The Universal Mind contains all knowledge. To It all things are possible, to us, as much is possible as we can conceive according to the law. Should all the wisdom of the universe be poured over us, we should yet receive only that which we are ready to understand. The scientist discovers the principle of his science; the artist embodies the spirit of his art; the saint draws Christ into his being, all because they have courted the particular presence of some definite concept. Each state of consciousness taps the same Source, but has a different receptivity. Each receives what he asks for, according to his ability to embody. In this way the Universal is Infinite and the possibility of differentiating limitless.
“My possibilities are as limitless as that Infinite in which I live and which lives in me.”
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction by W. L. Barth
1. God Loves A Prosperous Man
2. What Is Your Secret Fear?
3. “I Do Not Like To Believe That”
4. When Is Man Divine?
5. Why Are You Unattractive?
6. Am I “Good” Enough To Be A Practitioner?
7. “Whom Say Ye That I Am?”
8. What About Your “Investments”?
9. Things For Which We Cannot Pray
10. Man’s Colossal Stupidity
PREFACE
THE preface to a book, to fulfill its purpose, should enlighten the reader somewhat as to the nature of the subject matter which is to follow. This book is written solely as a response to hundreds of requests from persons wishing more complete information on various subjects, generally classified as metaphysics. This is not a course of lessons in metaphysics. It is not an attempt to change your thought; it is neither a subtle nor an obvious attempt at coercion. It is not a preachment against anything you may have ever done or may ever expect to do.
We have no controversies with anyone. As we claim freedom, so we extend its privileges to everyone else. We are studying the thought of the ages, and are satisfied with nothing less than Truth . . . that truth which proves itself to be really true. We cannot live by proxy or attain by pretense. We are dealing with real laws and actual forces, when we deal with mental and spiritual laws, and they cannot be fooled. From our own endeavor will come our own reward, only we shall know that we are dealing with a Law which is amply able to provide the tools, and which is intelligent enough to guide us aright.
Perhaps some readers will not agree with us. We shall not accuse such readers of chronic imbecility or degeneracy of judgment because they do not agree with us. A divergence of opinion provokes thought. Once when Jane Addams was questioned about her opinion of all the young girls who were bobbing their hair, she replied: “I am not concerned with the uniformity of the outside of the head—the hair dress. It is only when there is uniformity inside that I become worried.”
It is human nature to try to persuade others to think as we do. Nothing seems completely good to us unless those nearest and dearest to us share it with us, but, actually, we should never be even slightly concerned about what another does or thinks. We claim to believe that God is all, and, therefore, the only life in every individual. This being true, He is as much the life of the man who thinks the exact opposite of our belief, as He is our life. The stage of a man’s growth does not determine whether or not God is the life at the center of his being. God is just as much the life of the hyacinth bulb when it is buried in the ground as He is the life of the exquisite, personally conceived.” And another writer joins us in this sentiment:
“There is only one God. We search after Him in different ways, we use different words in our talk about Him, but there is only one unity at the end. Diversities of human temperament we recognize, and diversities of mental habit. Diversity there must be; it makes for the richness and interest of life. But, when God is turned to, as the origin and sustainer of life . . . the focus and first and last necessity of life .. . essential unity underlies all diversity.”
In our system of thought, we are convinced that it is possible to rely upon spiritual law, as enunciated by Christ Jesus, with the same confidence and constancy that the physicist relies upon gravitation, and with the same kind of predicted results. But only by giving every man his mental freedom, while still conforming to our own highest concept of Reality, can we maintain our spiritual integrity.
Any book, read by a thousand different people, will mean to them a thousand different things. If you have an inquiring mind, you will likely find some questions answered. It’s up to you!
E. S. H.
INTRODUCTION
THE teachings of Religious Science, briefly and helpfully interpreted in this book, are, in the last analysis, the fundamental truths underlying the religious and philosophical faiths of mankind. They are not new in the sense of being a new revelation or a new discovery but are, in fact, as old as human thinking about the mystery of life. By an inborn necessity of his nature, man has ever been a restless seeker after truth; and more especially that truth in which is involved the meaning of his own being in the present and the possible future.
It is with this universal quest after Reality that Religious Science is concerned. It teaches that right thinking will demonstrate success and abundance; it does this through the same law that it uses in healing. A successful man thinks success, for the law of mental action governs all things. Physical reaction is an effect and must follow; it has no other choice. The law of cause and effect governs everything.
It must be remembered that even the most advanced student of metaphysical science is as yet only in the kindergarten of this most marvelous and infinite realm of mental and spiritual truth. Many things we understand but imperfectly; they await our fuller mental and spiritual unfolding. The students of Jesus, the Master Metaphysician and Teacher, had the advantage of three years of personal instruction from the Master, but still they needed to be told: “I have much more to tell you, but you cannot take it in now; but when the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into the full truth; he will take what is mine and communicate it to you.” In the light of such a revealing statement from Jesus, we are finally persuaded there awaits every sincere student of the Truth supernal, a clearer understanding of the healing principle of life; and with such further enlightenment, there will follow a greater measure of success in our efforts to heal inharmonious conditions in our own life as well as those of other lives that come to us for counsel and help.
The test of truth is its livableness. No philosophy of whatever name is worth a moment’s thought that cannot be fitted into the framework of our human life on this plane of existence. The metaphysics that will finally stand the test of the highest reason must become anthropocentric; that is, it must be adaptable, in every sense, to human experience in the here and now. Any philosophy that contravenes universal human experience may well be held suspect. Wisdom was not born in our present age, nor have we plumbed its final depths. All of which means that in our thinking we may not discard or ignore the sane conclusions of the race.
Religious Science knows little or nothing of creeds, ordinances, revelations or external authority. The one thought that runs through all its teachings, like a line of light, is the thought of One Being; One Mind; One Spirit; One Principle—-a Unity from which all flows and to which all returns. Concurrent with this sublime insight is the logical and practical corollary—the essential and eternal perfection of man —the Image and Likeness of that Being, which is the root of all that Is. A thousand years before Christ, we find philosophers and sages who concerned themselves with this One crowning truth. Moses and Isaiah. Plato and Jesus. Emerson and Whitman, prophets and poets, all alike have witnessed, each with his own accent, the spiritual ground of Law, Order, Form, Truth, Beauty, Goodness, of that Divine Unity that overarches, undergrids and interpenetrates all things, including the life and spirit of Man.
If it be true, and doubtless it is true, that he is a real benefactor who makes two stalks of corn grow where only one grew before; then, likewise is it true that he is a benefactor who, by his practical mental and spiritual insight, widens the area of truth in which men are seeking for more understanding and light. Such an one, without question, is Ernest S. Holmes, Dean of the Institute of Religious Science, whose teachings are outlined in the following pages, and to whom we joyously bring this meed of appreciation. His sane and helpful philosophy of life, based upon the conclusions of the wisest and best of our race, is inspiring and stimulating thousands to a nobler and more satisfying understanding of life. His teaching that health is the normal condition of man; that sickness is an abnormal condition; that man’s mental and emotional life objectifies itself in his body and his environment; and, above all, that the Indwelling Spirit and Wisdom can radically transform the whole of life—these and other great spiritual truths, are spreading his well-deserved fame far and wide.
Dean Holmes would be the last person to wish anyone to unduly exalt his personality, or even to praise his work. These lines were read only by his collaborator, Maude Lathem, but they are but a frank and friendly statement of what folks think of him and his work. It is not too much to say that when the history of this transitional age—the history of the notable change the world is now undergoing—from its exclusive dependence upon material forces and laws to an acceptance of the powers of Mind and Spirit . . . when this history is written, then a tribute will likewise be included to him whose insight has made a real contribution to health, happiness, and a more wholesome life for mankind.
W. L. BARTH.
Educational Head, Institute of Religious Science, Los Angeles, Calif.
Chapter 1 – God Loves a Prosperous Man!
IF YOU belong to that small, and rapidly diminishing, group, who cling tenaciously to the old-fashioned idea that wealth and wickedness are Siamese twins, you will probably be shocked by this homily. If you still insist that virtue and poverty are concomitant attributes, you will derive no joy from further reading. It is our claim that neither “goodness” nor “badness,” in the ordinary sense, is the reason for either success or failure. Law is the reason for everything. If you will have your goodness and poverty delivered in the same capsule, I would still like you to explain to me why a hungry man is more saintly than a well-fed one! My belief is that God not only loves a prosperous man, but that we discredit both Him and ourselves when we experience poverty!
One of the oddest quirks that we discover in human nature is to find someone desiring to be radiantly well, gloriously happy, abundantly supplied, well loved and fully expressed, and yet avoiding any use of the word “spiritual,” and shunning any possible thought that they may desire to be known as spiritual. The fact that they are anxious to secure a material fortune but cannot bring themselves to connect it with anything spiritual, may be a hold-over from the old belief that “to desire the good things of life, while not exactly sinful, was yet an unworthy ideal.” Many wince at the mention of God in connection with supply, as if such a thought were blasphemous.
Perhaps, before going further, we should give a few definitions of these important words. What does “spiritual” mean? I think spirituality means a constructive atmosphere of goodness, of truth, of beauty, of harmony, and of reality. Such an atmosphere comes, it seems, in such degree as one comes to believe, to understand, and to make use of this invisible Presence, this invisible Intelligence, which is what we mean when we speak of the Spirit of God. To be spiritually-minded is to be whole-minded. To be whole-minded is to be holy. It means we realize the complete unity of God and His creation. If we, therefore, demand from ourselves, freely, openly, and emphatically a spiritual reaction to success, it means that we understand the complete unity and close relationship of all life and can the more fully express prosperity . . . success . . . abundance.
What do we mean by “success”? By success is meant, in this particular discourse, a life that is complete. By success I do not necessarily mean to point to the man who has a million dollars. A man might be a millionaire and, at the same time, a dismal failure. Equally, a man might have a very few dollars and be a very rich man, because he would be satisfied, happy, complete. Success means that which is necessary to maintain a balance, an equilibrium: Subjectively, it means a state of well being, a sense of happiness; and objectively, an environment that reflects this inner state of consciousness.
A successful man will be at peace, and because he is at peace, he will be happy; and because he is happy, he will be surrounded by happy circumstances. He will have a sufficient consciousness of substance that his environment will reflect a degree of supply sufficient to enable him to have those things which make for a fuller life, whether we call it much or little. A successful man will have such a consciousness of the unity of good, that this consciousness will find its objective correspondent in friendship, in love, in human interests. The word “poverty” usually conveys to our minds the idea of a money shortage, but actually the word means lack of any good thing. Poverty is the very antithesis of abundance, and abundance of good is necessary to human happiness. That alone proves the statement we have made. Could you even imagine God liking someone who was not joyous, spontaneous, happy? Then, how could He like a man expressing anything short of opulence?
Now, the next thing is, is there anything in the universe that denies us this abundance? A thou-sand times, No! Our chief reason for claiming that God loves a prosperous man is that it is only as we experience good that God is expressed through us. The more completely we realize good—in all its manifold expressions, health, wealth, and happiness—the more completely do we express God; that is, the more does God become personified through us. So, God could have no knowledge of, or love for, the man who does not express abundance! This is a little hard to take, but if God could know anything of lack or limitation of any kind—lack of money, lack of health, lack of intelligence, lack of friends— then LACK would become an eternal verity, for God is changeless. What He knows today, He has always known, and will know throughout eternity. But God is always One—not a house divided against itself —and He can never know anything unlike Himself, so we need not be concerned about lack ever becoming a Reality.
There is nothing in the universe that limits us, or that would or could desire to limit us. This idea that God is trying our souls to see whether or not we can take it, so to speak, is nonsense. That idea is born in ignorance, in superstition, in the night-time of the soul, and has nothing to do with spiritual realization. There is no power in the universe that tries or tempts us but our own ignorance. There is nothing in the universe that withholds from us because we are withholding; because, in withholding, It would withhold from Itself, and we are some part of Its purpose; therefore, not only is there nothing in the universe that limits or restrains us, but the Spirit even seeks, urges, pushes against us, to fulfill Itself. We should get a clear understanding of this, for a man is already defeated if he approaches life with the morbid idea that there is some Power in the universe ready to deny him or to inflict punishment upon him.
Every normal individual feels that there is Something in the universe which, if he could get hold of It, would straighten him out. This insistent and universal desire for self-expression, which every man feels, is proof that there is Something in the universe that wants us to be successful. Furthermore, we could not experience such an urge, if the fulfillment of it did not already exist for us in Divine Mind!
It is apparent that man has had the accumulative instinct from the beginning of his history; and Jesus did not denounce this acquisitive faculty, if we use it in connection with the universal Law: “Seek ye first the kingdom of heavens, and all these things shall be added.” Within this universal law (“Seek ye first the kingdom . . . “) is included the Law of Increase, the law of giving and receiving. There is in man an inherent faculty which lays hold of what is its own, and every needed thing will be “added” if we follow the law of righteous accumulation.
Let’s right now banish forever the idea that man must be poor to be righteous!
If, by this time, we are in agreement that God cannot know poverty or any kind of lack; that opulence, itself, should be manifesting freely in our lives, what steps shall we take to bring abundance into the lives of those who are now experiencing poverty? How shall we make two trees grow where one grew before?
To begin with, we are never seeing poverty, but the representation of an idea of lack, which has taken hold of our consciousness. A symbol of lack. Poverty itself is not a reality—since God cannot know it—and, therefore, it can be changed. Both prosperity and poverty are states of mind. If we desire to erase the thought of poverty, we go back to the thought of prosperity ( an affirmation of the allness of good) the source of which is God; and we are confronted with the revealing truth that poverty is lack of knowledge of God! If we had a complete realization of the allness of Good and our oneness with God, we would automatically express abundance.
All truth resolves itself into this self-evident fact, that the universe must be a sustaining and self-perpetuating spiritual order, amply able to provide for its own needs, and to adequately express its own inherent desires. Man is some part of this universe. Why then is he limited, unless it be that he has contradicted the fundamental principle of self-existence, and, in ignorance of his true nature, repudiated the greater claim which he might have made upon the universe?
We reiterate, prosperity is a state of mind. Activity is also a state of mind; and the law of compensation is an invisible, but infallible, government of Divine order. It is done unto us as we believe, but the belief is largely subjective, and we are all more or less marked by the grooves of experience, a large part of which has been adverse. Those who wish to experience the supremacy of spiritual thought-force over apparent material existence must claim and know, in their own thought, that there is a Divine Intelligence directing them.
We are not struggling toward wealth, then, as such. It would not make us happy. Happiness is an interior quality, a state of being, the result of knowing that, in the long run, the Divine will win; the knowledge that we can trust the integrity of the universe. Our good will come to us in such measure as we ourselves measure it out in our own existence.
All that is in the universe is with us … nothing against us. Each one of us has access, immediately, in our own consciousness, to that absolute Power, that unconditioned Presence, that infinite Law, which molds and makes things out of Itself, by Itself directly becoming the thing It makes. The good which we desire passes out of It, as though it came from the very hand of God, which it does.
But, even God cannot give us anything unless we are in a mental condition to receive the gift. The law cannot do anything for us unless it can do it through us. We live in the midst of eternal good, but it can only be to us what we believe it to be. We stand at the mouth of the river, but we must let down our own bucket if we wish it filled with the pure waters of Reality. It is not enough that this substance is everywhere around us and in us. There were thousands in the crowd through which Jesus passed, yet only one woman —she who touched the hem of His garment— received healing. The woman was eager for the blessing, and believed she would receive it, if she could touch the hem of His robe. Unless we consciously open our minds and recognize our oneness with omnipresent substance, we shall appropriate none of it. The knowledge that God wants us to live fully; the certainty that there is no Force to keep our good from us; the assurance that abundance is ours for the asking, will avail us nothing unless we use that knowledge.
There are those who will deny the possibility of a Divine guidance, but it seems to me they have not thought the matter through to its final conclusion. The universe would be incomplete if man were not expressed. That Principle which so lavishly distributes the heavenly bodies, peopling the infinite reaches of space with personifications of Itself, must have both the intelligence and the ability to provide for man’s needs. How can we deny ourselves the privilege of Its personal attention? Some will say that such an Infinite Presence cannot be personal. Here again this attitude of mind has not contemplated the full measure of Reality. The Spirit personifies in and through everything—the rose, the blade of grass, the mineral, animal, and human kingdoms. Each and all are specific demonstrations of the ability and desire of Universal Mind to find concrete expression.
It is a mistake to suppose that some things are spiritual, while others are material, and that a sharp line can be drawn between matter and Spirit. There is no variation in the spiritual principle which underlies and governs all expression. Matter is Spirit in form; conditions, Spirit in many forms. The best business methods evolved for the handling of affairs are the ones nearest Truth. All legitimate business, constructively handled, is in accord with Truth. The Spirit expresses itself in everything, as “God is all in all,” and there is no dividing line between form and substance.
When we know that our business is an activity of the Spirit working through us, we shall be viewing our business in the right light. When we are certain that the things in which we are interested are constructive, we should go ahead with complete assurance of success. The only Power there is, is with us, for there is no power opposed to the Truth.
In our mental treatments for prosperity, we resolve things into ideas, conditions into states of thought, and act upon the premise that the thought is the father of the thing. This method is both direct and effective, and when rightly used becomes a law unto the thing thought of. But, in doing this, we often contact obstacles in our thought which rob us of our good. For instance, we sometimes come up against the thought of competition, the belief that there are too many people engaged in the business in which we are interested. Competition is a belief that there is not enough to go around, and, while believed in, this thought manifests itself in limitation. In other words, if you feel that your line of business is crowded, and you must therefore be on tip-toe to keep ahead of the other fellow, the probabilities are that you will find yourself crowded out. We must resolve this thought into its native nothingness. Truth does not compete with anyone. Therefore, we could not allow the thought to enter our minds that we are competing with anyone. We should never watch to see what another is doing or how they are doing it, for when we do this, we are limiting our own possibilities to the range of another’s vision. Principle is not bound by precedent, and our good is not limited or conditioned by any good that has ever been manifest. We should confidently expect a greater good than we have ever experienced or than we have ever known of anyone experiencing.
In everyone there is a unique possibility, ready to take the stamp of his individuality, and if one has not yet discovered his particular niche in the scheme of things, he should work more for direction and guidance than for the demonstration of prosperity. He robs no man who takes his place in the rightful scheme of creation, and, fulfilling his own destiny, becomes a beacon light that others — seeing his flight—may find the way again, out there in the dark. To believe in competition is altogether false and untrue. There is plenty to go around, with an abundance left over. As Emerson said: “Men suffer all their lifelong under the foolish superstition that they can be cheated. But it is as impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself, as for a thing to be and not to be at the same time.” When the mental gate which is now obstructing the flow of Spirit through the uniqueness of our individuality is lifted, there will be an out-push which nothing can resist. Every man should be willing and happy to be himself, remembering that “imitation is suicide.”
One thing more I would impress upon your minds before we leave this subject, and that is that will power has nothing whatever to do with the kind of success or prosperity about which we have been talking. We are discussing that abundance of life which is the result of the operation of Law. You cannot conceive of any amount of will power having anything to do with two and two making four? All the will we need in that is the knowledge that they do make four. So, we must come into the knowledge that we are surrounded by a mental Principle (which operates according to law) which receives the impress of our thought, and acts upon it creatively and intelligently. Our congressmen who passed the laws of our United States do not go about trying to enforce those laws; that is left to another power, but those who keep the laws are rewarded with protection. Just so, God, Himself, since He has endowed us with the gift of choice, cannot compel us to keep His laws. If we act in accordance with Law, there is nothing that can withhold our good from us. If we fail—well, that is our affair. The universe knows nothing about negation, and God does not know about our failure. The secret of getting what we want lies in obeying the law governing what we want.
True, ideas come from Infinite Mind through what we call the human mind. But ideas can only come to the mentality that expects them, and opens its doors of thought to them to enter and pass through into expression. A man, then, before he can be truly successful, must be eternity minded, without longing to die and go to heaven. In other words, he must begin to consciously experience immortality, while in the flesh. It is asking a lot of ourselves, but not one-half of what the universe intends for us. Nothing will be lacking in our world when we recognize our spiritual inheritance. “He that hath a bountiful eye, shall be blessed.” We fulfill the law of increase by seeing all things with the bountiful eye.
I am unwilling to leave this subject without calling your attention to the inspiring example of Solomon. He was certainly not rich to begin with, but when told that he might ask of God what he would, he did not ask for great wealth. Instead, he asked for wisdom–for rich ideas— then he developed those ideas, until the world acclaimed him a man of great wisdom. Then the logical thing followed; people came from far and near, seeking his advice, and bringing him in exchanges, Riches. The Queen of Sheba brought him quantities of gold, and the King of Tyre brought him the material with which to build his temple. Do we need further proof that right ideas are the chief requisite in the acquisition of any good thing?
Finally, I would remind you:
“The thought which produces prosperity is a righteous thought, one linked with the spiritual consciousness within man; one recognizing God as the source of man’s supply; one recognizing man as God in expression, and consequently never lacking anything of God.” Is there still a doubt in your mind about God loving the prosperous man?
Chapter 2 – What is Your Secret Fear?
WE HAVE not yet found a man or woman who is not afraid of something. Maybe it is only a fear of having people believe we have a fear. Maybe it’s only a subjective hold-over tendency from our religious forbears, who devoutly believed that God must be feared. Maybe it is only the fear of what people will think about us: what we have, what we do, or how we look. There are various sources from which people derive fear, and there are certain fundamental fears which practically all people have. The fear of death is the Goliath which slays the multitudes. The reason this is such a great fear is not only because we cannot bear the thought of leaving behind the people whom we love, but because it involves an uncertainty of the future. And this fear of death—which is actually the father of practically every fear—involves all uncertainty: fear of lack, lack of time, lack of friends, lack of health, and lack of economic security. That is one of the greatest fears in the world today. When this economic thing shall be intelligently worked out, as it most certainly will be, a large part of the objective fears of man will disappear with it. Of course, we can understand the fear of physical suffering, not only because of the discomfort and pain, but because it disturbs all the normal relationships of life.
If your particular fear does not come under any of the heads we have mentioned, there is still another fear, which is as great as the fear of death, and that is the fear of life; the fear of people, the fear which comes from sensitiveness. In some respects, this is the worst fear that can take hold of one. I do not know if there is any way of weighing and measuring it as against other fears, but there is no fear greater than the fear of life.
Let us consider these fears—yours, mine, our neighbor’s—try to analyze them and see what is behind them, where they come from, and whether or not we shall be able to do anything about get-ting rid of them. It is our natural supposition that no man is harboring any “pet” fear just for the fun he gets out of it. All men certainly want to express freedom, whether they know it or not.
First, we will consider the fear of death. Where shall we go when we die? That is certainly one of the big questions in our mind. Where shall we take this mind and this subtle body? We are tremendously concerned about this body. And we should be, for we are assured that it is the “temple of the Holy Ghost.” So, what will become of it? If today is the logical continuance of yesterday, then all the tomorrows that stretch down the vistas of eternity will be a continuity of experience and remembrance. We shall keep on keeping on. All the evidence that comes to us, from all the sources of knowledge, bears us out in this assertion. We shall continue in our own individual stream of consciousness, but forever and ever expanding. Not less but ever more; more, and still more.
When we came into this life, we were met by loving friends who cared for us until we were able to care for ourselves. Going from the known to the unknown, and judging the future by the past, we can believe that when we enter the larger life there will be loving hands to greet us and loving friends to care for us until we become accustomed to our new surroundings. It seems to me that our work in the next world must be a continuation of our work in this one.
But—a little more about what becomes of this body. Shall we become spirits, when we pass from this plane, or shall we have real, tangible bodies? Shall we recognize each other? My belief is that we are spirits now, as much as we ever shall be. And we are able to recognize each other now by our minds—by our use of the One Mind—and by this same Mind, we shall recognize each other throughout eternity. But, shall we have bodies through which to function? It seems to me that we shall. We have bodies here, why not hereafter? If the soul clothes itself in form here, and if it continues to live after the passing of the physical body, it seems logical to conclude that it will still need a body. The soul must take form, if we are to recognize each other. Without form, it would automatically return to, and mingle with, that undifferentiated Substance, out of which it was created. If the soul can create a body here, I see no reason why it cannot create one hereafter. But, the question might arise: “Out of what does the soul create such a body?” We should realize that God’s world is not limited to one plane. I can conceive of a matter more subtle than the kind we are in the habit of handling. The new idea of ether beautifully supplies a theory, to fit this need. From it, I draw the conclusion that there could be a real body within the one I now have; just as solid, just as tangible, just as definitely outlined, and every bit as real. This would give us the body of the resurrection within the one we now use.
If we could be made to realize the eternity of our being, death would lose its sting and the grave its victory. We should then no longer rebel about those who have gone before, knowing we shall all go sooner or later. What difference can it make when we go or how? Nature believes in change, and she allows us to stay in one place just long enough to gather the experience necessary to the unfolding and advancement of the soul. It is change that saves us. If there were no change, we would become too set, too rigid, too inflexible.
As to the fear of physical suffering, we shall be able to overcome that when we are positive in our own minds that it is neither intended, divinely ordained, nor endowed with permanence. Then, and not until then, will we believe we can escape from the bondage of suffering. I do not know any man, either in this thought or out of it, who has entirely overcome all the ills of the flesh; but I do know the greatest aid that can come to him is to rid his mind of all fear. Once fear is aroused, it dominates the conscious operations of mind and body. We have no fight with doctors, medicine, surgery, hospitals. We believe in everything that makes for the wellbeing of man, mentally and physically; but many of the greatest doctors in the world agree with us today that there is not a sick person on earth, who would not be far better off, if he consciously cooperated with spiritual healing, recognizing the fact that all things are Divine; that each thing in its place is best; and that God uses every avenue for expression.
A hundred years ago, it was considered quite the thing for a woman to be “delicate.” The greater her opportunities for leisure, the more one heard about her ailments. But the world is changing. Many people now are ashamed to let anyone know when they are ill. They have at least sensed the fact that it is not natural to be sick. And thousands are recognizing, in varying degrees, the necessity of making their minds impregnable to the fear of disease. To many is coming the knowledge and faith that there is a Great Power everywhere, which works toward good rather than bad. And this is our release: seeing that there is no power in the universe against us. As God cannot behold evil, it follows He does not know disease. Therefore disease is not a thing of itself, never was, and never can be. We must conclude then that the Great Physician within us, which already has created us in His own “image and likeness,” senses us as perfect; and when our sense of that perfection shall be complete, then perfection will be manifest in and through us. This consciousness of the ever-present availability of good, will go a long way toward eradicating the fear of disease.
Then, let us take up the fear of life—the fear of people, the fear of being misunderstood. Generally speaking, the man who is misunderstood, who is frequently criticized, is likely to be doing something worthwhile. It’s the person with whom everyone agrees that is lost in the mass of mediocrity. The head that lifts itself above the others has the rock thrown at it, so don’t be concerned when people criticize you. Of course, it is normal to want people to like us, and a good thing to say to ourselves, when people criticize, is: “If people knew me better, they would like me.” Which is literally true, for if we could know every man in the right way, we would certainly find something in him to admire.
Often, the reason we are disturbed when people say unkind things is because we have a sense of our own inadequacy. This can be cured. A bit of conceit would cure it, but that is using one ill to erase another—a counter irritation, like applying a mustard plaster on your neck which burns so that you forget your first pain. Truly speaking, the man with a sense of inferiority and the man who is conceited are, alike, just mentally sick people. No one is great and no one is small. This is obviously true, for every human being has immediate access to GOOD, by his own acceptance, and every man can have all of it that he can embody.
However, there is no objective thing one can do, when suffering from a hurt, without becoming arrogant—which the whole world now recognizes as a defense mechanism. Besides, it does no good, for in the silence of his own soul, the person is still suffering, no matter how arrogant he may appear. That is why we can feel nothing but pity for the sarcastic man. We know we are looking at a man who is attempting to hide his own hurt.
Naturally, we want to get over this feeling hurt, this fear of what other people think about us. How comforting it is to know that we do not have to heal ourselves of what the other man thinks about us or about anyone. We need only to heal ourselves of what we think. Let’s begin by trying to love all people. It can be done. As we come to understand that a man’s shortcomings are merely his diseases, just as the Measles and Mumps, just some place that his thinking became warped, we can no more censure him than we would condemn ourselves for holding a distorted viewpoint. And if ever we become so perfect that we do not have any diseases, then we shall never see them in anyone else, and in this conscious unity with our good, people will be healed by the very atmosphere of our presence.
As individuals, working out our freedom, we want to get away from argument; away from hurts, away from trying to force our opinions on people, away from pretending, away from the feeling that we have to suffer other people’s criticism.
This can be done in one, and only one, way; and that is by seeing right through all this camouflage to the Eternal Spirit back of each one of us—the One Mind, in which we all “live and move and have our being.” All are made out of the same Stuff. When we unify, in love, with Life, we talk in a universal language with which we can speak to prince or pauper.
Now, we come to another great fear—the fear of WANT, in all its ramifications. We cannot call it stupid, but it is one of the most amazing sights that civilization has ever witnessed: a land of plenty, filled with abundance, and thousands unable to sleep because of their fear of not having enough to eat, enough to wear, enough with which to pay their rent, and so on. We are neither blaming the rich man because he has more than we; nor are we blaming ourselves that we have less, but we know when we shall have learned how to live, such a state will not exist again.
Life, thus far, has been subject to want, according to economic cycles of stupidity, and we may never arrive in this life at how to live correctly. When the collective intelligence of the race shall arrive at a concept of freedom, the human race will be free, and not until then. We only ex-change one kind of bondage for another, when we attempt to compel freedom. There is no way by which we can compel people to love one another. When we are ready for universal love, we shall have it. I do not know how long it will take the world to acquire sense enough to live together in loving comradeship, working together, playing together, and developing together.
But, is there any way that we, as individuals, may learn how to do away with want? I think so. We cannot wait for the world to become happy. Jesus made it plain that the place to begin is in individual consciousness, “First cast the beam out of thine own eye . . . ” If we do this, we do not need to worry about whether the world is progressing or not. All the great stirrings of the world today are the result of a change of thought in one individual first, then his community, then his State, and so on. There is good enough to go around, and we as individuals must think right and share in that good.
If we are thinking clearly, we shall know that it is not going to rob anyone else if we have enough. Christ said that He came that we might “have life more abundantly,” and since nature has already provided enough, it must be that when we know how to take it, we shall have it. By merging mentally and spiritually into the consciousness that there is enough to go around, we shall overcome the fear of want, and we shall overcome want, at the same time, because they are one and the same thing—the thought and the image.
We are subject to, and the servant of, anything that we obey emotionally, and unfortunately our possessions often possess us. If we could only come to know that there is such a thing as spiritual Substance, and that that substance is limitless and omnipresent, and that it takes form in our experience according to the mold we give it, then the only need would be to open our consciousness to It, and we should be able to demonstrate what we needed. It would be folly to think of saving it, for the supply would be ever available. We would then be no more apt to hoard wealth than we are to save the water we failed to drink from a particular glass. We always know we can get more.
You are aware, the law of Nature is use or lose, and we shall find that the new economics will have that law as one of its fundamental factors. The people who are truly prosperous are generous souls. Even our intellects become sluggish if unused. Our muscles become flabby from lack of use. Talents unused seem to disappear. We must bear in mind that there is an inflow and only by using the outflow to pass the blessings on do we widen the channel for the inflow. This thought alone should cure us of any thought that we have by hoarding.
Jesus lived and taught, but His having lived will be no salvation for us unless we go and do likewise. It is only our conscious unity with good that saves. Abundance will come to every individual when he is wed to it and is conscious of that union. We shall all get over our fear of want, when we come to such a consciousness of spiritual Substance that we can know that everything we do brings to us that which we need.
I haven’t yet spoken of the fear of punishment. You may be puzzled as to whether we shall be rewarded for our virtues and punished for our mistakes. I believe that we shall be. But, by punishment and reward, I do not mean anything other than that sin is a mistake and punishment a consequence. There could not be a God who either punishes or rewards. To believe so, would be a concept of dualism, a house divided against itself . . . a King angry one day and loving the next. Unthinkable ! I believe in law, a law that governs all things and all people. If we make mistakes, we suffer. We do this right here now, and shall, no doubt, do so hereafter. Reward and punishment are the logical outcomes of the uses we make of life. But this problem never enters the mind of one who is at peace with himself and with life. First of all, in the step to overcome any fear, is to concede that God is for us. This done, we have at once overcome the fear by seeing that there is nothing to be afraid of. The world is all right, and we can meet it on its own terms, but let’s meet it constructively, as a gloriously becoming thing, knowing that the Kingdom of God inhabits every soul; and no one has ever tried and failed in a conscious cooperation with the universe itself.
Only one injunction would I leave with you, the words of the apostle James: “He that wavereth is like a wave of the sea, driven by the wind and tossed. Let not that man think he shall receive anything of the Lord.”
Maybe I have touched upon your specific brand of fear and maybe I haven’t, but you are King in the domain of your mind; and the genius of God is under the command of your choice. If you harbor thieves, you do it with your eyes open. It’s up to you!
Chapter 3 – “I Do Not Like to Believe That”
ONE of the greatest stumbling blocks in any man’s spiritual advancement is dishonesty: the refusal to honestly face an idea, if that idea happens not to please him. This comes, in part, from the human tendency to take the line of least resistance, whether it be in our more physical endeavors or in the operation of our mind. Confronted with an idea that repudiates one we have held for years, we go far out of our way, entirely around the idea, to keep from being compelled to analyze, and, possibly, to absorb it. Our cry is, “I do not like to believe that!”
Back of this, you must see, is the fear that an idea may be forced into our consciousness which will uncover to us our own responsibility. If we are falling behind in the race of life, we don’t like to think it is our fault. If we are experiencing physical discomfort, we attribute it to the weather, to long hours of work, to inherited tendencies to certain diseases, to the food that went into our stomachs . . . to anything rather than to the ideas we entertained. If we seem less successful than our neighbor (and it seems difficult for us not to compare ourselves with some neighbor, absurd as it is) we say to ourselves, “It is because I did not have as good a start in life.” “It is because he has a pull that I do not have,” or some other excuse equally as ridiculous, rather than face the fact that we are the actual creators of our own destiny. We do not like to believe that.
Every normal-minded person believes in something greater than himself. Every scientific person is compelled to admit that there is an intelligence in the universe, whether he ascribes the elements of personality to it or not. It is not a mark of intelligence to deny a supreme Something in the universe. Some of us feel there is an absolute and positive Presence in the universe, to which we may consciously come, and which will consciously respond to us. But in speaking of this Universal Presence, we do not think for a minute that It blesses some and damns others, but rather responds to everyone who approaches it.
Do you ask why we have a right to believe this? From the simple reason that we can talk to one another and be understood by one another. So far as we understand the law of intelligence, we may set it down as axiomatic that intelligence responds to intelligence, intelligently. That is why we can converse and understand each other. If this is true of man, the part, why is it not true of the Whole? That seems to me the simplest possible manner by which to arrive at the conclusion that Universal Intelligence, if It exists, must respond to us. So, I am quite certain, whether we understand it or not, no matter how far we go with our metaphysical abstractions, God is more than an infinite IT, more than a cold Principle, without any motivation of feeling and emotion. It is quite likely we are willing to believe this.
When we are told there is no such thing as an individual good; that as we claim great ability, great opportunities, great happiness, we are recognizing these things for every man whose consciousness is open to receive them. Perhaps we say: “I don’t like to believe that.” Maybe we think the other man can attend to his own business; he can make his own affirmations of good He can. But all blessings that we claim as belonging to us, as perfect man, are also the qualities of real man everywhere. All blessings from God are as impersonal as the sun and rain. The soil will produce just as beautiful strawberries for the man with only two teeth as it will for you and me, if that man uses correctly the law governing the planting of strawberries, whether we like to believe it or not.
If you tell me about the beauties of some mountain scene I have never experienced, I get from you a word picture, but I do not have the thing in the same way that you have it. It is now yours, and when I experience it, it is mine. Why, then, may we not feel justified in believing that this Universal Mind and Presence is at this moment all around us and within us, and as we wake up to a perception of Its Presence, It wakes up to us, so to speak, and flows in us and is us. In such degree as we embody It, It embodies us.
We all look about us and discover we have a certain physical environment. We may like it or we may not like it. We may think it is beautiful or we may think it is ugly; we may say it is friendly or we may say it is not friendly. But, regardless of this, each one’s environment is going to be to him what he is to it. If we do not like it, there is nothing in all the universe that denies us the privilege of changing it. That sounds all right to you, now, for you are thinking perhaps I am speaking of something outside of you; something you may do with your hands, with hammer and nails, with cars or horses, something that functions entirely on the physical plane.
We are not talking about that at all. We are speaking of the realm of your mind. You create what you choose by thinking it. Obviously, God could not create man, with the gift of free choice, without making him able to think, and he cannot think without bringing upon himself the results of his thinking. Universal Mind has no choice but to create the thought that is given to it. If it could contradict that thought, it would be recognizing something outside of Itself, and would not be a unit. There is nothing which we see, in the entire universe, whether it be a tree, a stove, a man, or a bird, other than a thought objectified. It could not be there if it were not made out of Mind, for that is all there is to make anything out of. We are appalled at this responsibility. Again we say: “I don’t like to believe that.”
As a matter of fact, this should be the most comforting thought ever entertained by us: that thought is creative, because with it comes the realization that it is creative only because we are using the Mind of God. What greater thought can ever come to us than the realization that God is with us. “If God be for us, who shall be against us?” To the man who understands, and will take the position that he wishes to work in union with the Power of Good, will come all the power that he can conceive of and believe! Such a man will then know that he cannot fail in what he really wants to do, and can have what he really wants to have.
I do not care whether we call God the Spirit or the Mind, or whether we call Him the Creative Principle, or the Universal Mind, or the Heavenly Father, or something else—one thing we must learn that it does not matter what we call anything; the only thing that matters is that we have the right idea about the things to which we give a name. The Divine Reality responds alike to the symbol of the cross or the crescent. We should think of our spirit as being part of the Universal Spirit, and of our minds as open to the Divine Influx. As any specific knowledge must come from the center of all knowledge, it follows that whenever and wherever the mind of man is open to the Divine Influx, it will receive instructions directly from the Source of all. Science, invention, art, literature, philosophy and religion have one common center from which is drawn all knowledge.
But we must not overlook what we term negative thoughts; thoughts of hate, of lack, of jealousy, of greed. Universal Mind takes these and brings them back to us—multiplied. Undoubtedly, we will not like this. We are perfectly willing to concede that we help ourselves somewhat by uplifting thoughts. Maybe we go so far as to admit that spiritual thought is creative. But negative thoughts — surely they have no power to do anything? Just the power that we give them. The Creative Substance cannot refuse to take the form that our thoughts give It. It doesn’t know “good” or “bad” thoughts; It knows only to multiply and return to us that which we ordered by our thinking. We cannot break the Law: “It is done unto you as you believe.” We cannot express freedom when we are in bondage to negative beliefs. We had better obey the whole law, if we expect perfect results.
When confronted with undesirable conditions in harmony and lack—we know they are not the result of obedience to the law. We know we have been betrayed by an erroneous thought, and we will not allow any self-righteousness to dull our ability to separate the real from the false. We will declare our unity with Good, and know that the law of our being is a law of annihilation to anything unlike itself.
No matter how often we say, “I do not like to believe that,” we must remember we are not dealing with a field about which we can say I do, or do not, like to believe thus and so. It is not a question of likes and dislikes. It is only a question of what is so and what is not so.
And this body of ours—the objective manifestation of the invisible principle of life—is always an effect. It cannot by any possibility be a cause. So, if we would change conditions in the body, our only alternative is to go back to the cause in Mind, and make the change there.
When we speak of the body of a man’s affairs, we refer to the outward condition of his circumstances. His business or his environment (which is always an effect of his inner life) can be changed by changing the thought about the conditions.
God does not bestow the gift of abundance upon this or that man. God does not know whether you and I have much or little. The Source of our supply is unlimited and it rests with us how much we will embody.
Every time we say that our environment is against us, we are cursing it, and cursing ourselves in our relationship to it. Let’s erase any principle of hate—the tare of the wheat, the Devil grass of the lawn. Let’s pull it up and leave only the principle of right action. Let us bless our environment, visualize it and idealize it in thought and imagination. We should meditate, or think, an environment into existence, which is like the thing we feel will make us happy. The existence of life or form is from within and never from without. So I think we have a perfect right to contemplate our environment. The environment should be contemplated as joy, as love, as appreciation, as recognition. I hear so many people say, “I do this or I do that and am never paid for it.” It is impossible for a man to be compensated for his work if he refuses to be compensated. If we contemplate our environment as not appreciating us, then we shall get back from it in kind—we will not be paid.
Once and for all, I wish we might convince ourselves that it is as important to comply with the Law on the unseen side of life as it is to abide by law in the manifest world. If you were given a recipe for a cake that you had particularly enjoyed; and you prepared to bake one just like it, would you—with all the ingredients before you and the recipe in your hand—say, “I am not going to put in any flour. I do not like flour. I do not like to believe that flour should go into this cake?” Your own sanity would prevent that. You would know there were certain standards that you must live up to if you hoped to produce a cake of the kind and quality you had in mind.
If you drive your own automobile, you would not say: “Today, I am going to drive this car without gas. I do not like the smell of gas. I do not like to think this car requires gas in order to run.” If you were in your car and attempting to operate it in this manner, you would probably be sent to the nearest psychopathic ward.
Yet, knowing that law is God’s method of operation; that law obtains throughout all nature, governing both the seen and the unseen, we insist on doing things in our own way, simply because we like it better. Will we like the results better?
Heretofore, maybe we have been unconscious creators, so let’s not condemn ourselves, but when we realize that by perfectly understanding the law—and working with it—we shall be able to bring into our lives just what we wish, let us accept this power, with love and gratitude, and never again be heard remarking: “I do not like to believe that.”
Chapter 4 – When Is Man Divine?
SOME one has said that half a loaf is better than no bread, and ignorant faith is better than no faith. So perhaps we made some progress when our religious convictions were rooted in the Divine, even when we were convinced that Divinity was outside of, and vastly removed from, us.
For the first time in the history of human thought, we are coming to the place where intelligent people are setting about to rediscover man. People are becoming afraid of what the intellect, uncontrolled by spiritual ideals, may do to the human race. Many modern, scientific men are turning, with great earnestness, in an endeavor to find something that gives value to life, other than the mere uncovering of mechanical force and energy. Too much knowledge with too little wisdom is dangerous.
If a man is seeking God, and if he happens to have the ability to think straight through, he will arrive at the inevitable conclusion that the discovery of God will have to come through the discovery of himself. This calls for an absolute unity between God and man; not a unity someday to be attained, but one that exists now; that existed before he found it out; and would have existed just the same if man had never made the discovery. Thus we realize that man is immortal now, whether he knows it or not. If this is not true—if he is not immortal now—there is nothing he can do to achieve immortality.
As man mentally retraces his steps to the Source of his being — God — there gradually awakens in the human consciousness a concept of itself which is transcendent of the objective form. Every individual who lives finds that the great within of himself is immersed in God and is God, even while the great mental makeup of himself is the result of his experience. The physical makeup is merely an image, cast as a reflection into the mirror of his experience. Man walks back and forth, enslaved by the shadows of the walls he has cast between himself and Reality. The shackles are phantoms; they are not real and the Truth alone has the power to strike them from him.
I do not need to remind you that it is upon the belief that man is an incarnation of God, and, because he is, his life is endless, that the whole structure of Christianity is built. And it is upon the same structure that every other great religion the world has ever known has been built. It is upon this inspiration that the greatest poems have been penned. And it is upon this cornerstone that our greatest art has been given to the world.
We have been so afraid of mentioning the word God—so superstitious about everything concerning the Deity—that the thought of ourselves as divine has been foreign to the general conception, to express it mildly. But, we have to face facts. We must be honest in our investigation, if we are to get anywhere. And if there is anything that we need to know it is this: that the Eternal is incarnated in each one of us; that God Himself goes forth anew into creation through each one of us; and, in such degree as we speak the Truth, the Almighty has spoken! Once you gain this heavenly vision of your divine sonship, my advice to you is to claim your divinity; demonstrate it every day of your life, and refuse to make the slightest concession to appearances.
We think of all mind as One Mind and all spirit as One Spirit. At first, you may feel we are going too far with this idea, particularly, if you have not thought steadily along these lines before. But, let’s consider how far the world has gone with us. The old idea that the stuff out of which our bodies are made is any different from any other stuff, is an antiquated theory now. We now deal with the universe on the basis of an absolute, fundamental, universal unity. The answer of modern science relative to what we have miscalled a “material universe,” is that the universe is One! Science, you see is unifying matter; psychology is tending to unify mind, and we announce that Spirit is One!
If I say, “God is Mind,” would you know what I mean by it? If I say, “God is Spirit,” that, too, is just another word. But, whether I say “Spirit,” “Mind,” “Principle,” “Cause,” it is Reality we are talking about. Personally, I like the word “Reality,” and the word “Spirit,” as they do not sound outlined, but fluidic and flexible, ready to be formed.
Whatever we agree this God is, this God is you. There is no world external to consciousness, and we shall never know any God greater than the God our inner consciousness proclaims. Look into your own mind and determine whether this is so. This has to be the ultimate criterion, because the universe is to you and to me what we are to it, and can never be anything else. Whatever this Life Principle is that animates us, we did not make it. When we speak of God as Causation or Reality, we are not trying to introduce a new fashion. We are referring to a principle resident within us which we did not put there. No experience we ever had put it there; and certainly all our experiences merely tend to awaken us to the conclusion that it is there, and teach us how to use it. That is what God is.
Perhaps, now, you will wish to know if there is in this Infinite anything that knows us. Does God know me? Sooner or later, we all ask that question. Either there is no Power, no Intelligence, nothing in the Universe that knows me or cares what happens to me, or else there is such a Power, omnipresent. Of course, we no longer believe that we can pray to a God who will bless us and not bless our neighbor, simply because the neighbor does not believe as we believe. Whatever this Infinite Thing is, it is not a house divided against Itself. It is harmony. It is the all of you, the all of me. But, does It know me? Does It know you? Does It know Itself?
These are deep questions. In the long run, you must answer them for yourself. But I believe that Infinite Intelligence does know us, but I do not believe that It knows us apart from Itself. I think we are part of Its self-knowingness. The enlightened thought of the ages has proclaimed this. I think Mind knows us, but It knows us as a part of Itself, not as separate or isolated. It knows us within Itself. We are part of Its self- knowingness. Therefore, I believe that our self- knowingness, what we know about ourselves that is really true is the present level of our evolution —our present consciousness of God.
In saying this, I hasten to explain that I do not think I am God. There is a vast difference between saying I am God and saying God is me. Ice is water. All ice is some water, but not all water is ice. So, we might say about the life of man: all of the life of man is some of the life of God; some of the life of God is all of the life of man, but man is not all of the life of God. It is my conviction that whatever my life is, is God. In essence, there is no difference between my life and God; the difference is in degree. Consequently; if that infinite I Am in me and in all men is God, it accounts for the fact that in moments of illumination, we are able to see that Thing back of us. That Infinite Thing knows me at the level of my ability to know It. Its self- knowingness is me and my self-knowingness is It.
Now, let’s not be confused about this. Certainly, we could not pick out any John Jones and say to him, “You are God.” But, reason—if there is such a thing and we know how to use it —does compel us to say to a John Jones, “God is you; there is no you outside God.” If God is a Divine Presence, omnipresent, then it follows that God is present in the “where,” where I am, or there could be no where I am, or else the where I appear to be is a hole in the universe. That doesn’t work. Therefore, if I am, God is that which I am, though of course, infinitely more. This is not a question of opinion; it is not so because we think it is so; it is so because it is so.
If you agree with me up to this point, I hardly think you will argue with me about when, and if, you are divine, but instead will gratefully express your divinity from this moment on, remembering Christ’s words: “In that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.”
There is an Infinite Intelligence which gives birth to our minds, and if our minds are in league with It, then we arrive at the reason for the power of thought. Does it not follow that the creative power of thought does not repose in the human will, but in the Divine Presence? And should we not have an entirely different conception of spiritual healing, if we knew that it had nothing to do with mental suggestion, but with that silent recognition of the Spirit already resident and inherent in the individual for whom we are working? You and I, by taking thought, do not do anything other than line ourselves up with that which is the Father of thought. But could it be other than that “the highest God and the innermost God is One God”? When we seek to heal spiritually, we are seeking, psychologically, in a sense, to involve the Spiritual Principle inherent within the individual needing healing.
In other words, my mind is the mind of God, functioning at the level of my perception of life. So, to me, my mind must be as God. It is the only thing that could interpret, understand, accept, or reject. God, the Universal Creative Principle, is in us, and that is why our thought is creative. That is why we think at all. Naturally, there is one Ultimate Thinker, yet this Thinker thinks through all of us. The Universal Mind is incarnated in every one. Every man has access to it; every man uses it, either in ignorance or in conscious knowledge. Consciously using it, we bring into our experience today something we did not appear to have yesterday . . . a better environment, a happier circumstance, more friendship, more joy. These manifestations are of the nature of Reality.
The Truth of Being is worth repeating. It is that which I am seeking. It is that which you desire most to know. That is why I reiterate my statements, over and over again.
Is there any danger in teaching a man the truth about himself ? Have any of my statements startled you? Are you afraid to be told about your divinity? I think not, for when I know that the God in you is the God which is in me .. . the only reality there is between us . . . in such degree as I know it, I cannot seek to do you ill. It would be unthinkable, because I should know that all I could do would be to hurt myself. The only danger to any man lies in too rapid progress intellectually without a balance of the soul, or the spiritual qualities which alone can synthesize.
When all the nations of the world shall see God incarnated in each other, then we shall no longer have use for swords, but it’s going to be hard for us to get spiritual realization while we believe that perhaps we are holier than other men.
Again, if we insist on believing that God is somewhere apart from us, or somewhere apart from the subject for whom we treat, then how are we going to know whether that God is going to come down and incarnate? But, if, on the other hand, we are certain that God is incarnated, it is going to be a question of the God in us saying “Hello” to the God in the other fellow. That is not meant to be profane, for, after all, isn’t that just what is taking place? Though the question is still on our lips, it is already answered WITHIN. Isn’t it the salutation of the Divine to Itself? That is exactly what this self-realization is: the pronouncement of Spirit Itself, the self-announcement of Reality through us.
Philosophically, you cannot dodge this: God in us, as us, is that which we are. I want you to say it to yourself, as many times as I have repeated it to you, until it has become a part of your consciousness. The more careful the analysis, the more complete the conclusion has to be that it is so. If this be true, and this Mind of ours does partake of that universal wholeness and is creative, then we are bound by our own liberty, and bondage is an expression of freedom—man’s freedom under the infinite law of all life.
One warning I would leave with you. We must not be disturbed by the contradiction of objective experience. We shall have to know that the Truth we announce is superior to the condition which it is to change. We shall have to see that the God in us recognizes the God in the other fellow until the God in the other fellow recognizes the God in us. This cannot be done by the human will. It is only when we let go of that and recognize the pure essence of the Spiritual Principle inherent and incarnated in each one of us, that we find the thought arising from the atmosphere of realization has no adversary.
I believe that each one of us, in turning to the great inner life, is turning to God, and yet an individual is never God. He who penetrates this inner life will find it birthless, deathless, fearless, eternal, happy, perfect, complete. Gradually there dawns into his consciousness a sense that God, or the Infinite, is flowing into everything he is doing.
You ask: “When is a man divine?”
I reply: “Now are we the Sons of God, and it doth yet appear what we shall be . . .”
Chapter 5 – Why Are You Unattractive?
IF I were to ask you the question today, “Why are you unattractive?” you might tell me because of that mole on your left ear, or that patch of grey hair just showing around the temple, or because you are too heavy or too slight, too dark or too light, too tall or too short, too sick or too poor, or any plausible idea that might suggest itself to you . . . none of which would be the real reason.
You might even answer me that you do not care whether or not you are attractive, but if you tell me this, I shall know, without further explanation, that you care more than most people, and you are merely being psychically defiant to fool yourself. You do not even fool yourself, much less anyone else.
How do I know you want to be attractive? How do I know that every man and woman in the world, given the choice, would be attractive? Because all the world is seeking happiness.
Wealth alone does not bring it; neither fame nor prestige alone will guarantee happiness. No kind of eminence insures it. Only love brings happiness and being attractive is one dependable manner of giving direction impulse and momentum to love.
I have asked you why you are not attractive, if you are not; and I have stated that all people wish to be attractive; that all people, given a choice in the matter, would be attractive. Now, I wish to go one step further and say to you, without equivocation, EVERYONE CAN BE ATTRACTIVE!
Of course, you are not waiting for me to name a new brand of cosmetic that will best suit your skin, nor even outline exercises that will add grace and suppleness; nor do I imagine you will expect me to advise you to sit down and say, “I am attractive. I am attractive. I am attractive,” and promise that by such repeated affirmations you will rapidly be transformed into something you are not. But, I am saying to you, thinking on the qualities that make for attraction, you will provide a mental equivalent, and attraction will become manifest in your life. Whatever you can make real in thought, provided your thought shall believe it is real, in reality or truth must be real. This is not as easy as it sounds, and yet it is so simple that wise people are confounded by it.
What do we mean by attractive?
By this we do not wish to convey the more familiar synonymous terms of ability to allure, to draw, to influence, to entice, but rather the more comprehensive idea of spiritual magnetism, which would include chemical affinity, cohesion and adhesion . . . the drawing power of Spirit, which is forever irresistible.
In Science of Mind, under the head of Attraction, we read:
“Everyone automatically attracts to himself just what he is, and you may set it down that wherever you are, however intolerable the situation may be, it is just where you belong. There is no power in the universe but yourself that can get you out of it. Someone may help you on the road to realization, but substantiality and permanence can come only through the consciousness of your own life and thought.”
This doesn’t mean that you have done some terrible thing to get yourself where you are and you should condemn yourself for some past conduct or some fugitive thought. That would be the same old putrid dish of superstition offered in a new receptacle, and make us find a thousand reasons why the Absolute is relative. It tickles our belief in duality, this wishing our previous sins on us, but we cannot leave you so. Your sins are forgiven. But because we are subject to the law of Mind which puts us where we are, people build up a belief, and the law works mathematically and looks like proof. In any case of lack, or any case of failure, we must go back over the belief in failure and erase it. Spirit never failed, never was a failure. There is no law of failure and no psychological reaction to it. Because if one feels that he has ever failed since living in this stream of consciousness, he automatically fails today. Spirit never changes.
Your effort to acquire attraction need not be accompanied by a tumultuous cataclysm. It requires only that you become wisely fastidious in the choice of your mental diet, realizing you will starve your higher nature by giving living quarters to negative thoughts—such as the belief that you are unattractive—whereas thoughts on the supremacy and allness of Mind will nourish and exalt you. When one understands this thoroughly, one will no more indiscriminately accept the vagrant thoughts that hover about his mental doorway than one would indiscriminately accept any unchoice food that was placed before him.
There are certain points I would like us to get clear in our minds, as we talk on the meaning of the life of the individual, points that appear to me so self-evident that it would be impossible intelligently to maintain a denial of them. These fundamental points are: First, that there is a creativeness in the universe which gives rise to the creativeness in the individual; therefore, that the creativeness in the universe and the creativeness in the individual is the same creativeness. Second: That there is in the universe, and in the individual, a personal element which makes possible free will, self-choice, spontaneous action, restricted only to the necessity of such volition forever remaining true to the natural order of things and to the nature of reality. When we shall have repeated these two points to you, in as many ways as we can state them, until they have become a part of your conscious belief, you will understand how natural it is for you to accept (and bring into manifestation) the idea of your attraction.
If we make one nature the whole nature, if we make the life principle of man the life principle of God; if we make the life principle of everything one life principle, then we are able to see how it is that the spontaneous will of the universe, manifested in the individual, gives the individual the right of choice, under the law of the nature of the universe, but not beyond that. From this standpoint, we should all have to remain “fatalists”; a very happy fatalism, in that all we should have to do is to say that it is our immutable fate, sometime, somewhere, as Browning said “in His good time” to arrive. The only fate we would be subject to, would be the fate of the necessity of the case, of ultimately awakening to a realization of our own nature, and such a conscious and constructive use of it, that we would discover that we are already saved and provided for.
There is no deviation between this unity of good and its manifestation in the individual life. As intelligent beings, manifesting this unity with good, we are the most attractive individuals in the world, for we have, in our inner being, the strongest magnet ever conceived . . . the drawing power of Spirit. Understood in this sense, there is no individual attraction. All may have it. It only appears that some persons are far more attractive than others because all men do not individualize this attraction equally. Therefore, I want to deal with creative personality, not as something which of itself is developed; not something which you and I as individuals develop, but the USE OF WHICH we as individuals develop. It is true of every law of nature. Why is it not true, then, of the law of our being. We do not put creativeness into the soil; we take it out. We do not put energy in the waterfall; we take it out. Man is not a creator but a user. That is why he is called a “husbandman,” which literally means a dispenser of divine gifts. In these days when many people still believe in the thought of competition, we hear much about self-reliance, to the point that many young men think they are creating something in and by themselves. We would not have you believe that you can create attraction. Spiritual attraction is. You do not even create your own muscles. You may remind me that they are developed by use, but the use merely develops that which already existed! You wake up to your attractiveness, by a process of mental reasoning, and you consciously use that attraction to bring into the social orbit of your life people and things reciprocal to your thought. It is of the greatest importance, that we shall come to understand this. Take it in spiritual and mental practice: if a practitioner thinks he has to create a life force by his thought, he is wasting time. If, on the other hand, he knows that the creative force is, and his thought merely differentiates it, he practices scientifically and effectively. There is all the difference in the world, isn’t there?
You and I did not make this universal creativeness. Emerson recognized this when he said: “We are compelled to be Its benefactors. We are conscious, in the moments of our highest inspiration, that we are nothing and It is all.” And Jesus had no superstition about it. He said: “Not I, but the Father who dwelleth in me . . . ” He believed that God was in Him and He was in God and the two were One . . . not two. That is what we must believe. Therefore, the creativeness of our personality is the thing upon which we draw, the development of which is not its creation, but its use.
If you have thought yourself unattractive, you have undoubtedly prayed many times that God would show you what to do, that men might like you and women praise you, so that you might experience that inner glow of self-satisfaction; that you might know, without contradiction, that you are charming, beautiful, and “altogether lovely.” You might be compared to a man standing knee-deep in a brook of clear, cold, fresh water, and begging someone to give him a drink. His only need is to bend his head and drink to his heart’s content. You need only to open up the avenues of your mind, by a recognition of your oneness with Eternal Beauty, and every attribute of good will be so manifest in your life, that all who run may read. Your attractiveness will cry from the housetops.
This creativeness of the universe is equally distributed among all people, generically speaking. By “generically” I mean by the will of God, by the will of the nature of the universe. When I say “the will of God,” I mean the nature of being, because that is the will of God. God cannot will anything other than his own nature, and the will of God is the spontaneous nature of God everywhere. Therefore, the will of God is the creativeness of man—the manifestation of the Divine in what we call the human—and that will cannot be more for one person than another. But, biologically and psychologically, people are by no means equal. I have to agree with Mencken that some men are congenitally unfitted for certain tasks. I would not be so foolish as to think everyone is intelligent enough to sit in the White House. But I am speaking of generic man, the universal idea of which each one of us is a unique individualization.
Fortunately, we know now that it is not necessary that each one of us shall be biologically and psychologically exactly alike, or what we call equal. There are people very much further advanced than we are; there are people much less advanced than we, and my belief is that this goes on to infinity. I believe in the natural order of an evolving universe, visible and invisible .. . an infinite manifestation and an ever-evolving one, out of a potential, which is a flat possibility to all people.
Someone may say, because we are not all alike, that we are not all perfect. Not at all. I believe in the natural, instinctive, spiritual, unconditioned and unviolated perfection of every living soul, no matter what he appears to be. But all are not evolved to the same point in their perfection. Emerson said: “We wake in this world to the realization that we are on a certain step of a stairway and we are conscious of other steps below us and innumerable steps above us.” All great minds have perceived that same truth. So, I say that any man who fulfills himself in his life, whether he is sweeping streets, building bridges, preaching sermons, raising the dead, or running a hospital, that man—if he is fulfilling himself to the level of his present comprehension—is just as perfect as God. We will never get anywhere with a consistent spiritual philosophy unless we come to see that.
Can you realize what all this has to do with whether or not you are attractive? With your expressing charm, beauty, personal magnetism, graciousness? Or will you be like a man who was telling me recently of a minor ailment, that had been slow in disappearing. I said to him, “Are you working on it? Are you treating it?” He replied: “Oh, I couldn’t bother God with a little thing like that.” Is that the way you feel about desiring attractiveness for yourself? If that is your viewpoint, you will have to correct it. God doesn’t know size—big and little; nor degrees of goodness — good, better, best. Remember what Job said: “Is it any pleasure to the Almighty that thou art righteous? Or is it any gain to Him that thou makest thy ways perfect?”
There is just as much life in a flea as in an elephant. A buttercup is as beautiful as a mountain. And the life of the snail is to itself just as important as the existence of you and me. “There is no great and no small to Him who knoweth all . . . ”
The only way we can ever arrive at spiritual power is by a conscious sense of unity. There is one creativeness in the universe. We did not put it there and God Himself did not put it there. It is God, and God did not make God. When I say God, I mean this Universal Creative Intelligence. That is the same thing that is in me. But my use of it is my individuality. The way I use it manifests my personality . . . my charm, my attractiveness . . . the visible evidence of my invisible subjective individualization of this universal creativeness which we call God, acting as Law and Order. Therefore, when I repair to myself, to that inner creativeness, I am consciously communicating with God. But, according to my nature and Its nature, the truth of which is constructive, the destructive use of it automatically inhibits my evolution—automatically punishes me until I change my program and use it constructively. Consequently, my freedom is so great that I can abuse it, but not for long.
Psychologists have been unable to satisfactorily explain to us what a person is, yet there is a known personalness. Right where you are when you read this, there is personalness and personality. Where did it come from? We may not accept psychology’s answer that it came from our ancestors, yet I am an advocate of the study of psychology. It has great spiritual significance, unless we fall into the terrible mistake of thinking the effect is its own cause. But the thing itself, that appears to be evolving, was, is, and ever will be person. We believe that there is in the universe a latent Intelligence—the Infinite capacity to know and to be—an infinite, intuitive, instantaneous power. It is impossible for the finite to grasp the full meaning of God. This Infinite Power, this Infinite Being is, or has within Itself, what we may call an Infinite Personalness. This does not mean that God is a person, as we think of a person. On the other hand, it does not limit the idea of Infinity to think that the Spirit has the elements of Infinite Personalness; and the fact that It has produced personality is proof that It is possessed of these elements.
No matter how you arrive at personality, it is spontaneous, it is volitional. Where did we get it? We could only get it out of the reservoir that contains it, and that is the universe. If it were contained in the universe, then we couldn’t help getting it, and if it were not contained in the universe, there is nothing in the world we could do to get it. We get our personality and its creativeness out of the universe, because there is a creativeness in the universe which we use, and the individual use of it produces our personality. Must there not, then, be personality in the universe? You and I are persons in the universe. Therefore, there is a Universal Person. There has to be. It is not a question of whether you and I think there ought to be. What we believe has nothing to do with Reality, and when we shall learn to look at God, not in the light of what we believe, but in the light of what must be, we shall get somewhere. After all, the most abstruse, abstract and profound truths are so simple that we overlook them. But, I am thoroughly convinced, in my own mind, that we are perfectly sane when we believe that the Infinite Personalness in the universe is my own personality, and yours, and every other personality, because I do not see from what other source we could get them. This personality is God manifesting Himself or Itself at the level of our perception, and it couldn’t be anything else. They accused Jesus of blasphemy, because He understood that someday all people must come to know that the deep reservoir of our own mind is the Eternal Mind, God, living Spirit Almighty—and the creativeness of the mind of the individual existed in the Infinite eons before he ever used it.
One thing more we must not forget: When all of the charm, all the beauty, all the attraction (which must be the Infinite) is loosed and spilled over man, the finite, only as much as the finite embodies can catch it, no more. Only as much as we bring into the Kingdom of Heaven, can respond to us. May we, then, not feel justified in believing that this infinite Something which we call God, this Universal Mind and Presence, is at this moment all around us and in us, so to speak, and flows in us and is us? Are we not Infinite Attraction right this minute? In such degree as we embody It, automatically It embodies us.
Chapter 6 – “Am I Good Enough to Be a Practitioner?”
IGNORANCE and superstition have always been allies—”vultures born of the same egg.” And it is not surprising to find, in a country where so many years there have been just two kinds of people, good and bad, there are yet individuals here and there puzzled about “goodness.” Finally, it reaches, through some insidious suggestion too subtle for understanding, the absurd height of asking: “Am I good enough to attempt to express more good?” Because I have not reached the top, shall I refuse to take the first step? Because I have not prepared for calculus, shall I refuse to do my sums in addition? If the requirements followed these lines, there would be no progress from “sense to soul.” Jesus refused to allow His disciples to call him “good,” explaining that there were none good . . . none except the Father.
Yet Jesus did some pretty effective treating. Shall we wait until we see, as clearly as He saw, the unity of all life, before we attempt to use what light we have? Shall we now bury our one talent and foolishly expect that we shall later dig it up and find it has multiplied into ten? What did Jesus say on this subject? Seems to me I recall something about “The things that I do shall ye do also, and greater things, because I go unto the Father.” Greater things than Jesus did! Does that mean that we have to be better than He was to do this? Did He say that perfection was the thing that was required? On the contrary, He made it plain that BELIEF was the one essential factor. “It is done unto you as you believe.”
With that out of the way, it appears that we should go about the business of “doing good” . . . the business of demonstrating a little more joy in the world. Jesus fed the hungry, healed the sick, and raised the dead. If we are to do better than this, our demonstrations will have to begin right where we are, with exactly the mental equipment we have today, whether we call this good or bad.
It gives us a new sense of human values to realize that all humanity is Divinity waking up to Itself through self-discovery and self-realization.
In actual practice, this is what a man does, and all our study and concern with theories is only that we may prove and practice them. Practice, then, is the art and the act and the science—art, because it is harmonious, a thing of perfect harmony; act, because it is an aggressive, conscious thing; and a science, because it is subject to exact laws—of bringing our thought, consciously and subjectively, to absolutely believe, accept, and embody statements and declarations which affirm the great realization of spiritual perception as now present in fact, in experience.
We know this: we are the sum total psychologically of everything that has gone before. Spiritually, we are the offspring, if we wish to put it that way, the manifestation or emanation of a universal wholeness. This universal wholeness, this Divine or Universal Mind, is God, and is in us in every true sense of the term, because, as the originating principle of life, we have God, or Universal Spirit, and nothing, out of which anything and everything was made. And Spirit plus nothing gives us Spirit; therefore, every man is truly born of God. I wish to arrive at the perception that this is true, not because I hope it is true, but because it has to be. If it is not true, there are no implications following. If it is true, then man is primarily and fundamentally perfect, no matter what he has done to himself, as Walt Whitman said: “the seed of perfection nestling at the innermost part of our own soul”; and as Robert Browning must have perceived when he said: “a spark which a man may desecrate, but never quite lose.”
And you ask, are you good enough to try to bring out this realization in your life and the lives of others?
If by goodness you mean that state of being which some people think they attain by sacrifice and long suffering—an imagined condition of perfection to which they have grown by refraining from untoward experience, then I should say that goodness, such goodness, has nothing to do with your equipment as a practitioner. You would not refuse to enjoy the sunshine just because you swore a bit yesterday; you wouldn’t close every opening in your room, so that the fresh air could not penetrate, just because you felt wicked from not going to church last Sunday? No more can I imagine you would refuse to claim the greatest blessing that is yours (merely for the accepting) just because you thought you were not good enough. Isn’t it more likely that we are afraid someone who knows us will not think we are good enough? Aren’t we more afraid about what people think about us than what we think about ourselves? I am convinced that there is always something within man, which constantly proclaims to him his Divinity, and which is always pushing out for expression, but we are stopped when we remember that those who know us might not believe we were sufficiently qualified. Let’s banish from our thought the idea that the world must call us “holy” . . . as the world understands the word . . . before we can claim our wholeness with Good, and demonstrate it for ourselves and others!
On the other hand, if you are inquiring whether an individual whose thought is Godlike is a better healer than one whose thought is not, then most certainly I will reply in the affirmative. True mental healing cannot be divorced from spiritual work, and the man who is most God-like, i.e., the truest, the highest, the noblest, the most complete, the most peaceful, will be the best healer, because his thought reflects greater perfection. A practitioner may, and does, free his mind from self-condemnation. He may know to a certainty that there is no sin but a mistake and no punishment but a consequence, and that therefore there is nothing that can prevent him from becoming a practitioner at such time as he shall recognize his true relationship. But, once he has taken this step, the only way he can successfully practice, is to see nothing but perfection . . . perfect God, perfect man, perfect universe. However, it must be distinctly understood, healing is not creating a perfect idea or a perfect body. It is revealing an idea which is already perfect.
Spiritual mind healing, you can see, is not just psychological healing. It is not will power; it is different from the ordinary concept of prayer; it is not holding thoughts; it is not beseeching God to be God (God is already God). It is the actual determination on the part of the mind to intelligently—with as much emotion or feeling as possible–realize its own inherent, eternal, and never-changing being. Mental healing, in its highest sense, cannot be divorced from a true religious conviction . . . by which I mean an individual’s idea of God. Healing is knowing the truth that the same pure Intelligence, which is the volition and will of the universe, is incarnated in us right now. The treatment becomes a statement of our belief, an affirmation of our investigation; and these things externalize in exact- mathematical ratio as the beliefs which deny them are dissolved from our consciousness.
Besides this Infinite Presence (God) there is also in the universe an Immutable Law, which governs everything. Wherever we look, we see Law in force. Not only are we to consciously draw inspiration from the Divine Presence, but we are consciously to use the Divine Law, combining what is called the personal and the impersonal elements into one unity.
Having reached this conclusion, we then say what we would like the Principle of Life to do for us. We do not wish a good for ourselves that would not be good for other people. That is why Emerson said, “A prayer for less than the all good is vicious.” But good is right; good cannot do evil. Abundance cannot hurt anybody. We should work consistently and definitely to convince ourselves that we are happy, surrounded by an environment of goodness and truth and beauty, of friendship, of everything that makes, life worthwhile. It is not going to hurt the rest of the world for you and me to have plenty. It is not going to hurt the rest of the world for you and me to be happy. We are not trying to make the people around us think as we think. We do not have to watch the other fellow. There is nothing in the universe to watch but ourselves. We will never see or experience anything but ourselves.
No matter how inclusive our treatments may be as to the omnipresence of good for all persons, when we are giving treatments, we must treat with complete specificness. If we wish to demonstrate a companion or a position, we are not treating to heal some physical ailment. If someone asks us how to get to a certain place, geographically, we do not direct him in the opposite direction. Why, then, should we be chaotic in giving treatments? There is nothing more specific than mental treatment. We are going back to the Essence, God, Spirit, the Absolute, the Unknowable, in that It is more than we shall ever know, but not unthinkable. Let us try to realize not only that with God all things are possible, but that poverty, disease and other human ills do not have stages of development in Divine Mind.
When doubts, fears and contradictions come up in mind, we must turn to them and consciously and definitely put them out. We must remember a thought is a thing. A thought that doubts good neutralizes a thought that affirms good, and vice versa. It does not matter what has happened or what condition exists, we must realize that we are using a Power, compared to which the united intelligence of the human race is as nothing. We must still affirm, with an ever-growing conviction, the active presence of good in our experience right now. A treatment becomes a mental entity in the spiritual world, just as a kernel of corn becomes a physical entity in this creative force of nature which we call the soil, in conjunction with the elements. The word which we speak is complete and sure and has means and processes of producing itself at the level of our recognition. Consequently, as the recognition becomes greater, the experience becomes broader. We are dealing with Absolute, unconditioned Causation right now, and in such degree as our concept embraces this conviction, we are able to demonstrate the condition we desire.
The sooner we realize this is the truth about mental practice, the quicker we will demonstrate.
Few people understand this. I only know enough about it to know that it is. But it is the most marvelous thing in the world; it is the greatest discovery that was ever made by the mind of man; it taps the greatest resourcefulness that has ever been tapped; and it is absolutely real, whether we believe it or not. The first thing, is to believe it. There isn’t any approach without belief.
We are not attempting to convince you of the effectiveness of mental healing. You are too well acquainted with thousands of authenticated cases of healing of every kind of lack—lack of health, lack of money, lack of friends. This is only to give you a better idea of the manner in which Mind works, and the qualifications requisite for successful healing.
This matter of treating, for ourselves or another, is a conscious, moving, acting thing .. . the conscious approach that man makes to First Cause. We start with Absolute Intelligence as fundamental. Just as I know that I exist and I respond to that thought, and you respond to me and I to you because of our intelligence, Intelligence must recognize and respond to Itself. The only way Intelligence can respond to Itself is by corresponding with Itself. So, our approach to First Cause is mental, because it is a thing of consciousness. It should be scientific, because it is supposed to be built upon the theory that we are surrounded by a Universal Intelligence, which accepts our thought and acts creatively upon it. When we say it should also be a thing of faith, we mean we should have the same faith in a mental treatment that we have that nature will invariably act in accord with harmonious laws—an acceptance and belief equal to that built upon an understanding that if we put certain combinations of natural forces together, they will produce certain other combinations. Just the same faith that we have that when we plant a potato, we shall later dig potatoes, and not turnips.
The youngster at school accepts what he is told about gardening. He plants his bulbs at a certain time and goes about his studies, confidently expecting that he will have flowers in due season and of the kind that he has planted. If we could do our mental work in the same manner, how much more effective it would be! All we have to do is to place our request, believe it, and let it alone. The hardest thing any man has to do is to learn to trust the Universe. It would seem that it might be the easiest thing to do, but it is not. We like to dabble with our requests—pull our prayers back; give our treatment and then steal back to see if it is taking root. We might excuse a child under four years of age, if we found him digging up his mustard seed two days after planting, to see if it were growing. But if we, as adults, plant our seed one day and dig it up the next, then plant again and dig up, our neighbors are likely to carry the word that we are “not quite all there.” And we shouldn’t be. But that is exactly what we do in our mental work.
An individual giving a treatment must believe that there is a Power and a Presence that responds to his thought. No matter what all the world believes, no matter what anyone says, he must believe that this Power does, directly and specifically, respond to his word . . . that he is actually in league with the only Power there is. Without this conviction, our word returns unto us void. We are to approach this Presence simply, directly and easily, because it is right here within us. We can never get outside ourselves. We shall always be interior in our comprehension. I am here and It is also here. In other words, we are surrounded by pure Intelligence and we are part of it. Intelligence responds to us directly, specifically, concretely and personally. On these points, I take it we are in accord. To each one of us, this Infinite is the infinite potentiality of all abstract personalness.
God is Universal, Life is Universal, but at the point where the consciousness of man contacts It, It becomes personal. We are Its personality. Therefore, when we approach this Principle of Life, we should approach it not as something distant and far away, or something to which we petition. It isn’t necessary that we go to some hallowed spot, to some sacred precinct, for Spirit is within us. We can never find Reality outside ourselves. Consequently, the one wishing to demonstrate must turn to his own mind and his own thought, because in his own mind and his own thought is the place where he is an individualized center of God-consciousness.
This should add a new dignity to our concept of ourselves. It should enable us to know that that eternal I AM in us will always remain infinite, unique, eternal and yet, in Its Oneness, the root of all life. A man no longer feels himself a worm of the dust, a lost soul. There is just as much God in one man as another. It seems there is more God in one man than in another simply because all men have not used as much of this Divine gift.
Another point, we should certainly get straight is, man puts into a treatment what he hopes will come out of it, but he does not have to make the product. When we say we put into a treatment what we want to come out of it, many people take that to mean that we must inject a positive force and energy into a reluctant force of nature and compel it to work. This is not so at all. If we put corn into the ground, we get corn, but we do not have to make the corn come out of the soil. We could not do so. If we had to put into our thought the force to make that thought creative, we would be lost.
A potential possibility remains latent until the mind acts upon it. What would it benefit us if the potentiality of the universe lay at our feet and we didn’t use it? As soon as we comply with any law of nature, it immediately is known to us, but, until it is known to us, it is just exactly as though it had no existence. In the evolution of his thought, man provides avenues, through which potentialities come into being. Man does not create anything except the form, shape, and the use. Electricity might have been used centuries ago, if man had created an avenue for it.
Anyone can heal who believes that he can and will take the time to put that belief into motion through the Law. If we are troubled by an imaginary hindrance—the thought that we must attain a degree of perfection—before we dare use any of the knowledge we have about God, we should build up our faith by a realization of what we are . . . One with the Infinite. We should conceive of all good–health, happiness, and abundance—existing for us and for all men. We should remember that BELIEF is the weight which thought carries in its creative activity in Mind, and it must be uncolored by any meagerness or mediocrity of past experience. When we have strengthened our belief, by aligning ourselves with the nature of Reality, which is wholeness and unity, goodness, truth, and beauty, we shall see that we do not have to contend with anything on earth. We do not have to struggle to find a place for ourselves in the universe. In the sight of the Almighty—which is in the sight of our own spiritual natures—we are of It, no matter where we are. Anything that expresses, is the light that it expresses.
Chapter 7 – “Whom Say Ye That I Am?”
ALMOST two thousand years this question has been reverberating through the halls of Time, “Whom say ye that I am?” And equally long we have been proving how little we knew about the correct answer. The requests that have been made “in the name of Christ” are so foreign to His nature that they reveal, with the clearness of a polished mirror, how little we have glimpsed of our real heritage.
In studying the life and teachings of Jesus, the most unique character in history, we discover a few simple ideas underlying his philosophy, the embodiment of which enabled him to become the Christ. Fundamental to his concept of life, was his belief in a Universal Spirit, which he called God, or the Heavenly Father. This Heavenly Father was an Intelligence to which He consciously talked and from which, undoubtedly, he received a definite reply. Our whole philosophy, spiritually conceived, is based on the assumption that such a Reality exists, that standing within and back of each one of us is God, the Eternal Presence as us; that this inner Presence is God, not something else; that there is nothing between us and It but our belief. Therefore, our thesis is that every man is a God, though in the germ; that within the most humble of us stands the personification of the Almighty; and that as much of this as we loose, through right knowing, is spiritual power. That is what our practice is. It is not sitting around making incantations; it is not seeing how long we can hold our breath. It is not anything like that. What we are trying to do is so simple that we do not believe that it is. Jesus said, “Believe!” Believe what? Believe that I am I. Therefore, everyone must turn to himself and believe that I am I. That is the direct representation of God on this earth, or on any other earth. Of course, man can commune with the Eternal because the other side of man’s nature is the Eternal, and this side, the transitory form in which he molds it, is the use that he is making of the other side. Thus you see our practice is changing our mode of thought and trying to adjust it to this Divine, Eternal Ideal which has power, just as the light has power over darkness, because where the light is, there is no darkness at all.
John the Baptist, still thundering his message of repentance, could not quite understand this man Jesus, who preached this Oneness of God and man; the disciples only vaguely sensed the messages He tried to crowd into the brief time He had with them; but the Scriptures, taken in their entirety, give us a clear picture of the Christ . . . a story of the unfoldment of personality through the experience of one who was aware of His relationship to the Universal Mind and Spirit.
Jesus located God and the Kingdom of Heaven within Himself. He thought of the Spirit as being personal to Him, as directly responding to, and being aware of man’s approach to It. No wonder John the Baptist was puzzled. This was certainly not what he had been taught. Most people believed, and taught, that God was a mandatory power, sitting somewhere in the vastness of space, and governing the world with a rod of iron . . . blessing some and cursing others. Intelligent people of this generation no longer believe that.
Nor did Jesus believe it, ages ago. He located God in His own soul. And so complete was this realization that He was unable to find a place where the being of Jesus began and God left off, or where the Being of God began and Jesus ceased. And this overwhelming conviction of Jesus—the discovery of Himself—was the greatest discovery of all times. And in this location of the real self, He unveiled the mystic Christ, heralded throughout the ages as the One anointed of the Most High, the Son of God. This Divine Incarnation is not a historical event; it did not take place two thousand years ago in Judea; it is eternally taking place. That is why Eckhart, the great Catholic mystic, said that God never had but one son but the Eternal is forever begetting the Only Begotten. This is just another way of saying: All through the ages, God is giving birth to one son, forever reproducing himself through humanity, but all of humanity is the son- ship. There is but one son and this is Christ, and as this nature arouses in us, then “the words which I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.” What we try to do, in our system of thought, is not to suggest to a person he is all right when he is not all right. It is a method of trying to awaken man to an inherent divinity and perfection which is in every living soul. Our whole process is an awakening. The spiritual nature never sleeps and something in you and in me senses this “imprisoned splendor” as something that has never been hurt, confused, sick or poor. Our knowledge of this Divine Reality, according to an immutable law in the universe, automatically and through a mechanical law of mind, sets the objective man free.
This Divinity, the Life-Principle of everything, is incarnated in all that lives, from the lowest to the highest. Most of us are running hither and yon, searching for Reality outside of ourselves, when, all the while, the conscious realization of this inner Divinity is the unveiling of the Christ! It is indwelling, as well as over-dwelling, and the Christ is forever infolded within human personality. The search for Reality must eventually end in the realization that It is within. And he who seeks the Christ outside himself will never find Him. Sooner or later, we must come to the conclusion: that that which we look for, we look with; and that which we find, we take with us in the search. Only another way of saying that Reality wells up from within and is ever an inner light.
Jesus taught, again and again, that whatever is true of man—of the reality of his nature—is the Divine Presence within him. Added to this unique realization . . . this enlightening concept of Deity, of placing God at the center of his own being, was the realization of an absolute law obeying his will, when this will was in harmony with the Spirit of Truth. Logical and reasonable as this may seem to us now, when Jesus taught this philosophy—this concept of the relationship between God and man—his utterances were novel, to say the least!
Naturally, we must believe that Jesus was like other men, both humanly and divinely speaking (if we have laid aside all superstitions) so, we must conclude, the difference was not in His nature, but in the way he used his powers of mind and spirit. But Jesus had an enlightenment which, perhaps, no other man has had, before or since His time; an absolute acceptance that there is a law, which obeys the will of God and man alike—of God always, and of man when he is in harmony with God. And he had a complete, conscious realization of the Divine Presence, permeating all things and indwelling His own soul.
Teaching this complete relationship between God and man and the law, Jesus had, on the one hand, a Universal Presence—an Intelligence with which He could converse, and from which He could draw inspiration and power. And, on the other hand, He had a law, which He could command and which must obey when His will was in harmony with the Divine Will. Thus, you perceive, Jesus had balanced the meaning of the two pillars which stood in front of the temple of Solomon: the Law and the Word, the relationship between the personal and the impersonal elements of nature. Consequently, there was ever at the door of His thought a Divine inflow of ideas and a dynamic outflow of spiritual power.
Jesus laid down no hard and fast rules of conduct. His philosophy was one of simplicty; a direct approach to God through our own natures, an abiding faith in Good as the eternal Reality, an implicit trust in the Law as being absolute. But, at the same time He made it plain that salvation is not in the Way-Shower, but in that which is shown; that no man will ever enter the Kingdom of Heaven by proxy but can enter only by making his unity with good. This is clearly taught in the parable of the wise and the foolish virgins. While proclaiming this definite relationship between God and Man, He definitely taught that all men are alike. He said in substance: “If you will listen to what I have been telling you; if you will believe the Kingdom of Heaven is within you; if you will believe that God is in His Kingdom, then will Christ dwell with you.” And Jesus believed what He taught. That His faith was justified by His works is shown in the results of His life upon the centuries following Him.
Always when there dawns upon any individual member of the human race the realization of his own divinity, the eternity of his own nature, the unity of his own life with the Eternal, and the immediate availability of the Law, through the power of his own word — there Christ is born again.
This much we know: If a man can create in his own consciousness the image of good and keep it there, he will experience it, but not at the expense of his fellow man. Back of all, in and through all, there is a cause, a destiny being worked out. Each man is divine and senses that divinity in conscious unity with good, with all humanity, all creation. Unto the great has come that sublime and divine realization that the man who gives most, gets the most, by way of that law of cause and effect, which is immutable, the chancellor of God and the servant of man.
If we could but understand: God has not made some men Divine, but God has made all men Divine, by the very reason of the fact that all men are some incarnation of the Divine Soul. The same life runs through all, from the least to the greatest, threading itself into the patterns of our individualities. He is “over all, in all and through all,” and every man is a potential Christ, an, as yet, undeveloped divinity. Christ, the perfect man, is developed within us through the realization and revelation of the self to the self. God in us is Christ, and Christ in us constitutes our true Sonship to the Parent Mind, which is God. So, that which Jesus did, we can do. That should not sound sacreligious except to a person whose mental gates are still closed. When they mistook Jesus for God, he said in essence: “It is expedient that I go away; you are mistaking a person for a principle, but the spirit of truth shall awaken in you the truth which I have been talking about.”
Who is there that at times has not felt this inner Presence, this inner sense of greater Reality, which bears witness to Itself through our highest acts and our deepest emotions? In the long run, each will fully express his divinity, for the urge to unfold is constant and unremitting. And the voice of Truth is insistent. Mingled with the voice of humanity is the word of God — for Truth is a synonym for God and whoever speaks the truth speaks the word of God. Behind all revelation, behind all experience, is a unity; through all is a diversity; and saturating all is a divinity. The intellect must give its consent and the mind must unify with the Spirit, for the outlet for Truth must be true. And the Christ which Jesus revealed is already incarnated in our own nature, and this hidden center seeks to find circumference through our lives.
The more one senses the universality of things, the more universal the individual mind becomes, the more individual it can become, the more one has with which to individualize that Universality. Why? Because the principle of individualism is inherent in the more impersonal presence of that which is universal. Do you see, then, why Jesus, a man who recognized Spiritual Reality, would naturally seek the Kingdom of Good first, and then all these things would be added, because the lesser has to be included in the greater? This thought of Universal Life being manifest directly through each one of us in a unique way, is a very beautiful conception, for if it is true—and there seems no doubt that it is—then there is no one who ever took our place, or ever can, or ever will. There is no one living, no one who ever did live, or who ever will live, who can do just exactly what we can do in the same way. This knowledge would immediately cure the belief of either an inferiority or a superiority complex. While every man could say to himself: “There is no living soul can do what I can do,” he would not say it as though he were conceited, for he would at the same time have to remember that every other man could say the same thing to himself. No man can take another’s place, because the Eternal has put the imprint of individualization of Itself in every living soul. Every man is a genius in his own line and need not wonder whether or not his genius will find expression. Emerson said that when we realize our Divine individuality, then the very act creates the outlet for that act. For each one of us could then demonstrate his place in life where he is fulfilled, where he is happy, and as he draws upon the invisible Presence, he is drawing upon an Infinite source of inspiration and of Reality.
Jesus understood that perfectly, therefore, He put off the old man—or the carnal, human, finite conception of limitation—and emerged with the mind of Christ. “Put off the old man and put on the new, which is Christ.” It is a mental and spiritual process through which people go. Consequently, the “only begotten” is the manifest universe, part of which is visible to us and part of which is invisible.
Regardless of what opinions we hold, there are only three ways by which knowledge can come to the world. One is science, the result of which is facts. Another is opinion, the result of which is philosophy. The other is illumination, the result of which is religion. From one, or all, of these three sources, all knowledge must come. The great mystics reveal Universal Cause, acting as Absolute and Immutable Law. The great opinions of philosophy reveal—or should reveal —a reasonable back-ground for self-existent life.
The great religions reveal—or should reveal— a Divinity that shapes our ends. We need all three. Fact will never contradict faith, when we place faith and fact in a right relationship to each other. Therefore, the great mystics have never said anything that contradicted the slightest fact. Nor did Jesus deny the experience of people whom he healed. He did not say to them: “Nothing ails you,” any more than we would repeat such a nonsensical statement today to people who ask relief from their suffering. Jesus recognized that disease was not an entity, and knew that the sufferer did not have to endure his pain. Therefore, He had to contradict that disease had existence, from that standpoint, from the standpoint of the Absolute. But Jesus never said “Peace,” when there was no peace. While the idea of Christ, carrying the idea of Sonship, was more completely manifest in Jesus than in any man who has ever lived, the Christ has come, with varying degrees of power, to all people in all ages, and to every person in some degree.
The birth of Christ in the consciousness of the individual, is a recognition which makes possible a greater degree of this Divine Incarnation. But that birth, as Eckhart says, is forever going on.
The expansion is gradual but eternal. What we will be millions of years from now, we cannot even guess. We have nothing in our intellect now equivalent to an embodiment of an idea that will even make it significant to us. But this conception of the immediate relationship of the universe to the individual, must always deliver a power to the individual, which is commensurate with the conception. The meaning of Christ, then, is the entire Creation of God, of which we are a part, a Universal demand which the Infinite makes upon Itself, that It shall be expressed. “But, Whom say ye that I am?”
” . . . Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
Chapter 8 – What About Your “Investments”?
PRIOR to the period of our recent economic disturbance, the entire world was more investment-conscious than at any previous time in history. From elevator boy to corporation president, the first item people scanned in the morning paper was the stock market report.
Then came the panic. As stocks dropped to new “lows” people lost confidence and dumped everything onto the market. Many good investment stocks went right into discard along with the more highly-speculative holdings, and people awoke in a state of bewilderment.
The same thing is happening to us in our spiritual life. We have come upon a day when we have lost faith in much that we one time considered an authority. When we lose faith in the authority of any existing institution, we are very likely, in repudiating its tenets, to throw out something that we should keep, just as we did with our stocks, when our perspective was gone. Now, we are not alarmed over the thought that we shall suffer greatly in the dropping of many creeds and ceremonies, but we are anxious that we shall hold on to God.
I have nothing to sell you, nothing to teach you, nothing of which I wish to persuade you, but I would like to share with you a knowledge which you may find helpful. Ours is a pursuit of spiritual understanding, the knowledge of which will aid you in any kind of business. Some people get fanatical in trying to discover Truth. Let us try to keep perfectly sane in our pursuit, always recognizing that fanaticism is accompanied by personal egotism, and that personal egotism leads into fanaticism. There would be no religious fanaticism if man understood religion and its universality. There should be no danger of a sane man losing his reason in the pursuit of spiritual things, because all insanity is the result, some result, of a disconnection of the mind with Reality, with actuality, with everyday affairs. Therefore, in our spiritual awakening, we do not need to separate ourselves.
To do so is a mistake. The method of approach is to take the spiritual outlook to where we are. It is by unifying life with Reality that we come to see in every objective symbol a spiritual cause and a reason for its being. There is a way to arrive at peace and happiness in what we are now doing.
Whether our problems are social or economic —whether our investments are for today or for eternity—metaphysics, rightly understood, is a valuable asset in the fine art of living. We have foolishly thought that we could insult the integrity of the universe and prosper. But man is a spiritual expression, and as such must find his real satisfaction in the things that endure. We must awaken to the truth that essentially this world order in which we live is a spiritual order; that honesty, justice, and love are the very foundations of all life; and they cannot be flaunted with impunity, without destroying the moral and spiritual principles that underlie all human relationships. This inquiry into our problems is producing a rapid evolution in our thought. But the inquiring attitude is a healthy mental state. The world, spiritually speaking, is in better condition than it has been, because out of all the controversy, the mental turmoil, there will come some kind of an answer. And the new answer must provide a bridge between the intellect and emotion. It must be intelligent, scientific, and artistic.
It may be asked: What can one depend upon? Whom can one trust? Where shall we invest our wealth? Our advice, which we are convinced is both sane and practical, would be to set one’s mental and spiritual house in order and, then, in so far as possible, make it produce for one the necessary and the beautiful things of life. What can be more practical than to gain the ability to demonstrate in one’s experience that he can consciously call on a Higher Power to do his bidding, whenever his will is in conjunction with Its will, with the full assurance that Its will can never withhold his real good?
In attempting to analyze mind, we must realize that all that we can analyze is what the mind does. We assume certain things to be true of the mind because of what it does. What the mind itself is, no one knows. If you insist upon immediate answers to all questions about creation and destiny; if you are looking for a theological dictionary—a religious ready-reckoner, so to speak —you will not find it here, for we are not including the guide posts at all crossings and turns. This is rather a running commentary, pointing out some of the more advantageous spots upon which to rest. You will find others as you go on.
Each one is seeking to reinterpret life to himself. There are certain things which we must know about ourselves, inside as well as outside. We may look about for saviors (and it might comfort some individuals to have one) but we shall not find them. We may listen to sages— and can interpret or misinterpret what they say —but we will never find any satisfactory answer outside of an immediate, personal, spiritual experience . . . a certain interior awareness through which the soul recognizes itself as being in unity with the universe and with all other selves. The most impossible mental state is that which does not know that good must come to all alike, at last.
In theorizing on what the mind appears to be, we are conscious of the most striking fact. Mind is the one and only energy we know of in nature which is conscious of itself and, at the same time, conscious of other energies. Electricity is an energy and appears to be an intelligent one, but it is not at all probable that electricity is conscious of itself. The creative power in the soil is most certainly intelligent—multiplying and bringing forth exactly what is given to it—but it is not probable that it is conscious of what it is doing. However, while it is not conscious of what it is doing, it still brings to bear an intelligence upon its acts, so much greater than our conscious intelligence that we cannot even compare the two. Isn’t this an interesting fact, from the metaphysical viewpoint, that our conscious mind, in its everyday walk of life, is dealing with creative intelligences in nature, which do not know that they are creative intelligences, but which still know how to be what they are, and know how to do what they do.
You are wondering what all of this has to do with your investments? Before you invest money in any stock, you surely look carefully into what that stock has done in the past; who are the men who are sponsoring it; what are the plans for expansion and what are its resources, and how much may it be expected to pay in dividends. When once you hear of a stock which exactly meets these requirements to your satisfaction, no one can keep you from finding out all that can be learned about that stock. Just so, if we can interest you in Mind; if we can show you something of what it has done in the past and what it can be expected to do; if we can give you the assurance that Omniscience occupies the president’s chair; if by investing a small amount of your capital—time and attention—you can discover for yourself that it pays unbelievable dividends, we believe you are intelligent enough to look further into it.
One thing is certain, the more deeply we penetrate mind, instead of exhausting that which we are penetrating, the more we discover how much is to be penetrated. We might have so much water in a reservoir, and when we have used it, it is gone; so much money in the bank, and when we have drawn it out and spent it, it is gone; so much food in the larder, and when we have eaten it, that is the end of it. Everything in the objective world begins and ends in the duration of time. When we enter the subjective world— the spiritual or thought world, all of which mean the same thing—when we enter ourselves, in other words, we discover ourselves to be an inexhaustible reservoir. Why is this, unless there is really an inexhaustible Self, which we all may feel?
Another thing which we can guarantee you is that this great exploration which the mind makes in the realm of spirit is as fascinating an experience as you will ever have. We must be careful, however, to differentiate between this form of practice and mere day dreaming. In day dreaming, one sits around longing for things, picturing himself as being something, but in the very same moment being certain it could never be, letting his imagination run wild, soaring, as it were, into realms of fancy. Some people have done this, and upon being told that they had not proceeded properly, have exclaimed: “But you said we could have anything we wished.” In scientific mental practice, one does not just “wish” for things. One consciously uses his thought to set creative power in motion, and then awaits with expectancy the result. He is, in a certain sense, experimenting not with Mind itself, but with his own thought, in seeing what use he can make of the Creative Power of Mind. This creativeness, we do not inject into Mind; it is there already, a natural law in the universe.
The operation is so simple that one is almost incredulous on first hearing it. One pictures himself, thinking of himself as he would like to be. He should do this without contradicting the good of others, without seeking to coerce others. And he should do this in as absolute a sense as possible; that is, he should withdraw from any contemplation of the relative facts in the case, and think only of the desired outcome as being established in Mind. He takes a proposition which his mind can encompass—such as realizing that he is surrounded by abundance, and by right opportunity—and compels his mind to accept this idea as now being a fact in his everyday experience. Consequently, his work is intensely practical, and, even though he is an idealist, he is scientific in his application of this universal principle of Mind to the problems of his daily living. Whether we think we are dealing with our individual minds or with the Universal Mind, we are dealing with the same thing. What we call the individual mind is merely the place where some individual uses the creative power of Mind. Man expressing God at the level of his intelligence. And the beautiful part is that we do not have to tell Mind how to bring about the thing we are demanding of it. Mind finds Its own avenue and outlet, and releases Its own energies for the purpose of self-expression.
It is not our desire to make this sound complicated, abstract and unintelligible. The primary object in studying these subjects is to relate Truth with life and life with Truth and so transform our everyday living. Metaphysics means clear thinking; it means Intelligence, Love; it means God humanized. If we fail to make it plain that the ever-availability of Good, through the use of our minds, means added wisdom for anything and everything we undertake—investments or expenditures—we have fallen short of our purpose. Every man can prove the proposition for himself and the Almighty has already given him the power. We shall never know that it actually works until we try it, but once we have proven it, there is added to our lives and our experiences a something which will so change us that we shall never again be the same; our whole reaction to life will forever be different. We shall have made one definite step in the spiritual evolution of the soul. As Jesus said, “They know not what they worship, but we know in whom we have believed.”
Often we say we cannot see our way out of certain conditions. We do not have to see our way out. We have to know that there is a way in to that innermost region of us, which co-exists with First Cause. Right now there is a power in you and in me which is God. There is a Presence which is Good; a knowledge which is Perfect. In this sacred spot of the Most High within us, we dwell quietly and calmly until we reach a conviction that all is right with us. As we wait for it, it will not come, but WHEN WE BELIEVE IN IT, it will be there. It has nothing whatever to do with time.
We shall finally be delivered because the universe is fool-proof, a universe of law and order, of cause and effect, and nothing can be more wonderful than the majestic, sublime, and eternal march of cause and effect. Our part is to unify with this universe. There is One Mind, and that Mind is Harmony, Peace, Good; that Mind is God. We must unify with it by deliberately turning from discord to harmony, to the belief that in the spiritual world there is a counterpart, a prototype, a real Entity back of us, though It is only partially and imperfectly revealed in our human way of thinking. Spiritual healing is, and is the result of our attempt to seek out the universal harmony, to unify ourselves with the life of God.
Thus, it can be readily seen, the man who has the greatest embodiment of this Divinity is, in manifestation, the most divine. It would seem to me a superstitious reaction to believe that Spirit cares more for one than another or that Truth is partial to any individual. It comes to all alike. The sun shines alike “on the just and the unjust.” Each in his own tongue interprets the God that is, and out of the God that is and must be, creates the image of the God he worships. This has always been so and perhaps always will be, and if that is true, then enlightenment alone will create out of the God that really is.
To give you a simple instance of the practical value of this principle to any kind of business, suppose you believe you are not a good salesman because you do not make friends. At any rate, you feel the need of friendship. You are an individual, typical of countless other individuals, who is very sensitive, very confused; whose experiences have been such that you think everything is against you and nothing for you. No one loves you; no one considers you; no one plans for you. You are conscious that, once in a while, you are asked to a party through some spirit of altruism on the part of another, and, being conscious of this fact, you are doubly miserable. You are that individual whom the world has apparently turned against; the one who hasn’t a single friend.
What, now, can you do for yourself? In the light of these principles more or less outlined, are there any steps you can take which will help you change conditions? We think so. Either these principles work or they do not. If they do not, we will discard them. If they do work, it is worth our while to give time and thought to them.
We maintain if you are intelligent enough to recognize the absence of friends, you are intelligent enough to perceive the qualities which enter into friendship: loyalty, honesty, integrity, understanding and such. The first step for you to take is to become friendly in your own thought. When you recognize that you are joined to every other person by your common heritage of good, you can easily prepare for friendship by creating an atmosphere of love and harmony in your heart. Not anywhere else but in your own thought.
You might begin by saying to yourself: “Everything is One. The Mind which I use, which I call my mind, is the same Mind that every other human being uses, so there can be no ill will or opposition in any man’s mind toward me. I have no enemies. I am one with all Good. But every man is one with all Good; therefore, I am one with every man. Wherever I go, whenever I go, I am meeting friendship, love, kindness, and consideration. I am loving every man and am desiring every man’s good as I desire my own. I give to every man kindness and unselfish service. Therefore, these have to come back to me in friendship, ‘Heaped up, pressed down and running over,’ for Universal Mind can deny me nothing.” Who does this, will find friends wherever he goes. Every man has within himself the power and the capacity to know God, to understand Reality, to be divine because He is divine, and to be absolute and complete master of his own fate, when he understands the Truth.
I believe we shall all become more and more interested in these subjects, for it is my opinion that we are rapidly approaching the time when primary metaphysics will be as well understood as are the elementary principles of mechanics in the present age; when the science of metaphysics will be used throughout the world for the betterment of mankind.
Even now all men believe in God, but all men are not aware that they believe in God. The only way we shall ever know what God is to us is by an inner conviction—which will be theoretical—and an externalization of that—which will be practical. The inner conviction we have; and we wish now to externalize it. We align ourselves in principle with God, who is our Creator, the Essence of the thing desired. If we really understand this, soon there will externalize the perfect answer. This will happen according to law just as exact as the law of gravity. And now comes the most difficult part of it all. The thought and the idea must be abandoned into Mind. We have to take hold of the idea, knowing that we are dealing with Reality, and let go of the idea knowing that Reality is dealing with it. It is not easy to hold and let go at the same time, and yet in a certain sense that is what we have to do. We are dealing with something that takes ideas and makes facts out of them. As this is understood, the power is set in motion which will manifest at a level which will be absolutely identical with the mental and spiritual level of the embodiment of the idea.
Let us forever remove from our minds the thought that we shall some time get to the place where God will become available. God is available, right this minute, and we are where God is, and all of God—the everlasting good, the ever-present, ever-available, limitless potential power, intelligence, creativeness—is wherever our thought rests, ready to spring instantly from this invisible being into concrete form through our imagination.
You think you want information concerning investments; you believe you are looking for something secure, something you can put your trust and money in, and YOU ARE. The thing we are all seeking is Reality. We may call it God; we may call it peace of mind; we may call it certainty, positive happiness, absolute salvation; we may call it the Kingdom of Heaven, but, in the last analysis, it is a search for that alone which is permanent. We all know enough about Reality to readily believe that if we could push farther into it, there would be wonderful experiences to enjoy. Every man has at times felt if he could just do something to break the bonds within himself—open up some door which appears to be closed—he would step into completion and be instantly perfect. I am certain when a man has harmonized himself to such a degree with Reality that IN ONE MOMENT’S THOUGHT HIS DIVINE NATURE IS RELEASED THROUGH HIM BY IMMUTABLE LAW, it will then be impossible for him to use his power destructively.
He would have to use this power for beneficent purposes only, for POWER is only delivered through love. The universe cannot be divided against itself, and we arrive at the most powerful use of thought only through constructive methods.
Take my word for it, until such time as you can prove it for yourself: the right use of the creative power of Mind will bring you greater results than anything in which you have previously invested; it will bring you greater results than you can even now dream of, for your power of imagination will increase with use. He who penetrates this inner life will find it to be birthless, deathless, fearless, eternal, happy, perfect, complete. Gradually there will dawn upon his consciousness a sense that God, the Infinite, is flowing into everything that he does. As individuals, we must re-educate our minds, and realize that we have an ally, a Financial Adviser, a Presence, a Law, in which the past, present and the future . . . and all people whom we call living or dead . . . live and move and have their being, forever unfolding.
Chapter 9 – Things for Which We Cannot Pray
MOST people who believe in God, believe in prayer. It is natural that each one of us who prays shall feel that his way of praying is the only way to pray, and that is the right way. We are all more or less familiar with different religious beliefs and approaches to Reality, each prescribing a way to pray. And each is right for him who believes in it. Each manner of praying is the only way of praying for the one who believes it. I believe every man’s prayer is good; but I believe that all men’s prayers, in so far as they are effective, are effective because they embody certain universal principles, which, if we understood, we could consciously use, and that power which is obtained by a few would be as easily used by all.
As Bible students, you are familiar with such promises as: “If ye abide in me and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will and it shall be done unto you.” And the still better-known reference: “Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do.” All along, we have given particular attention to that word “whatsoever” (revised—whatever). And now you are astounded that I imply that there are, or may be, certain things for which we are prohibited from praying. It sounds paradoxical only to those who have not analyzed what prayer is and who have not gone deeply into these promises with reference to prayer. “Abide in” carries with it not only the thought of continuous existence in, but a thought of permeation, oneness with . . . a Oneness with God, wherein man may ask what he will and it will be given him. When man recognizes his oneness with Good, what can he ever ask aside from good for all men? The other promise is exactly the same.
“Whatever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do.” Do you observe the phrase that contains the catch? In my name! In His nature; the nature of God. Bearing this in mind, we can then proceed to the things that are automatically barred from our prayers. At once, we know that we cannot pray for evil or misfortune to come upon any man. If we are abiding in Him, we shall not be able to think upon, or recognize, evil or adversity, either for ourselves or for any man. Granting that we could know it, it would not be possible for God to know it, and it would be impossible to talk to Him about something of which He was unaware. And He can only know Perfection.
Obviously, if we pray for understanding, for joy, for peace, for love, for prosperity, for any good thing, He will give it to us. These things are in His name. It will not be a matter of overcoming God’s reluctance, it will be instead a matter of our acceptance of His highest willingness. This brings to our mind again the fact that no law is set in motion to answer our prayer. We simply recognize a law that has always existed and put ourselves in alignment with it. Emerson says, “Is not prayer a study of truth, a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite?”
Prayer is essential, not to the salvation of the soul, for the soul is never lost, but to the conscious well-being of the soul which does not understand itself. There is a vitality in man’s relationship to the infinite, which is productive of more good than any other vitality man has ever encountered in the journey of his evolution. As fire warms the body, as food strengthens us and sunshine raises our spirits, so there is a subtle transfusion of some invisible force as we pray, weaving itself into the warp and woof of our own mentalities, and that is why everyone prays.
If spiritual things be true, it is not enough simply to declare they are so; we have to understand how they work and why—the laws governing them. Then we shall be able to say: “Here it is; this is the way it works. You can use it and I can use it.” There is no special dispensation of Providence; there is no God who cares more for the Jews than He does for the Gentiles, or cares more for the Gentiles than He does for the Jews. As intelligent observers, we must realize that God is a Universal Presence, a neutral force, an impersonal observer, a divine and impartial giver, forever pouring Himself or Itself upon His or Its Creation.
If we wish to be beneficiaries of this Divine Influx, we must consciously receive it. I do not believe there is anyone living who has been given the secret to the Kingdom of Heaven. No one man knows the one and only way of salvation. If we put together all the knowledge that the world has about Chemistry and related subjects all that the scientists have been able to determine about it—then we have the Science of Chemistry. If we arrange in proper order all the findings of all of the psychologists of the world, we have the Science of Psychology. And our position is that if we will collect the teachings of the spiritual geniuses of all ages, and put the volumes into one group, we will be able to discover what the world knows about the Science of Spirit. Therefore, it is necessary to break down the boundary lines of isolated opinions and come into the broader field and greater perspective.
We say, in our system of thought, that there is nothing but God, and that when we talk to each other God is communicating Himself to Him-self. It is small wonder that people who believe that Divinity is an external thing should think we are sac religious. From their point of view they are right, but if that Something which we call God, in Its essence and in our approach to It, is not to be found in our own spirit, then we shall never find it. Emerson said: “Listen greatly unto yourself.” And Jesus said: “Who hath seen me hath seen the Father, because this is the manifestation of God.” God must be, and is, a universal essence, an undivided and indivisible Spirit, omnipresent, and present in our own spirit as that which we are at this moment. Our approach to this Divine, Creative Principle is the Still Small Voice. God is an indwelling Presence. I do not believe in lost souls, but I do believe that every living soul is in search of himself and his relationship to whatever Reality is. I only know what Reality is in a very small degree. We have come to believe there is a Reality which we sense in our own being, giving birth to a direct relationship to the Infinite— all the magnificence and the beauty and the power and the peace which is commensurate with the estimation of the meaning of the Infinite . . . God.
Mind must be the thing that prays. We cannot arrive at any other conclusion. Without mind there is no philosophy, there is no science, there is no psychology, there is no religion. There is no prayer and no answer and no universe, unless there is a mind to be aware of it. But you ask me, What is mind? I do not know. Nor does anyone know. It is intelligent to say that no one knows what mind is. No living being knows what matter is. Theoretically, we dissolve it, but it is still there—a material object, an illusion, or lines of force in energy. There is no one living who knows what it is, and yet if a man denied it was there, we would say he was insane. All I could tell you about mind is that mind is that thing in me, whatever it is, which enables me to know that I am. It is that in you which enables you to know that you are. If I had a mind which was all mine, and you had one which was all yours, how could you know that I exist or how could I talk with you? Therefore, we believe that there is only One Mind in universe and it is incarnated in everyone of us.
God must be Universal Mind. God must be the power by which we think, will, and know. Therefore, it follows that prayer to God is a communication with that inner Life, with that divine, indwelling Spirit, which is everywhere present, omnipotent and all-powerful. Jesus taught his disciples to pray that age-old prayer: “Our Father which art in Heaven; Hallowed be thy name.” If you study that prayer, you will find it is a straight affirmation of the presence of God, the Parent Mind, in man, for He had already said: “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” That is a prayer of affirmation. And the method which Jesus taught for prayer is the method we use. I am not saying it is the only method. “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet (into your own mind) and when thou hast shut thy door (shut out objective struggle) pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father, which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.” That means the invisible cause of life is contacted by the mind; the invisible cause is set in motion by this act of the mind, and the objectification takes place following this interior process. That is what prayer is. If we think God is a far-off, divine event, a distant Presence, a heavenly Dictator—something apart from that which lives and moves and has its being right where we are—then we are certain to believe ourselves disconnected from this Infinite Being. But, if we think of God as an Indwelling Presence, our form of prayer is naturally addressed to a Presence in us which shall tend to awaken our own mind to it.
Some one might say: “Where does God come in in this performance?” God does not come in. God never went out. Every word we speak is God, everything we see is God . . . the buttercup, the sunset, the morning dew nestling in the petal of the rose, that is God; and love and laughter are God. God is everything, every-where, every place—the innermost presence of our own thought, the outermost rim and circumference of our own experience. Someone might ask: “Is that spiritual?” What is spirituality? Spirituality is a conscious, consistent, and persistent determination to enter into an atmosphere of good and believe in it and unify with it. It is not a profession; religion is a life—a life spontaneous, happy and free.
It is not a burnt offering the Infinite requires, but a clean mind, a pure heart, an honest and sincere purpose, a direct belief and a complete acceptance. Thus Solomon prayed for greater wisdom, for a more divine understanding; and Jesus prayed that all people should see what he saw, that they might be “in me as I in Thee.” We believe in prayer, but we call it something else. We call it “treatment,” and the answer to prayer we call “demonstration.” I do not mean by that that we deny the efficacy of prayer. We affirm it; we merely call it something else because these words mean something different to us. Many people who come to me for treatment haven’t the slightest idea of what it is. They imagine that one man has a secret about God that some other man does not have. Treatment, as we understand it, is the conscious act, through prayer (if one prefers to call it by that name) through meditation and contemplation, of definitely accepting the presence of a good which the objective world cannot see—back of which is the belief that we are surrounded by a creativeness which intelligently responds to us. It is not a beseechment, because it rests upon the belief that the universe already desires to do this, and must because that is its nature. Therefore, what we do in a treatment is to align the mind, the thought, or Spirit, with form, which is the manifestation of that Spirit. The physical universe is a mold and nothing else; it is an effect . . . never a cause.
The first step in prayer, then, is the recognition of this Universal, Creative Presence, which surrounds us and is responsive to us. Then the next step is meditation, or unification with this Intelligence. Prayer has stimulated countless millions of people to nobler deeds and nobler thoughts, because anything that tends to connect our minds with this Oversoul of the universe lets in a flood of Its consciousness. The prayers of Jesus were an acceptance, rather than a request, and yet perhaps no other man has ever lived who so continuously recognized, accepted and practiced the Presence of God. ‘Whatever the enlightenment of this man’s mind was, it certainly placed him in a relationship to the Infinite Being whom we call God, which was so close, so immediate, that it was more like two people talking with each other. Jesus came preaching a gospel of fulfillment here and now for everybody. Jesus did not try to tell God the better way to do things, and Jesus was not afraid that some people would be damned in the hereafter.
Recognition, unification (or meditation) and realization (or contemplation) are all mental acts, something which the mind does to itself. Meditation differs somewhat from prayer; it is greater than prayer. Why? Because it is a conscious attempt, based on a conscious belief of a definite unity, to establish this in one’s mind by the recognition that the unity exists. It no longer says: “God, will you be good?” It no longer says: “God, please give me a crust of bread, I am starving.” That is a prayer of limitation, a denial of the abundance of the universe. That deifies want and crystallizes impoverishment. Meditation is the conscious act of definitely unifying the mind with the Spirit. Jesus said, “My Father and I are one.” Our meditations are prayers put in the form of affirmations . . . conscious association of unity, a belief in the inevitability of unity, and the desire to mentally accept that unity.
The last step, and perhaps the greatest, is contemplation, or realization . . . the entering into the essence of that which is beauty, peace, the essence of one’s own life. It is the highest act that the human mind can reach, because it no longer merely meditates on beauty, but itself becomes the beauty which was the object of its meditation. Then it is that the soul itself, as Emerson said, is nimble and hops about. It beholds its own glory everywhere; where one no longer feels that the thing is going to be, or ought to be, or must be, but where he knows that it is and he enters into it and it enters into him. Beauty is no longer a thing apart from the soul; Truth is not something to be attained; God is no longer something toward which we aspire; and the Soul, alone and naked and bare and unafraid, merges into the Universe, not to the loss of its individuality, but to the glorification of it.
With this understanding of the complete process and purpose of prayer—or meditation, as we call it—we are reminded of the many things we had meant to pray for, the variety of things we had thought we wanted, that automatically fall away. Among the things we cannot pray for, are FAME, and inordinate Ambition. Naturally, we are not referring to such ambition as is born of the desire to completely express our individuality: that is a praiseworthy undertaking. It might easily come under the head of “the hunger and thirst after righteousness,” which does come in His name. But inordinate ambition, that which will elevate man above his fellowmen, we cannot pray for. Nor for Fame. Both are misnomers, based on the supposition that one man can be greater. This is impossible, for all men are sons of God. No prestige could be greater, and no man can have less.
We cannot pray for our good to come to us through particular channels, and at the same time expect that it will be a perfect demonstration. That would be based on the supposition that God is limited and could only fill our need through one channel. We might be greatly limiting that Infinite Supply which was already rushing toward us. And we cannot pray to go to Heaven. I hope this is not a terrible disappointment, though it may be … to those who have endured, as patiently as possible, all the ills they thought the flesh was heir to, resting in the confidence of certainly going to heaven when they die. You will not. You are in heaven now! The Kingdom of Heaven is within you. Be at peace now. No condition, no place, no person except yourself, can cheat you out of the kingdom of heaven. It is a state of mind. Furthermore, we cannot pray for anything for ourselves, the coming of which would cheat or in any manner hurt another, for no thought like that can penetrate the consciousness of one abiding in Him. We can only ask for good, for Good is the nature of God. Good is in His name . . . His nature. Prayer is its own answer as Spirit is both cause and effect.
The approach to God must be spontaneous. We need not worry about salvation. God is for us. But if we seek to destroy, we will be destroyed; and when we are tired of being destroyed, we will stop it, and nothing will have happened to the soul itself. Frequently our eyes are so veiled with the tears of anguish that we fail to see the glories around us; our ears so filled with discord that we are unable to hear the music of the spheres; and our thought, unattuned to that Divine Inspiration, is choked with the morbid reactions of life, the unhealthful reactions, the little bickering petty-isms of life. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could learn to expand and let the soul grow in beauty and joy?
Whenever prayer becomes meditation and meditation becomes transmuted into contemplation, there is always a demonstration. I am not going to say there is a demonstration “if it is the will of God.” That is the will of God. Wherever prayer by meditation reaches contemplation, there is always a demonstration . . . I am resting my premise on the theory that it is the contemplation of Reality, because a man cannot contemplate that which is not so . . . then there is an answer. That is why Jesus laid down the rule of prayer as specific, not as an abstraction; not as a violation of the law of nature or repudiation of this impersonality governing everything, but as a statement of the immutable law of cause and effect in the world of Spirit.
We can have what we want, but we have to take what goes with it. There is no person reading this but has the same potential power Jesus had, and our work should exist for the purpose of stimulating the realization, so that we all will know that we can know. I do not know anything that brings such a consciousness of completion to the mind of a man as the knowledge that there is a direct action in his own mind which—operating independently of any objective condition— can transcend it without confusion. It is the only thing I know of whereby the mind does consciously enter the realm where things are made out of nothing that we see, and where the ‘Word itself becomes flesh and dwells among us.
Every man is his own savior, because every man has a direct approach to Reality. Let us learn to believe and to perceive and daily to announce; and whenever negation comes up into our consciousness, let us declare the affirmative, and know that there is One bearing witness with us, even the Spirit of God, that wherever there is light there is no darkness. Every man has the power of faith and understanding to remold and remake his life, to recreate his destiny; not by willing, but by being willing to know. Not by coercion; the race is not to the fast but to the sure-footed. The race is not to anyone who contends with any powers, visible or invisible, but to the one who knows. “God is not afar off; the word is nigh unto thee, even in thine own mouth, that thou shouldst know it and do it.” Let us feel the direct, indwelling presence of a Power and Spirit, sufficient to meet every human need; and accept that It not only desires to, but that it is Its business to; that Its whole purpose and time shall be devoted to supplying that need, if we live in unity with It. Living in unity with It is very simple—the act of acceptance, belief, acquiescence, and embodiment. Then will our Oneness with Spirit be so complete, there can be no question as to what we may pray for. Our every prayer will be a song of praise: “Yea and Amen.”
Chapter 10 – Man’s Colossal Stupidity
IT IS NOT inconceivable that a few generations from now, when “a little leaven shall have leavened the whole,” historians may record this age as the period of man’s great stupidity. It is understandable even now. If we were notified tomorrow that a deceased relative had left us a million dollars, and we had only to identify ourselves and receive the fortune, what would be our reaction? Many of us would mentally claim the money and begin spending it before the check was in our hands. Others would conservatively await the receipt of the check before changing the basis of their living. But what of the man who paid no attention to it? The man who treated it as he might treat a notice that he had won a shaving mug? Probably the kindest thought any of us would have about him would be that that man should certainly have a guardian!
Yet thousands of us are just as crassly foolish. In the midst of the greatest abundance the world has ever seen, we suffer and die because of lack. We choose blindness when we could have vision. We remain enmeshed in the throes of poverty, when we could have wealth—riches inexhaustible. We accept the portion of sorrow which negative thinking lays in our lap, when joy is our inheritance. We live in turmoil, when we might have peace—”that peace which passeth understanding.”
We are like a sculptor, having both the training and the tools with which to work, standing before a huge block of marble, admiring its beauty, yet never turning a hand, and all the while wondering why an interesting statue does not emerge . . . entirely forgetful of why he had studied for years and why he had tools with which to work. We are like a man who hates darkness and sits alone in a house completely wired for electricity, praying for the light, yet never moving a finger to switch on the powerful illumination. Will it be strange if future generations, knowing all this, call us stupid?
How many people in the world really believe that all good is ours right now? Not one in one thousand. Too long we have formed the habit of thinking a thing “too good to be true.” This article is an effort to have you see that nothing is too good to be true. I am going to take the position that if a man feels consciously or subjectively unable to cope with life, it is because he does not understand that every individual is a unique characterization of the Universe Itself; and that there is something in him that is primordial, perfect, complete, and all he needs to do is to develop that; and not fall prostrate at the feet of those people whom his mistaken viewpoint thinks must be great. Emerson says that the greatness that men have, we have given them. We drape greatness about them from our own perception. I would like every man, as we begin this discussion, to understand that we are everyone some part of the spiritual wholeness which is God. So there is no great and no small.
It is true that it is the Father’s good pleasure to give us the Kingdom of God; therefore, there can be no failure in the giving. We must know that. The Kingdom is already given us. Abundance is already given us. Regardless of appearances, we are dealing with an economic abundance in America today and not an economic scarcity. And freedom is given us. The Bible says: “If there had been any law whereby this freedom could be compelled, then verily by the law would that freedom have been given.” If there had been a way in which the Divine Creative Principle could have compelled man to suddenly appear on the scene of experience, full-orbed with all his freedom—and still be an individual—then verily by the law would that have been done. But even God could not do that. The only way God can evolve a spontaneous creature is to let it alone and allow it to awaken to itself. “Behold I stand at the door and knock.” It is already here but we must see it.
Regardless of all we believe can be accomplished by man, because of his oneness with God, I do not believe that any man can be happy unless he believes in the continuity of his own existence. I have come to believe that it is impossible for a man to be contented in this life unless he feels sure of the next one. This is my conclusion, after about twenty-five years of devoting practically all of my time to dealing with people’s souls. (In another chapter I have tried to make plain why I am certain that life has neither beginning nor end.) I believe that the greatest single curative power known to the mind of man is a spiritual thought in the subjective mind. By spiritual thought I mean here an absolute inner conviction that one may trust in the integrity of the universe and that sooner or later all things will be made right. Without that, we have materialism; and a philosophy of materialism never yet created a great art or a great religion or a great philosophy or a great anything.
Man spends the first third of his life in preparing himself for life, physically and mentally and financially. He is always expecting, hoping, progressing, expanding—something big, something satisfying is going to happen. Consequently, his mind is open. He is happy. He is expressing. During the next third of his life, speaking of the average man, he marries, he has a family. His whole thought and emotion is spent here. But quite frequently, in the last third of his life, he begins to meet with frustrations. When the time was that everyone believed in some kind of religion, he trusted to some kind of a future. Now this is more likely than not to be shaken. Dr. Jung, of Switzerland, one of the world’s greatest psychologists, said in a recent article: “I speak not as one who believes or disbelieves, but as a physician, as a psychologist, and as a scientist, and I say that, at least, a belief in immortality is good mental hygiene.” And people who do not have it will miss something, because during that last third of life there will be little to which they can look forward. That is why we often see the last third of a man’s life appear to decline, when it should be another great experience, and a subjective preparation for something even more sublime. The soul longs, with its deepest intensity, for self-preservation. It is the spiritual conviction in that deep, cryptic being of ours, that we are born of eternal day and made in the image of God to traverse a heavenly way. It is the strongest emotion we have. Why is this true, unless away back there, in the beginnings of creation, there was incarnated in us that deathless principle of life, which of itself knows no defeat? We may analyze ourselves all we want to, and get a certain satisfaction out of so doing; but there can never come lasting peace and happiness without spiritual conviction, the reason being that Spirit is Reality.
This may not seem pertinent to the discussion of whether or not we are making intelligent use of the things God has provided for us, but I have gone thus at length into the necessity of believing in a life hereafter; because it is my conviction that if a man knows that life never began and will never end, he will be immediately fortified and inspired to begin the work of bringing out perfection in his daily life. When man understands that God is incarnated in him; that he is a new creation—an individual impartation of that which is Divine—he feels a new birth. When he grasps the fact that the Divine thing in him which longs to be, will always be, then will his intellect see it and his emotion respond to it, and life can no longer frighten him. President Coolidge must have sensed the need of greater stimulation of the spiritual perception of the nation the time he said: “We do not need more national development. We do not need more intelligent power: we need more spiritual power. We do not need more knowledge: we need more character. We do not need more government: we need more culture. We do not need more law: we need more religion.”
Even though we appear only vaguely aware of our divine possibilities, the world is on the eve of the greatest spiritual revival it has ever had; and not just a revival of religious convictions, but a revival of spiritual realities. After having passed through an age of scientificism, when people were afraid of being thought fools, unless they could give what seemed like a logical answer to everything, we are now witnessing a strange phenomenon in the evolution of thought and intelligence. Many of our leading scientific minds, having apparently analyzed the material universe to a vanishing point, are beginning to consider the spiritual and mental as being real. Marvelous as the previous age has been, its material frontier is falling into a state of collapse. Objective empire has pushed us as far as it can go without the invisible; and we are just entering a period of discovery on a new frontier, which will not collapse or exhaust itself. Instead of coming to a point of exhaustion, we continue to arrive at new points of expansion.
The more we learn, the more we find there is left to be discovered. If we hold on to this open-mindedness, it is possible we may save this generation from the stigma of stupidity.
We find ourselves today, then, somewhat inspired and somewhat inhibited by what the world has believed. Jesus understood these things perfectly. That is why he said: “Judge not according to appearances but judge righteously.” Let us forget for a time the religious aspect of our subject and approach it from another angle. Let us not think of God as Love, or even as Conscious Intelligence, but let us say It is that Source from which our life springs. When we are confronted with the problems of everyday living (embracing the thought of supply, and health and happiness) we like the word SOURCE.
We constantly speak of the source from which we get so and so. It is literally true that “God is all. God is Good. Then all is Good.” And a clear realization of this would manifest perfection, but this does not always seem a practical thought to the consciousness which has not dwelt long upon the thought of man’s unity with this Good. So, we shall speak of it as Source. It must be intelligent, therefore, it is Infinite Intelligence . . . Mind. There is just One Mind and we are all in It, and everything is in It. Is there anything real to us unless we could know that thing? Of course not! I know what I experience. It appears as though it were possible for man to experience Infinity, and everything that happens seems to bear out this observation. Jesus’ words, “Before Abram was, I am,” seem to indicate that infinite possibility pre-existed any experience we have ever had.
Everything is created on an infinite and limitless design, because it rests on an infinite, limitless basis, and the whole order of evolution is to produce individualized freedom, still acting as a perfect unity. As stated before, God being Himself or Itself freedom, could not create man, and at the same time not create a way in which man could be free as God, because it is only out of God’s freedom that He can make anything. Whether we form the belief emotionally, religiously or intellectually, we are bound to arrive at the conclusion that in making man, God had to make a way whereby man would automatically be free. Let us recognize and rejoice in this freedom. The more completely plumbed the human mind, the more it ought to yield. Instead of its being exhausted by use, it grows by use. There is that which increaseth as it scattereth. We are dealing with an infinite and final Unity, which, though it appears to break down into multiplicity, never breaks down its unity.
We might as well proceed from this view-point: We are this moment in an Infinite Mind, which presses against us, is in us, and is our minds. It is not only Its own Mind, but It is also our minds, because we are made out of It, and there is nothing out of which it could make us but Itself. We are in Infinite Mind and Infinite Mind is in us. It is by that Mind that we think. That Mind is eternal; therefore, we are eternal. That Mind is complete; therefore, we are complete. That Mind is Substance; therefore, we are one in essence with all the substance of the universe. We do not appear complete. We act as if we were temporal, limited, unprepared and afraid.
I am not so foolish as to think that people do not suffer; that they do not experience want; that they are not unhappy. But the potential me—the potential you—is just as perfect as the inherent God. This is why the world will call us stupid: that we do not call this perfection into objective manifestation. It is not a matter of choice that we are potentially perfect. It is not a matter of conjecture. If we wish, we might say it is the gift of God. As Jesus said, “Fear not, little flock, it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.” Thus you see, goodness is already given.
We may have misinterpreted it; we may have used our very freedom to bind ourselves. In fact, I think we do that very thing and the intelligence which we use in the wrong way (which wrong makes us unhappy) is the only thing that can make us unhappy. Someone might argue that faith and fear are entirely different attitudes. Really fear is nothing more than misplaced faith—faith in a power opposed to good. I believe it is all one, and every experience we have is as real as it is supposed to be. It is not necessary to deny objective reality—not necessary to deny that we suffer or that we are unhappy—in order to understand subjective or self-conscious Reality, and no great thinker has ever done so. Goodness is already given, the Divine Gift is made, the Divine Impartation is made, and as we awake to the realization of it, it is ours. That is what demonstration is.
We shall find everything that we believe is perfectly logical and inevitably necessary, fundamentally so; but it is the misconception of the way that it works that causes confusion in the individual mind. Treatment is a rational thing, but it is a thing of feeling, too. What are we doing when we make our demand? Are we praying? Are we giving a treatment? It is all the same thing; we are invoking the law on our behalf, that it shall do a certain specific thing for us, but we are not limiting the way the thing shall be done. The only man who can know whether or not this is so, is the man who can prove it; and he will know it to the extent that he does prove it. It is there to be used. It has been proven by many.
The discouraging thought, that it may not be good for me to have a greater good, never enters my mind. I know it is good for me to have a greater good. The next thing, then, is how am I going to take it? I am certainly not going to be able to experience a greater good while I deny its existence. I cannot realize this good I desire as long as I say: “I know I cannot get it because I have no pull.” Our progress does not depend on the influence, or even good-will, of any man. It is not “pull” we need, but to listen more intently to the inner push of the Spirit, which is forever pressing against us for expression. The trouble is that for so long the world has looked upon things spiritual as being unnatural that men stand a little aghast at the word. And they are practically incredulous, when told that by their own thought they can reach out and contact the Source of all Good! By their own thought they can demonstrate abundance! By their own thought they can change joy into sorrow! By their own thought they can change their physical environment! It, at first, sounds so incredible that thousands of us never even try it. But when the time shall come that we can speak of spiritual things normally, naturally—when we can get together and talk about our spiritual experiences, and no longer feel that such talk is weird or queer, then we shall have removed one of the big stumbling-blocks to our growth.
The soul feels it is united with the whole, but we have to consciously sense the union, individually. Consequently, people with adequate spiritual convictions are in a better state of health than those who do not have spiritual conviction. The person who wishes a healed mind must understand something about Spirit. He may do it in a crude way or a refined way, but he must do something to get that conviction into his consciousness, that he does not walk alone in life; that there is a Presence and a Power and a Capacity inherent within him, which is greater than anything he shall ever contact. Then it shall be that his life will be a constant unfoldment in grace, charm, enthusiasm and a great sense of peace.
What I would have you understand is that everything is all right, right this minute, if we only knew it. This is true and at the same time it is not true. It is true in principle, so far as Reality is concerned. Nothing more will ever be provided for our good than has already been provided for us. But that which is true in principle, is only as true in practice as we make it. Though we are surrounded by beauty, for instance, only as much enters our consciousness as we allow to enter, only as much as we can appreciate. Even though this All-Good is ever-available, and immediately responsive, we have a part to do in bringing this into our experience. The fortune was willed the man, but since he would not cash the check, it was as though it never belonged to him.
Above all things, we must know definitely and consistently, that the universe is for us and not against us. But someone will say: “It is not true that the universe is for us. Look at the evil, the lack, the limitation, the physical pain and anguish of the human race.” Particularly will people say that who have believed, for countless years, that God wanted them to suffer. Such a thought is perfect nonsense, but it does not dissipate by just saying that it is nonsense. We must convince the mind that God does not—could not—desire evil. We shall have to get over, too, the age-long determination to believe that evil is an entity. We shall have to learn that evil is not person, place nor thing, but is an experience we are allowed to have (because of our divine individuality) until through negative experiences, we learn to use the law affirmatively; to cooperate with it and thus enjoy its full benefits. For the true law is a law of liberty and not of bondage. Our sins were forgiven us before we ever sinned, which, however, does not mean that we can keep on sinning and get away with it. The universe, though, is foolproof. It does say that we can have what we want, but it also says that we shall have to take into our experience the logical result of our thinking, be it good or what we call evil. It is as impersonal as electricity. It will warm us or burn us, according to the way we use it.
So, perhaps, we arrive at the place where we want to use the Law to demonstrate our good. If it be that we can be well; if we can be happy; if we can be prosperous; if we can have a fuller life by our thinking, then we should like to begin. How shall we go about it? First, you will recall, our treatments must be based on the proposition that the universe is limitless and immediately responds to us. Even if we do not know a person of influence or pull to give us a helping hand, Spirit fills every place, so every place is a place of influence!
God makes things out of Himself, by Himself becoming the things He makes. So, we find that a spiritual treatment, for the betterment of conditions, works according to a mechanical law in the universe. We must first be sure that what we want is in unity with good, and then the gaining of our desire can only produce good to ourselves and to everyone else. We must believe that the universe itself desires us to have this good, because in our expressing this good, It is expressing Itself. We must have faith that the universe instantly responds to us, and we must understand that for every action there is an equal reaction, which means, in metaphysics, that at the level of our recognition will it be done.
This is how a spiritual treatment works, as we see it. It is a reaction of the mind upon itself, entirely. Someone may say that it is a reaction of the mind upon the universe. The treatment itself must be a reaction of the mind upon itself. There is only one Self. In such degree, then, as the mind perceives, understands, and mentally and spiritually assimilates perfection, it will be perfect. The reaction is equal to the belief. Is that not by the same law that water will reach its own level by its own weight? Therefore, our word should be spoken in belief, in conviction, in complete and implicit trust and, above all else, that word should not be limited by any existing circumstances. The word creates its own mathematics; it creates its own outlet. The demand that the word makes upon the universe, creates the way for the demand to be met. This is in line with the later idea of evolution among the great thinkers of the world: that when the mind needs anything with which to more fully express itself, the thing arises out of the demand.
The excuses most often given, for not taking hold of our good right now, is that “we will have to wait for greater understanding. We do not know enough to give a treatment.” That is not so. On any journey we undertake, we start from right where we are, so in our treatment for any greater good, we start from right where we are, regardless of how conditions appear. No treatment is as good as it should be, if the one feels that the demonstration is dependent on anything in the objective world. It is only as we sense that we are truly using the spiritual law, which is Creator and not creature, the Cause and not the effect, the Thing Itself and not what It does, that our treatment is effective. Consequently, our treatment should be given absolutely, without regard to what it does. When we think of Spirit as being fluidic, waiting to flow into the form which our thought directs, we shall be able to lose sight of objective conditions. If we say, “But I have no money with which to pay the rent.
I don’t know which way to turn,” and our thought is engrossed with our lack, does that not constitute our belief? Is that not our treatment? Not only is it a treatment, but it will demonstrate just as it is given: We will have no money with which to pay the rent; we will not know which way to turn ! There is no more important undertaking ahead of man than that of recognizing his unity with Good; recognizing his Oneness, his Wholeness, his Completion. Something is radically wrong with the manner in which men have tried to solve their problems, without taking God into consideration. There has been too much misery and unhappiness. It seems we would welcome the information that help is at hand. Shouldn’t it bring tremendous happiness when we learn that there is a Divine Law upon which happiness and prosperity depend? Isn’t it cause for rejoicing when we learn that we can consciously unite with the Source of our good?
It seems to me that with the knowledge of these tools which are at hand, we know how to work. Wherever any thought arises within us, which denies us the right to demonstrate a more abundant good, we may know that thought arises out of the psychological nature of experience and our reaction to it. It does not arise as a pure image of the Spirit, which can conceive only freedom and knows only good, understanding only peace, and lives only in the consciousness of self-expression. Treatment is effective only in such degree as we get back to the conviction that we are dealing with a Power that makes and re-makes. So, as these unpleasant objective conditions are brought into our mind, we say to ourselves that they are like a picture which is cast on a screen, and it is our business to get back of the picture to the mind which projected it and change the picture.
To say it all in a little different way; from the standpoint of the spiritual universe, there is no solid fact; there is merely outlined form. The findings of modern science tend to affirm this position. The material universe is not a thing in itself, but it has a definite meaning; its business is to give form to Spirit. The human body is some part of this form. If we can accept this position as true, we can come to believe that the nature of the Spirit is to control the flow of the form, then we can understand how it was that Jesus was able to heal the paralyzed man; was able to say to the blind man: “See.” Jesus did not create vision; he re-molded the concept of vision. Jesus did not create the ability of man to reach out and grasp at a physical object; he merely recreated the idea of the instrument which could reach out. In such degree as we understand this principle, we shall be able to perform the same so-called miracles, and it would be in accord with law. But we must first come to sense the spiritual universe as real, and know that the power of our word, in conjunction with the Spirit, is immutable. We should have to learn to transpose the physical universe for a spiritual one and call upon the Invisible side of ourselves. This is far more than suggestion; it is the realization of life. The Essence of life is ever-present. It is the intellectual and mental faculties which mold this essence into form. The Essence is already here and conviction measures it out.
By this time, I know you understand that a treatment must be spiritual. What do we mean by spiritual? We do not mean repeating any sacred words or burning incense. These ways are all right. All ways are good if they lead somewhere and do not confuse us to the point where we think the way is the end in itself. For ourselves, we believe that, with the simplicity of a direct approach, we can short-cut the ways and short-circuit much of the performance, and at once “enter in.” We must believe. “They could not enter in because of their unbelief.” We must not limit the Infinite.
And we can begin right now to heal ourselves of physical troubles, of mental fears, of lack and limitation. And when enough people can believe that by pure reason, or by perfect faith, spiritual healing of the body can follow, then everyone will naturally seek that method—the cleanest, easiest and most satisfactory method of all. It is not going to do us any good to wait until the world comes out of its confusion. It is not going to do the world any good for us to sit down and cry with it. Jesus said: “And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me.”
He did not say, “if I be dragged down.” So each one of us must be continuously endeavoring to promote his own welfare, not at the expense of someone else, but by applying this principle directly and immediately to himself, for himself, in himself. Is that selfish? I do not think so. It would be selfish if we were trying to get something, of which there was not enough to go around, but since we are dealing with that thing which is increased as it is scattered, since we are dealing with the Infinity of Reality—something which cannot be exhausted—we are not selfish. It is simply self-expression. We do not desire anything we would not have everyone have.
There is no individual good. That is, there is no good for me, which does not exist for you.
But suppose you will not accept that good, should I deny myself the privilege of experiencing that good because you will not accept it? If I refuse to be at peace in my own consciousness, is it then necessary that you, too, shall refuse to be at peace in your consciousness, in order that you might show that you sympathize with me? Not at all! “If the blind shall lead the blind, shall not both fall in the ditch?” It is only when we see clearly to walk ourselves, that we are able to choose a direction which another will desire to take. I think each one of us is beholden to himself, and to the world, to live a normal, well- balanced, fruitful life, not sad nor depressed, but demonstrating to the fullest our ability, love and self-expression. The Infinite is not limited. It has enough for all, so it is not selfish to demonstrate happiness, joy, harmony, peace, beauty, love, friendship and right action. They already exist and we must use them. Individually, we must look for the best, expect the best, and know that the best is going to come, and so reduce the number that future generations shall call STUPID, because their good was at hand, and they failed to use it.
And it is the truth known which frees us. What is that truth? It is that we are some part of that Infinite Being; that we are right now supplied with everything we need; that we exist right now at the point of limitless Spirit; that right now we have the only “influence” we shall ever need. “Beloved,” wrote the apostle John, “now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that when He shall appear, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is . . . ”
* * *
For the benefit of those who did not study carefully the chapter on Treatments; or for those who might imagine themselves unable to clearly formulate their thoughts in a first treatment, I am repeating here a treatment given to one of my classes, in the hope that it may be of some assistance. It is not the words, of course, but the conviction back of the words which creates the form which the treatment shall take. This is for general well-being. A treatment for the belief of a specific need, would be handled specifically.
TREATMENT
Living Spirit within me which is God, uniting me with all good, makes me one with all people, breaks down every difference of opinion, calms every tempest of thought, stills all doubt, casts out all fear.
I let that Divine Presence within me illumine my intellect, direct my thought, guide my feet, and inspire me. I let that peace which is the atmosphere of this living Spirit within me flood me with the knowledge of perfect unity, and I know that no good thing is withheld from me. Infinite Spirit within me brings every good and perfect gift, and I accept the great gift of life which is peace, joy, love, unity and wisdom.
I expect only the good, anticipate only that which is perfect. I accept God as being perfect in me. Even in those places where my human mind cannot fathom the apparent mystery of this Invisible Presence, there is an inspiration of hope, a realization of faith, a consciousness which is beyond the intellect, and I know that I am guided into the pathway of good forever.
The End
Los Angeles, Calif., November 10, 1936.