CONTENTS
How to Agree with One’s Adversary
Master or be Mastered
Time Individualism
How to be Rid of Poverty
Remission of Sins
How to Remove Impressions
Human Hens
You Live in Your Thought-World
The Paralysis of Fear
The Living Bridge
The Power of Impression
Haunted by Ghosts
The Time for Weaning
Making Things Go Right
How the World Comes to an End
How the Lord Provides
Unprofitable Companions
Mental Patterns
The Sin Against the Holy Ghost
Utilizing Energy
Natural and Controlled Old Age
The Use of Remedies
The Swing of the Pendulum
PREFACE
The effort to discern and develop inner resources, to adapt externals to internals as part of the discipline and endeavor of life, has necessary place in any plan for betterment of conditions. No one is yet at the height of his possibilities; everyone is embarked on the voyage of discovery.
These pages are offered both as a guide and a stimulus to those who are awake to the signs of the times, who feel the thrill of a new impetus toward results; the heritage of the many, though in past years discerned only by the few. The widespread state of awakeness to “the things of the Spirit,” that is displacing the long sleep of obliviousness, furnishes receptivity to declarations that would fall otherwise upon deaf ears, upon hearts deadened to responsiveness. Among the many, some there be to whom what is herein written may be a way-shower as they seek deeper realization of new-old truths and gird themselves for conflict with long-established habits of thought, word, and act.
It is tendered with the desire to show that within, rather than without, is found the Force of forces that transforms, renews, and regenerates human life, lifting it to the fair level of self-accomplishment and self-dominion. That self-discernment, self-effort, and self-attainment, for which we are primarily endowed, is the purpose to be fulfilled by our existence.
Though published originally in The Exodus, these chapters will be new to many, and may serve as companions at odd moments when we like to rest awhile with our books and draw fresh inspiration for “ trying again.”
Ursula N. Gestefeld.
HOW TO AGREE WITH ONE’S ADVERSARY
“ Agree with thine adversary.”
At first that seems a queer statement, for an adversary is one who is opposed to us, who will work us ill; and why should we agree with such an one? Why not resist instead? That seems the natural thing to do^ for, surely, we must overcome an adversary if we would not have him overcome us. This is plain common sense.
But perhaps after experience has begun to open our inner eye we may discover that the best way to overcome an adversary is to agree with him. Does this mean to go over to his side utterly?
No. It means to maintain our own, but to find out the nature of the adversary, why he is such, and the way by which his nature and its action can be made to befriend instead of hurt us.
It means to find out the reason why, and from what source, we suffer, and through added knowledge to avoid such consequence.
All forms of ignorance and their progeny are adversaries for the soul that has a great destiny to fulfil. They stand in the way of that fulfilling, obstacles to be overcome. When they are attacked and fought by another form of ignorance they are not conquered, and continued strife and confusion result.
You, probably, are suffering from an adversary. Though “ his name is Legion99 you know his particular name for yourself. He stands squarely in your path, and look which way you will you see his threatening face. How shall you be able to get beyond him and leave him behind? How shall you escape his power over you?
By ceasing to regard him as an adversary. By ceasing to fear and seeking to understand him. By gaining knowledge of his nature and why he confronts you; why he seems to have the power to cause you suffering. By coming into this agreement with him, the agreement which is understanding in place of ignorance; understanding his relation to you, and the purpose he serves.
This understanding can not be gained so long as the Great Purpose is unseen. But you see it. You see that you are a living soul, not merely flesh, and that you have inherent possi-
bilities which are infinite. Yon see that you are to do your part in the development and actualization of these possibilities; that their grand fruition is impossible without your cooperation.
Seeing this, you know by logical inference that nothing which now seems an adversary can always successfully oppose you. There must be a limit to the power of all adversaries, if you, the living soul, are immutably destined to immortality.
Seeing the fact of logical limitation on the part of the adversary, and as logical survival on your own part, the next thing to determine is “ Can I find and prove the limitation of his power right now? ” And understanding answers “ You can.”
Now, how shall you agree with him? By believing that he can make you suffer in spite of yourself? No. By seeing, first, the naturalness of suffering, its place and uses in the journey of the soul. The souFs first teacher is sensation. The experience that involves sensation gives the first revelation. Sensation rouses resistance, a resistance which though at first blind, acts as an impetus forward for the soul.
With the revelation of experience a wise, therefore a directed resistance follows; a resistance which is government instead of a running away from. Sensation is natural to the soul, always accompanies the soul, but changes in quality as the soul learns how to agree with its adversary. One kind is escaped only as another is cultivated.
Your adversary is named “ dyspepsia ” is he? And you are very much afraid of him, are you? You do not need to be. You have but to agree with him “ quickly, while thou art in the way with him.” As a soul moving forward in the ultimating of your own potentialities you are “in the way” where is found the consequences of ignorant use of Thought-Force; consequences which are overcome only by wise use of that force. And you now are able to use this force against your sensation instead of with it; for you know that dyspepsia is disorder and waste of energy.
You have been told from childhood that you had “ a delicate stomach ” and must be very careful what and when you eat; and this from being a dominant thought in your family has come to be a determining thought with you; and this thought is your adversary which appears threateningly before you every time you think of eating.
Or, as a business man you have been so intent on making a success in business that you have almost entirely overlooked making a success as a man—as a soul; and you have pushed and hurried, and hurried and pushed, giving yourself and your own requirements no time because you thought you had none to give. You have eaten and drunk, slept and dreamed business, directing your own energy and Thought-Force into that channel and diverting them from where you have needed that nourishment which comes from cooperation with the Great Purpose.
This side of your nature has its rights and you have violated those rights in your haste to get rich and dazzle your fellows with your success. Look upon this adversary of yours, “ dyspepsia,” and find his nature and meaning that you may agree with him. You can not help but agree as you trace the sequence of cause and effect. He is a consequence, and you have but to find the causes that have brought him and set Thought-Force to work to destroy them, to have him dissipate and disappear. Your painful sensation incites desire for a better one, desire to seek for its cause as a way out of bondage to it.
Perhaps you thought you had found it and found also the truth that makes free; and you are surprised that the adversary still sometimes confronts you. Well, perhaps when you had that sense of distress in your stomach yesterday you did not agree with him quickly but let the sense-thought get in ahead; and so of course the judge delivered you to the officer and you were cast into prison.
This judge, you see, has no personal preferences and you can not be his special favorite, so escaping what otherwise he might impose on you. This judge is absolutely impartial. As the law of cause and effect it sentences you to the consequences of such causes as you permit to operate; and it delivers you to the officer of experience who casts you into the prison of sensation, where you remain till you pay the uttermost farthing of your debt to the law.
To agree with your adversary by understanding his nature and relation to you is the first necessity, and the second is to agree quickly. Do not let the sensation-thought get in ahead of the truth-thought. Whatever your thought, Thought-Force in its ceaseless action tends to bring it to pass. Your own thought of tendency to and suffering from dyspepsia, added to the general current of like thought, draws that current into you as a channel for it to pass through and leave its deposits.
You must repel instead of attract it. You attract it by the sensation-thought, you repel it by the truth-thought; and the truth-thought attracts to you the great stream of truth, the living waters, as a channel through which it shall pass and leave its deposits.
You are the chooser, you determine, and if you agree with the adversary quickly while you are in the way with him—on the instant that the sensation-thought presents itself, you will escape being cast into the prison of suffering because the judge will not have to deliver you to the officer who executes that judgment. Your adversary, whatever his name, always delivers you to the judge. And because this judge is absolutely impartial, if you have understanding you know what the verdict will be and that it is just.
Take heed therefore to act—to think quickly whenever the sense or thought of evil, pain, sorrow or suffering of any kind presents itself. The prolongation of so many of our miseries comes from negligence in this respect. We are too apt to be lazy; it is so much easier to drift than to swim. We are so prone to excuse ourselves with the plea “ But, of course, I can not expect to be entirely free from these conditions till they are lifted from the race.”
How are they to be lifted from the race? Only by your doing your part. You are a member of the race. If each member does his part, the whole is done. You are accountable to the race as a member of it. It has a right to demand of you the best you can do for it. You are also a soul in which dwells the Power of the Whole. The Absolute demands of you the exercise of this power.
The tendency to excuse ourselves is a tendency to be discouraged, but with right understanding we shall be merciful to ourselves. That golden mean between indulgent indolence on the one hand and fanaticism on the other is the place where we need to stand. From this point of vantage we gain the best results. Here, the power of the individual soul over environment and tendencies is found, felt, and demonstrated. Here, the Power of the Whole can be put to practical use with the signs following.
You want power. You can have it by finding it, and you may find it within, for it is already there, waiting your recognition to work for you.
The Likeness of God—what does that mean? God is Absolute. You, as a living soul, are absolute to your sensations and sense-conditions. They are only relative to you and consequently they are the lesser while you are the greater. They are for time, you are for eternity. They dwindle and die, you increase and remain. Their possibilities are finite and limited, yours are infinite and unlimited. You can understand them, they can never understand you.
Hence you must agree with them for they can not agree with you. You are eternally over and above them, you can not remain conformed to their pattern. Outstrip them you must, for the Divine Energy is constantly pushing you on. Whatever your adversary, however he is named, the name of the Lord is writ upon you, and the power of the Lord is within you. Your eternal Individuality is unaffected by any of the adversaries which confront you as a soul; and this is the resource from which you draw all that is needed for the overcoming of adversaries.
And the overcoming is through that agreement which uncovers their true nature and place, and strips them of the power ignorantly imputed to them; that agreement which checks what otherwise would be a consequence through imposition of a contrary consequence.
MASTER OR BE MASTERED
Have you found by this time that as a living soul you are either to master or be mastered? Has this truth struck you so forcibly that you have awakened from the sense-sleep and set yourself to the work of mastery?
If so, you have ceased to read your fate in the stars and you are making endeavor to follow instead the line of destiny.
Perhaps you have been strongly inclined to think that “ the stars in their courses ” have marked out what you are and what you shall do and become; have settled your life experience so positively that there is no use in trying to work against them. If this has been the case, you have snapped a pair of handcuffs around your wrists and attached a ball and chain to your feet and crippled your own endeavors to accomplish anything higher and better than what you read in the stars.
Here, as in other directions, you have mistaken an indication for a fixed reality, a suggestion for a positive truth, a letter for the spirit beyond it. In looking intently at the stars you have overlooked your own nature and possibilities; in reading the register of mortal fallibility you have failed to find and read the register of divine and eternal immutability. You have allied yourself with the lesser, whose nature and limitation you will have to discover through experiencing all that you read, when you might have allied yourself with that eternal push which nothing can withstand.
But to-day an opportunity is yours. You can choose which you will serve, the stars, or that which the stars themselves serve.
Standing on one of the thoroughfares of a great city you see a large car full of people moving along a track without any visible means of propulsion. That moving car has its point of departure and a terminus. That is all settled. If you board that car you will be carried to the terminus unless you get out before the car reaches it.
But this is your option as the individual, and when you give the signal to stop, the gripman knows how to bring the car to a halt though the cable underground is still moving, driven by the power at the power-house. The gripman is subject to your orders though the power still impels the cable. Your resolve, your mental motion, causes him to stop the car even though the cable does not cease moving; to do that which enables you to get out of the car at any moment though the other passengers are carried to the terminus.
And what is possible for you is possible for them. You would laugh at any one of them who was so ignorant as to believe that he had to be carried to the terminus of the road whether he wanted to go or not; and you would tell him that he had only to use his prerogatives as an individual to escape being carried there, if he did not want to go. More, you would show him that he could use that car as a means to help him to a certain point on the road instead of walking there, if he did not wish to walk; that he was master of the situation instead of a victim, if he chose to act as he was able to act.
Have you believed yourself to be a victim to that fate marked out for you by the stars, moving along to the terminus in spite of anything you could do to prevent it? Then it is time that you signalled to the gripman to stop the car and let you get out, and if it does shake you up a bit when the car comes to a halt no harm is done.
That cable moving along unseen underground has brought you to the point where you act as you choose, and it has served you well. If your fellow passengers are carried to the terminus it is because they do not know enough, or, knowing, do not choose to get out. They are being used, while you have used the same power. It carries them whether or no; it carries you only as far as you choose to go.
What is called fate, your future as indicated by the stars, can run the course indicated, carrying you along, a victim; or you can say Stop! The Zodiac is a book, a writing to be read; but the hand that wrote it and the soul that reads it must be greater than the writing. If the soul reads “ Finality! Inevitableness! ” it is carried along to the terminus of the mortal road. If it read “ Only mortal tendency! ” it rises in its strength and majesty to say “ Thus far shalt thou go and no farther.”
You do not want to be ruled by a tendency or any number of them. You do not want to be drawn down by gravity; you want to rise above tendency; and this is your possibility as the individual.
You are greater than visible nature. All that you see in this visible world says “ Come! read me! ” and if you, not understanding your birthright, are appalled and weakened by what you read, you suffer the consequence of your own ignorance. No star, or any number of them, has power to determine what you shall do, or what others shall do to you. Though you may read, if you know how, variety of human tendencies, the relation between them, and the effects which naturally follow causes, you have but to see and begin to apprehend your God-being to say “ Stop! you shall no longer rule me. With my divine birthright I will begin to rule you.”
Here is where you get out of the car and move on your own feet in any direction you choose.
You say “ I see operative law and what it naturally brings* therefore now I can use the law which has hitherto used me, and I will use it to the ruling and overcoming of the natural tendencies which are pictured to me in this great World-Bible, the Zodiac. I will no longer be the servant, I will be the Son who puts all things under his feet.”
To consult the stars every time you contemplate an action to see what they will tell you about it is to strengthen a tendency which should be outgrown; which can be outgrown only as its nourishment is withdrawn. By this course you keep it strong because you keep feeding it and thus give yourself more work to do eventually.
The kingdom is in you, not in the stars. You say Lo! here! and Lo! there! when you should see the throne of power in yourself. You overlook the greater to fasten yourself to the lesser and be carried along to the terminus of the road. You will never be truly individual till you act as the individual—the Son rather than the servant. Because of your relation to Almighty God you have all the privileges of that relation—sonship; and you prostitute that relation and those privileges when you bend the knee to any lesser power.
You are to be crowned King, for you are the heir-apparent. Why should you crown a natural tendency as king and permit fate, instead of destiny, to rule you? Why should you bow before that which should bow to you—which will bow to you if you assert your right to rule?
The natural man is the sum of tendencies which are strong and forceful. The spiritual man is the ruler of those tendencies who makes their very strength serve higher purposes; who sees and works according to that destiny compelled by origin and conquers the fate incidental to human ignorance of divinity. Why prolong the merely natural, when the greater waits to be appropriated? Why look to the future for what you can begin to accomplish to-day?
Oh! how much we need to learn that we are in eternity now and that time is of our own making, its duration dependent upon ourselves! How much we need to learn this in order to live in the present, instead of in the past or future!
We are apt to live mainly in the has been, or the to be, overlooking that present which is all we will ever know, and so overlooking what is possible now. In our eagerness to grasp the two birds in the bush we let from our hand the bird of the now. In our desire to succeed in whatever we undertake W? let g° the*
very means we need for success and accept, instead, that which “ gendereth to bondage.”
Cease looking to the stars to see if they are propitious and look instead to that Lord of all their hosts which is your own God-being, in which is all that is needed for the work you have to do and the success which is for you. “ Look unto me and be ye saved.”
A sign of the times to-day is the inclination of the people to look outside the theological fences for knowledge. This is good. It shows a desire for understanding and enlightenment; but one can tell the degree of progress reached by observing where the seeker looks to find what he needs. In proportion to the real enlightenment will attention be withdrawn from the external world and concentrated upon the human Soul till its slumbering divinity awakens to become Master.
Whether stones or stars, each tells a story; but the reader of the story is greater than they.
To claim the birthright is to be done with the has been and ready for the to be, through possession of, not subjection to, the present.
Will you get out of the car or be carried to the end of the road?
Try to feel that comparative good and evil are but the temporary aspects which existence wears to the soul that is on its way from the Adam to the Christ. The way is of God; what the soul finds in the way is of its own making, first ignorantly and afterward intentionally. Through all that to it is good or evil runs the thread of absolute good that knows no opposite, the thread of manifestation of God. Positive, good; comparative, better; superlative, best. These degrees are for the soul which finds and experiences one after the other, till it joins itself to the best and knows the lesser no longer. The difference between a limited and the unlimited good is what it must experience in order to know the best, and volitionally unite with it—to dwell forever at the right hand of God. From the level of sense- consciousness evil is a terrifying reality. From the ethical standpoint there is something better. From the spiritual, there is the best that is all. On the plane of sense-consciousness the soul is a common servant; on the plane of ethics it is an upper servant that would like to be a ruler instead, but does not know how to become one; on the spiritual plane it becomes ruler through knowing its own sonship.
TRUE INDIVIDUALISM
“ What shall save me from affliction? ”
True individualism.
Shall we look for the meaning of that answer?
Until we awaken to the truth of our being—while we are sleeping the deep sleep of Adam—we are subject to the experiences natural to that sleep. Awakening is the remedy, but Oh! how we cling to the dream, loath to let it go, even while we exclaim, “ If only I could be rid of this suffering!;;
First, we must awaken from the belief and get rid of the idea that God arbitrarily inflicts anything upon us. This is one of the most stupendous errors that has ever dominated mankind. It is the natural outgrowth of that view of God, that makes him a being to be addressed as one that had it in his power to help or harm us, and that was likely to harm, if we did not hasten to placate him.
This view divorces God from “Nature and makes natural phenomena, their discovered properties and consequences, something to be set aside, if not found to be in agreement with the literal word of the Bible. It is a view which pits dogma against demonstration and blocks the way of a higher conviction that unites God and Nature.
We must see, to begin with, that God does not and cannot choose, because the power of choice compels the possibility of acting in another than the very highest and best manner. If God can so act, then God cannot be infinite. If God is capable of doing a certain thing, when he could do a greater and a better one, he is not Deity but is human instead. ,
God is Love in all dealings with mankind, and Love sees and knows nothing opposite to itself. Hence there is no power of choice with God, if God is Love. The sun shines because it is its nature to shine, not because it chooses to shine. If it could choose, darkness would be the equal consequence with light, and we could never be sure which we should have.
We have supplicated God not to give us the darkness, but to be pleased to give us only the light, not seeing, that if there be darkness to us, it is because something has come between us and the light that the sun always sends out, because it is its nature to shine. Let us stop this supplication and apply ourselves to the removal of what has come between us and the light.
You, that have been on your knees praying to God to take the affliction from you, rise, and stand upon your own God-given feet while you do what you can to put it from you! God never arbitrarily afflicted or punished you. You have experienced the consequences of your own ignorance of the one true God and your relation to him, that is all. Your remedy is to “ Know Thyself.”
Disease is discord. You through natural, not intentional, ignorance are not consciously in accord with that great principle of your being, God. All your experience has been the natural consequence of your natural ignorance; for though in your real being you are forever united to God, in your self-consciousness you are a long way from that unity. Only by finding it do you become truly individual, and then dominant where you have been subject.
Here is the key to the solution of all life’s puzzles—find your original, fundamental, and eternal unity with God. This is what is sought by all religions and all philosophies. This great necessity of finding is what makes of you—a living soul impressed with the different thought-patterns of the human race through natural susceptibility—the eventual Master of them all; the individual that is crowned with the glory of the God-head.
Spend no more time in vain regrets for the past, but get ready to be this King in the world, to whom all afflictions are subject, because they cannot afflict him; for his power is greater than theirs. The man that has nothing to lose cannot be robbed. The man that has yielded up his life cannot have it taken from him. The man that sees through temporal conditions, that understands them as but incidental to this finding, knowing, and proving the eternal unity with God and the power this unity imparts to the Soul, cannot be afflicted by them, because he sees them as opportunities for proof of what he is finding.
“Suffer it to be so now, for thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness.”
You are a soul, living from and in that God-being that, as the Lord, is always one with God. Through your pain and travail you are to be born into your kingdom of heaven—into consciousness of this unity and accompanying power to prove it. When in your pain and travail you see that the sun shines, though you look out upon darkness; that the Omnipotent Love that is changeless Good is acting constantly according to, and never contrary to its own nature; that healing streams of energy are pouring toward you all the time, ready to energize you the moment you get out of discord and come into accord with them—then you find your opportunity for individualizing your own soul and incarnating in it the divine ideal.
This is the moment of awakening from the Adam-sleep that is lollowed by the dispelling of the dream phantoms that cannot retain substantiality in the light of the sun. This is the point in human experience where one becomes more truly than ever before, a man, or a woman, because one begins to be the individual; begins to walk, having before been carried.
While an infant in arms that power of choice, that belongs to you and not to God, is latent; but now it is quickened and you can use it. “ Choose ye this day whom ye will serve.” You can choose whether you will continue to serve natural impulses and tendencies, or the fundamental unity that acts as a steady drawing toward God. That chain of connection with Deity never has, never can be broken. Eend as hard as you will, with all the power of ignorance and darkness to help you, and it cannot be broken.
You can keep yourself in the outer darkness for a long, long time; but God waits; the sun always shines.
You step out of the ranks of the sleeping dreamers, one of them no more, the chosen of God instead. For you have chosen to act and live according to unity with the eternal, instead of unity with the dream and dreamers. You have taken that step out of darkness that is sure to bring you into light, because you have found the way to dispel the clouds that shut out the sun and make the darkness.
Steady and changeless from before time till time shall be no more, the light of God goes forth; but to the Adam-soul this sun must rise, and with healing in its beams. You must see and know it for yourself, I must see and know it for myself, each finding his own Lord and God and embodying what he finds. To individualize by incarnation the eternal truth that is for all, is the work we are given to do; and in the doing we co-operate with that eternal purpose that is compelled by what God is, instead of by what God chooses.
To love darkness rather than light, is to harbor the unclean spirit that must be cast out for healing to follow; healing for the ignorantly self-inflicted wounds that we believe God to have intentionally made, as long as we believe that God chooses to act this way or that.
“Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.”
The humanized God we have ignorantly worshipped—we really feared instead of worshipped him—has shut out from us the one true God who is the same toward the just and the unjust. Whether a flower opens itself to the rays of the sun or closes its petals against them, the rays are the same, the sun still shines. The difference is with the flower.
In your real being you always have been, you always will be, one with God. As a living soul, rooted in and growing out from this being, you are to find and embody this unity. This is your destiny. You cannot fulfil it as long as you continue the process of embodying mortal beliefs. You are to choose which you will do and then set yourself to watch how you think day by day, for “ according to thy word be it unto thee.”
You must think this unity, if you would feel and embody it. What fellowship have you, the heir of eternal life, with darkness? With pain and sorrow and woe? These are but incidents on the plane of sense-consciousness, and you are to ascend above them and know them no more. But this ascension is in soul, its register is in the embodiment. If right attention is given to the soul, the embodiment will require little.
Do not mourn as one without hope. You have only to get out of the darkness into the light to have the divine sun-rays energize you and fill you with new strength and peace. You <^must take this step; the teachings of the Science of Being show you how to choose and act upoi). your choice. God’s way is perfect; you mend your own ways and bring them into accord with God’s way.
You become truly individual when you find, claim, and use your own individual relation to God; use it to the overcoming of all unlikeness to God, which you can accomplish by virtue of the power that that relation brings.
This is the foundation that eternally is laid, and if you attempt to build on a foundation that you lay yourself, your structure must eventually fall. What you are fundamentally is already fixed. What your relation to God is already fixed by the sequence of cause and effect. This is the eternal foundation on which you are to build your character, a foundation which is steadfast and sure. Higher and higher your building shall rise, growing more and more beautiful as it becomes glorified; as your original and pure Likeness to God appears in it, glorifying your humanity with divinity.
Let nothing, no tradition, no ancient or modern authority, no sense of weakness or limitation stand between you and that One God that shall be your God. Be individual, fear nothing, take thought instead of being taken by it, hold by the logic of cause and effect, set the God-ideal before your own mental eye, and nothing can prevent your building what, as the son of the carpenter, belongs to you to build—build Likeness to God into your subjective body.
This body of Light shall shine through your physical body with a radiance which is heaven-born, a halo which is one of the “ signs following ” for the eyes that can see and read it. “ In him is no darkness ” who feels union with God. From him shines forth the light that dispels darkness wherever he goes. “ They that sat in darkness have seen great light” when the Master passes before them, and blessed are they, if that light draw them to follow after.
HOW TO BE RID OF POVERTY
“I begin to see how physical conditions can be bettered by watchfulness of the mental state; but I do not see how poverty, for instance, can be alleviated in this way; and until poverty is removed misery must remain.”
If “ overcome evil with good ” is a possibility, a law, then whatever seems evil to us is to be overcome by our co-operation with that eternal good that ever works for us to bring us out of limitations into the “ glorious liberty ” that is our birthright. But, clearly, unless we give this co-operation, we make the “ commandment ” of no effect.
While water naturally runs down hill it is possible by means of the adequate machinery to make it flow up the hill and serve our needs. This difference between the natural and the possible is something you need to see clearly, in order to understand why you should do your part toward the overcoming.
First, as a living soul, clothed with a “ coat of skin,” you are in the way with natural tendencies which you will feel, by which you will be affected. If a torrent of water is rushing down the mountain side and you are in its pathway, you will be swept along by it. Naturally, you are in the pathway of Nature, and of that great Force that pushes on ceaselessly and compels what may be called natural laws.
But if experience has brought you to the point of observation, jostled you out of the natural passivity to natural tendencies that is the souFs inertia, you may see that by stepping out of the pathway of the torrent you may escape being carried along by it to the foot of the hill. If you remain in it, you will have to take the consequences due to the relation between cause and effect. If you step out of it, as you have power to do, you set up a cause which brings to you a different effect.
This is your power as the individual and your possibility in your relation to Nature. More than this, you can not only step out of the pathway of the torrent and escape what would otherwise be your experience, but, by using your own faculties to that end, you could construct machinery by which you could chain that forceful rush to your service, and make it provide for your needs where it had threatened to overthrow and exterminate you.
Force is force; it is always operative; you cannot stay it; but you can utilize it, if you know how. A mighty thought- current is surging onward carrying with it into conditions and experiences all souls whose inertia has not yet been overcome; that are standing passive in its pathway. The common fear, dread, and expectation of poverty constitutes a rushing stream that engulfs many an one that believes his conditions an unmerited misfortune.
Now, if you will step out of the pathway of this stream and let it rush past you for a time, while you do that work on your own part that supplies the necessary machinery, you may utilize its force and make it serve your needs. You may use the force of this thought current to carry to results another kind of thought which you, as the thinking soul, may begin to create for yourself. For you there is a possible which compels the natural to your service.
Are you ready to claim your birthright and begin to establish your dominion, as the individual, over all things? Not only over what are called the “ forces of Nature ” but over your own natural relation to them and tendency to be affected by them? Over all that seems evil, even poverty? Are you ready to do that work which will make these “ forces ” serve you, even to the removal of your poverty? Are you ready to seize the possibility and make water flow up hill?
In our childhood days we read wonderful stories of the genii who could be summoned to perform men’s bidding and bring at command untold wealth of possessions. In our later days when poverty has well-nigh extinguished the last spark of hope in us, we have longed for the ability to prove this story true, the power to command invisible beings to minister to our needs. And the power to command the natural and make it serve us has been latent in us all the while, requiring the hammer- strokes of experience to make us find and use it.
If you wish to be rid of poverty, that incubus which strangles and kills too feeble aspirations of the Soul, you must step aside from the pathway of universal tendency to poverty through fear and expectation of it. You must see and know that you have a right to supply for daily needs, and that you should be neither a beggar nor a monopolist.
“Your father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask him.”
You need shelter, food, and raiment while you are clothed with the coat of skin. These things are normal to the plane of sense-existence, and you have a right to them. But you do not recognize and claim your right when you keep thinking the fearful, anxious thought “ Oh dear! I wonder how I am going to pay my next month’s rent? I am afraid I shall have no money, even for food! Oh, I know I shall end in the poorhouse! ”
You are creating poverty for yourself by letting such be your constant thought. You are standing in the pathway of the torrent; and you but add to your misery if, looking at others, you say “If I only had his wealth! He has no business with so much and he ought to divide with me! ”
HOW TO BE RID OF POVERTY
Envy of others is no basis for effort for one’s self. Step one side for a moment and see this great stream of mortal tendency —of mistaken belief with its offspring of misery, suffering, and despair. Look at yourself and see the divine impress upon yon. In the current of the stream you are used. Standing one side and understanding your own nature, your relation to both the natural and the infinite, you can use its force to lift yourself into the realization of your God-given possibilities. If you will seek first “ the kingdom of God and his righteousness ” all the things you need on the material plane shall be added unto you by this righteousness.
Here is a mighty truth to be remembered. As personalities we become our ideal. If you hold continually to the poverty-ideal; if this is your mental pattern for yourself, you are in the way of this common tendency, and it will leave its mark upon you. If your Soul-ideal is lifted up above its level you are being drawn above that level. You step one side to be drawn up. You must cease to think poverty. You must think supply; think it positively and persistently; avoid the poverty-thought as you would avoid the very devil himself—if you believed there was such a being.
“According to thy word be it unto thee.”
Neither must you make the mistake of desiring wealth for wealth’s sake, deluding yourself with the specious argument “ I could do so much good with it.” If you are trying to accumulate wealth, it is because you desire wealth. Own the truth. “Whatever you do, do not attempt to deceive your own soul. If you desire it, you believe it is necessary to your happiness; otherwise you would not wish it.
If you claim supply for daily needs you are claiming that to which you have a right and you are trusting in the-Lord. Manna falls daily in the wilderness, sufficient for each man’s eating. It always has, it always will; but each man must go out and gather it, and no man need have any left over, for the next day’s supply will come with the day. This attitude is trust, and trust comes with self-knowledge; to this trust belongs ability to be poor without being in poverty. . . *
Poverty, after all, is largely a matter of comparison. A grinding poverty in which one ias not even bread to eat, is poverty unmistakably. But what one man calls poverty another man calls plenty. The one who has enough to eat three times a day, two rooms to live in, and one suit of clothes at a time, is rich, as compared to the one who has not half as much, ‘poor, as compared to the millionaire. «
We shall find that the whole question of poverty assumes a new aspect when we avoid comparisons between ourselves and those who have more than ourselves. We shall not feel half as poor when we stop enumerating the millionaireVpossessions and
wishing we had them. When we do this, we do not trust, do not see that the manna in this wilderness of sense-consciousness is sure to be provided for us. Oh! it is the onions, leeks, and garlic, that we wish, and to have only manna, even though in quantity sufficient for the day, is to be so poor!
But trust is not something that makes it unnecessary for us to do anything. To stand in the pathway of the torrent and trust that it will not strike us, would show gross ignorance of Nature, of both our natural and our possible relation to it. This kind of trust would keep us from stepping to one side and using our own faculties for the construction of the machinery that would pump the water up hill to a house which we had set there.
To be able to be poor is to have mastery of poverty. To be content with full supply for daily needs, without haunting fear for future possible ones, is to be master of the present situation and to have a strong hold upon the future one. “ Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Take care of the seeming evil of poverty in the present day and let future days alone.
See yourself as the child of the Almighty who has a right to supply from the great storehouse. See that every gold, silver, or paper dollar, and all that dollars bring, is out of this storehouse. Every dollar, and everything bought with a dollar, is a combination of elements in Nature, and the living soul, though unconsciously so at first, is the combiner. Analyze any and all the millionaire’s possessions chemically, and you resolve them into what are called elements. Analyze them metaphysically and they are “ resolved into thought whose substance is Mind.”
By your own persistent mental attitude, by casting out the poverty-idea and holding the plenty-for-the-day idea; by affirmation of supply, instead of affirmation of lack; by willingness to do without wealth and by contentment with supply for needs, you can make the force which gives impetus to universal thought currents serve you and bring to pass what your word declares. You can summon the genii who will perform your bidding, for “ye are of more value than many sparrows.”
Take care, however, that you discriminate clearly and carefully between wealth and supply, for here is the parting of the ways—black and white magic. You have a right to your needed share of the universal; but “ the love of money is the root of all evil.” Banish poverty from your conversation, as you have found it is wise to banish disease. Never tell people they are too poor to meet and discharge righteous obligations. Never think yourself too poor to do this.
You would not think so if you were not trying to have something left over after paying what you ought to pay. You are saying, “What should I do if I got no more money after paying this bill? ” Pay that bill and let the “ if ” alone.
REMISSION OF SINS
“ It is such a comfort to know that all my sins have been taken away! ”
Yes, one would suppose that such an assurance would be a great comfort. But what if there is no sound basis for it? What if it is a belief that is not true?
You can not suppose such a possibility? Well! perhaps you had better suppose it long enough to make a candid examination of the case. Did you ever hear of “ a fools’ paradise ” ?
Not that you are considered a fool for believing what you do. Not for a moment. Your belief is quite natural because of your religious training. You have been taught to believe that the Bible is literally true, every word of it, just as it stands; and the Bible says that Jesus died for your sins, that he has taken away the sins of the world. So, of course, if you believe that he did this and that he was the Son of God, you are freed from your sins and they are gone. There is no more score against you. ^
But suppose this view is not true? Impossible! you say. That is what people said when Columbus declared there was another world, when the claim was made that a message could be sent around the world in a short space of time, when it was said to be possible to remain in your own house and speak so as to be heard by some one miles away. And yet all this impossible has been proved possible; and why may not much of our “ impossible ” to-day be proved possible in coming days?
But the possibility must have examination. It has always been those who would admit the possibility when others cried “impossible! ” to whom the proof has come, for only they have eyes with which to see.
Now look at yourself, candidly, for a moment. You are I what is called an individual, are you not? That means that you have vonr own body with its differing members and organs, your own stomach, nerves, and brain, your own faculties and feelings, vonr own ideas and opinions. Bodies like your own, members, organs and faculties, even ideas and opinions, like yours are all about you, are common to human kind; but 1/ours are not common. They belong only to you. They are individual.
You experience tliem and what goes with them. Your digestion is your own. You eat and digest your own dinner with your own stomach. You do not eat another’s dinner or digest it with his stomach. You do not feel his feelings, you feel your own. Yours may be like his, or his may be like yours, but yours are your own and his are his own. There is likeness between you and him, because you are both of the same kind, the human kind. There is likeness between your bodies, organs, processes, faculties, feelings; but for likeness there must always be at least two, for likeness is betweenness—to coin a word for the purpose.
With the human kind there are more than two, there are many, and there is, also, a general likeness between the individual members of the kind; but each member is what we call the individual, and though all that makes up the individual is common to the kind, he has only his own.
Hence where one million stomachs are carrying on the digestive process, literally there are one million stomachs, one million digestions, and one million consequences; but mystically there is but one stomach, one digestive process, and one consequence. There is but one organ that is the stomach, that is not anything else; and this one organ has a certain function and this function has a certain consequence. The multiplicity of human kind does not affect or alter this oneness of organ, function and consequence; a oneness which compels one experiencer —that is a dictionary word, though rarely used.
You are the one experiencer of all that pertains to human nature, hence you are the epitome of the whole, for the one million can experience no more and no less than yourself, because they are but repetitions of the kind.
If you become thoroughly acquainted with your own stomach, digestive process and consequence, literally you know only your own; but mystically you know the race stomach, process and consequence.
If you find how to help your own and bring a consequence that is still better than the purely natural one, literally you have improved yourself, and, mystically, you have improved the race. Literally you have dealt only with your own organism and brought to yourself a consequence that is beyond the one merely natural to the one million because of likeness.
You have demonstrated the possibility of the individual that lifts him above the plane of mere natural liken pps to the race, and in so doing you have offered proof to each of the one million of what can be done. Mystically, you have done this for them by doing it for yourself; but what you have done for them does not preclude the necessity for individual doing on the part of every one of the one million.
If you, as the individual, can better the consequence of the natural function of the natural organ, each of the one million can do the same. But will each do it? This is another matter. What yon have done for them does not tonch this question of what another, or all individuals, will do.
While there is, mystically, only one stomach, one process, one consequence, literally there are many to experience that one; and while yon have improved npon the merely natural, and have done this, mystically, for the whole race, each member of the race mnst experience, literally, what yon have done, to have its benefits. While the betterment is for the one million it mnst nevertheless be experienced by each one before the experience can belong to the million.
Suppose that there was a defect in the digestive process due to ignorance of the nature of the organ, function and consequence. You gain knowledge of this defect and why it is and how it can be removed, apply this knowledge in your own person and see the defect disappear; and you have found and proved for the whole race the way out of the difficulty.
But what you have done does not put them out of it, literally. Only in a mystical sense have you brought to them salvation from the defect and its consequences. The literal salvation depends upon individual doing. So whether you gain knowledge of how to remedy defects or how to improve upon the merely natural, it is your doing that proves what can be done; and it is only the individual doing that can experience the result.
The individual experience of the result is not, and can not be, the literal universal experience of the same result. The literal experience can be had only by the individual doing.
Now apply this illustration to the doctrine of salvation from sin through belief in Jesus Christ, and see where it brings us. We have committed sin, we say, but it was natural, we did not know better. This however does not excuse us from paying the penalty, for God must be justified. But belief that his Son paid the penalty will excuse us and justify God.
How illogical! “ As a man soweth, so shall he reap.” This is Jesus’s teaching. Does he say that some one else, himself or another, will reap for us and relieve us of this necessity? The word is “ shall” not “ may,” and there is no “ perhaps ” in the statement.
If you eat food, you, and no one else, will digest and assim* ilate it. You, and no one else, will reject or put from you that which is not to be retained. No one, above or below, past or present, can do this for you, for it is compelled by Nature and Nature is no respecter of persons. The law of cause and effect is not, and can not be, broken for you. It is deaf, dumb, and Hind to mortal desire and petition; but it serves royally him who knows.
If you stole somethin? from your neighbor last year, how can anything that Jesus did, or anything the Bible says, wipe
out the fact? Your error is not taken away from you by one or the other. Whatever your sin, or error, whether it be the subtle error in thought or the more obvious sin in act, must you not put it from you if you would be rid of it? Must there not be this individual doing if you would experience the result?
The world has rested too long in the inertia of the belief that “Jesus did it all”; meaning that you and I have not to do what he did, but believe instead that he was the Son of God- offered as propitiation for our sins. He “ did it all ” indeed, but he did it for us only mystically, not literally; and this is the huge mistake of Christendom—making literal that which is only mystical.
He showed in himself what is possible to you and myself. He saw, taught, and proved the way out of the Adam-sin and its consequences. He was, pre-eminently, the individual. His understood relation to God was brought to bear upon the merely natural with consequences that are the heritage of the human race. He proved the’way out of sin, misery, disease, and despair, by walking in it, to its end, going before us to show us where to plant our own feet. He did for us all that the New Testament relates of’liim, but mystically, not literally.
Hence ye are not, and can not be, relieved from that doing on our own part, which is the putting away from ourselves all sense-defects and the putting on that divine Likeness that is an improvement upon the merely natural. He showed us what needs to be done and how to do it. There his work ended. This he could not have showed had he not the same human nature that pertains to ourselves, and the consciousness of the divine nature that we have not yet acquired.
He bore our sins because his human nature was our own. He took them away because with his divinity he triumphed over them. What he did we can eventually do if we walk in his footsteps and thus work instead of believe what is fundamentally untrue.
“ Though your sins be as scarlet they shall be white as wool ” when you have done your part as the individual. You can cultivate a consciousness of inherent divinity till you bring it forth in victory over the sense-errors of your human nature. You are not a puppet or an automaton. You are an individual, and you should recognize this fact.
All dis-ease is consequent upon sin, and sin is, originally or fundamentally, error in thought. All unhappiness is from the same cause. All weakness and sorrow has the same origin. All ease, happiness, strength and joy is from truth in thought. You are the individual thinker. Where then shall you look for the disappearance of the one and the appearance of the other?
Your thoughts are your own, and their consequences are your own also, however common the kind is to the human race.
HOW TO REMOVE IMPRESSIONS
“I saw such a dreadful sight on the street to-day and I can not shake off the feeling it gave me.”
This is not an unusual experience. We have all shared it at some time, and the impression made upon us by what we saw has haunted us for days. This lingering of the impression was due to our ignorance of the way to remove it, our lack of knowledge of self-protection.
Remembering that you are a soul, not a physical body, you will see that you are naturally susceptible to impression. Because of what you are as a living soul, standing between God-being :n the one side and the objective world on the other; because your five senses are the natural avenues through which impression is made on you; because the education of existence begins with impression, you naturally receive it, first, from the objective world through the senses.
Because impression is thus made upon you, you, though out from God, are identified more with matter than with Spirit; and you live, think, and feel on the plane of impression. Because you have divine possibilities in you, though you are naturally susceptible to impression, you can, when you know how, set to work to remove any impression previously made and of which you wish to be rid. More than that, you can learn so to protect yourself that sights, which otherwise would make a profound impression upon you, leave one slight in comparison.
Your whole work as a soul, a work that is to bring you from the infancy to the glorious manhood of self-consciousness, is first, the experience of, then resistance to, then victory over natural impression. This is your line of destiny in which you master your fate.
You are fated to be susceptible to every impression through the senses, for this is the consequence of what you are as a soul, the consequence of the law of cause and effect. But you are destined to overcome all undesirable impression, to rule instead of be ruled by it.
If you will observe yourself carefully you will see that you are being impressed continually with one thing after another, and that existence is a succession of impressions. Some of them are from without and others are from within. You see something disagreeable and immediately your thought goes to work to stamp that impression more firmly upon you. You keep thinking about it, thinking according to it, dwelling upon it, incubating it, till it hatches into a feeling that you can not shake^off; till it possesses you.
From impression to possession is not a long process unless something interferes to check it. Now you had better get yourself well in hand and set about interfering in this process that leads from impression to possession, for until you get ready to interfere you will be a victim to it. Do not stop to beg God to save you from it, but set about your self-salvation, for from God you have your power to accomplish it. Use of what you have, rather than supplication for what you think you have not, is the means to be employed.
Are you ready? Then begin to do this one simple thing— meet the undesirable impression with the contrary thought.
Simple enough, is it not?
“No sense in it,” do I hear you say? How do you know unless you have tried it?
You want to know why such a simple thing shall bring a result? Because impression from thought is as natural to you as impression through the senses, and impression from thought can be volitional.
By purposely holding a thought which is counter to your sense-impression you make a counter impression upon yourself, and the strongest one will win. Action belongs to nature, and counteraction belongs to you. As a living soul you are impressed, but also as a living soul you can impress, and according to your choice.
Here is your power, which, if you recognize and use it, will make you master where you have been servant. You do not have to be possessed by an undesirable impression; you can dispossess it by possessing yourself. Bead the New Testament and see how the healing of all manner of dis-ease followed upon the casting out of possessing devils.
You have ignorantly allowed yourself to be possessed by natural impression; you must rescue yourself from this possession by your own volitional impression made by your use of thought- force. This being the necessity, begin at once to form the habit of “ speaking the word ” to the sense-impression at the moment it is made.
You are walking along the street, you see a crowd, and some men pass you bearing a mangled form. “ Oh! dear! he has been killed! How dreadful! ” is your impression. Quickly—– No, his life is not at the mercy of accident. He is a living soul, and nothing that mars his fleshly body can rob him of life. His life is “ hid with Christ in God ” and he still is, whatever mortal sense may say to the contrary.
Impress this thought upon yourself and it will tend to counteract the sense-impression. To do this quickly is to avoid the feeling which would he generated by the thought according to sense-impression; avoid it in the measure that the counter-feeling is generated. Do not forget that thought generates feeling. To understand this and act upon the knowledge is to emancipate ourselves from a dreadful bondage. Without this knowledge and its practical application, without self-protection, a sense-impression will color everything in life.
When yon saw this “ dreadful ” sight on the street, not understanding what you could do to counteract the impression it made upon you, you described it to your family when you went home, and to the friends who were with you in the evening, going over and over it, keeping it before your mental eye. When you went out the next day you were “ so nervous! ” that any sudden noise made you jump, the sight of a crowd made your heart beat and a faint feeling came over you, and you were sure that another accident had taken place. For days you expected to see or hear of something dreadful as having occurred and you were really unhappy because you were “ so sympathetic.”
That nervousness, expectation, and fear, were the consequence of being possessed by an impression. If you do not possess your own soul, it will be possessed; that is sure. And your pride in your sensitiveness and susceptibility to suffering—for you have rather plumed yourself on your tender-heartedness—is proof that you are possessed by a devil as well as by an impression.
An error-thought, the result of ignorance, made active through a sense-impression, has you in its grip, and it must be cast out to free you from that tender susceptibility in which you have so much pride. You must dislodge it by putting a truth- thought in its place. You can do this because you can, if you will, think contrary to the impression, instead of according to it. Thought is curative. Your truth-thought will help to counteract the impression made upon you, which keeps you on the lookout for accidents and makes you suffer one nervous shock after the other.
“ It gives me such a fright whenever I receive a telegram ” some one says. WTiy? What is there in a piece of yellow paper to make your heart thump and then drop way down to your shoes? It is your thought of what that message may be, that makes you have that feeling.
A death in the family or among your friends has been announced to you in that way, and now you can never receive a telegram without thinking of death, because the impression previously made upon you has not been counteracted, but allowed to remain. It has become strengthened by your dwelling upon it. Your thought has revolved around and around it. You have “ lived it over ” again and again instead of setting yourself to work to efface it.
You have ignorantly allowed yourself to become possessed by your thought according to natural impression, and this is a natural consequence, but for you there is a possible consequence, and that is emancipation from such possession.
“Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free ” from it. Now you do not get knowledge of the perfect truth of being—what you are in the real of you and what your possibilities—through your sense-impressions; and as long as you continue to think according to them you think yourself away from that truth that makes free from bondage instead of towards it.
You cannot appropriate it, make it your conscious possession, until you put it into your “ self ”—into your own soul; and you appropriate it by thinking according to it in the very face of that sense-impression that is contrary to it. By this means you “ right about face! ” and because you are looking at the higher reality you have the sense-plane behind your back.
Every soul must sometime thus turn unto that Lord that is its real God-being; and when that time comes for you, you will draw strength and courage into your own self, or soul, that will tend to give you mastery of sense-impressions.
Grief is persistence of impression. It can be counteracted. Make an impression purposely. Make one with a purpose in it. You can if you will try. T^ut you indulge your grief, indulge the impression, strengthen it by thinking according to it continually. And here, without intention, you are becom^g selfish. The remedy is to become selfless—become another self, for this one that is so full of grief and sorrow is not a kind to be perpetuated. You need to get rid of it; the less of it the better.
Action is natural, counter-action is possible; and with this possibility the power of the individual is pitted against natural tendency; and the final victory is on the side of the individual through the power pertaining to individuality.
Stop excusing yourself for this or that because you were “ bom so.” No matter what you were born, you have as great possibilities as ever pertained to any one who has lived in the world. Your excuses are paltry. Seek for self knowledge instead of sheltering yourself under a “ I can not help it.” “ Know Thyself ” and divinity is possible unto you, but it is attained by mastery of the natural; not by violation of the natural but by compelling it to serve you. All that Nature—all that the Universe contains is for you, but you must take possession of it.
Stop weeping and go to smiling. Smile purposely, deliberately, and religiously and thus make an impression upon yourself. Keep it up persistently and the impression will become strong enough to dominate and dispossess the “ weepy ” one. What you are naturally, is fixed, but you can become what you will.
HUMAN HENS
You are a human being, you know, and as such you have a variety of aspects. Sometimes you are the personification of jollity, and sometimes you are the very embodiment of despondency. In your outer manifestations you run the scale from one to the other, up and down, showing in your face, or re-presentation, what you are in your self-consciousness at that time.
Do you know why? Why you re-present something? It is because you are a human hen.
Does that remark surprise you?
Because of the nature of the unit its fractions are related to each other. Though you are a unit, as a human being, there are many fractions in you, as composing your nature; and you will present different aspects at different times as these fractions present themselves—as you re-present them by manifesting them.
For instance, the tiger in you was manifested the other day, when you became so angry at that man who lied about you, in order that he might work out a business scheme to his own profit and your consequent loss.
He not only slandered you, but he deliberately robbed you, and when you found it out, you felt as if you would break every bone in his body, if you could get hold of him. You were fairly quivering with rage, and you were, re-presenting—for those who could see—the natural tiger in you. For the moment, natural instinct was dominant in you, and it would have gone hard with that man if he had been in your way.
He, in his turn, re-presented the fox in what he did. By cunning craftiness he accomplished his purpose and made manifest the fox nature that is naturally in him. It is one of the fractions.
So, you see, whatever you are on the surface at any given time, you are manifesting the natural concomitants of your own human nature. But you have also a possibility that is capable of more result than belongs to a natural tendency. You, as the unit, are more than the tiger-nature, as a fraction; and therefore you can accomplish more than the fraction can.
You can understand the tiger-nature, but it can not understand you. You can see its naturalness, its place in a unity, and you can say to it “ You are all right for what you are, but you shall not rule me.” The natural tiger-nature cannot restrain itself, but you can restrain it. It roars and strikes with all the force of natural tendency. When it is dominating you, because of this very force you are re-presenting not only what is in you naturally, but also your lack of self-government, your subjugation to the animal instinct in you, when you should be seated on a throne, with it crouching submissively at your feet.
Do you not see that as a human being, a personality, you are the means by which Nature is re-presented? Nature objectively is spread out before and around us, presented to us for our judgment. And we render our involuntary judgment by re-presenting it through ourselves.
In the human being, man or woman, is summed up all that is seen as objective Nature, and which is repeated, or re-presented, through him. Here is your opportunity, therefore, to re-present the possibility in you that is more, far more, than a natural tendency.
Because of your likeness to the Absolute that is the other side of you, the side that is toward God all the while your human side is toward Nature, you can bring your inherent power of control to bear upon the tiger, the fox, the lion, snake, and bear that are in you, and say, “ I will not that they shall reign over me. I will reign over them, as is my birthright, and by means of my God-likeness.” And because the unit is greater than any of its fractions you can accomplish it.
This is your line of destiny—through experiencing them becoming acquainted with your own composite nature, with its many natural tendencies; and then learning your greater possibilities through opportunities for proving them.
This line of destiny is existence, which must continue till the destiny is fulfilled, and its fulfilment is mastery. Your divine inheritance is your possibility through your likeness to God. Your natural inheritance is the experiencing of every nature, instinct, and impulse that goes to make up your composite nature.
Your natural inheritance is servitude to these impulses and emotions. Your divine inheritance is victory over them by mastering them. Your destiny will not be fulfilled till you stand as the tried and proved Master of your human self.
While the tiger in you strikes and rends, you are a tiger in human form. Your possibility as a human being, a possibility not belonging to the tiger, is obscured and only the natural is re-presented. When you have your foot upon his neck, and render love instead of a blow, the possibility due to your God-likeness is re-presented and the merely natural is obscured.
You are an example to the rest of mankind. What kind of an example are you affording? The natural, or the possible?
Yes, your protest is a natural one. You would like to afford the higher example, but you can not help the other one. But here you mistake. You can help offering the natural one and you can offer the higher one instead, when you know how. Here we come to another nature in you, for, as said before, you are a human hen.
You are an incubator, and you will experience what you hatch.
Now you cannot have given your attention to an effort for self-knowledge without discovering that thought is creative. You are a living soul, you know, not a material body. Your present body is the means by which you manifest your grade, or rank, as a living soul. As a living soul with a visible body, you are the human being with a destiny to fulfil.
You think thoughts. There is a natural order in your experience. Your thought is according to impression and impulse. Because thought generates feeling, your feeling is according to your thought, and your action is according to your feeling. Therefore “ as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”
Where then is the point of resistance? With the action? Yes, this is good. With the feeling? Yes, this is better. With the thought? Yes, this is best of all. For it follows, does it not, that, if the thought is dealt with, all that ensues from it is affected?
Your thoughts are the eggs you are incubating; and the chicks you will hatch out will be according to the kind. This is Nature and Law.
As a business man you have made some money. You are very glad of it, for money is a good thing to have. You have worked many years, been careful in your investments and frugal in your expenditures and feel that you have a right to that money, for you have honestly earned it. You are not as young as you once were, your ability for hard work is behind you. But lately you found that what you had accumulated was in danger. You thought that you had invested it so securely that you were sure of support in your old age; and now it looks as if all you had would be swept away.
As a human hen what will you do? You will brood over that egg of thought, fear of poverty, till it hatches in poverty for you, even though, later on, your investment proves to be safe. With your uprising and your downsitting you will be thinking “Oh! dear! what shall I do? I shall have to go to the poor- house!”—thinking this with every mouthful you eat, so that your food is poisoned for you; thinking it in the home and out of it wherever you are, whatever you are doing; brooding over that thought-egg, incubating it till in due season the chick appears.
You know, you have seen examples that prove it, that a man with ten thousand dollars may be much poorer than the man who has but ten dollars; for wealth and poverty are matters of
feeling more than of objective possessions. Becanse you are a human incubator, you can live really in the poorhouse, though outwardly you have a home on Fifth Avenue.
You will live, in either case, in the midst of the brood you hatch. You can spend your time in naming and counting your chickens, but it would be more profitable to spend it in careful selection of eggs. If you do not like some of your brood, see to it that you brood over no more such eggs. Careful selection of your thought-eggs is the requisite essential for desired result.
It is your own fault if you are miserable in your anticipation of poverty. By this fear of and anticipation of it, brooding over your thought-eggs, you are really in poverty, because the poverty is in you; and when you are feeling poverty, wealth does not exist for you, even though you have a large balance at your banker’s.
Even though your friends say “His poverty is all in his mind; he imagines himself poor,” you are poor as long as you feel poverty. You really experience it within yourself, for your imagination—your imaging power—makes your inner world. With that power you form your thought-eggs; as a human incubator you brood over them till they hatch for you either misery or joy, according to their kind.
According to the Dictionary, incubation, in pathology, is “the unnoticed or unknown processes or changes which occur in the interval between the exposure to an infectious disease and the development of its first symptoms.”
This interval is your own brooding over your thought-eggs. Impression, natural tendency and impulse first determine your thought-egg. You form it, not understanding what you are doing, and brood over it till it hatches, till the “ first symptoms ” appear; and then you wonder where in the world that chicken came from.
The atmosphere in an incubator must be kept warm for the eggs to hatch, and your fear and expectation supply the necessary heat.
Though you may not like your present brood of chickens, they are good for you, for they are evidence of the kind of eg£S you have allowed yourself to brood over and hatch. They are proof that you can have another kind, if you will select another kind of egg.
It is not your fault that you are a human hen. There is nothing wrong about that. On the contrary, it is a great privilege that goes with it—you are able to choose your eggs; and thereby you control results.
Learn to see that every experience you have is evidence of your own natural tendencies, and that it may also be made opportunity for evidence of your greater possibilities.
. YOU LIVE IN YOUR THOUGHT-WORLD
“Care killed a cat ” you know, and a cat has nine lives. If care can kill a creature that has nine lives, what will it do for a poor mortal who has but one? Finish him quite, I should think; should not you?
Seriously, has not worry made more misery than any other one thing in the world? Oh, that haunting spectre of worry, standing beside one continually, poisoning food and drink, shutting out the light of day and compelling one to dwell in the dungeon of his own dire imaginings!
What a bondage to live in, and how few know that it is a needless bondage! Perpetual worry is perpetual slavery, and women, especially, are so prone to worry.
Do you plead guilty? Have you worried over what might happen till your nerves were “ all unstrung ” and the slightest unusual sound sent a pang of terror through you?
This is what you have done. Your little son did not reach home from school at the usual time. Immediately you began to worry. You were sure that something had happened to him. He had been run over in crossing the street, probably. At once you saw his little form lying in the dust injured and suffering. Your heart leaped to your throat and choked you, you gasped for breath and were so weak you could scarcely drag yourself to the door to look for him.
Though your feet were leaded your thought leaped forward to his probable injuries, the rush for the doctor, his long illness, his crippled condition in future, or even his death; yes, even to arrangements for the funeral; and all this in the moment or two that it took you to get to the door and look down the street, and see him in the distance trotting along all unmindful of his mother’s misery.
Then in the great rush of thankfulness that swept over you was mingled another element—for a moment you wanted to get hold of him and give him a good shaking for the fright he had caused you.
And there was where you were unjust to your child and to your own better nature, for he had not caused your fright at all. It was your own tendency to worry, to imagine the worst, that caused it. Your own thoughts made your feet like lead and your heart beat madly.
Your feelings were what you created for yourself by letting a tendency dominate you. What you pictured to yourself by your thoughts was what you saw and felt. Your thought-pict- ures scared you half to death. You gave yourself such a shock with them, made such a demand upon your stored-up energy, that the supply nearly gave out.
Not understanding how to keep the channel between you and the inexhaustible reservoir open, you had so little left that you did not—as you yourself said—get over it for days. You knew neither how to avoid such a demand upon your stored-up energy nor how to renew your supply. You paid the penalty of your ignorance and then wanted to shake your dear little boy. You dropped in a heap on the doorstep, and when he finally reached you, you hugged and scolded him at the same time.
Oh, yes! You can laugh at it now, but you did not feel much like laughing then. And though you laugh, you will do something quite as absurd again, unless you learn that thought is creative and that you must use it, if you do not wish it to use you. “ Use, or be used ” is the command of Nature.
“But,” you say, “ your illustration does not apply to me. I have no children, and I am not prone to worry over possible accidents, or the health of any member of my family. My trouble is of a very different kind.”
Oh! yes! I see. Your case is quite different. You are worrying over what is to become of you in your old age when you are not able to provide for your needs. You thought you had laid by a sufficient sum and invested it securely, and now it has taken to itself wings and flown away—the investment has turned out badly.
Now do you know that if you did not worry over that you would worry over something else? You are fast getting to where you would be out of your element if you did not worry. It is becoming such a habit with you that you would be sure to find something to worry over, no matter what your circumstances might be. And such a pernicious habit as it is! It makes you have troubled dreams besides robbing you of all comfort and pleasure in your waking hours.
You live in your thought-world. That is why you are so miserable. It is peopled by your fears and anticipations, and the population has multiplied till you are crowded and jostled on every side. And yet they are all ghosts, nothing but ghosts. You have made every one of them, and you can withdraw the life from every one of them. If you do not keep them alive they must dwindle and fade out. They feed on you. They are so many vampires that suck your vitality into themselves.
It is for you to say, Stop! Yon can go to work to make a new thought-world and fill it with angels instead. The law of being compels that you live in the midst of your own creations; for you are a living soul, you know, not a fleshly machine.
Therefore your thought-creations must become like unto the real of you, before you can see its beauty and feel its power.
What do you say? You can not help worrying? Yes, you can! You have not tried in the right wa^, that is all. You have tried not to worry. You must do something instead of trying not to do something.
You must think. You cannot help yourself. It is your nature as effect of cause. And when you try so hard not to think worry-thoughts, it is a great strain and effort and you get discouraged. You have only to think truth-thoughts persistently, and the worry-thoughts will take their departure because their vitality is withdrawn. The ghosts will vanish, the vampires die of starvation.
To do, is much better than to try not to do. Never allow yourself to brood over a disagreeable thought-egg. Get off from” the nest as quickly as you can. Go and do something; sing, dance, run up and down stairs a few times and keep thinking hard—“ I have nothing to worry about. God is my supply and I can not lack.”
Never let yourself sit down and brood over the disagreeable. You will not change the population of your thought- world that way; and if you want it to be bright, sunny, and wholesome, you must make it so. Thoughts that are in accord with your true being are God’s messengers who bring to you that fullness of health, strength, and peace that is your birthright. By their help you take possession of all that pertains to the eternal real of you, and embody it.
Then you make manifest your true God-being, glorifying the flesh. There is no dominion manifest in perpetual worry, except the dominion that your thoughts have over you. Your higher dominion is shown by your control of your thoughts; and the way to control them is to keep pegging away on the positive, affirmatory side.
When you worry you are negative and therefore passive to all impressions from the universal thought-atmosphere that are of the same kind. You attract what you think. Because this law holds good on the one side as well as the other, you will attract supply for your needs when you persist in the affirmative thought. Persisting in the negative or worry-thoughts, your tendency will be to experience them later on.
If you could once get a good square look at your thought- world, and knew that you had created what it contains, you would lose no time, but set yourself to work at once to change its inhabitants. There are no more forlorn or despicable creatures in the external world than you will find there; and when you constitute yourself the sanitary officer, physician, and priest of the community, you will redeem that world from defilement and darkness and reconcile it—bring it into accord with—God.
This yon can do by your use of the same thought-force that has used you in making this world. By your use of it you remake your thought-world, make it into the likeness of God. You dwell in heaven or in hell according to your thought- world, not acording to outward circumstances; and this world is under your control through your power to change it.
No matter what your fate may be, knowledge of your destiny and right use of thought-force will enable you to conquer it. You can reach that poise and equilibrium where no combination of circumstances can appall you, because you see the line of destiny that runs through them and brings a triumph over them at last.
Suppose you do have to leave your handsome house and live in a small one in an unfashionable neighborhood. What of it? The house and street belong only to the world you look at through the natural channel, the senses. This is not the world you live in. Though you look upon what appears to you as an external world, you are living in your thought-world all the time, and your feelings are according to that inner world.
That poor, mean, unfashionable house has no power to make you miserable. It is your thoughts about it that make you miserable, and you can be just as happy there as you choose to be. The external world never did nor never can make happiness or misery for you. It is your own attitude toward it, made into a mental environment, that constitutes your happiness or misery, your fate or your destiny.
Be glad that you are finding out what it is to be an individual even if the knowledge, and the power born of it, cost you something. Be glad that you can leave behind self after self as only “ stepping stones to higher things.”
As the individual you will see and live by destiny, not fate; and then the fate you thought so hard and bitter wiil take care of itself. See that you have the glorious privilege of proving by use the great creative power that is the mainspring of everything that lives and moves. Though naturally you have been used, all the while within you was the possibility to use; and experience has brought you to where you can exercise your possibility, and bring it to bear upon what you are now, naturally.
You have glorious opportunity to prove your own latent power, and you had to be pushed to where you would stretch forth your hand to lay hold upon the possible. Therefore it is all good from beginning to end, for though naturally servant, you are to become master.
The mastery of fate is gained by attention to the thought- world, and worry is removed in the same way. Set up a counteracting tendency and eventually the victory is yours.
THE PARALYSIS OF FEAR
Have you ever observed the paralyzing effects of fear? A sudden fright makes your heart thump, your throat contract, your voice fail, and a tremor possesses you from head to foot. Your strength goes on the instant, and a deadly weakness assails you at the moment you are without power of resistance; a slight push would overthrow you. Did you ever think of what the effect of long-continued fear must be?
Is anything more common than fear? Is any one phrase repeated more often than, “ I am afraid ” ? We are afraid that it will rain or grow cold; that we will be disappointed; that something will happen; that we shall take cold, or be ill in some form; afraid that our children and friends will be ill or unhappy; that we shall not be prosperous; that some one will do something that will reflect discreditably upon us, and so on ad infinitum.
Natural existence is one constant long-drawn-out fear, as the undercurrent moving steadily along, whatever may be on the surface at the moment. We are born in fear and surrounded by fear, adding our own to the common stock, when we begin to be a unit in the community. To fear is a tendency strengthened by frequent repetition, till it is ever present in daily life, and we are unconsciously in bondage in consequence. We are always more or less expectant of something painful; we draw scarcely a free breath. We are shut in and bound about with bonds, the stronger for being invisible. Under ordinary circumstances we do not notice them, but in an extremity we call upon God to free us.
However fearless outwardly one may be, no one is really free from fear, till he has gained some insight into his nature and destiny. It cannot be otherwise. Sense-knowledge fosters fear; wisdom begets fearlessness. Fear increases susceptibility to suffering; fearlessness decreases this susceptibility. It follows, therefore, that wisdom is to be sought and found before liability to the undesirable is diminished; hence that the remedy for all ills is to be individually obtained.
Whatever tends to allay fear tends to alleviate suffering. Whatever tends to the extermination of fear tends to the extermination of suffering. Now which do yon desire? Alleviation or extermination?
Yon can get alleviation more easily than extermination, bnt you will simply increase the amount of work you must eventually do. The fear of suffering is natural, and whatever offers even a temporary help is eagerly grasped; but you may purchase present relief at the expense of future misery. Enlightenment is the only sound basis for extermination of the root-cause of all suffering—ignorance and fear.
You do not like to be called a coward? No one is calling you a coward. The bravest soldier that ever faced shot and shell is afraid, down deep within him, as you, as all are afraid; for this fear is a natural characteristic of human nature. The question of susceptibility to disease is a puzzling question for all physicians to deal with. Ask your own and see if this is not so.
Why are we susceptible to disease? Beyond reference to natural tendencies, heredity, etc., they cannot tell you. But the Science of Being shows that it is because of natural, latent fear, quickened and intensified by ignorance of what we are and our relation to Nature. Fear is born of ignorance, and ignorance is natural.
You—this personal you—are an existent soul. As an ap- ple-blossom on the tree must precede the fruit, you, as you are naturally, must precede what you may become. First the natural, afterward the possible.
As this natural personal you, you are immersed in an ocean of thought-atmosphere which you are unconsciously inbreathing and outbreathing. It is full of germs—the thoughts of the human race from the dawn of time. You inhale them, and some of them remain in you and germinate, begetting their kind. What you attract, sticks to you. Fear makes you passive instead of resistant. Instead of outbreathing the germs, you hold them to yourself. Your inbreathing is strong, for it is natural; your outbreathing is feeble through your ignorance and fear.
By understanding what you are in the real of you, which is so much more than the personal you, you can make your out- breathing strong enough to expel the germs, instead of retaining them. You can, through cultivation, offer that resistance that will prevent them from germinating in their passage through you. You will never stand free from the liability to dis-ease, to suffering, till you cultivate resistance to it and undertake the work of extermination of its root-cause.
You will never be sure of healthfulness, of the fulness of harmonious consciousness that is possible, till you have freed yourself from the bondage of natural fear and thereby removed your susceptibility to suffering. The degree of susceptibility always determines the measure of suffering. Lessening of susceptibility must, then, lessen the suffering.
Now it remains to determine whether or not natural susceptibility is capable of control. What are you? An automaton or a machine ? Machines do not love or hate. They break down, but do not weep over their own wreckage. You feel, and you express what you feel. You are more than a machine. You are a living soul rooted in your God-being, and you are to grow to maturity through experience. First you experience that susceptibility to impression—experience it by its consequences— that is natural, because it belongs to the infancy of self-consciousness.
You, as the living soul, are an infant in knowledge of your being. How can a baby recognize and bring to bear upon sensation the faculties and powers of God-being? The consequences of what you are naturally as a living soul make the demand upon you that quickens them to action and brings you out of infancy into manhood, when you use them to that end.
So, you see, your ignorance and fear stand between natural susceptibility and possible freedom from it. You pay a debt to Nature and the paying process is a hard one; but you may, if you will, amass a fortune which you will righteously keep as your own. The foundation of this fortune—health, strength, power, and peace—is fearlessness through understanding your original and destined relation to God and Nature.
The air is full of miasma say you? You—the real of you— are greater than miasma. The water is full of germs? You are greater than they. You have inherited a tendency to consumption? You are vastly greater and more powerful than any tendency. You have lost all your friends and all interest in life and do not care how soon the end comes? You are more than these friends and this state of existence, and its end is but the beginning of another.
Now you might as well face the music. The only way out of suffering is by extermination of its cause. Alleviation, whatever the means employed, is only postponement. Extermination can be achieved only through your effort to supplant the natural with the possible; only by your effort to think and live according to your being instead of according to your natural sense.
Were it not for your natural susceptibility you would not know your own power of dominion, for there would be nothing over which to exercise and thereby prove it. Were it not for your suffering, there would be no incentive for you to cultivate resistance to it.
Susceptibility is good, suffering is good, experience is good; fear is the devil. He goes to and fro in the world seeking whom he may devour; and they are many. He has very nearly devoured you for he paralyzed you so that you did not resist what you are capable of resisting when you know the capabilities of God-being.
Get up above the level of your pains and pangs and look down upon them from this height. He may stand there too, but a step below you, for the mountain-peak affords standing room for but one. Answer each and all his utterances according to your original God-likeness. That never changes whatever he shows you.
The ministration of angels will be yours when his presence does not keep them away. You will be fed and sustained in the position you have taken. From the Father’s house will be brought to you daily supply for daily needs. There is enough there. The supply can never be exhausted and yours is your birthright which will never be denied, except by yourself. Act upon it. Claim what is for you, what has always been for you, waiting appropriation. ‘
“ God and one are a majority.” However multitudinous your miseries, that majority will always achieve victory over them. Do not mark a date in your calendar as the time when the work shall be successfully accomplished. Let dates alone. It will be done. Let this suffice you. Do your part and leave the rest.
When you plant a seed in the ground do you demand the blossom the next hour? You know that having planted the seed —your part—a process of growth sets in which unlocks and brings forth to manifestation the potencies hidden in the seed. You know that the order is sure and on that basis you trust the result.
Your faith has under it a foundation which will not sink out of sight at the first heavy weight placed upon it. You will be able to wait for the blossoming period without for one moment abandoning your trust. The possible does not supplant the natural in a day, but it does supplant.
The blossom appears where the seed has been—in your hand. And all the while, before the seed and after the blossom, you are you. The eternal is incapable of annihilation. What is there to fear? All that belongs to time passes and is not. You remain.
A shadow passes before your eyes and is gone
THE LIVING BRIDGE
There is a grieved look in your face, your eyes are moist, and your heart is heavy. You are wrestling with one of the problems of human existence. One whom you called your friend has wounded you so deeply that, although the blow was given days and weeks ago, the pain is still sore and you can not speak of it, you can only do your best to hide it.
He misjudged you, attributed to you a motive which you did not feel and judged your actions by that standard. The shock was so great, at first, that you could not reason, you could only feel. You were stunned by it, for you thought that you knew him and that he knew you; and had any one told you that he would have so judged you, you would have said “ Impossible! ”
Then as the hurt grew stronger your constant thought was “ How could he do it? How could he? ” and looking at him you saw one whom you had never known. Your old friend was gone and a stranger was in his place, a stranger who looked at you through eyes that had lost the loving-kindness you had been used to see there.
You could make no defense, not because there was none to be made but because you could make none to him. Did he not know you better? If he could misjudge you so cruelly what was there to be said? Was it worth while? The mistaken opinion you could bear, but that he should be the one to utter it was the crushing blow.
It is no wonder that your eyes are moist and your heart heavy, and yet—and yet . You need the help of under
standing, not simply why he judged you as he did, but the understanding of what and why existence is. All problems must be solved—to be solved at all—according to their principle. This circumstance, like all circumstances that make up your experience, is part of what is good for you though very evil to you.
Suppose that you were on one side of a river, with a need and a desire for what was on the other side; that you were compelled to get to that other side some day. A bridge would be a help adapted to your needs. Eesting upon either shore and spanning the stream it would be, for you, a means to the inevitable end.
But as you attempted to walk over it you might find the way hard, because of the construction of the bridge. You might have to climb over obstacles, find a wall across your path that you could not climb over but must dig under, some steps that led down into a dark pit of which you could not see the bottom, or up an inclined plane where you continually slipped back.
As you met these impediments tc your progress, you would either give up your effort to cross the river as useless, or overcome them with great difficulty. If you ceased effort, you would find yourself compelled to renew it after a time; the continued effort to move forward in spite of all obstacles would set you further along your way, no matter how small your measure of progress might be at a given moment.
Unless it was inevitable that you must reach the other side of the river, there would be no object in encountering these obstacles and aiming to conquer them. If there was any other and easier way of reaching it, there would be equally no object. Only necessity for reaching the opposite shore, and the bridge as the only means for it, would spur you to continued effort; and only continued effort would yield continual progress.
Suppose that your own effort, when you encountered your first obstacle, developed a strength in you, that helped you to overcome the second one, when you reached it; that the strength necessary for reaching the other shore was gained only in this way. Then these very obstacles, due to the construction of the bridge, would be a means of reaching that shore.
In this case not only would the bridge as such be necessary, but its construction, hard as that would be for you to meet and master, would be equally necessary; and the wall, the pit, and the inclined plane would be your good friends, though appearing to you in the guise of enemies. Wrestling with them you would say, “ Let this obstacle be taken away from before me. It is too much for me. I can not bear it.” And if you were told, “ Overcome it: you are able,” you would feel that too much was asked of you.
But as you gained even a measure of success, you would see that only trial advanced you in the desired direction, and that the means of your trial was good and necessary. Your enemies would disappear, and friends would stand in their places; but previous to this, as one of the obstacles in the way, a fellow- traveler, whom you had revered as a friend, might assume the guise of an enemy. When you had looked for his approbation, jrou received disapprobation and even condemnation. You were all wrong, he told you; you should do this, and you should not do that, and his words cut like a knife.
By the help of this illustration try to see your present existence as a bridge between two states, the link that preserves continuity of existence. Your present is one shore, your future the other. Your present is what you are, as a living soul, now; your future is what you, as such, will become. The bridge is your becoming; the inevitable and only bridge that lies between present facts and future possibilities.
Places, people, and things do not make you what you are. You make them what they are by your need of them. They belong to the construction, and as the bridge is good for you and necessary to what you must reach, all that belongs to its construction is good and necessary. It is all a means to an end, an end compelled by what you are in being, and by the order of development from that being.
You, as a living soul, come into existence from that being without knowing it, but with potentiality for knowing it. Because of the fundamental relation between being and soul, the destiny which an existing soul must fulfil is to find that being from which it springs. Existence for you, and for all, is this finding—finding and knowing the source of existence by proving, through experience, its nature.
Hence existence is a becoming, continuous though difficult, winding, and tortuous to the traveler over the bridge. You have only met one of the obstacles that belong to the bridge. You have met others and with a measure of success. This is one you did not anticipate, but think back a little and see if you anticipated the others.
This is not the first surprise you have had. The bridge is full of surprises; its nature compels. Each surprise is more or less of a shock to you, and these shocks are necessary to bring out of you what you have not known was there—your own power of resistance to obstacles.
But this is such a terrible shock, you plead; you were so utterly unprepared for it. You had perfect confidence in your friend, and whatever the appearance you would not have misjudged him. You thought this confidence was mutual, and you would not have believed that he could so wrong you.
Yes, there is blood on the bridge, the blood of the heart whose wounds are a part of the price paid for the strength to cross it. Look at the Great Example, see the marks of crucifixion, hands, feet, and heart; and the wound in the heart is last and deepest of all. We become able to bear crucifixion in small things, but crucifixion of the heart! There our strength fails us, fails us for a time during which we moan in pain. The footprints along the rest of the bridge are marked by the blood that tells its own story, yet the Via Dolorosa becomes the way for the triumphant journey of the king.
You are able to bear other things, but not this?
You are able to meet and conquer even this. Cross the bridge you must, and you are God-endowed to this end. In you, way down deep in you as the hidden source of a living spring.
is a power which is of your original likeness to God. It is entombed in your sense-consciousness. It can come forth triumphant from this tomb only by your help. You must call it forth. Your experiences, of which this instance is one, are what impel you to do, finally, what is necessary for resurrection from that tomb. The pain makes you call with a loud voice, rolling the stone from the door; and that dead comes forth alive, ready to sit at table with you, when you have loosed the grave-clothes of old habits and feelings that bind him round about.
You do not know of what you are capable, till you prove your capability. Your capability can be proved only through something that challenges it. Opportunity for proof is your bridge, the living bridge of existence, and its construction is according to human needs.
The bridge is alike for all, and yet individual. At the same time one is at the pit, another at the wall, another at the inclined plane; but all enter upon the bridge and leave it by the same door. Nature and her order are what all must follow, but yours and mine is the choice as to what that order shall be to us. The sorrowful way becomes the triumphal way when we learn how to master fate with destiny.
It is your fate to meet the wall, the pit, and the inclined plane, and contend with them. It is your destiny to conquer them, and by means of that power which you, sometimes, call upon. When you have labored long in vain with the strength of your sense-self, you will call forth and use the strength of your God-self; and then, strong in the recognition of your destiny, you will fearlessly meet and conquer fate.
Your friend is still your friend, for though he has misjudged you, he has spoken as you appeared to him. We do not know how we appear to others till such occurrences act as a mirror. Strong in your intention to do what was right and best to you, you can understand his judgment as according to what was not right and best to him; and his condemnation as blindness to your motive. Then you, in your turn, will judge righteous judgment, returning good for his evil; for you do not expect him to see with his eyes closed what another sees who has his eyes open.
Find your consolation in your motive for the action he has condemned, and return him loving charity for his condemnation of your motive and purpose. This act, which has hurt you so sorely, will serve to make you stronger because of the demand it makes upon your resources; and he, not you, will be punished by it, because he has weakened his own power of resistance to impression. He has placed an obstacle of his own making in his way, in addition to what naturally pertains to the construction of the bridge.
THE POWER OF IMPRESSION
You are just recovering‘from a bad attack of “the blues are you? And the sympathy of your friends is very grateful and soothing, is it not?
Of course you are entitled to it, for yours is a case of “ constitutional blues,” and you must submit whenever the “fit” comes upon you. You regret that the family is made uncomfortable, that you find yourself unable to speak a cheery word, but must mope and poke about the house with no life in your step and with your face like the darkest side of a dark cloud.
0 yes! You are very sorry that your presence should be a kill-joy, but you cannot possibly help being blue; and if people only knew, as they never, never can, what you suffer!
This is the way you reason, and will probably continue to reason, till you begin to get your eyes open to your own selfishness, because as far back as you can remember, you have “ been subject to fits of the blues.” But the truth of the matter is that you are subject to your own selfindulgence, instead. You are your own jailer, holding your own power behind the bars of ignorance, shackling it with the opinions and feelings born of natural tendency and the education based on a wrong premise. You are the prisoner, not the free man that you might be, did you seek to learn instead of to feel. You are living in your sensation, yielding to it and cultivating it by yielding, when you might establish dominion over it, if you chose.
There is a way of gaining dominion over our sensations, but it must be sought to be found; and you have not been seeking it, even though you have wished, again and again, that you could be rid forever of the blues. You have not been truly seeking it, because you have not looked in the right direction. You have looked out of yourself instead of into yourself, and have feebly wished, instead of vigorously acted, as is necessary.
You need self-knowledge even more than knowledge of the things you see—geology, botany, astronomy, etc., and when you have self-knowledge these will yield you far richer treasures than before. You need to know what you are, as well as how you feel, and to know God by proving your own God-like power.
Gopd as it is to believe in God, it is better to know God; and this knowing must be individually sought and found.
Neither book nor priest can make you know God. If they are kept in their true place, they can but help you to that finding, that will bring you at last to “ the Father’s house.”
Are you ready for self-knowledge? Are you prepared to get away from your sensation long enough to see interiorly what may be held before your inner eye? Moses, you remember, lifted up the serpent in the wilderness and all who looked upon it, lived. If you will look upon what may be held up before you, long enough for it to make impression upon you, you, too, may live more truly and abundantly than ever before.
Till now you have not half lived. You have existed, but the bounding life that fills all things according to their capacity has filled only the tiny pint cup that you have been, not the overflowing measure that you might be.
Have you found out that you are a living soul, not a flesh- body?
Why, of course! Everyone knows that.
Do they? They may know it theoretically, but do they, do you, prove it practically? It is the proof that changes you, enlarges your capacity, not the theory.
As a living soul it is natural to you to be impressionable. This is your outer nature, that which is in contact with external Nature. On this outer side you receive impression from external objects—they seem external to us though they are really bounded by consciousness.
You also receive deeper impression from the ideas you habitually carry with you. The thought you habitually hold impresses itself upon you, because of your natural susceptibility to impression, till you practically become it. This is a natural consequence of what you are as a living soul rooted in the being that is the changeless identity; changeless through all this variety of sensation that we call existence.
But there is also a possible consequence of what you are as such. Because of your natural susceptibility to impression, because of the great truth of individuality, you can make impression on your own soul, on yourself, thus using the natural fact as a means toward your own power over the natural. It is natural that you are impressionable. It is equally natural that you can impress.
Put these two facts together, and what do you get? Add still the third fact that you feel the impression, that it becomes you, practically, and what is the sum of these facts? The sum is dominion; for if you are susceptible to impression; if the impression made on you as a living soul is what you feel as you; if you can impress yourself, it follows logically that you, by virtue of your individuality, can supplant one impression by another; and that, consequently, you are not obliged to remain subject to blues unless you choose to.
The power of individuality over natural susceptibility and tendency, is the great truth, the gospel of glad tidings at the close of this nineteenth century, promising for the twentieth a higher, nobler, better race of men and women. “ I cannot help it ” is to become an obsolete expression, for it is the utterance of that incapacity that is removable through applied self-knowledge.
Adding demonstrable facts together, we arrive at possible truth, which becomes practically, as well as theoretically, true to us when we apply the knowledge gained to our own conditions and circumstances. You are dwelling in the valley of your possibilities, when you might dwell on their summit. You are enfolded with the mists and fogs of the valley, when you might revel in the clear sunlight of the mountain top.
Look to your addition. The factors for the successful working of your problem are all at hand. Those that the problem involves are eternally ready. You as the seeker for its solution have to become ready. Then the self-knowledge which, applied, will solve the problem, may also be found at hand, for it is never without a witness, a John the Baptist, in the world.
Work according to the rule of addition. Even though you are naturally subject to depression, add to that fact your natural susceptibility to all impression, and to that your own power to impress, and you have as the answer to your life-problem, “I, because of what I am in my real being, can impress upon my own soul what I will, overruling what has been unconsciously impressed; and, as I feel my impressions, I shall feel dominion over, instead of subjection to, blues, when I have impressed this dominion forcibly enough upon myself to supplant the old impression.”
In this way you can “ help it,” and the sooner you get to work, the better. When you care more for self-mastery than you do for self-indulgence; when the mixed joys and miseries of existence have quickened in you the god that lies sleeping, he will awake from slumber and assert that higher manhood which is his birthright—his right through relation to Origin. He will refuse to be lulled longer by the sedative—“I cannot help it.” “ I can and will help it. Depart from me! ” he will say.
How can one help being depressed when things go wrong? When one sees so much misery that one is unable to relieve, so much evil and sorrow one is unable to remove?
You, and everyone, can help it in just the way pointed out to you, and you will not follow in this way half-heartedly when you see—Moses lifts it up before you—that all the evil is incidental to the Soul’s voyage of discovery. It belongs neithei’ to the port from which it sails nor the one which it enters as a final harbor; therefore, the final port is not made while the evil is before the vision. Each soul is making the one voyage whether steering its course by your compass or not. If your compass is the best, the voyage of others is prolonged when it might be shortened; but each is somewhere between the two ports.
Let this comfort you and strengthen you to make your own efforts to set free the god in you. When he takes charge of the voyage all the rest follows as a matter of certainty.
Learn to add, for he works according to mathematical accuracy. Add your power as the individual to the tendency God-ward which his presence in you affords, and your tendency to the blues must dwindle and fade away. The stronger supplants the weaker. So it has always been, and so it always will be. At any moment of existence you can “ turn from death unto life”; turn from a tendency, that, however strong, is doomed by its very nature to death, to a tendency that, also by its very nature, is bound to grow stronger and stronger.
But the tendency, on either side, is one thing, and you are another. It is you who turn, not it. You have power of choice, it chooses nothing. It simply acts according to its nature. You can refrain from acting according to one nature and can voluntarily act according to another.
“ Blues” is only the mental dwelling upon subjective pictures that grow more real the longer you look at them. The remedy is, make a picture that will benefit you while you look at it. Use the very possibility that has used you. It has used you as the means of manifesting its power. Use it as the means of manifesting your power—the power of the soul that has found its own individuality.
The weaknesses of human nature have found you. Find the strength of the higher nature and rule them. You are able to do this, if you will. Have you not yet suffered enough to make your beginning?
The beginning of your own effort is the first step in your redemption from suffering. Like the child learning to walk your first efforts may be feeble in immediate result, but they will be oh, so potent, for the ultimate result. The feet that first seem so aimless will walk steadily and run surely as the effort to use them continues. Development is life, cessation of effort is death.
Keep on trying to conquer your natural tendency. It is a means to an end, the means by which you will prove what is possible to you. The natural is only the means of calling out and establishing this possible.
HAUNTED BY GHOSTS
You are one of the many who are ghost-ridden, and your ghost is the fear of death. Wherever you go, he is with you. When you are the happiest is when he makes his presence felt the most forcibly. Just when everything is according to your desires and you are congratulating yourself upon your good fortune, his chill breath freezes you and his clutch almost paralyzes you. “ What if I should die? ” you mentally gasp, and a sickening fear of what lies beyond excludes all else for the moment.
Fear always accompanies ignorance. You are ignorant of the nature of “ here ” and consequently can have no knowledge of “ there.” If you knew more of what and where you are now, you would have an approximate knowledge of what and where you would be then.
Look at your hand. It is yours, and you use it, but it could be amputated and you would still think, hope, and feel. Both hands could be spared and this would still be the case. Both hands and both feet could mingle with the dust and you would continue to suffer and enjoy, to plan and reason. Sections of your body above hands and feet could follow into the invisible, and you would still be entitled to the rights of citizenship.
How is this? If the body is the man, in this case but half a man is left—half a citizen. If the citizen is still complete, the man is complete. If the man is complete, his body is not he. If his body is not he, its destruction cannot make him incomplete, or less than he was when he had and used it. If some members of the body can be spared without impairing the man, the inference that the disappearance of the whole body would not impair the man is warranted.
But, you say, “ we have no evidence that the loss of the whole body does not affect the man. This is speculation.”
What is speculation? Thinking apart from, or contrary to, the evidence of your senses, you say.
Did you ever sit in a railway car in the station—of course you have—beside a train of cars on another track, and, looking from the window, say, “We are moving ” ? You thought the car you were in was moving—you had the evidence of your senses— when it was the other train that was moving. Your car was stationary.
What I see, I know ” yon are accustomed to say. What you see is what you do not A-now, in the sense of understanding it. It is what you believe in from the basis of appearance. Sense- evidence is one thing, reliable evidence is quite another.
“When I see a man put his hand in another man’s pocket and abstract his pocket-book, I know that man is a thief,” say you? You believe, you do not know that man is a thief, and because you are judging according to appearance—sense-evidence. He may have laid a wager with the other that he could pick the other’s pocket undetected. In this case he would be no thief. Even our municipal law recognizes motive and intent, or the lack of them, in the perpetration of an act. The evidence submitted in a court of law must be metaphysical as well as physical.
Do not be too sure of your evidence when it is of this kind— sense-evidence. And this is all the evidence you have of what death is, till you set yourself to work to find another kind. Yesterday you saw the man, to-day he is dead, in the to-morrow his body mingles with the common dust; and that is the end of him acording to sense-evidence.
But whether or no “ that is the end of him ” depends, not on what you see, but upon what he is as a man. If the man is as complete after all these sections of his body are removed as he was before, then his body is not he; and if not he, the removal of the whole body may still leave him intact.
The senses cannot reveal the nature and destiny of man. They can recognize only what is recorded in his flesh-body—the handwriting on the wall; and they will even misread that. Not till faculties act with the senses, supplementing their limitations, can his nature and destiny be seen. You see more truly with your faculties than with your senses, if you only knew it; but you have been looking through your senses so persistently, you have not developed your faculties. If you had, you would not be afraid of death.
Your hands and your feet are your possessions, they are not you. A change can take place in your possessions without being a change in }’OU. You are the same man if you have a thousand dollars or if you have none. There is difference in jout feeling —probably—but not change in you as a man. Your body being your possession, change in you does not necessarily follow change in, or loss of, it.
If this is true, that amputation of your whole visible body that is called death will not change the thinking you, your ability to think and feel. Your brain not being the thinker but only that part of your possessions that registers his thoughts, its loss will prevent that registration in a physical body, but not the destruction of the power to think them.
See this difference and you will see that your survival of your physical body does not depend upon it, but upon what you are as that living something that uses the body. What follows? Today, now, while using that possession, your physical body, your feeling constitutes your happiness or misery. If the thinking you is complete apart from that body, and survives the wholesale amputation, you will still feel, and, therefore, enjoy or suffer. Your capacity for feeling must remain unchanged, though what you feel cannot be recognized by your remaining friends because you have no longer a body that they can see. That amputation makes you invisible to them, therefore they do not follow, from the basis of sense-evidence, your subsequent career.
Are you afraid of what you are now ? Of where you are now ? If not, you need not be afraid of what and where you are then, and you can be sure that you will continue to exist. But of this you may also be sure: as you need to become better than you are now, so you will then need to become better and better; for this necessity is inherent in your nature.
A part of your fear of death is due to the teaching you have received and to your own confounding of condition with locality. You have been taught that you were wicked, that God was angry with the wicked, and that you would surely suffer in the place of torment after death for the deeds done in the body. While this is true in one sense, it is untrue in another.
There is a place of torment after death, because the feeling you survives death and continues to have experience in which the results of former acts are encountered. To see that you might have done better and what you have lost by doing as you have, is a place or condition of torment prepared for you by the law of cause and effect. But this law makes you the punisher as well as the redeemer of yourself, and you need fear no wrathful God.
What the law brings to you, while you are ignorant of it and its working, prepares you for what it will bring for you when you know how to use it; and your torment fits you for mastery of the conditions that cause it. As you are in torment now while you have a physical body, if you prepare torment for yourself, so you will be then; no more and no less. And yours is the power of emancipation from suffering by ceasing to create the conditions that cause it. There is no hell other than in yourself—your own condition. Heaven and hell are side by side.
Do you remember when you were a small child and your mother tied you to the stair-rail with a clothes-line, leaving you free to run as far as the line permitted, but preventing you from wandering out of her sight? And how sometimes you would succeed in untying the knot and scamper away, when for a long time she could not find you?
Your flesh body is not you, but what you are tied to in the childhood of self-consciousness. Sometime, not realizing how or why you do it—unless you have become wise—you will untie the knot, or cut it, and depart from the sight of your friends. And you will enjoy a kind of consequent freedom without, however, failing to experience what yon have prepared for yourself.
See that “ before death ” and “ after death ” constitute one continuous “ now,” in which is the incident of loosing the clothes-line—the “ silver cord ” that.connects you with that house, your physical body. You are not the house, you are attached to the house, and you will become detached from it, having a wider area to roam in, but under the same necessity for gaining understanding of the nature and destiny of man that you were under before.
Clothed with the flesh, you see the flesh. Hence you see others, and they see you. Unclothed, you will not see others as you see them now, and they will not see you. But you will still see; your powers do not belong to the physical body. The power to see is in you, but while you use a physical body you see through that body. Afterward, you see without it.
In your dreams at night your physical eye is fast closed; but you see, and remember what you see. Then, what you see and do is, in large measure, independent of }rour physical body; and by this experience you may understand the life after death to be the continuation of what you are before it, but without the flesh- body that is now so active. Do you miss that body in your dreams? You seem to yourself quite complete, do you not? But your eye is closed, your feet and hands are still; and yet you walk, talk, enjoy and experience pain.
“With you are opportunities; in you are possibilities. Your hereafter will be, always, what you make by the union of the two. So great is your own power that you need fear neither God nor devil. So dense is your, and all men’s, natural ignorance of it, that you do fear, anything and everything, and live for years a ghost-haunted man. Inherently capable of becoming a god, you become, instead, a prey to all manner of surmises and happenings.
Put them from you. Shake off the weight that oppresses you and step out into the sunlight of self-knowledge, a free man. Not all the forces of the universe can extinguish you. They can make you smart, will make you smart, so long as you need that incentive to find yourself.
God is Love. What should you fear outside yourself? Death may be to you a lifting of one veil and the drawing of another; that is all. Veil upon veil may be raised and lowered, and, through it all, you are you. Identity remains. It stands for a time before a veil and then passes behind it.
You shall neither fear nor court death. You shall be ready for it by “ dying daily.” Wlien you look at the sun you say, “ it sets.” WTien you are the sun you say, “Behold, I am here,” though others say “ it has set.”
Remembering that the physical world and its processes are representative of the greater invisible world and its processes, let ns see if we cannot find an explanation of some of the puzzles that beset yon in your efforts to understand existence and your relation to it.
A measure of understanding is necessary for the mastery of conditions and circumstances that you desire, a measure that increases as you make effort to live according to it.
An infant is provided by nature with the food it needs. It is not obliged to procure its food for itself. Its mothers breast is ready and waiting, and from this source it draws its daily supply. The collective causes that have brought the infant bring also what is needed to sustain it. Xo responsibility devolves upon the infant; its wants are provided for and met.
This is good, but can there not be a better? It depends. There can be no better for the infant than what is provided for it by natural relationship, but the infant cannot remain an infant indefinitely. By the law of its own nature growth is compulsory.
Infancy is but a temporary state, having its natural limitations, and it must be passed beyond and left behind. Xature herself teaches this lesson, for the mothers milk ceases to flow when demand is no longer made upon it. The infant must outgrow infancy, becoming the child; and the child requires different food.
As growth goes on, the time for weaning arrives. To wean is to accustom a child to food other than its mother’s milk. This time is frequently a time of trial. The child does not like to lose that to which it is accustomed. Did the little one express its thought and feeling it would probably say, “It is cruel to take my mother’s milk away from me. I have always had it and I want it still. It belongs to me, and there is no justice in depriving me of it. See those infants over there! They have their natural food still, and I have the same right to it that they have. Why should all this pain and misery be inflicted upon me? It is not right.”
And from the little one’s point of view he is right. Yet, fortunately for him, nature, and not his point of view, governs.
Did his feeling govern instead, would he ever become a man? If his desire to retain indefinitely his mother’s milk were to prevail, would his best good be served?
Because nature compels growth, because the fact of infancy involves the further facts of childhood, boyhood, and manhood, his weaning is a necessity that, however stern, is really kind. The little one’s natural ignorance prevents him from recognizing the kindness; he feels the sternness without understanding its necessity, and his rebellion is natural. But it is rebellion against what is better for him, just the same.
You, and this is true of all, are the little child grown from the more helpless infant, that must be weaned from what is merely natural to it; and none of us like the weaning process. We resist it and bewail it and wonder what we have ever done that we should be so afflicted. How can God send such trials upon us, if God is Love? And because of our natural ignorance our protests and bewailings amount to just this—“I want to remain a nursing infant and I ought to be allowed to remain so.”
You think that, if you had your way, you could arrange human life and its affairs much better than they are now conducted. How true it is that “fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” Look at yourself. What do you know? You see a great world about you, see human beings of all kinds and sorts, with every possible kind of condition and experience. You see a vast disorderly jumble of want, woe, pleasure, misery, joy, pain. What does it mean?
Have you arrived at the stage where you are ready to find out? Ready and able to see that the natural experiences of each one bring him inevitably to the weaning time which his own nature compels? To the time when he must let go what was good for him at first, and because that growth, compelled by what he is in being, has a better in store for him?
How hard we try to remain infants, resisting all that tends to make us men. Yet the resistance is natural, till our ignorance of the destiny that is compelled by origin is lessened through knowledge; till we begin to discern what we are and what we are destined to become.
You who are crying and struggling and declaring that you will not be weaned, that it is cruel and wicked that you should be deprived of what you have always had, are being brought by the law of your own being, not by an arbitrary God, to where you must pass on into what is better for you. It is far better for you that you be compelled to seek for and find food for yourself, than that you should continue to have your early milk supplied to you.
Manhood is involved in your childhood, but it will never be evolved and established as long as you insist upon continuing the natural infancy. Here is the kindness in the seeming cruelty. When all goes well with us, when everything is just as we wash it, our satisfaction is a preventive of the development insisted upon by both God and Nature. We are content with the milk and have no incentive to develop spiritual bone and muscle. Fortunately nature and experience cut our teeth for us and proclaim that the time for other food has come.
The gradual manifestation of what we are in our God- derived being brings relentlessly the time when we must move on from childhood through boyhood toward manhood; those stages of self-consciousness that constitute existence. The eternal energy that is resistless pushes us out of the one into the other. Because we do not understand, we hang back, offering a resistance that requires a stronger push to overcome, and that consequently causes pain—God’s ministering angel. Our pain eventually makes us step with the push.
You were born to affluence, were you? You have always been accustomed to luxury, have had good health and plenty of friends. One by one these good things have melted away from you till now you are comparatively alone, both health and money gone, discouraged, unhappy, disconsolate. Whose trouble is like unto your trouble ?
Your story is but the old, old story, common to the human race, the same in essence, though it differ with different individuals in form and coloring. You are being pushed by the creative energy toward soul-manhood, and your pain and sorrow are caused by your clinging clutch upon infancy and its milk-food. You do not like to be compelled to eat the “ strong meat ” that is better adapted to higher needs. You resent the teeth that experience must help you to cut in order that you may partake of other food.
Look away from your miseries for the moment and look at yourself. What are you? You are a living soul, growing out from a perfectly endowed God-being that is known only as it is manifested. You are not flesh and blood, you are using flesh and blood temporarily. You are now more than that thing you are using, and because of what you are in being, you must become more than you are now.
In your knowledge of your being and its origin you are naturally an infant; but childhood, boyhood, and manhood are involved in infancy and necessitate a becoming that leaves each behind till the highest is reached. As a living soul, grow you must; it is the stern necessity of your being. Your temporal flesh-body may drop away from you, but you, the living soul, must move on to the accomplishment of your destiny.
The law of manifestation of being is truly kind even when it seems the most cruel. You are given your opportunity, in what to you seems deprivation, to pass from dependent childhood into a higher self-conscionsness by proving your power to command for yourself what has hitherto been yours without effort. It is a glorious opportunity and you are a privileged person to have it.
You are entitled to the fruit of the tree of life, but you must put forth your hand to take it.
By virtue of what you are in being—“ the image of God,” “very good”—you are entitled to health and happiness, to adequate supply for all your needs; but as a living soul you must lay hold upon them for yourself. Only the very experiences you are undergoing, and that seem so very bitter to you, would bring this great truth home to you, and spur you on to the necessary effort at appropriation. They are good for you, however evil they seem to you, for they are a means toward this greatly to be desired end.
By finding what you can do without, you discover what you must have. What you can do without is what is not needed for the greater becoming. What is requisite for that becoming is what you must have, and the great storehouse holds it for you.
No one in the world is a favorite with the Almighty and recipient of blessings, over and above yourself. The greatest saint that ever lived in the world had no higher relation to the eternal Absolute than you have. There have been many, probably, who were more conscious of that relation and its possible consequences, but this consciousness may be yours also.
Stop thinking of your miseries. You are dwelling in a graveyard because you live continually in the past. You are thinking all the time of what you have had, when you should be thinking of what you may become. Get out from among the tombs and live in the sunlight of inherent possibility.
No one has become what you may not become. No one has achieved what you may not achieve. To become is a thousand times better than to have been. Milk was all right for you at first, but some day you must eat meat. Infancy is natural, but it cannot last forever. First the natural infancy of the soul, and afterward its spiritual manhood, attained only by selfeffort joined to the universal push.
What of it if your friends are gone and your luxury also? You have yourself, and you would know nothing of your inherent resources, the riches within, if you were not driven to look for them through deprivation. The little child would not eat exclusively the other food, if its mother’s breast continued always at command. Eejoice that you are being brought to where you may know the possible, even at the loss of some of the temporal.
MAKING THINGS GO RIGHT.
“0 dear! nothing goes right and I am tired to death trying to make things go right! ”
This is what yon are thinking and feeling; consequently, yon are not very happy. Do yon wish to know what the matter is ? It is friction; just that, friction.
Did yon ever stand by a machine and watch its workings and hear now and then a grating noise in one place and a sqneak in another? Those were indications that there was something wrong somewhere, a lack of proper adjustment between the parts of the machine, and a need of lubricating oil. They told the story to the one who could read it.
You are “ out of gear,” and your grating and squeaking tell the story to those that can read it. There is lack of proper adjustment somewhere, and a need’of lubricating oil. You have tried your level best to make those for whom you feel yourself responsible do as they should, and do it in the way in which it ought to be done; and with all your effort things still go wrong. You have tried so hard to do your duty, and you still desire to do your duty, but you are, you say, “ tired to death,” and feel as if you could not make much more effort.
How the machine grates, grinds, and squeaks! Let us see if we cannot discover where the difficulty lies. You have been trying to accomplish what does not belong to you to accomplish. You have been endeavoring to make others do thus and so when they cannot really do what is right till they see for themselves and act upon their own seeing.
You have forgotten that your dear ones are also individuals. You have tried to make them see through your eyes, instead of trying to help them to see with their own eyes what you see. Your effort was not adjusted to the eternal principles and laws of being, and so you were compelled to push it to accomplishment. And you have pushed and pushed till you are “ tired to death.”
Look this fact squarely in the face. Your child is first God’s child, and afterward, yours. Equally is this true of your brother, your sister, your friend. The relation to the eternal First Cause gives individuality, and individuality is first. The family relation is second, and tributary to the first. You have been trying to make the second relation all in all.
You are a living soul; so is your child, your husband, your wife, your brother, sister, or friend. You and they have come into existence with a common destiny stretching before you. Human existence and its experiences are the logical, therefore the divinely ordained means by which the human soul passes from a sense of being to the realization of being. All possible human existence, all possible experience, lies between these two points; is entered and passed through by every human soul, whatever the race, color, or creed. Nothing that you can do can alter this order or remove its necessity ; and however much you may love another, your love and your effort can abate not “ one jot or tittle from the law till all be fulfilled.”
As the individual, not as the child of fleshly relationship and dependent entirely upon that relationship, must the one whom you speak of as yours travel in the road that lies between natural sense and spiritual realization. You have been trying to carry your loved ones over that road on your own shoulders. What success you have had at one time, at another time has brought defeat. You have not adjusted yourself to the necessity and order that is compelled by the Origin of humanity. You have put yourself in the place of anothePs individuality, endeavoring to do for him what that should accomplish.
And this is not only your own, but our common mistake. Not understanding what you have done, you have grieved sincerely over the scant success you have had, for your motives were pure, and your efforts unselfish in the main. You were working for the good of one who was dear to you. But if you think a moment, you will see that individuality is a mighty factor, to be reckoned with in all our efforts for others. Not all your love for another can make his heart beat, his lungs expand, his bodily organs perform their functions, or digest his food. It may affect those functions, but it cannot perform them. He must eat and sleep for himself, not through you; he must do his own breathing. Equally necessary is it that eventually he must do his own thinking, must resolve and act from his own individuality.
What then can you do for him? You can show him the way, instruct him as to what belongs to the way, teach him how to walk in the way, and inspire him to make effort to use his feet. You can even grasp his hand and steady his footsteps, but you cannot carry him from the beginning to the end of the way on your own back. By doing what you can do, doing it with all your heart and soul, you come into adjustment with the principles and laws of being that are working in and through human existence to their own manifestation, and you avoid the friction that “ tires you to death.”
See that just as you have your own salvation from all evil to work out, so has your best beloved as well; that as help in that direction is good and valuable for you, so is it good and valuable for him; but that the help to help one’s self is all that truly helps.
You wish your son to be a good and upright man, a credit to the family. You want him to be successful in business or in his profession, have a position in society, possess influence in the community. This is all good. But how do you wish it accomplished ? “ If he will only do what I tell him, I can bring it all about/’ you say. Can you? You may be largely instrumental in securing a certain amount of worldly success, but the soul-success depends upon himself. Neither you, nor any human being, can make another good and upright, but any one can help another to become so.
Here is your brother who has disappointed you sorely. He is unsuccessful in business, has formed bad habits, is in danger of losing the esteem of others. All this might have been saved, you think, if he had only listened to you. Yes, if he had been a puppet who moved as you pulled the wires, then he would have moved only as you directed. But as he is not a puppet, but a human being, possessing the power of choice, he has not chosen to act according to your desire, not seeing, presumably, what you see and what prompts your desire.
And so individuality asserts itself in those to whom we are related after the flesh; and it will not down. It must be reckoned with, and adjustment to it is the only way to deal with it successfully. When in all earnestness and loving sincerity you have done what is in your power to do, see that the remainder rests with the individual.
“But my brother’s ill fortune has come from others. He is so easily influenced he has been drawn into bad company, and this association has given him bad habits and made him neglect his business.”
Yes, it is the old story, old as human nature itself. And your conclusion is that your influence must make him what you want him to be. It is because he is easily influenced that he has fallen to the level of his lesser nature. It is only through influencing himself that he will rise to the altitude of his higher nature. Your influence is for good when it is wisely exerted, but Oh! the need for wisdom in your use of it. When your influence is used to help him make of himself what is possible, then you and your effort are adjusted to the meaning of existence and the need of the human soul; but when it is only your influence, minus the effort of his own individuality, that holds him back from anything whatsoever, so sure is it that when you relax and let go he will gravitate to it inevitably.
The great necessity is this adjustment to what existence is according to the principles that compel it; and you—as we all— make the mistake of thinking yonr feeling should and must determine consequences for another. You “ desire only what is right and best” ? True; but this result as a ‘permanency for another cannot come because you wish it. It must come because that other wishes it. Because you desire it for that other, you will help toward it all you can; but the wiser help is not given when individuality and its power of choice are not sufficiently reckoned with.
Do you see that you have tried to stand in God’s stead? That you have tried to make what it requires the Infinite to make? That instead of co-operating toward a result you have tried to do all the work?
It is no wonder you are “ tired to death.” The impersonal never gets tired; and its ceaseless push will go on when your time to cease pushing has come. You have a part to perform. Each is his brother’s keeper, in that each owes generous and loving help to others. But help to an end does not mean effort on one side only. It means co-operation, help joined to help, effort joined to effort. To see and understand this will save you so much of the disappointment and pain that comes from trying to put your own individuality in place of another’s. Each soul is from a common source, is moving toward a common result. Between the beginning and the end of the way, experiences are various. Both the depths and heights of possibilities are to be known.
If your dear one is drawn toward the depths, fix your own eye upon the heights and know, not hope, that he will yet scale them triumphantly. Stand ever ready to help, but stand in your own place, not in the place of the Almighty. Let your push be one with the infinite push and “in process of time it cometh to pass.”
It is this “ process of time ” that you rebel against, not seeing its necessity. Your feeling, your desire, cloud your vision. It is not easy to stand on one side and look upon those you love from the impersonal standpoint; but our energy is largely misdirected till we can do this.
Cold-blooded, is it? Lack of feeling?
God is no respecter of persons. What does that mean? Does it not mean that we must come into accord with what God is, compelling our feeling to that end, instead of expecting God to accommodate His own nature to our desire?
In our real being God’s work is done; adaptation to that which, therefore, eternally is, is our work. As we learn to do this, friction ceases. Adjustment accomplishes all things. Stop pushing. Instead, let the great purpose be fulfilled in your brother.
HOW THE WORLD COMES TO AN END
You have heard more than one prediction, doubtless, that the world would come to an end on a certain definite date; and, while you do not believe in being superstitious, you have mentally marked this date, and looked at it now and then with a little creeping chill and a “I wonder if it really will?”
Of course you have said, with a laugh at the prediction, “ How can any one tell? The world has wagged on for many centuries and I think it will wag on for many more.” Yet you confess to a slight feeling of uneasiness at times, and you would really like to know, if it can be known, when the world will really come to an end. Can any one predict with certainty?
Yes. The world will come to an end, for you, when you have outgrown it. When it has come to an end for you, it will still remain for those who have not outgrown it.
The world will never come to an end all at once for every one living. By its nature it persists, by our nature we pass it and leave it behind. Do you wish to understand this? Then give your attention for a few minutes to a view that you can afterward apply practically.
When you were a child you began your study of the science of numbers. As the student you were the beginner; the science of numbers did not begin then. It was, had always been, and, by its nature, must always be. The science of numbers is abstract truth. You began to seek that truth and consequently you began to discover it. You had capacity for this seeking and finding, otherwise your effort would have been of no use.
But your capacity developed as you went along. Your persistent seeking was the means of your own development, and that development of inherent capacity gave more and more discovery. From the beginner, knowing nothing of the science of numbers, you became an expert, one who knew and proved.
At the beginning of your effort you found, ready to hand, a means to the end in view. You wished and intended to become a mathematician; this was the goal you sought. You began the development of your inherent capacity by your use of the blackboard and figures. The blackboard and figures were not the science of numbers, were not the abstract truth you had set yourself to seek; they were only a first and necessary means to your end.
As the first means and necessary to a beginner, they were good. Because they were the first, or natural, means, they could not continue to be as important for you all the way to the end. The reliance which you placed in them when you were the beginner could not continue and you become the expert mathematician.
You found it necessary after a time to endeavor to solve problems, to see their principles and obtain the answers, with less use of the blackboard and figures and with more reliance upon your own powers. Mental arithmetic took the place of your former work, done entirely by use of the blackboard and figures. These came to an end for you when you outgrew the need for them; but they remained to meet the need for those who still required them.
In themselves, you see, the blackboard and figures did not come to an end. They were not annihilated. They remained, for what they were in themselves; but what they had been for you came to an end, and wisely so, otherwise you would not have become the expert mathematician. The power to work problems mentally is necessary to that end.
Now apply this illustration to the visible world. It, and what it contains, is the blackboard with figures upon it. What a wide variety is spread out before you. You, the living soul using a fiesh-body, are a beginner in your search for the truth of your being; that abstract truth that is the science of being. As a living soul you have inherent capacity for discovery, for understanding this science, for its practical application to the problems of your own existence. You are to become the expert, the demonstrator of all these problems from simple to complex.
But this attainment depends upon your beginning as a seeker for the hidden truth. This discovery, with the power to demonstrate all that may be found, is the aim of your existence as a living soul. This work accomplished is the end of your natural and the perpetuation of your spiritual existence. ^ ^ _
As a means to this end, a natural means, the visible world with its variety confronts you. You are to use it as a beginner. You are to leave it when, becoming more than a beginner, you pass beyond it in the work you have to do. By your own growth beyond the need for the world, you will leave it behind, and it will come to an end, for you.
What says the Great Example? “ Be of good cheer. I have overcome the world.” It seems to you that you can never outgrow this world. What! leave all beauties it reveals, the good things and dear friends that are so much to you?
Yes and no. When you became able to work your problems mentally you retained in your consciousness all that had real value.
You dealt with, numbers, their values, their relation to each other, their governing principle. You dropped only the external shapes, the figures on the blackboard. Turning from the blackboard, the externals, you had internally, all that was real; all that was represented by what was on the blackboard. You neither left nor lost anything that was essential in itself, only what had been at first essential to you, but which, as you gained more and more discovery, as the development of your own inherent powers increased, became less and less necessary.
As the beginner in the science of being, you need the great blackboard with its figures. What you are, what all men are, in the composite nature of being, is represented to you by the world and what belongs to it. The correspondence between the differing shapes you see, all the way from the amoeba to physical man, and the variety in your own fundamental being, is the relation of figure to number. Sack of numbers is their governing principle.
You are to begin to overcome the world by outgrowing your dependence upon it. Only by outgrowing your dependence upon it as something external to yourself, something indispensable, will you use it. Up to that point it uses you. While the student uses the blackboard and figures as one entirely dependent upon them, they really use him. He is to use his own powers, depending upon them, instead of being entirely at the mercy of the blackboard. When he has outgrown his own natural dependence upon it, he will use it, not for his own, but for others’ needs; for the demonstration to them, that can see only by means of a blackboard, of what he knows.
You, as a living soul, have this destiny before you. You are to become the expert demonstrator of your own fundamental nature. This demonstration is in an ascending scale till your likeness to God—to Origin—appears. You are fated to meet all the obstacles your natural blindness to the truth of your being puts in your way. You overcome your fate with your destiny.
You have inherent capacity for knowing your own nature and its origin. Your human experience is developing that capacity, so do not cry out that you cannot bear it when some experience makes demand upon this capacity. Without demand, there would be no development; without development, there would be no attainment, and from beginning to end, all is good.
You will never be obliged to forsake anything really essential. In your overcoming of the world you will carry along with you all the good and true, leaving behind only the first means by which you found the good and true. All the pure, true love you have given to others, all that they have given to you, will go with you as you outgrow the need of the world-blackboard. All that is fit to survive will survive the means by which it was discovered.
You need fear no real loss, for gain is constant. It is more and more of the real, with less and less of the phenomenal; more and more power, everlasting power, as you grasp the real, using the phenomenal without being used by it.
This is the secret of Jesus’ life and power, and as he is our example, we are to do what he did by becoming what he was. He was master of the phenomenal world, the blackboard with its figures. He used it, it never used him. He used it for the demonstration of his nature, his God-derived being, to those who could see only by means of the blackboard. His words, “Be of good cheer. I have overcome the world,” were equivalent to saying, “ Do not be discouraged. What I have done you may do.”
Let go your hold on the outer world by feeling that it is not as necessary to you as it once was; by feeling that you are not as dependent on fleshly ties as you used to be; that there is compensation for all mortal sense of loss in the growing realization that what is represented by these ties is more than their outward form. .
“Who are my mother and my brethren?” Were these words Jesus’ repudiation of fleshly ties? By no means. They were the recognition of a larger relationship, a greater that includes all the lesser.
Holding to the outward, failing to see what is represented by the outward, you suffer as one without hope when anything dear to you is taken away. But this is your chance to find and prove your own power to do without it; to have and use in yourself that which shall give you gain for every loss; for what is stored in your consciousness can not be taken away from you.
The problem is there, and the answer is there also. Write it down there, and it is yours forever.
So take courage. “ Gird up your loins ” and see that destiny is stronger than fate; that fate is temporal and destiny is of the eternal. The circumstances attending the development of your own powers come to an end, but you go on “from glory to glory.” C Not one experience comes into your life that you are not inherently able to meet and conquer; and the experience is your opportunity for development of your power.
However evil to you, all experience is good for you. Remember that.
“The Lord will provide.”
You are fond of quoting that, are you not?
It is well to have confidence and trust in the infinite power, well to refrain from anxiety and worry, but take care that you do not fall into another error. It is true that “ the Lord will provide,” but how does the Lord provide?
That is not your affair? You mistake, it is your affair. “ The Lord helps those who help themselves,” and this is the Lord’s way of providing.
Suppose you had to cross a stream and there were no bridge. Because of your confidence and trust in the Lord’s power to provide a bridge, you would sit quietly down and wait jtill a bridge over the stream appeared, would you? Do you not think you would get rather tired waiting?
You are expecting a miracle and there are no miracles. The Lord works with and according to law, not contrary to it; law is never suspended or violated.
You need a bridge in order to continue your journey and you can have it. The Lord will provide one when you do your part of the work, not before. If you use the power that is yours from the Lord, and go to work to build a bridge, you can have one. “ Prepare ye the way of the Lord ”; this is your part, and as your part is performed, the Lord provides.
Overanxious thought for the future is an extreme that should be avoided. Worry accomplishes nothing but robbery. It robs us of our strength and happiness, makes us weaklings and cowards. But over-passivity is equally unwise, even when we dignify it by the name of “ trust in the Lord.” Not even God Almighty obtains result without action, and do you think you can accomplish what God cannot?
You must work for what you want to the extent of doing your part, then you may safely trust the rest to the Lord, not before. Action on your side is an essential for result, and to sit down quietly, fold the hands passively and say, “ the Lord will provide,” before you have prepared the way for the Lord to provide, is contrary to the established order of things.
“But I have done everything I know how to do, and I am not out of my difficulties yet,” you say. Then you may safely trust the rest, if you have really done all you know how to do, and as sure as God is God “ things will take a turn.” Here is where trust is legitimate, essential. If you know what you are in your real being, what you are as a personality, and what the meaning of existence, you know that the most adverse circumstances, adverse to mortal sense, are really good for you, for the great purpose is being worked out through them.
But when the adverse circumstances come from neglect of opportunities, failure to see and use them, neglect of duties and shirking of responsibilities, the situation is quite another matter, and trust in the Lord, as the one who will shortly get you out of it, is misplaced.
It is you who need to get up and get out by your own effort, and the Lord would not be willing to deprive you of such a fine opportunity. While you wait for him to work a miracle, he will wait for you to do what belongs to you to do, and he can afford to wait much longer than you can.
You are lazy, and you believe that you trust in the Lord. Your kind of trust is really laziness. It is so much easier to fall back against the Lord as a prop than to be energetic and wide awake, alive to your responsibilities and opportunities, active in your use of them. You can trust in the Lord enough to put you into the poorhouse, and you can trust in yourself and in what you can accomplish “in the strength of the Lord” enough to put you into a palace of your own. Real trust is accompanied by the action that reaches out for result, false trust by an inaction that blocks the way to result.
There is a deal of sham sentiment connected with trust in the Lord. You have had much of it yourself and you had better examine your own position carefully to see if you are neglecting to do your part. What is your part? Use of every power, faculty, and capacity you have.
The Lord is your own real being. To this real being pertain God-like powers and possibilities, but you, the living soul using a flesh body, are the user of these powers, the one who fulfils the possibilities. The Lord cannot get along without you any more than you can get along without the Lord. The Lord needs you for manifestation. What the Lord is, is proved or demonstrated through you; and when you fail to do your part there is failure of demonstration. “ A little more slumber, a little more folding of the hands to sleep ” is a cessation of the activity that belongs to you that prevents the power of the Lord from being manifest.
Dismiss the idea that the Lord is a great and powerful being separate from yourself, who rules over the destinies of mankind according to his good pleasure, and gives you what you desire when you sit down quietly and smile serenely and wait for it to drop into your lap. The Lord is not God, and neither God nor the Lord is this kind of a being.
God is the infinite Love, the supreme Mind that is the Origin of all that lives, and the Lord is the expression of God, the individualization of God. The Lord is the Divine Ideal, the archetypal Man that is your own individual identity; and you, whatever your family name, are the living soul that is a measure of recognition of that identity. Hence, from the Lord comes all that you are and have, and the Lord does provide for you most bountifully. You may draw upon and use all the resources of being, all the powers of the Lord, and thus you develop and actualize all the Lord’s possibilities.
Because of your relation to the Lord, you are capable of overcoming all that stands in the way of your growth in self-consciousness, but action on your part is an absolute essential. Existence for you and for all is progress in self-recognition, a finding and knowing the Lord more and more.
You are able to think, reason, apprehend and comprehend; able to compare one possible situation with another and make your choice between them; able to work to bring about what you need and desire, and to avoid—to make effort to avoid—what you do not desire. All this is from the Lord; therefore, when you do these things, you do your part and prepare the way of the Lord. When you neglect to do them because of a false sentiment, you fail to prepare the way of the Lord, and his nature and power will not be demonstrated through you.
You are the warrior in the arena of human existence. Your enemies are your instinctual, natural tendencies. From the Lord comes the strength and power to put them under your feet making them your footstool. If you are on the Lord’s side instead of on the side of the instincts and tendencies, if you throw your power into that scale instead of into the other one, you are bound to succeed in all right undertakings, for the Lord will provide.
Sentiment is necessary in existence and cannot well be spared. It is the warm sunshine that brings forth many a beauty that otherwise would not appear. A man without sentiment is a man with a small soul, but necessary as it is, understanding is as necessary to keep it from being of a false quality. Sentiment without understanding leads to mistakes, even as does over-rationalism without sentiment. The purely sentimental view of “the Lord will provide ” leads to the cessation of the personal activity that is vitally necessary for growth and progress. “ With all thy getting get understanding ” for without it you will not have that provision from the Lord that otherwise you might have.
Effort is necessary for growth. Effort in your own, your merely personal strength, falls short of what is possible to you. Effort put forth in the strength of the Lord will accomplish all things eventually. Add your own personal effort to the Great
Push that is moving everything in Creation, and nothing can forever bar your way to consciousness of infinite power as your own power.
The Lord will provide, the Lord does provide, the Lord is always providing for you and your needs. Are you always ready to use the provision? You, the living soul, may achieve and become what nothing else that lives can accomplish. You may go on “ from glory to glory” unconquered but conquering at every step of the way. You may do this, but not when you do nothing and trust everything.
Trust in yourself through understanding what you are as an existent soul, and what your real being, is quite as necessary as your beautiful trust in the Lord. The practical side is seen in the words: “and keep your powder dry.” All the trust in the Lord in the world will not send your bullet to the mark, if your powder is not in proper condition. You cannot, even in the name of religion, ignore Nature without paying a penalty. Not even God works contrary to Nature but always in accord with her. You must do the same, and as you work with Nature you attain dominion over all things, but this dominion as a practical fact is gained, not given.
It is given primarily, and is an abstract possibility as the power of the Lord; but as a proved and demonstrated fact you must win it for yourself. Do not deceive yourself. Others may point to you as an example of Christian resignation, but some day and somewhere and somehow you must bestir yourself from that sloth; for it is sloth and not common sense. Be resigned after you have done your part, not before. In the strength of the Lord, by the power of your eternal God-derived being, you may accomplish all things, for all things are yours to accomplish.
Will you get understanding?
UNPROFITABLE COMPANIONS
“It is of no use for me to try, for I have not your ability.” What kind of a mental picture is that? One that is going to stimulate and strengthen you, or one that will discourage and enervate you? You can easily answer, can you not?
Have you never heard the saying, “ Comparisons are odious ” ? This is true in one sense and untrue in another. All depends upon the standard of comparison. When you compare yourself with a great artist or musician, with one who stands upon the top round of the ladder of success, you suffer by the comparison. You fall below that standard and permit yourself to be downcast and discouraged in consequence; and, seeking a reason for your lower level, you say, “ I never had his ability or opportunity, and I never shall have them.”
You mistake. In your own judgment of your possibilities your standard is wrong. Judging your own success by what the successful man has accomplished, it is far less than his; but when you judge your inherent ability by his success, you are in error.
” What man has done, man may do ” used to be in our copybooks at school as a means of stimulating our ambition and effort; and the lives of self-made men, those who had carved the statue, “ Success,” from the hard marble of obstacle, were held before us as examples of what we might become. Perhaps when we were older we said, “ That is all very well theoretically, but practically one cannot accomplish all that another accomplishes, for we are not all alike.” And perhaps we have held that opinion to this day.
How much we need a glimpse of the meaning of existence to enable us to sift our opinions and see where they are sound or unsound! Our successes and our failures, our happiness and our misery, depend largely upon our habitual standard of comparison; for in human existence everything is relative. Standards differ, consequently, but one tendency is manifest with all.
This tendency is seen with you in your self-judgment just pronounced, the tendency to make the one state of consciousness that we call “this life” the measure of our opportunity and result. Look at this man who represents for you what you would dearly love to become. Though there is a marked difference between what he has done and what you have accomplished, judged by the average worldly standard, how does he differ from you fundamentally?
He is a man, a human being. So are you. He possesses the capabilities inherent in human nature. So do you. He has all that goes to make up the genus homo. So have you. He had a fleshly father and mother. So had you. On the natural side he is related to that father, mother and family; to the world in general. So are you. On the hidden side he is related to the Great All, and endowed with the faculties and powers that are from that source, and not from flesh. So are you. As a living soul he came into existence stamped with family and racial tendencies. So did you. As a living soul he has a God- being from which these tendencies are to be made to serve the Great Purpose. So have you.
The strength and power of the Lord are yours as they are his. His family tendencies, as compared with yours, are not quite like them; but as compared with the purpose of existence, they are equally a means by which you both may prove your power over natural tendency. As living souls with existence itself, from its lowest to its topmost plane, before you, you stand on the same footing and have equal opportunity, for, in your real being, you are alike. As members of families, your dominant tendencies, your privileges and opportunities according to conventional standards, are not alike.
But with which relationship goes the most power? The relation to Origin or the relation to a temporal family? Which is the most lasting? Heredity from God, or heredity of the flesh? What do Nature and its working Principle aim to produce as the highest product? A member of a community or the individual?
Take this view of yourself. “ In my relation to the Great All, and in my consequent possibilities, I am as if there were no other human being in existence. My real being is the universe. As a living soul I am in that universe, and I am to know it throughout its vast range, to its outermost boundaries. This is my destiny and nothing can thwart it. No one is, or can be more than I am. No one has, or can accomplish more than I can, for no one can know more than his own being, or do more than make its nature and power manifest.”
“Lift up your heads 0 ye gates! and the king of glory shall come in. Who is the king of glory? The Lord of hosts. He is the king of glory.”
Open the gate through which may come your own God- derived being in his majesty and power. You close it hard and fast when you think and feel, “I shall never amount to anything.” What right have you to dishonor God’s handiwork?
Man is the image of God. Then Man’s powers are drawn from Deity, are sustained from that source, and who shall say that the supply fails?
If the image of God, the real being, is the root from which every living soul draws its nourishment, what is possible for one is possible for all. It does not follow, however, that what is practical for one is, at the same moment, practical for all. Fundamentally all are alike, and all alike may attain the same ultimate result—Divinity. But between Origin and Destiny fulfilled, there are stages of progress, and, at the same moment of time, one existent soul is in advance of another.
But how shall the backward one catch up? By thinking “ It is of no use, I never can get there,” or by seeing, and cultivating the feeling, “ Because of what I am in origin I can and shall reach it ” ? Which view will yield the most result? There is a natural inertia for all, but yon add to and increase it every time you compare yourself with another to conclude, “What he is is impossible for me.” With God nothing is impossible. For you, a living soul, rooted in an eternal being, looking upon and using what, for you, is a temporal world, plus God, nothing is impossible.
In your thought, your hope, your endeavor, detach yourself from the flesh now. You need not pass through physical death to do this. It is the dying daily of which Paul speaks. Attach yourself to God, and with this plus you can move the mountains of incompetency and failure out of your way, for this is the faith that moves mountains.
Yet there is something else to be looked after. Examine yourself and see what is your motive for wishing to accomplish what the other man has accomplished. Standing on the top round, fame is his, the admiration and the plaudits of the world. Do you long for them? Is this the reason why you wish you could achieve what he has achieved? Would these plaudits sound sweet in your ears? Would you rest satisfied with the fame and admiration? Then it is better that you do not have them, better that you gain a victory over yourself than that what you call success should be yours.
To find the source of power, to find ourselves, really, is so necessary and vital in the hurry and push of our modern civilization, where others who have gained what we want are our standard of comparison. But to know how to use it when found is as necessary and vital; and this knowledge and the effort according to it will depend upon another standard. When we care more for our God-likeness than for our worldly-likeness, we shall achieve the otherwise impossible, a success that is eternal because our “ kingdom is not of this world.”
The ideal and the practical must walk hand in hand. Do not keep your eyes so fixed on a sentimental heaven that you have none for the ground you walk on and so stub your toes repeatedly; neither be so exceedingly utilitarian and politic that you never lift your eyes higher than the ground. This world and all that pertains to it is ours for use, and by your use of what Nature and your natural relations offer you, you work with the everlasting trend or contrary to it. Through an ignorant selfdepreciation you are held back from what you might accomplish. You need to look through the mask of flesh and blood to see what you are and what your powers, for till you see, you will not claim and use them.
Do you think there is danger of an unwarranted egotism in this other view of what you are? There is not the least danger when it is understood. The very last one in the world to become an egotist is he who has passed through the flood that destroys commonly accepted beliefs and opinions, because, as the individual, he has builded even a very small ark of understanding. This flood is to prevail, you know, “ till all the high hills under the whole heaven were covered ” ; for the whole heaven of your own real being, that stands perfect and complete forever, is above this variable existence which is to be understood in its best and its least, its hills and its valleys, through its relation to the changeless and eternal.
Understanding of what you are is the most important thing possible, for till you have it you are likely to either depreciate or unduly exalt yourself. The golden mean is found only through self-knowledge, and not through the self-knowledge that is called the evidence of the senses. Not till the evidence of the faculties is added to the evidence of the senses do you really know instead of believe. While it is true that “knowledge is power,” true knowledge is the only true, or lasting power.
Stop comparing yourself with those whom you envy—yes, you do envy them for all your protest. Compare yourself instead with what you may be, because in your real being you are as much as was even Jesus of Nazareth. If your real being is the image of God, who ever was or will be more? But he knew what he was, and what was possible to him in consequence; therefore he demonstrated what you have not yet demonstrated, for you have not known what he knew. “ I and the Father are one,” said he. Equally are you and the same Father united, or at-one; but you must gain the consciousness of that oneness which was the secret of Jesus’ mighty works and power.
Practically, you need not strive to become the best of musicians, of artists, of literateurs, but some day you must begin to strive to become the best of men; not better than any one who ever lived, but the very best species the genus, Man, can produce. For this is the aim and end of existence, and when you see the possibility and strive for it the Almighty God works with you for accomplishment.
MENTAL PATTERNS
You are a very good accountant, are you not? You can count up your miseries with the most painstaking accuracy. Not the smallest of them will escape you. With the extended power of vision which long practice has given you, you will see the tiniest one, pounce upon it and drag it forth to appear in the sum total at the bottom of the list.
Your power of vision and swift dexterity are commendable; whether the use to which you put them is profitable or not, is a matter of legitimate doubt.
Are you as eager and ready to count up your blessings and joys?
You have none to count? Oh! stop and think a minute. No one is without some, if ever so few. You have dwelt so long on your miseries, that it is hard for you to turn your eyes in another direction, but you will find something else to count up, if you persist.
You are not now, you never have been, in a position or condition that could not be worse; and whatever prevented it from being worse was a blessing, therefore. Just look for a minute and you will find ever so many blessings in your life that you have not seen before because you did not look for them. The rule of addition is a good one to apply to your experiences, only try to apply it to the good as well as the evil, and be as zealous in the application, too.
We become, practically, what we continually see. It is not meant that if we were to look at a tree quite constantly, we would become trees, for we never can change our fundamental nature; but what we persistently dwell upon mentally tends to embody itself in us, and give quality to our consciousness.
A medical student who is studying different diseases to learn their symptoms and course, as is well known, is apt to run the scale and experience many of these symptoms in his own person.
Persistent dwelling upon miseries, enlarges, emphasizes, and multiplies those miseries. The addition leads to multiplication. The rule will work both ways. Persistent attention to joys will multiply those joys. Multiplication is impersonal, what is multiplied is personal, and you have something to say as to what shall be multiplied.
Your birthright gives you power to have blessings multiplied unto you, and you are throwing away your birthright, selling it for the miserable pottage of multiplied miseries. By your continual addition you are hugging your miseries close to you and you will not let them go; and there is no other way for them to forsake you. Till you let them go, they cannot go. You are the one who must choose.
You enjoy them, did you know it? If you did not you would be driven in self-defence to look for your blessings. You have to look for something. You are so constituted, you cannot help it. You are the species that can form an ideal, a mental pattern, and hold it before your mental eye. You can form for yourself, you do form for yourself, the mental pattern according to which you build your outer life; and your building shows the material you have used. Your miseries are your pattern, and your life conforms to it.
Now up with you and change your pattern. Be as resolute to do this as you have been to hug your cherished miseries and you will accomplish it. You must have a better mental pattern, this is imperative. Where can you find a better one than what you are in your real being?
You do not know what you are in your real being? Then listen carefully. You are not a poor, weak, unappreciated sufferer, afflicted as is no one else; you are the image of God.
You correct this statement, do you? You were the image of God originally, but not since Adam fell.
Now what in the world has the theological Adam to do with you? Did 3rou steal a pair of horses, or were you guilty of theft, because a man over in the next count}’ stole some years ago? Use your common sense and do not be frightened by theological bugaboos. Theology is formulated human opinions about God. WTiich is the greater and surer? Theology or God?
Had you not better elect to stand by God, and that logic that is God’s law, rather than by human and insufficient opinion? Who or what can change what God creates and endows? Whoever or whatever can do this is greater than God. What is greater than God? There can be no greater, for the greatest is God. It follows then that what God creates and endows is changeless. What, then, is the consequence?
You, this moment, in the real of you that is God’s primary creation, are just what God created you. You never have been, you never will be anything different. No act of your own or another’s can change you, for God is greatest. This suffering you, that is continually adding up miseries in order that they may be multiplied unto you, are not this God-created and endowed being. You are the seeker for it, its possible finder, the experiencer of all its possible capacities and their results; and you are experiencing the creative power of your thought without understanding what it all means.
But your very experiences may, and eventually will uncover that real being for you, and show you what you have done, why you have done it, and how far you have departed in your self-ideal from the eternal pattern.
It will help you to tear aside the veil of temporal condition, and see and realize what you eternally are, if you will set about looking for and counting up your blessings. You will be surprised to find how many you have. And you will find the more, if you make it a rule of daily living to rejoice, rejoice without ceasing. If you do this you will have no time for mourning, you see.
Did it ever strike you that continual mourning was multiplied selfishness? No, surely not, for if you had seen it this way you would have set about correcting the habit. Dwelling upon miseries is a habit, a bad one, and we dignify it by the name of loyalty; loyalty to the old times, the old things, to our lost friends. The way to be rid of a bad habit is to form a good one. You need not wrestle and strive with the old habit, only just be persistent in forming the good one and the bad one will take care of itself.
Suppose, when you get up in the morning and that dreadful feeling of depression comes over you, that you make it a rule to begin to sing. You do not think singing would do any good? Well! you try it and see, before you pronounce too positively. Sing something rousing, stirring, triumphant, something that embodies a contrary thought, something with a ring to it. Never mind if you disturb your neighbors a little—provided you have not arisen unseasonably early—you will help them also; for they will feel the vibration of the strong thought, and it will help to rouse in them the feeling it will rouse in you.
Change of feeling is what you need, is what we all need; a change from the natural to the spiritual. It is in your power to bring about this change. When you feel like weeping, begin to praise the Lord. When it seems as if everything you valued was being taken from you, begin to thank the Lord for all that has been given you.
Rejoicing is the great panacea for mourning. You can hardly do both at the same time, and if you will rejoice, how are you going to mourn? By being continually checked instead of encouraged, the tendency to mourn will die out. By being continually encouraged the tendency to rejoice will be strengthened. Choose which you will serve, and look out that you make a profitable choice.
You cannot rejoice when your eyes are full of tears and your heart as heavy as lead ? You can try to, and the trying brings eventually fullness of result. You can try to see and think of the good things you have in your life—no life is so barren that there are none in it. Make it a point to look for and rejoice over these good things, thanking God that you have them, and you will find that there is given you “the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.”
“I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my soul shall be joyful in my God.”
Make this resolve with yourself and then put it into practice. Rejoice with your lips, if your heart feels like breaking. The sound of your voice, the thought to which it gives utterance, can and will help to rouse a response in you. All joy, beauty, and gladness, the sufficiency of all good things, are for you. Reach out your hand to take them unto you. Do not be denied your lawful appropriation, by your miseries. The tree of life grows side by side with the tree of knowledge. Its fruit is yours for the taking.
Make sunshine and you will have sunshine. The great source of supply is at your right hand. Because you are God- endowed you can command for yourself. You can draw from the infinite reservoir all you need. But to have it you must “ greatly rejoice in the Lord,” for the Lord is your own eternal being, the image of God. Because your real being images or expresses God, nothing that pertains to its nature can be taken away from you, or destroyed.
Rejoice that life, health, strength, power, peace, the fulness of life everlasting are yours by right of your origin. Be joyful in your God, for God is the source of this supply.
Rejoice that you have a career to run, that whatever you experience on the way is but a help to a forward step, if you will make it so.
Rejoice that you are alive and have both opportunity and power for proving your divine heritage; for helping your fellow- men to discover and prove theirs.
Rejoice that you have valuable lessons set for you to learn; rejoice whether you like the books that contain them or not.
Rejoice that you can stand as an individual in the world and see the whole panorama pass before you to the end, knowing what it means, and fearing nothing it presents to you.
Rejoice that for you the mountains may fall, the rivers overflow their beds, the sun be darkened and the moon fail to give her light, and your “ I am ” will remain. .
Rejoice that you can rejoice, that you may rejoice. Rejoice day by day more abundantly. Like birds of the night your miseries will take flight as the sun rises upon you.
THE SIN AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST
You are greatly troubled about the “ sin against the Holy Ghost”?
You need not be. You do not understand what it is? That is why you are troubled. Understanding of your own nature and destiny will shed light upon this problem and remove your anxiety. It is when we lack necessary understanding that perplexities overwhelm and submerge us. When found, it yields an explanation you have not gained elsewhere, for it is “ Thus saith the Lord.”
You have learned that the flesh and blood body is not yourself, have you not? That, veiled by the object, there must be the seeing subject? Flesh and blood cannot be the living soul. The living soul that uses flesh and blood cannot be the thing used. The machine is one thing, the user of the machine quite another.
This user of the machine, the living soul called by the family name to which you answer, occupies a position between its flesh and blood body and its real being, its Lord. It sees, naturally, only this body, with its environment, and not its real being. It must find and know its Lord.
Existence is for that purpose. Existence and experience are one. In existence, or by experience, this living soul turns, some time, from its flesh body and environment as the all, to its real being or Lord, and sees that being as the eternal reality back of all the sense-phenomena on the plane of the flesh body.
Then it—you—begins to live a new life. It—you—has been bora again, born into a knowledge it did not have formerly; a knowledge that brings consequences before unknown. When this time comes for you—and it has come, has it not?—you begin to live according to this higher ideal. You no longer see yourself as a material being, created from dust, but as spiritual in your real being that you have found, as perfect, whole, intelligent, possessed of God-like powers.
You have a new self-idea as a standard for daily living, a mental pattern before your inner eye according to which you try to think and live. A hitherto unknown feeling grows up in you, a feeling of certainty, security, peace, You say, “ whereas I was blind, I now see.” Existence itself, and all connected with it takes on a new meaning for you.
God used to seem so far off, and you had more or less fear of Him. Now the Supreme Love that is God stands at your right hand, never leaving nor forsaking you. The constant Presence is your strength and support, and all fear of God has left you. A new way of gaining knowledge appears to you, an opening up from within, a bubbling, gently flowing spring of the water of life, a quiet, persistent revelation that answers your questions and becomes a factor in your daily life.
You “ seek unto the Lord ” and the Lord answers you, for your own real being is all-knowing. The “ Spirit of Truth ” that shall lead you into all truth, enters in and takes up its abode with you. You are being led, led gently, where you used to be driven. You were driven hither and yon by your experiences, by their pain and unrest, before you knew of your real being and the meaning of existence; but now you are no longer driven. You see, even if dimly, where before all was dark, and you are drawn toward the light.
You feel this drawing and you move with it willingly, escaping the driving that before pushed you reluctantly along. Existence is a moving on, you know, and you see now that move you must, if not in one way then in the other. So at first you were driven forward, because you did not know how to move of yourself. Now you see and know and you move of your own volition. This indwelling spirit instructs, strengthens, guides, and comforts you. You are no longer as a sheep without a shepherd.
You see and know where before you were blind and ignorant. In your ignorance you believed yourself to be made of the dust of the ground with an uncertain and threatening hereafter before you when you should have finished your three score and ten years of this life; a life in which you were doomed to more or less suffering in spite of all you could do to avert it.
Now, with your different self-idea, you believe this no longer. You can see, to some extent, the principle that governs the problems of existence and determines their correct answer. You see that, logically, you are of the Eternal and not of the temporal, and that all existence is but the gradual knowing of your being. With your old view you made many mistakes, formed many conclusions that were untrue by comparison with the eternal standard, however true to you at the time.
But those sins—for an error is a sin—are forgiven you because they were not intentional; they were only natural. You were responsible for them in that you created the errors, or committed the sins, but only according to the law of cause and effect. You were not morally responsible, because you did not intend to create an error, or commit a sin. Without intention there can be no moral responsibility. There can be no intention to do wrong till there is perception of both a right and a wrong, and the difference between them. Intentional doing of a wrong is impossible to the Adam-soul—you—for it does not know either right or wrong. It acts naturally according to its nature.
You formed your first self-idea and lived according to it, naturally, not intentionally. You sinned ignorantly and the forgiveness belongs to your lack of intention to sin. But now that you know what you did not know naturally, now that the Spirit of Truth has taken up its abode with you, if you deliberately and willfully act contrary to what you see and know, that sin cannot be forgiven you; for it is not natural, it is intentional, and you must work out its consequences to the uttermost. The law of cause and effect compels this result also.
Dismiss the idea of a God who will interfere with this law and lift from off you the consequences of your own thoughts and acts. There is none such. You can see instead, readily, can you not, that there must be a wide difference between a wrong ignorantly done, and one done intentionally?
A child does many things that are unwise, because it is a child, because it acts naturally, or according to the nature of the child. These are forgiven it because it is the child and knows no better. In those acts there was no intention to do wrong. But when the child has become enlightened, the enlightenment makes him a boy of fifteen, makes him more than a naturally ignorant child. If this boy does what the child did, this forgiveness does not belong to him for he knew better than to do what he did. The possibility of this forgiveness is destroyed by himself, by his intention to do what he knew better than to do.
The sin against the Holy Ghost is your own deliberate willful thought and action contrary to what you know to be true and right. Therefore the forgiveness that belongs naturally to lack of intention to do wrong cannot’ belong to you.
If you act always according to your highest perception and conviction of right and wrong, you will never sin against the Holy Ghost, for this sin lies in intention only. Even though you make mistakes, they will not “be reckoned against you.” They may be contrary sometimes to the eternal truth of being, but they are not contrary to your knowledge of that truth. You sin against the impersonal truth ignorantly, but you may sin against yourself knowingly.
How many have feared for years, long painful years, that they had sinned the deadliest of all sins, the sin against the Holy Ghost; feared the more because they did not know what that sin was. They dared not ask God to forgive them, for that sin was beyond forgiveness, and existence became, consequently, a living tomb. How slow has been the coming of the “ freedom of the Sons of God” ; but it has come for you when you see what you really are, instead of the degraded specimen of humanity seen through theological spectacles.
Fear of hell has brought more penitents to the anxious seat than has love of God. You need have no fear of any damnation that you do not make for yourself. True, “ he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation ” ; but this danger can be averted. You have but to act according to what you see and know and your future is safe. “ The kingdom of God is within you99 and you can enter in and dwell there, and no theological hobgoblins can destroy your peace.
God is Love, not wrath nor vengeance, and all along the line of your experiences that Almighty Love is working ceaselessly to manifest itself to you. Whatever the seeming to you, it is all-potent for you. Through whatever you come, it overcomes, and goes with you by day and by night to show the way in which you are going steadily toward God. Nothing can thwart its mighty purpose, turn it aside, prevent it from blessing you.
Evil is but the attendant shadow. The steadily shining light is the infinite Love that draws all to itself. Even though clouds impede its rays, it is there all the while, doing its work ceaselessly, and you are feeling its benefits at those times when you can get out of the darkness and chill of the shadow.
When you were a child your mother loved you. When you acted as the child, and, because of an unrestrained impulse, struck at her, she loved you just the same. Her love did not depend upon your recognition of it, but Oh! how much it became to you when you became able to recognize it. It waited for you, was faithful to you all the while you knew it not. It watched over and guarded you and led you in the way you should go, a constant presence that gave you only blessings. Yet how different was all when, no more a little child, you were capable of seeing and feeling that love. It remained the same for you, but it was far more to you than before.
So God, that infinite Love that is God, is always the same for us, but becomes so much more to us when we see and know that to which we are at first blind, because we are children in self-knowledge. The all-wise Father displaces the implacable ruler and we rest content in the certainty of a divine protecting Love.
Recognize your eternal relation to God, and fear nothing but to act contrary to such light as you have. When you do this, you are always right, even if your thought is not exactly in accord with the truth of being. When you live according to this standard you will never sin the sin against the Holy Ghost. Feeling the mighty Presence you will part company with fear and trust it wholly. “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.”
“What is the use of talking to me about mastering conditions, when I am constantly mastered by them? Against your theorizing stands the fact that I cannot help them.”
Permit a slight correction. Against the theorizing stands the fact that you have not yet helped them, and also, probably, the other fact that you do not know how to make the attempt. You have tried your best, and without result? That is quite true, no doubt, but your best may not be the best—the best way of overcoming them. There is such a difference between a blind resistance and an enlightened resistance, and unless you have become enlightened as to what and why you are, what and why these conditions are, you cannot have worked in the way that will yield the result you desire.
You have tried to push them away from you with your own strength, instead of utilizing the strength that moves everything. There is this better way, the utilization of resistless energy, the very force that makes the grass grow, the water flow, the birds sing. It is an exhaustless supply that will work through any channel open to^it, and you can take advantage of that fact and use it for your own betterment. .
Mankind has made many inventions, many labor-saving appliances which have required less expenditure of personal strength and made possible a greater economy of time. Nature remains the same, her operations go forward as they always have gone forward, they are unchanged, but labor-saving inventions are utilizations of what pertains to her.
The sun still rises in the east, the dew is on the meadow- grass as usual, but the mower goes forth at sunrise with horses and a mowing machine, instead of with a scythe over his shoulder. In the machine he has many scythes where he used to have one, and instead of swinging it himself as he moves slowly step by step, he can sit quietly guiding the horses whose more rapid steps will give results far in excess of the old method.
What has changed? Nothing. More is utilized than formerly, and so the method of work is changed, while results are increased.
The old, old story of Creation, again and again repeated with each human soul, offers to you a great repository containing all you need. Your experience is your gradual acquaintance with it, and the learning how to draw from it according to your needs, how to utilize what may be utilized.
As the soil holds lovingly the seed implanted in it, clasping it close and feeding it silently, so you are held in the warm embrace of Nature and of God and fed silently from the exhaustless supply.
As the seed contains potencies of the plant and the blossom, so you contain the potency of that glorified humanity that is divinity, and whether you know it or not, you are being nourished to that end.
You are to blossom as the likeness of God, but you must first know the likeness of man. The plant precedes the blossom. And to your lesser likeness belong all your pain and discordant conditions. To your higher likeness belongs the power to rule them; but you rule after having been ruled.
So far you have been ruled. In your human likeness you have toiled and suffered. You have felt the thorn in the flesh— many of them, and you wish they were not there. By utilization of what belongs to your greater likeness you may pluck them out of the flesh.
If you do this work that is yours to do, you shall be crowned with it; you shall wear that most royal of all crowns, the crown of thorns. Woven into a regal diadem instead of rankling in the flesh, these thorns shall show their powerlessness beside the power of him who overcomes.
Thorns and thistles does the ground of existence indeed bring forth unto us, and we smart under their sting; but when you see and know, you pluck them forth from your consciousness and prove your God-likeness by your work.
“My grace is sufficient for thee,” was the answer to Paul, “ for my strength is made perfect in weakness.”
See the significance of that statement. “My strength is made perfect in weakness.” There are three factors to be noted, strength, weakness, and a making perfect. In your human likeness you are weak, you use your own strength. But there is a greater, an exhaustless strength that you may have, and you are to find and prove it as being beyond your personal strength, as you would not do were there not a weakness with which to compare strength and find one better than the other.
“My strength ” is what belongs to your God-likeness; your weakness belongs to your human likeness; your experience lies between the weakness and the strength, and that strength is sufficient for you, enables you to pluck out the rankling thorns.
You have tested your own mere human strength, you have tried to get rid of suffering and disease, you have done what you could, even as the mower has done what he could. But when this mower is shown the new appliance, the greater utilization of force, may he not choose between continuing to work as formerly and using the later method?
The work is the same, it is still his to do, but how to do it is a matter susceptible of betterment; and with use of the new appliance goes a larger measure of result. Suppose he turns his back upon the mowing machine, the loss is his own. What he might have he does not have, in consequence. Whose is the fault that he still toils days to accomplish what might be done in one?
The power to master the thorns stands before yon every time you read the life of him who wore the crown. “ The works that I do ye shall do.” The thorns will hurt and sting till you, too, pluck them out of the flesh. They do not pass from ns, we pass from them, by growing greater, stronger, higher.
Thought-Force is the resistless energy you need to utilize. Are you thinking frequently, “ It is of no use, it cannot be done? ” Then yon are using Thought-Force to strengthen those conditions instead of lessening them, driving the thorns deeper into the flesh instead of drawing them out. Why not use it the other way? Why not let your strength be supplemented by the great Strength? “ It can be done, and the great Power will accomplish it.” Is not this better than “ It cannot be done? ”
The persistence of your conditions is due to the resistless energy of Thought-Force, for it brings to manifestation what you think. If this is true, it will also bring to manifestation a change in what you think, when you get ready to make the change. It does not select what shall appear in your body; you do, and the body is full of thorns or “ grace and truth ” as you elect.
Can all these suffering conditions disappear immediately, all these thorns be plucked at once? Probably not, but they will go eventually if you utilize the resource that is ever at your right hand.
Jesus is our example of what may be accomplished. As our elder brother he attained for the whole human family, in that he proved what was possible for the rest of the family. His crown of victory—not a sign of disgrace—may be our crown of victory. In it are all the consequences of our limited human nature, sense- consciousness and what belongs to it; selfishness, pride, enviousness, falsehood, dishonesty, self-deception, that breed their progeny of disease and death. One and all they are to be put from us, plucked out of our life and so from our body, that we may be crowned with our achievements.
“My grace is sufficient for thee.” Do we get this needed help from those who are feeling the smart with us? It comes from a greater than they, and this greater is sufficient for all our needs. But Oh! how long it takes us to learn this lesson. A fatal obstacle is, “ It cannot be done.” That word you speak is made manifest. The work is not done.
Year after year you speak this word, and year after year you gather your crop of thorns and thistles from the ground of existence. You and the thorns are one, when your feeling should be, “ I and the Father are one.”
If you were to go to a foreign country to represent the United States Government, for all practical purposes while there, you and that Government would be one, because it was represented in your person. Whatever you did, it would support, because it would do what you did. It would act through you, and your acts would be its acts to the people among whom you were placed. You would have little fear for results, knowing that this Government was at your back, supporting all you did. Your oneness with it would mean, and be more to you than your oneness with the people among whom you were living, and with their customs. You would feel that the greater oneness would outlast the lesser oneness and give you the advantage every moment. Its strength would be your strength and you would not share in the experiences of the people to the same extent that would otherwise be the case.
Can you not have some of the strength now, that oneness with God, consciousness of it, gives ? And with that consciousness do you not have an advantage that other people have not? You share the weaknesses common to all who live in the world, but you may have that which is not of this world; and your power of resistance and overcoming will be increased proportionally.
God’s ambassador. What a position to hold! Conscious of oneness with God, you will watch how you think, speak, and act, for you must not disregard what your position compels. You must not commit your Government to anything it would be obliged to repudiate. Do not think or say that the thorns cannot be conquered. That work has been done, the proof has been given. Consequently your Government could not sanction that statement.
Jesus was God’s ambassador. His Government supported and sanctioned every declaration he made, furnished the proof that his words were true. In the person of that ambassador was shown what can be done for you and for all, but we must stand in the same place to have the same authority and support.
You will be recalled some day, but before your return home you will be crowned for your work by being crowned with it. No king upon mortal throne can equal you then for regal splendor and power, even though a crucifying cross is hard by you, and the shouts of those who desire the robber rather than the victor ring in your ears.
Death has no power to terrify you, no tomb can hold you. Conqueror of more than a worldly kingdom, with eyes that see far beyond a modern Pilate’s judgment hall, you stand unmoved on sunlit heights, while the surging throng presses toward Calvary.
NATURAL AND CONTROLLED OLD AGE
Hate to grow old, do you?
Dread old age as you would a plague?
Well, all your dread will not keep it from you, but a different mental state will make old age something quite different from what it otherwise will be.
Why should you dread it? What is it? The unpleasant pictures of old age you have seen, both actually and mentally, have something to do with your dislike. You have seen feeble old men and women who were dependent upon others for care, incapable of caring for themselves; seen them full of crochets, irascible and impatient, and you have pictured yourself in the same condition. You have seen scanty gray hair, wrinkled faces, withered hands, a bent back, uncertain footsteps, and you have shrunk from such a future.
You are ready to do almost anything to escape it; and you read of the many things that can be done to avoid it, ways and means becoming more numerous as time goes on. You decide that you will live on this diet, follow that regimen, go to another country, or do one or more of the many things recommended as a cure for old age.
You might as well decide to fly to the moon as to attempt to escape old age by these or any other methods, for you cannot eventually cheat Nature even though you succeed in parleying with her for a while; but with even a little true self-knowledge, faithfully applied, you may escape the hind of old age you shrink from.
Look into yourself, first, for a moment and find your motive. Why do you dread old age? Because you do not wish to be dependent upon others and because of your vanity. Now do not offer an indignant denial of the latter half of the reason, for it is true, as you will find if you can bring yourself to be honest with yourself.
How our looks play a prominent part in our thoughts till something more important takes its place. This is all right, no one should be regardless of his appearance, but how the desired end is best accomplished may be a matter worthy of consideration.
First, let us look at the difference between old age and an undesirable kind of old age, which is the difference between
Nature and what is added to Nature. Look out into this great beautiful world and observe how the seasons follow <jaeh other.
A seed is planted in the spring, it germinates and a green plant is the result. This plant, first small and tender, grows larger and stronger, forsaking its early youth and reaching out toward its maturity. A bud appears, is followed by a blossom, summer and autumn succeed the spring, the winter of rest and refreshment is the result. The existence of this plant is governed by law and is according to the order compelled by the nature of the seed.
Equally is this true of you, the human plant. You have your seasons, your spring, summer, autumn, and winter, and all are beautiful in themselves. It is you who ignorantly make any one of them otherwise. Your seasons may not comprise the same period of time as those you see in the vegetable kingdom, but there is likeness between them. In that kingdom they are contained in one year, in the human kingdom in many years, but there is but one overruling law in all kingdoms.
As a living soul you have your period of germination, your flowering and fruitage. This order is a growing old, a maturing that is compelled by the nature of being and of existence. You are to fulfil your destiny through the maturing of your capabilities and powers, to grow old in the appointed way, but you may keep your youthfulness in your old age.
You, not your physical coat of skin, is what we are speaking of, though that coat has claimed most of your attention when it should have been given to yourself. Have you not learned that your outer body, the physical body is but the representative of that which is more? The representative of you and your body, the body that would be yours did you die to-day?
Your hidden body, the body that you feel but do not see, is but clothed with the body you do see. That belongs to Nature, while the hidden body belongs to you. You are a living soul, and the common dust of the ground is integrated in shape as your coat of skin. Your body is formed in this mold and the mold can and will be cast off one day.
Your body, the inner body, is subject to transformation. It is plastic and will yield to the workman’s tools. The outer coat of skin, because it is a coat only, and not the soul-embodiment (the body carried along with the changing seasons), is not subject to like transformation.
As the representative of being, in the three score and ten of its period is represented the whole process from germination to rest. Its infancy and its old age, with all that belongs between them, are but the handwriting that reveals the nature and order of the soul-process resulting in maturity of self-consciousness; the illustration, but not the thing itself.
Why should you desire and strive to keep the coat of skin from showing marks of age? The growth from Adam to Christ is illustrated in its changes, the advance from being without knowing it, to the full realization of being and the power this realization confers. The whole process of creation, from the “ darkness ” “ upon the face of the deep ” to “ I am the light of the world ” is written there in seventy years—for the eyes that can read the writing.
But you make your body while Nature writes her record upon i your coat of skin. So you will find it far more profitable to attend to your own work than to meddle with hers. Your work glorifies her work, and your body will glorify her body. Your body will glorify the natural body when you have made it what you may, and then there will be no repulsive features about old age.
Have you not observed a great difference in people of the same age? Some are so much more youthful than others and their youthfulness is not affectation either. Youthfulness does not mean childishness, but a spontaneity of soul that is like a bubbling spring of water in a thirsty land. It is this youthfulness, this freshness and spontaneity of soul, even when the hair is gray, that glorifies Nature’s old age and makes it beautiful, that removes all you fear and shrink from.
Whatever the outer aspect you are no older than you feel. You will never be in any way repulsive, however many years you may retain your coat of skin, if you keep young in soul, as you can if you know how. By this youthfulness of soul is not meant lack of maturity, but the carrying of youthfulness, not childishness, into maturity.
In our New Testament we have an example in the person of Jesus of Nazareth of this combination of youthfulness with maturity. The Soul is older than time because of its origin and nature, but in existence it wears the marks of its existence, growth and maturity. With these may be continued that eternal youth that wells up within and overflows into the life, if we do not check and smother the flow.
Be yourself. This is the first important rule to follow. Do not try to be like any one you see or know, but aim to be like your own highest ideal. Copy no one, let yourself, your eternal self, be written in flesh. Be natural, not artificial, give your inmost deepest self free outlet. Be spontaneous, not stilted.
Do you know what is necessary for this spontaneity, for the free outflowing of the self that never grows old? The ability to put your foot upon the neck of your animal self, a keen moral sense that checks its spontaneity and holds in a firm grasp that which seeks outlet.
To rule the one is to permit the other. To master the lesser self is to give freedom to the deeper and higher self. One is held in the meshes of self-deception if, mistaking license for freedom, he permits the lower impulses to have their way with him.
This is not freedom, it is bondage, and how much license has worn the mask of freedom for those that mistake psychic intoxication for spirituality.
First the natural, afterward the spiritual. You feel the strength of the natural impulses in you, you covet your neighbor’s goods; but you can say, “ Be still,” to the impulse and so open the way for your higher nature to manifest itself. There can be no spontaneity of the deeper self when the sense-man bars the way.
A clean mental house is the first requisite. One cannot afford to be spontaneous who has anything to conceal. If there is much hidden within which he cannot afford to have known, the path of higher spontaneity is clogged. The need to live under cover instead of in the open light is fatal to this spontaneity. Without it old age is not glorified. Without this glorification the merely natural is not attractive.
Whether any one will ever know it or not, whether you ever carry it out in act or not, put that thought, that imagination in which you are indulging in secret, away from you. Cast it out, do not harbor it, it is unworthy of your high calling. It will leave its mark upon your face if you hold it long enough, and it is better to prevent than to cure. The angel cannot look forth when the devil stands in the way.
When you care more for what you are within, than for how you look without, you will attend to that mental housecleaning that permits the likeness of God to look forth from your eyes, shine in your face, speak in your voice.
Did you realize for a moment the joy of the freedom for him who has nothing to conceal, and, consequently, to fear, you would lose sight of your looks, your dread of old age, your fear of dependence, and thank God that you were alive, for the rest is in your own power.
The phenomenal world is yours, and all in it is subject unto you. The psychic world is yours, and all in it is subject unto you, when you do not invite control by your mental state. Like attracts like and what you harbor within draws toward it its kind. An unclean mental house compels an unclean life. But a clean mental house, bringing a clean life, opens the way for the divine self to appear and glorify the life.
Have you never seen in the faces of those who look toward the heavenly hills a light that is not of the sun, neither of the moon? A light that is from so far and yet is so near, that transfigures the face and makes it beautiful with a beauty that stills the senses and awes the beholder? Old or young, as we reckon time, though it is seldom seen in the young, experience being needed to lift the veil, we look in wonder and feel a solemnity that goes with us for days as we recall the face. It has no old age, this light, and the face it illumines is glorified.
THE USE OF REMEDIES
You are greatly perplexed over a question that you feel you must answer for yourself, are you? It has bothered and bothered you, and you want to do what is right?
Is it right for me, under any circumstances, to take medicine or employ a physician? ”
All who aim to follow the metaphysical, rather than the physical, view of existence, are confronted with this problem.
That you must never violate your conviction of right, is a foregone conclusion. JSTo one who is true to his own ideal can do this. But the question of all questions is, “ What is right?” Right and wrong are adjustable terms when applied to things relative. They are terms of comparison, according to an accepted standard. This standard may not be absolute; and then the terms cannot be absolute. What is wrong for one is right for another, because what is wrong to one is right to another.
One is always right, in a moral sense, when he acts according to his conviction of right, and is always wrong when he acts contrary to it, because his action is true to, or contrary to, the standard which is his. And when he is acting rightly, from another’s point of view his action is wrong, because the other’s standard for conduct is different.
Settle this one thing with yourself, first. “ It is right for me to act according to my own conviction of right, and wrong for me to violate it.”
Then comes the next step, “ According to what standard shall I form my own conviction of right? ”
Here there may well be hesitancy, for equally good people have contrary standards. The difference of opinion compels. (t But I,” you say, “ have a fixed standard according to which to regulate my actions. I have come to see that I am a spiritual being, always have been and always will be a spiritual being; that I have no part or lot in matter. My substance is the infinite Mind that is God. From that source I draw all my supply. Nothing can cut me off from that source of supply, and it is sufficient for every need. Because I am a perfect spiritual being, there is no reality to disease, pain, and suffering.”
This is true. In your real eternal being you are what you say. Your real being needs no remedies and no physician.
What more do you know about what you are? What do you see when you look in a mirror?
“ What I see in the mirror is the body or machine that represents me and that I use for a time. It is not I.”
You say you are eternal, and yet that you are using something for a time. You confess yourself a little puzzled as to how to make reconciliation between the eternal and time, do you?
It is only the difference between the changeless real, and the changing phenomenal. Your being is the changeless real and it needs no physic. It is never diseased. It has Likeness to God. Time is the process of manifesting that Likeness, the actualizing of the abstract truth of being as a living fact. Time, in short, is the process by which you find yourself.
Now, though in being you are free from all dis-ease, discord, in your self-consciousness you are not so free. Now and then you have a sense of dis-ease, or discord, of lack of harmony that you must deal with. It overcomes you temporarily till you become able to overcome it.
“Is it wrong to have a sense of illness? ”
No. When you are enlightened as to the nature of your real being, it is a mistake to let the sense cloud your vision and bias your judgment; to be deceived by it.
Because of your not-yet-attained mastery conditions that are relative to existence now and then confront you. You have made many affirmations, read metaphysical literature every day, declared your conviction as to the “ unreality of matter/’ tried to keep your thoughts upon the plane of reality, and yet one day you had a sense of illness that was prostrating. How surprised you were. “I did not think it possible this could happen to me/’ you said to yourself.
You suffered acutely and you treated yourself faithfully. Another treated you also, and your sense of violent suffering did not abate. Your family was alarmed and begged you to take something or do something that was visible, that they could see. You refused, remaining true to your conviction that it was wrong to use any remedy because you were “ a spiritual being and Mind is all.” Your sense of suffering grew more acute, your family more alarmed, and finally you yielded and drank the hot, strong dose of something or other that was brought to your bedside.
You experienced relief from your sense of physical suffering, but how you tormented yourself because of the way in which it was brought about. Your remorse was as keen as your sense of pain had been. You had done wrong, you had forsaken your principles, you had violated your ideal, you had been untrue to your conviction.
This is an illustration of the situation compelling the question you want to answer satisfactoril}-.
All sense of discord, whatever the name, pertains to the finding and proving of your real being—to existence. Conditions pertain only to the conditional, not to the absolute. Your real being is absolute to existence, and the existence of your selfconsciousness is relative to your changeless being. This existence therefore is conditioned, and you, as a living soul in time, are to gain mastery over its conditions by the help of your being —of its resources.
Experience of conditions possible to existence does not entirely cease with knowledge that the real being is above and beyond them. They cease only by ascension above their plane.
Try to see the nature and purpose of existence before you fix your standard of right and wrong in this matter. See the relative as well as the absolute, and how to reconcile one with the other.
The material world and all it contains is for use. Till you understand and use, you are used. You are used by Nature as a means for her manifestation to you. You are to use all that confronts you, exchanging servitude for mastery. You are to see, read, use, dominate. If you cannot use anything material without coming into subjection to it, it is using you; and with all your boasted freedom you are still servant.
For you, for every one who has gained an idea of what he is in being, there must be individual choice as to how far he will employ material means for the living of his daily life. In the main, all agree to employ food, heat, clothing, protection from the weather in the shape of a dwelling; and yet some say “ I can make no concession to materiality by using a remedy.”
A heated dwelling is a remedy for cold, clothes are a remedy for extremes of heat and cold, food is a remedy for hunger, sleep is a remedy for fatigue. All are making “ concessions to materiality” by using remedies for possible conditions. All are obliged to make such concessions before they become able to master the conditions that call for them. Both the conditions and their remedies belong to a state of consciousness that is natural.
You are trying to’co-operate with the Great Push that impels you toward a higher state, the spiritual. This is wise.
Can you not leave the natural state and still be in it? Is this a paradox? In the world but not of it, is the same thing.
In your views, ideals, convictions, emotions, you may be beyond the natural state while outwardly you still belong to it. In your inner life you may be of another world while still in the natural one. You will still use the remedies against hunger, cold, the weather, nevertheless; but they will not be to you, and consequently for you in your inner life, what they used to be.
You are using them, not they you, for you see clearly their nature, the limit of their usefulness, their true relation to you. You are deceived by none of them because you are not self-deceived. Using them according to enlightenment instead of according to ignorant subjection, yon are their master, and by right. Reaching this state wherein the eye is single, you will never mistake a means for an end, and yonr judgment will be according to the standard of right relation between visible and invisible.
If you “ wonld rather die than use a remedy ” die right away as quickly as you can, for you are using a number most of the time.
“All things are mine, but I will be deceived by none of them ” is a better conviction.
What you drank from the glass was only a means of making an impression on you that was an impulse toward recovery of equilibrium.
There are worse people than physicians. Putting aside the incredulity and obstinacy that result from the belief that the physical body is the man, they are a noble body of men and women, entitled to all honor for their efforts for humanity. Do not betray an ignorant prejudice and fanaticism by declaring that “ Never, under any circumstances, would I employ a physician.” When you stand upon the top round of the ladder of existence you can afford to say this, not before.
Because you may have come to see that all things are yours for use according to your need, and that you are lawful ruler over them, shall you fall back into your old way and run for some bottle, immediately you have a sense of discomfort? Or send a messenger in hot haste for the nearest physician? This would show that you were still self-deceived, were being used by the material instead of using it.
If you have gained the required enlightenment, for you it must be, “ first the spiritual, afterward the natural.” Your first, not your last, impulse and effort will be for the mental, rather than the material means.
Observe yourself and note whether your first impulse when experiencing a sense of illness, is toward mental or material means and remedies. If you find that your first impulse is toward the old way and means it is still with you “ First the natural, afterward the spiritual ”; and your knowledge is only theoretical. Regeneration still awaits you.
If your first spontaneous impulse is for a spiritual remedy, your regeneration is begun, and drinking a gallon of hot ginger will not check it, necessarily.
Beware, however, that you do not use liberty as license. You have liberty, the liberty of sons of God, to use whatever the world naturally contains; but if you make this liberty license, you will misuse and suffer the consequence. You will become darkened in your inner consciousness instead of more enlightened.
Seeing that you stand between the eternal and the temporal, and understanding why, all you have to do is to settle which shall be first for you, and then you may go on your way rejoicing.
THE SWING OE THE PENDULUM
You have changed greatly in the last few years, have you not?
You used to live for the day, for self-gratification tempered with your duty to others; but now you try to live for the great all of which this life is only a stage. Your desires, thoughts, and feelings are quite different. The worldly goods and pleasures are not now enough for you.
An aspiration for what lies beyond them draws you higher. A few years have passed since you felt this new impulse, enough for you to look upon your old self with wonderment. It seems as if you never could have been what its face reveals, and yet, at that time, you did not realize any special lack.
You tried to discharge your duties to others, speak well of your neighbor, and keep square with the world. Beyond these you felt justified in doing as you chose, in living as best suited you.
But what a difference between then and now. What has made the difference?
You came into a knowledge one day, unexpectedly perhaps, of which you had not dreamed, and at once all was made new for you. You saw a meaning to existence, a meaning for yourself, why you were here, to what end all tends, and with a rush you went over to the metaphysical side of life. Now the physical side seems so far away from you, and you wonder how you could ever have been what you were.
But your experience has been strictly according to law, the law that governs existence and that has common application. First the natural, afterward the spiritual. You were what you were, naturally. You were born blind. You were blind from your birth. Your natural existence was blindness to the truth of being. Natural existence itself, or birth, because of its limitations, is a natural blindness that time and experience must deal with and remove.
When you got your eyes open to see, the glory was dazzling; and now you are threatened with blindness again. Not the old blindness but one equally an obstacle in the way of higher results for yourself.
This dazzling glory that shines around us when we have our eyes open to see it, this glorious truth of being, that we are whole and complete forever as God’s image and likeness, is sometimes too much to be borne, and we need still another revelation to help us out of the next darkness.
You have become extreme in your views, have gone as far the other way. Once you would have had nothing to do with things metaphysical, would have ignored them all and turned your back squarely upon them. Now you are doing just the same thing in another direction. You are trying to ignore things physical, and to turn your back squarely upon them.
Like a pendulum you have gone from the extreme limit of one side to the extreme limit on the other. In both cases you are blind. One kind of blindness is better than another, perhaps, but it is best not to be blind at all.
Has it occurred to you that in refusing to give any place in your life to things material you have tried—and vainly—to disrupt the order of the universe?
True it is that your real being is the image of God, that your flesh and blood body is not yourself, that the material things constituting your sense environment may disappear utterly from your vision and have, therefore, no permanent reality. Though this is all true, it is not all that is true, and never had you more need of knowledge than to-day.
You are the pendulum trying to remain fixed at one extreme because you were once fixed at the opposite extreme. Your motive for the effort is good and worthy, but the direction in which it acts might be changed with advantage.
The point of equilibrium for the pendulum is the place of poise between the two extremes. Your own true poise will be found midway between the extreme of your old life and the extreme of the new whose glory has dazzled you.
The golden mean is truly golden, for it is the way of wisdom. In it she walks with firm feet and reverent mien, with calm upturned face, serene, untroubled eyes. In this path the light always reveals, and never dazzles. Try for this poise. Cease ignoring anything whatever. Look at everything, physical and metaphysical, in order to look through everything.
Parallel lines never meet. This is self-evidently true. Draw them for yourself and see how true it is, so: Though they extend infinitely they will never run together. This is truth and truth is fixed. It never compromises, does it?
One of these lines represents what you are in the real of you, a spiritual being, eternal, never diseased or changed. The other line is materiality, what you, the real you, are not; the physical mold and body. What you are in the real of you, and what you are not, will never blend together as one whole.
While this is true, it is not all that is true, for you, as a living soul, are neither of these lines; you are their point of unity. Now draw them again and add a third line, so: — |
The perpendicular line is yourself as a living soul. One of the parallel lines is your real being, the other your body and material environment.
You are, you see, related to both, and it is not wise in you to ignore either. Without you they can never unite. In themselves they are opposites. But in you they unite, because you are related to both. In you they find conjunction. You are to find each, and live toward each, according to the nature of each and your relation to it. In you they are to be reconciled, opposites though they are, because you are to be reconciled to both.
Begin at the left of the upper line, move to its end, and through the perpendicular line to the lower line, out on that lower line to its extremity on the left. You see that although these parallel lines do not, and can not meet, there is an open road from the left extremity of one to the corresponding extremity of the other. That road runs through yourself, the mediator between the two.
To see yourself as this mediator in whom these two lines meet, and understand why you are the mediator, is to find your true poise, the golden mean, the way in which wisdom walks.
You have friends who have not made the discovery that you have made. They are living in the old way, seeing all things through the old idea that they are made of matter, are subject to its laws, to all possible conditions of disease, sorrow, and pain. They look upon you as a “ crank,” think your “ notions ” the craziest under the sun, tell you to put your hand in the fire or eat arsenic and find out whether you are able to cope with matter or not.
You pity their ignorance and blindness, and consider them the deluded ones; and you stand each at opposite ends of the swing of the pendulum.
They do not know enough to know the relation of the metaphysical to the physical, and their own relation to both. You do not know enough to know the relation of the physical to the metaphysical and your relation to both. They need to learn what you have learned, and you need to learn more.
Though the parallel lines are forever distinct in themselves, in you they are not separate; and because you, a living soul, are their point of unity, you must deal with both. Therefore, do not make the use of material things a torment for your conscience. This is a great mistake. All things on both lines are yours, and you are God’s. Not your employment of them, but the motive which determines how you employ them, is the all important thing. Till you learn this and act accordingly they use you, though you never touch them.
Because the force of your new impulse has carried you to the other extreme, you “ want nothing more to do with matter.” “Mind is all, and matter is nothing,” you say; therefore you will depend upon mental means only, under all circumstances.
You make this a matter of conscience, and judge every one according to the standard that you have set up. If others do not do as you are doing, they are doing wrong. And all.the while things material are related to you in spite of your attitude and conscience, and you are using them every hour in the day.
Look for the golden mean—as perhaps you will not so long as you make a matter of conscience of that which is purely impersonal because it is Nature. Though in your real being you are free from all conditions that pertain to materiality, in your self-consciousness you are not entirely free. You are still related to them, or they are still related to you, and in spite of your theory you can not yet do without them.
You mistake when you make use of material means for conditions pertaining to a stage of existence, a matter of conscience; when you demand of others that they shall act according to your standard. Not act, but motive for act, is a matter of conscience.
If you are using them in fear, because your whole dependence is in them, you are in bondage to them. The bondage is a mistake. If you are using them as their lawful master who says, because he understands relationships, “ Suffer it to be so now,” you are out of bondage, and all such use is lawful to you.
The modern metaphysical teaching is presented too much as a religion and too little as a science. Mistake in the application of the teaching is a consequence. You cannot be too positive in your feeling or statement that the spiritual reality of being is changeless and eternal, and the body you look upon is material and is not you; that neither matter nor existence can make conditions for your real being, which is conditional only by its relation to the absolute God. But you can be too extreme in your immediate application of this truth to the circumstances of daily life. You need to establish through yourself, in yourself, for yourself, the relation of the material to the spiritual, of one parallel line to the other. Though there be a great gulf between them, you, as a living soul, are the bridge over that gulf.
You have the right of choice; not choice of what anything is in itself, for that is compelled by the relation of cause and effect. But you choose what any and all things shall be to you. As this is your privilege as an individual, see that you grant it to others also. Your neighbor must follow his own conscience, not yours.
The End