When faith is weak: Have the faith of God.
I had fainted unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.
All things are possible to him who believes.
Ye shall ask what ye will and it shall be done unto you.
Your Father knows what things ye have need of before you ask Him.
Great is thy faith, be it unto thee even as thou wilt.
When your happiness is eclipsed: A merry heart does good like a medicine.
If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them.
Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help.
All things work together for good to them that love God.
Rejoice in the Lord, and again I say, rejoice.
These things have I spoken unto you that your joy might be full.
For wakeful hours: He giveth his beloved sleep. – Psalm 127:2
Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest. – Matthew 11:28.
I will lay me down in peace and sleep, for Thou makest me to dwell in safety. – Psalm 4:8.
There remains therefore a rest for the people of God; they that believe do enter into rest. – Hebrews 4:9.
His banner over me was love. – Song of Solomon 2:4.
Thou shalt lie down and thy sleep shall be sweet. – Proverbs 3:24.
When your enemies trouble you: The Lord shall cause thine enemies that rise up against thee to be smitten before thy face. They shall come out against thee one way, and flee before thee seven ways. – Deuteronomy 28:7.
Love your enemies. Pray for them that despitefully use you. – Matthew 5:44.
Father forgive them, they know not what they do. – Luke 23:34.
And now shall mine head be lifted up above my enemies round about me. – Psalm 27:6.
If thine enemy hunger, feed him. – Romans 12:20.
To find peace: Great peace have they that love thy law and nothing shall offend them. – Psalm 119:165.
Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee because he trusteth thee. – Isaiah 26:3.
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give unto you. – John 14:27.
The peace of God that passes all understanding shall keep your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ. – Philippians 4:7.
Peace on earth, good will toward men. – Luke 2:14.
For healing: I am the Lord that heals thee. – Exodus 15:26.
He heals all thy diseases. – Psalm 103:3.
The prayer of faith shall save the sick. – James 5:15.
The sun of righteousness shall arise with healing in his wings. – Malachi 4:2.
The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. – Revelation 22:2.
Thy faith hath made thee whole. – Matthew 9:22.
I cried unto thee and thou hast healed me. – Psalm 30:2.
He sent his word and healed them. – Psalm 107:20.
For times of great affliction: When thou passest through the waters I will be with thee; and through the rivers they shall not overflow thee; when thou walkest through the fire thou shalt not be burned, neither shall the flame kindle upon thee. – Isaiah 43:2.
Our present afflictions, which are for a moment, work out for us an exceeding great and eternal weight of joy. – 2 Corinthians 4:17.
Weeping may endure for the night but joy comes in the morning. – Psalm 30:5.
These are all rich in comfort, for they are the organized experiences of God’s people. There can be none better, for a suggestion is measured in its power by the conception the receiver has of the authority and power of the person giving it, and by the greatness of the truth it holds.
Dwell upon these words that the eternal God has spoken to and through His people, and soon a mighty uplift of mind and body comes.
Many modern forms of suggestion are short and in the language of the day, but these from the treasury of humanity are rich with ages of trial and proof. When we interpret them in the light of humanity’s oneness with God, they offer an intimacy of contact and an efficacy of action that cannot fail.
“I am the master of the house. I am the architect. My subconscious is the servant, the builder. He shall build my plans, and report only normal sensation. My body is the temple of God. It shall be clean and well. I honor God by living in perfect health.”
Chapter 12. The Law of Suggestion
People often ask us, “What book gives the form of suggestions I can use in specific cases?” No two cases are just alike, any more than any two people are just alike.
We can hardly do more than to give the general principles of suggestion with a few illustrations of their use. To help those who would know and use the power of suggestion for their own and others’ good, we will give an outline of first principles with illustrations. If you will intelligently and persistently follow them, you will get results in any case amenable to suggestion.
The mind is conscious, subconscious and superconscious. The superconscious is the Voice of the One, or of the Christ Light within you. We best understand it as pure, sure knowing the truth. The conscious deals with that realm of sensation and thought of which we take cognizance. The subconscious deals with those sensations, thoughts, and activities of which we are unconscious.
The conscious side of the mind is the master of the house of the Lord, usually called the body. It is the architect of life and destiny. It creates the ideals for body, mind and character. It is equipped with every method of reasoning so that it may determine what is good or bad, right or wrong, in a world where these are entangled.
The conscious mind can reason by induction, i.e., it can take many separate facts and draw from them a general principle or law. It can reason by deduction, i.e., it can take a given fact and draw from it every logical sequence.
It can reason by comparison, i.e., it can take a proposed fact, compare it with a known fact, and determine its probable truth or value. It can reason by analysis, i.e., it can separate a proposition into its elements and determine their relative value.
The conscious mind can reason by synthesis, i.e., it can take many related facts and bind them into a consistent whole. It is therefore peculiarly fitted for such a world as that in which we live, but it would have no place in a world where only truth and right existed.
The subconscious is the servant in the house. It can reason only by deduction. It cannot compare any suggested fact with a known one because it can hold but one idea at a time.
The subcoonscious cannot therefore tell whether a thing is good or bad, true or false. Its deductions from any suggested fact are perfectly logical, but if a false premise is involved it has no means of detecting the fallacy.
The subconscious is essentially the builder of the body and cannot originate anything. It can only carry out hereditary tendencies, traditional ideas or things suggested by the conscious mind.
It is as tenacious in holding to a good idea or habit as it is in holding a bad one. It will work out any idea the conscious mind hold over it.
If we repeat that idea often enough, it will work it out automatically, without any conscious thought taking place. It is the seat and creature of habit.
All habits are subconscious, and we produce them by repeating a conscious thought. The more often we repeat the thought, the more rapidly we will form the habit.
For instance if a man smokes one cigar a month, he will not get the habit very quickly. If he takes one per week, he will get it four times as fast. If he takes one per day, he will get the habit thirty times as fast. Any idea whether good or bad becomes a habit of the subconscious works on the same principle.
Set times for “entering the silence.” To think of the things you want to take form in your life is a good practice. The more often you do it, the quicker you obtain results. Affirm repeatedly the things you want, or just steadily hold them in thought.
The subconscious takes the thought and begins to work it out into experience. To get results quickly you must set the will to hold the conscious mind on the thing you want to be, and keep it off the thing you do not want. You must (1) begin by thinking of the thing as something desirable, (2) as something you believe you may have, and (3) as something you are determined to have.
Then you must think the thing about yourself, and keep it up until the idea has become a fixed habit of the subconscious. Then you and the thought have become one, for you become what you persistently think about.
“As a man thinks in his heart so is he.” Health, strength, happiness, success, prosperity, in fact following this method can secure anything.
In thinking to form health habits, success habits, or any other sort, remember to use only the positive, constructive thought forms, and refuse to allow their opposites any place in the conscious thinking. You can, for instance, say to yourself a score of times, “I do not have the headache,” and when you have finished your suggesting, the strongest idea you have given your mind is “headache,” and in due time it will arrive as usual.
Yet, if you say, “I shall spend the day in perfect comfort. Sensations of ease, etc., shall fill my head,” thinking these ideas persistently will impress the idea of ease and comfort on the subconscious, and it will continue to work them out. Pain will go only when you fill the subconscious with the idea of ease.
Poverty will go only when you displace it in the thought habits with the idea of prosperity or plenty. Bad luck will end when you begin to think of your good luck.
Failure gives way to the persistent thought of success. Fear gives place to love. Hope routes despondency. Doubt yields to faith. Weakness must go before the thought of strength. Self loses its sense of isolation by identifying itself with God. Every form of obsession ends by the full realization of self mastery.
The functions of the conscious and subconscious are not an arbitrarily designated, but based upon known facts of physiology and psychology. Bones, muscles, nerves, and blood vessels, and various fluids make up the body. The tissues of the body are composed of cells, estimated at 30-40 trillions.
The muscles are divided into two classes known as voluntary and involuntary. The nervous organism is divided into the cerebrospinal and sympathetic systems. The cerebrospinal system, consisting of the brain and spinal cord, furnishes the nerve equipment to voluntary muscles.
The conscious mind, with its seat of authority in the brain, presides over this so that we move the body, arms, limbs, and other voluntary parts of the body by the action of the conscious mind.
Nerves from the sympathetic system largely equip the involuntary muscles such as the heart, stomach, liver, kidneys, and the organs of the pelvic region. The sympathetic system center is the solar plexus, sometimes called the “abdominal brain,” which is the seat of authority of the subconscious mind. Under its direction, the heart keeps beating, the blood keeps moving, the stomach digests food, the liver and other organs do their work whether we sleep or wake.
Incidentally, the subconscious carries on the work of repairing and creating the 30-40 trillion cells of the body, each equipped with a sensory and a motor nerve, a capillary from the veins and arteries, and a branch of the lymphatic system.
Through these various channels the subconscious is busy every moment running supply trains to the cells and running funeral trains away from them. Its place as the builder of the body is therefore undisputed.
For while these two nervous systems are intimately connected and related, their normal functions are practically independent, so that they carry on all the functions of the internal organs without our giving them a conscious thought. In fact, a normally healthy person never has occasion to think of the stomach or heart or other organs at all. The less he does so, the better.
The most depressing experience is to listen to the detailed account of the aches and pains and ills of people who delight to dwell upon their troubles. The exceptions to this are those who persist in talking about or dwelling on their dreadful experiences, fears and apprehensions, which they always magnify, if they are not wholly imaginary.
They are ignorant of the powers whose laws they are unconsciously setting into action, but the result is none the less deadly. Such people ought to be treated and mentally reeducated to avoid playing with deadly agencies. This may sound harsh, but it is judicious.
When the conscious mind dwells upon such things, the thought is at once sent to the subconscious, which immediately telegraphs the abnormal thought form through the sympathetic nervous system to every involuntary muscle and organ of the body. Immediately, it begins to work out an imitation of the idea originated in the conscious mind.
The effect may be only a brief “depression of spirits,” but if repeated, it becomes a habit that deranges the action of one or more organs of the body. They may not affect the integrity of the tissue of the organ. Nevertheless, they may very seriously impair its action, so much so that it is sometimes difficult to tell from an organic disease.
In this way such thoughts as fear, worry, grief, trouble, traditional notions about hereditary influences, do their deadly work, derange the functions of the body, and work havoc to our health, happiness, and usefulness. Instructing the patient in the laws of his own mind causes the cure.
Show him just how he has been unconsciously wrecking his own health. Carry it over into the realm of ethics, and show him that to know what is good and fail to do it is to be an intentional sinner. For what he knows, he must do or be a sinner, at least physiologically.
He must fill the conscious mind with the truth in thought images of health, happiness and usefulness. A cheerful philosophy such as is set forth in this book will banish doubts, fears, the “blues,” and all such like and speedily relieve the body of its ills.
We attain every good in God’s world by obeying the laws by which that good finds expression. A person may think, “I am prosperity,” until Gabriel sounds his trumpet, but unless he obeys the law by which prosperity finds expression, by being “diligent in business, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord,” he will probably remain poor all his life.
One may say, “I am health,” neglect to take proper exercise, feed his body on an unbalanced diet, fail to observe dietetic, hygienic, or other laws of health, and wonder why his “thought” doesn’t create a perfectly healthy body.
“Faith without works is dead,” said James, a noted healer of the early church. Health without observing its laws is impossible. If one does not know the laws, he needs to consult someone trained in such knowledge, and begin the truly great and often heroic achievement of knowing himself.
No single scheme of diet or living can fit everybody. Physiological reasons back the saying that “what is one man’s meat is another’s poison.” The whole matter of applying the laws of living is a personal affair, a thing to be worked out by the individual for himself.
Some may say, “I live a Christian life,” and fill their mind with such notions as – one holy day and six profane ones make a week, some duties are sacred while the rest are secular, God is pleased with poverty, sickness, anything short of “wholeness” (a whole person the whole time).
If they depend on someone else doing what they can do for themselves, they will never come to the heights of self-mastery, and will get little of the joy and peace and power that is the right of one who lives the real Christ-life.
Jesus found that the greatest drawback to spiritual progress was that the people believed so many things that were not true. Therefore he said, “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” The truth in any realm of life cannot fail to produce the desired results.
Chapter 13. The Material Accessories to Health
No spiritual philosophy of health can be complete which omits a due consideration of the material means that support the welfare of the physical body that is the temple for the life of God that dwells here for a time. The body is a fact, and no amount of mental juggling can alter that fact.
The materials that we take into the body tremendously influence its welfare. The body is the Life of God expressed in material form, just as the soul is the life of God expressed in immaterial form.
Certain laws of expression, which vary according to the form of life, govern the life of God. If the Infinite Life is expressed in spiritual form, it flows into that form by direct spiritual contact of the individual life with the Spirit of all life.
If life is expressed in material form, it is constantly maintained by life imparted through material forms, as the living soil imparts its life to vegetation, vegetation to the animal, and both to our body. The human body receives living energy from various material forms such as food, water, air, etc., while our spiritual body receives its energy direct from God.
Even here certain symbols and material forms help the process. No sane person expects his body to be fed by purely spiritual means without the agency of material forms.
Certain laws govern how these material agencies minister their energy to the body most efficiently. To know these laws is our first duty. We make no reference here to materia medica because we assume its use, and we regard the physician as God’s agent, dealing in divine powers, which many people need at times to use.
The author is not a physician, and is writing for the people who do not need material remedies, whose attention needs to be turned to the mental and spiritual powers in and about them.
Bones, muscles, nerves, tissues, and fluids make up the body. Its one supreme purpose is furnishing a dwelling place for an unseen being that fills every part of it, and governs its every action from one ultimate center, the brain. Just how matter and Spirit maintain this connection so that the vibrations of unconscious matter become conscious mental images is largely speculative.
We may trace all the steps, know the laws of nutrition, but still cannot tell how the same food will give the weightlifter’s arm one form of energy, the fine texture of the poet’s brain another, and a subtle form of energy called personal magnetism. However, we may know the building processes of the body, and the values of the various material agents and the methods of their use.
The body is forever changing. Two opposing processes are at work in this change. One is the constructive process, which builds the body, the other is the destructive process, which tears it down. From the cradle to the grave this builder and destroyer are contending for mastery.
In childhood and youth the builder has the advantage, in adulthood it maintains the supremacy, as we advance in years the destroyer inexorably gains the lead. When the builder can no longer keep the body in repair as a fit instrument, we move out to life on other planes of existence. Nutrition is the chief problem in this process of building materials.
The main hypothesis of homeopathic medicine is that since the body is composed of some twelve or more chemical salts maintained in proper proportion, a disturbance of that proportion causes its ills, and that by administering the needed salt, health would result with the restored balance. Certain “tissue remedies” were prepared to carry out the theory. People continued to be sick and die at the same rate as before.
Since humanity learned that we might “eat of the tree of life and live forever,” we have dreamed of some ideal food regime by which we might keep the body in permanent repair. We have not realized this dream, and the most fearful specter that haunts our imagination is that of being compelled to live century after century in this failing human body.
Whether the thought of humanity sets the bound or the will of the Infinite, we know that by some law it is appointed unto us to move out of this temple of the body eventually. Until then we are concerned with the question of materials for the building and repairing of its ever-changing cells.
Nutrition is the supreme problem, which involves (1) the question of materials, and (2) the means of transporting them to the 30-40 trillion cells of the body. For the cell is the unit. Its welfare means the welfare of the whole body.
About five thousand different proteins express in two hundred different cell types in the human body. Five great classes of food elements provide the materials, which are proteins, fats, carbohydrates (sugars and starches), water, and minerals.
Next to air, water is the most important in preserving the life of the body. Seventy percent of the body weight is water. Three and a half to four pints of liquids daily are necessary to maintain that proportion, and to furnish liquids for digestive and other purposes giving the body form.
Water enters the chemical composition of the tissues, rendering them pliable. It acts as a solvent in various ingredients of food and renders them capable of absorption. It is the chief ingredient in all body fluids such as blood and lymph. We cannot too greatly emphasize the purity of the water we drink.
The use of various mineral salts is to regulate the specific gravity of blood and other body fluids; to preserve the chemical reaction of blood and excretions and secretions; to preserve tissues from disorganization and putrefaction; to control the rate of absorption; to enter the composition of bones and teeth; to aid the blood to hold certain substances in solution. It stimulates the appetite and benefits gastric secretion.
The quantity and kind of food required depends on the individual, the nature and amount of his work, and the climatic conditions under which he lives. Wholesome bread, vegetables, milk, and water, with a certain amount of meat and fat, form the basis of all diets in the temperate zone, for they best sustain life. A mixed diet is manifestly best.
So that all the body’s tissues and fluids may remain in good condition it is necessary that we feed them all the ingredients necessary for their well being, in proper proportion, in the form most agreeable to the individual, and of the kind requiring a minimum of digestion.
Any diet that proposes one definite list of food supplies to suit everybody is unreasonable. We may safely follow certain general principles, however. Hard labor calls for increasing amounts of all articles of food to make up for the increased wear and tear.
A fattening diet must increase the carbohydrates. A reducing diet must lessen fats and carbohydrates and increase proteins. Brain work calls for easily digested foods. We give this simple outline in the hope that the reader will find a good book on dietetics, read and practice it.
Equally important with the question what shall we eat is how shall we eat? A typical sign of the times is, “Gone to lunch, Back in ten minutes.” Many people dig their graves with their teeth, and many others dig it faster by failing to use their teeth.
Digestion is both a chemical and a mechanical process. Mastication, the churning effect of the stomach, the peristaltic and vermicular actions have to be thorough and vigorous. Chewing is dependent on the voluntary muscles. It will not do itself as the others will, and we must do it thoroughly.
We should reduce every mouthful to a semi-liquid before swallowing. This mixes the saliva with it, and thus prepares it for the action of the gastric juice, the pancreatic juices, the bile and intestinal ferments. The process of digestion depends on the thoroughness of the mastication, but also on the still more important process of assimilation.
What shall it profit us if we have all needed variety of food if it comes to the digestive tract in such condition that the assimilative agencies shall be unable to extract the substance from it? One has but to study a chart of the intestinal tract to see that the millions of little mouths pumping away for nutrition as the food materials pass by demand that it shall be in as nearly a liquid state as possible.
The blood circulation transports the food materials to every cell of the body. It also carries oxygen from the lungs to all the cells, and carries carbon-dioxide, salts and acids to the various organs of elimination.
The breathing greatly affects the effectiveness of this function of the circulation. It is surprising how many people never learn how to breathe properly. Proper breathing is so important that whole systems of natural healing make it their chief stock in trade.
To see how the “divine breath” contributes to well-being, just practice the following exercise: Place your hand on the abdomen just above the navel and inhale, then as you exhale, let the hand press inward. Practice this until you can do it well.
Now, place the hands astride the hips, thumbs behind, and after inhaling as deeply as possible, bring the intercostal or rib muscles into play, taking more breath with them and pushing the hands outward. Now, with the muscles of the upper chest, which have so far been still, lift the chest while you inhale the last possible particle of air.
Exhale by lowering the process and you will have discovered nature’s great blood purifier. Deep breathing in the open air, on sleeping porches, or with open windows is a first aid to recovering vigor.
The blood circulation and deep breathing are also related to exercise. Most common ills, from the discomfort of cold extremities to the more serious complaints of a torpid liver, indigestion, constipation, etc., arise from poor circulation, due largely to the lack of proper exercise.
When Nebuchadnezzar – a man given to having bad dreams – developed a clear case of liver trouble, so that none of his court or friends could live with him, Daniel sent him out to walk on all fours and live on a vegetable diet until he came back to his right mind. The “Nebuchadnezzar walk” once or twice around the room, on arising and retiring, will work wonders in many forms of visceral inaction.
Besides many systems of physical culture, most of which are beneficial, a thorough manipulation by a good chiropractor will work wonders in a worn out and nervously depleted organism, and if repeated will keep the body in vigorous health.
The care of the skin is an individual study. An early saint of the church, of whom they said that “he never trimmed his hair or beard, never ate meat, never drank wine, and never took a bath,” probably died of some kidney or lung trouble.
Today one authority advocates the cold bath for every sort of ill. Another calls for hot baths, mineral baths, electric light baths, or another variety.
Some people can violate all the rules of sanity and sanitation and seem to suffer little immediate bad results. However, the number is not large enough to be encouraging. Let everyone choose just what is best concerning caring for his or her skin.
Doubtless many other points are worthy of mention in the proper care of the body. We might take even this brief resume of the essentials to show that it is much work to keep the body in health.
We do most of the care of the physical health automatically as a matter of habit, so that if we learn the right way, it is at least as easy as the wrong way. We shall keep the temple clean and in perfect health, and be spared the distress of having to call in the doctor to cleanse it with a scourge of cords.
Chapter 14. A New Generation
The primal impulse of the Infinite Life is Creation. This Creative Impulse expresses itself in living creatures to whom God imparts it. The theologians have told us that the Infinite Life is so perfect and so complete that it needs nothing to add to that completeness. Still they have felt the incongruity of perfect love that has no object but itself, or a perfect wisdom with no one to whom God could exhibit it. A hermit’s existence does not appeal to a normal person, nor to God as an ideal existence.
To relate to the Infinite Life, theologians have given us the conception of a trinity in which the one God lives in three expressions of being. Whatever they may say, pro or con, this arrangement is a large provision for the social life of God.
It is also the opening wedge for innumerable expressions of the Infinite Life in carrying out the Creative Impulse. The Infinite Life endowed many creatures with the Creative Impulse and procreative power, all steadily moving upward in expression until at last, the Creator has evolved beings who are “the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person” – beings who shall be like Him for they are one with Him.
Nature reveals this process of moving up from unconscious cell-life to conscious God-life. Critically as we try, we fail to find a satisfactory explanation of just how all these varying impulses seen in nature arise, apart from the idea of the Infinite Life pushing forward its Creative Impulse into expression.
Some conflicts arise in these movements: The moth’s body obeys the universal impulse to follow the head, and when the light shining upon it contracts head to one side, Mr. Moth plumps into the flame before the impulse of self preservation becomes operative. Despite such conflicting conditions, by some process as “survival of the fittest,” they reach the higher forms of creation.
The Creative Impulse is inherent in each form, from the lowest forms of life to the highest. The impulse to generate more of its kind is second only to the impulse to live. By some unerring instinct it finds the conditions that are favorable to that end.
The blue bottle fly does not need to be instructed as to the comparative values of fat and lean meat in the life of his progeny. He may alight anywhere, but only when his feet touch the lean meat does that the generative machinery start going. Call it instinct resulting from countless experiences of his ancestors, or some automatic stimulus from the contact of his feet with the lean meat, he attains the result under proper conditions.
A bird in the forest cannot explain why, but knows only that the voice of one charmer alone sets the thrill of Creative Impulse going and hastens to its mating. Nor does animal life understand the mystery of mating. It merely obeys the Creative Impulse set in motion by unerring agencies expressed in sound and color, and moves forward to its consummation – as it is written, “not one of them shall lack her mate.”
Comparatively few persons analyze the Creative Impulse. Poetic people call it love, the grand passion, and other equally appropriate names.
Love’s divine quality arises out of this Creative Impulse by which a man and a woman are drawn toward each other across continents and over seas unto the consummation of this divinely-given impulse to produce a new creation. The Creative Impulse within us finds its normal outlet in the reproduction of its kind, and we see its abnormal expression in large sections of many cities where an Inferno of wasting, disease, and death reigns that out-Dantes Dante.
We see the secondary normal expressions of the Creative Impulse in our creative skill in providing the modern comforts of life, conveniences of travel, communication, learning, and labor. The sex preference is the primal and distinctive characteristic of this Creative Impulse. The world owes a vast debt of gratitude to those who have turned all their energies of this Creative Impulse to creating great works and noble ideals of life.
Any of us can recall cases of young people becoming religious enthusiasts, with a burning desire to save humanity, or a devotee of art or literature or the drama, etc. In most of such cases, a happy marriage and children have restrained these enthusiasms for the time, because life has settled into its usual channel of expression. Now these early enthusiasms are not extinct, let us hope.
After the reproductive period of life has passed, the Creative Impulse emerges from the ripened experience, enriched knowledge, and deepened understanding, and rises upward into all those noble forms of expression in service that makes the later half of life the crown and glory of humanity.
Because of this Creative Impulse, superb, virile men and women are always marked by a strong sexual organization. Those who have wrought most, best and longest in the world of achievement have found that conserving these creative sexual energies in the body tends to recreate the body itself, giving luster to the eye, resonance to the voice, vigor to the step, and abounding energy and health for the most arduous undertakings.
Students of the hidden powers deep within us claim that by exercising the intention, we may transmute these energies into a fluid vitality, carried throughout the body, building it up, and regenerating it. Holding such a constructive idea in the mind is a tremendous suggestion to the subconscious mind’s unlimited command over the bodily functions, and it will do the work, even if the vital-fluid theory is incorrect.
We have only to take time to instruct the subconscious mind about what we want it to do, set it to the task by the firm, unyielding pressure of the will, so that it may know we intend to accomplish the task, and the subconscious will begin regenerating the body as a fit temple for the living soul to dwell in.
Many medical authorities contend that the vast majority if not all cases of nervous and functional derangements of whatever form, arise out of and have a distinct sex reference. Anyone who has dealt with the steadily increasing volume of nervous cases coming up for treatment can attest to this contention.
Additionally, it is in substantial accord with the Bible, the most authoritative book on the history of human life. It seems wise then to sound a note of warning in today’s language, against the prodigal waste of energy by which past and present generations are filling the world with a race of nervous wrecks.
We need to point out the rewards that accrue right now from wise maintenance of vital energies as the rational way by which we may realize and retain a normal manhood and womanhood. We may produce a new generation. We cannot continue practically to ignore how much influence that heredity pours into our lives.
In the last analysis of life, God is the Author of it all. Not only is He the “Father of the spirits of all flesh,” but of the bodies as well. The body and soul are parallel manifestations of the spirit of life, and all living things take on this dual character. Following the biologist back to the first living cell, we have a body and a soul.
When the first dual cell divided into two, the child took on the characteristics of the parent cell, and this law of double hereditary influence held through every variation and improvement. We see it in the human body in the vestigial remains of certain outgrown organs, the little tip at the top of the ear, the atrophied muscle that once moved the ear, which some people can still wiggle, the appendix, and some forty other insignia of our animal ancestry.
As we have inherited these influences of our animal ancestry in our bodies, we shall also expect to find that we have inherited similar insignia of the character of our ancestry in our souls. These soul qualities are so marked that the Bible likens man to more than thirty different animals – the bear, fox, donkey, hog, peacock – and many more, whom we have all known going about in human form.
If we trace our line of descent back to the year A.D. 1000, we are the direct channels for the mental and physical influence of sixteen million ancestors. Naturally the influence decreases as the square of the distance of the ancestors increases, our immediate parents influencing us more strongly as a rule than our grandparents.
The children of the same parents often differ radically, because the conditions of mind, body, and environment were totally unlike at the time of generation, and gestation. In view of hereditary influence, answering the question why we are what we are is not difficult.
Heredity, with the environment it produces, may furnish settings for the problem of life in which we work out individual expressions of personal character, but the power that works in us is apart from these. These hereditary influences hinder the Divine Spirit living out its life in us as it struggles toward perfect expression.
The spirit-crowned human is the ideal that sets the pace for everyone. We may not choose our ancestry but we can choose our destiny, and in doing so, we may so order the ancestry of our posterity as to give it radically different conditions under which to manifest the Divine Life.
The Creative Impulse, whose processes have produced these hereditary conditions, is essentially blind, moving in the general direction of the reproduction of species. The ideal generation awaits not only a procession of rational selection under the supervision of calm judgment rather than blind passion, but is still further deferred by the prospective parents’ culpable ignorance of how their nervous, mental, and moral states influence the unconceived and the unborn.
“The parents have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” – Ezekiel 18:2.Out of three sections of moral monstrosity, murder, adultery, and theft have shown an alarmingly increasing volume, and no doubt can remain as to the influence of prenatal states.
Recall also the age-long effects of war, which has killed billions of people since the song “Peace on earth” was first sung. War has created a spirit of wholesale murder that the cultivation of the spirit of militarism still fosters. These have fostered a disregard for the sanctity of life, and have created a worldwide atmosphere of thought through the agency of the press.
Daily the news media spreads the harrowing details of murder, leaving in the minds of the susceptible a residuum out of which further murders are born. Happily, a better informing education, offers hope. Arbitration is proving that right makes might rather than that might makes right.
In the interest of a new generation, we must balance the influence of heredity and the thought atmosphere in which we live. Yet, we must not lose sight of our divine birthright, in whose infinite power we can overcome all these adverse influences.
Many people have experienced an abrupt conversion to a better life. People explain such a phenomenon in various ways, but it is the way of the Infinite Life righting a wrong condition and restoring a person to his or her standing as a conscious son or daughter of God – a “new generation” in possession of all the powers and privileges that consciousness of oneness with God imparts.
Such a miracle of grace is cause for endless gratitude to God. However, the stubborn fact remains that such a case is the exception and not the rule, and that God puts the responsibility of a new generation on us.
We must create heredities, environments, and a worthy ancestry for our posterity. Then only will we fully establish the kingdom of heaven on the earth.
Chapter 15. Emotional Chemistry
Thought powers are creative, especially when they are born in the emotional nature. “As a man thinks in his heart so is he” – so he looks, so he acts, so he feels, so he is. We have all quoted the Master’s words, “Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life.” Yet we have perhaps never thought how profoundly the affectional and emotional nature influences the health, and the character.
Desires born in our affections and emotions do color our thinking, give our imaginations wings, bias our judgments, and influence our wills. We accept the facts but do not suspect the subtle chemistry by which our emotions cause sure and certain pathological changes in the chemical secretions of the body.
Such emotions as anger, fear, jealousy, hatred, worry, the blues and all the dark passions change the alkaline secretions to acid, and the acid to alkaline. They fill the body with subtle poisons that affect unfavorably all the tissues.
When the cells’ nourishing elements are incomplete, the nerves are starved, and the whole system becomes depleted. This lowered vitality invites all sorts or germs to come in and take up their abode and multiply.
Our knowledge of emotional chemistry is yet in its infancy, but we do know that sudden bad news takes away the appetite, causes fainting, and other physical ills. We know that headache, lassitude, and weakness follows anger. We know that fear temporarily paralyzes the nerve centers of the stomach, and heart, while hurry and worry burns up the nervous energies, leaving only clinkers and slag to irritate the nerves.
Recorded cases show that a nursing mother’s violent fit of anger caused poisonous secretions in her milk, which threw the baby into spasms. The perspiration and saliva show chemical reaction, so that detecting the particular emotion that held sway at the time the secretion was made is possible.
Every mental healer is familiar with the occasional cases in which the patient was perceptibly worse after the first treatment, owing to the conflict between the old chemical forces, caused by the wrong methods of thinking, and the new chemistry, caused by the new and healing truth.
The ancient Stigmatists, who longed to reproduce in their own bodies the physical marks of the crucifixion, believed that they could, and persisted in their ascetic and rigorous exercises until they succeeded in causing the stigmata to appear in hands, feet and side. This emotional chemistry is the secret of their success.
Morbid emotional thinking can cause such alterations of tissue as to defy the physician to tell whether a disease is organic or functional. Keep it up and you will secrete enough poison to fill the body with disease, and “enjoy poor health” all your days.
The old metaphysicians conceived the idea that disease had its origin in unwholesome emotions, and they prepared a long list of ills with their emotional causes. For instance, covetousness or impatience would cause bad breath; doubt, fear, etc., would produce asthma; hot temper and jealousy produced boils, and so on through a long list of the various ills that found their correspondence in some mental state.
Now one would not care to subscribe to that whole list, but they were grasping at the truth: Those ill thoughts do cause a change in the chemical secretions of the body, and so open it to the attacks of all sorts of disease. A mentality that is evil-oriented, with its wrong thought habits, will throw the whole body into the wrong kind of chemistry and make it a target for all sorts of ills.
Now if a momentary spasm of anger or other evil passion can produce such effects as are apparent in the lives of multitudes, what must be the effect on the bodies of those who live in one perpetual spasm of anger, fear, worry, jealousy and the like? Deadly poisons fill their bodies, and we recognize them on sight. For as a person thinks in his heart, so he looks.
Think of the effects of mourning – to clothe oneself in black, hold the insignia of sorrow before one and compel others to live up to it, constantly to whet the keen edge of grief – heathen signs of sorrow. When I pass out, if my friends respect my feelings and faith, they will all wear white, for hope is the whitest light this world has ever seen.
We have done comparatively little to learn the chemistry of right thinking, although we have sung the praises of cheerfulness to every sort of time and tune. Few people know or really care just how one material substance will start or stop the chemical action of another material substance.
All that most people care to know is that every poison has its antidote. Yet they need to know that a law of mental and spiritual chemistry exists by which every passion that disturbs the poise of the soul, upsets the mind, and fills the body with disease has its antidote.
The great trinity of spiritual potencies abides under the label of faith, hope and love. Put love over your anger and its horrid brood. Replace hurry, worry and anxiety with hope. Instead of fear, put calm confidence in the unfailing goodness of your Heavenly Father, and in your own ability to achieve what you undertake.
These spiritual potencies will set the chemical secretions right and fill the body with ease, health, and power and make life a perpetual joy. You will become a tangible expression of the emotional state in which your soul lives in body, mind, and spirit.
If you would fill your body with sensations of health, sweetness, and power, fill your emotional life with faith-emotions, hope-emotions, love-emotions, for these stimulate the right chemistry. The greatest of these is love, for it is the most influential, contagious thing in the world.
Love blesses the giver until “out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water,” and blesses the receiver, for he becomes eventually an artesian well to refresh the weary passerby with his testimony.
We have not yet solved the secret of how Jesus of Nazareth set up such chemical changes in the bodies of men as to heal all sorts of diseases. It probably lies in the fact that we do not do it because we do not believe we can do it.
Yet we shall someday know the meaning of this divine chemistry. One day we shall know how to call upon these divine agencies with such a sense of mastery that we shall produce a civilization that shall have no moral and no disease-death rate, and “whose inhabitants shall never say ‘I am sick.'”
Chapter 16. Formulas and Affirmations for Self Help
The way to self-mastery is plain. The following formula is a workable statement of the powers that bring things to pass. Its parallel with the spiritual philosophy of life is perfect.
You need not spend years of time and dollars in money for lessons. Just take hold of the handles of this mental battery and hold on until its full power gets into operation. Something will happen. You will learn how to help yourself. The formula has four factors:
The Ideal: It matters not whether it is perfect health, or personal influence and power among men, or prosperity in your material affairs. Just fill out the picture mentally.
Imagine yourself as possessing this ideal. Picture yourself as surrounded by every feature of your ideal. Build an air castle, as complete as your imagination can finish it, then go in and take mental possession of it. Do this seven times a day.
The Desire: Earnestly desire the reality of your ideal. Wishing a thing to be true is the first step to believing that it can be true, and that is next to willing that it shall be true.
Earnestly desire it for your own comfort and success. Wish it to be real for the good you could do unto others. Long for it that you may more fully express the Divine Life in you, and so honor God “whose you are and whom you serve.” In another words, this is prayer, for “Prayer is the soul’s sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed.”
The Belief: Earnestly believe in the “Power that is within both to will and to do.” Take that Power into your confidence.
Trust it to keep your heart beating, your blood circulating, the digestive and assimilative processes going. You trust in perfect confidence that it will make all the metabolic changes in the body without a doubt as to the outcome.
You lie down to sleep, without a question that it will keep your heart beating. If you had an idea that it would stop during the night, you wouldn’t sleep a wink that night.
Now if you can put so much confidence in this hidden intelligent Power inside you, just pull out another stop, and believe that it will do these things just as you want them done. Intelligently direct it to do things just as you want them done, instead of some haphazard way, and you will find that it will keep the confidence inviolable. “According to your faith shall be done unto you.”
The Will: This is the directing agent. It comes next in order, for “Faith laughs at impossibilities, and cries, ‘it shall be done.'” Every power in your life and outside it pivots finally on your faculty of will.
“Be it unto thee even as thou wilt,” makes “all power in heaven and in earth,” subject to that will, when it aligns with the Divine – you can be anything you believe you can be and that you will to be.
Will takes the unseen things and makes them appear to the eyes or other senses. It takes your ideals and builds them into realities.
Follow this formula, and it will bring strength out of weakness, ease out of disease, plenty out of penury, and personal power out of impotence.
The End
Thomas Parker Boyd – The Voice Eternal