U. S. Andersen Three Magic Words

Chapter 4 – FORM

The universe hums like a great harp string Resounding a mighty chord Answ’ring each thought by returning a thing From the place where all things are stored

THE UNIVERSE IS LAW

As far as the eye can see, the mind project, and the spirit perceive, there is nothing but eternal and immutable law! Working with the tiniest unit of matter he can visualize, man observes that the atom has a nucleus and moving parts which circle this nucleus in never-ending motion. Working with the largest unit of matter which he can visualize, man observes that the Solar System has a nucleus and moving parts which circle this nucleus in never-ending motion. How strange that the smallest and largest units we know are identical in their construction! Indeed, it is as if there were many mirrors in the mind, reflecting one eternal law in infinite gradations of size. No doubt the atom contains many atoms of its own. No doubt the universe is but a part of many increasingly greater universes. How small and lost we seem as we perceive the vast reaches of infinity. Yet all our perceptions exist in mind, and just as surely as we perceive them, we are the center of them.

Our premise is that thoughts make things; and in order to substantiate such a transcendent truth, we must turn to the beginning of all form. What is the one basic substance that permeates all space and all time? If we take apart a substance and discover atoms, and we take apart the atom and unleash energy, we must eventually say that the basic thing behind all form and all creation is energy. What, then, is this energy? It obviously does not explode helter-skelter throughout all apace, but rather becomes apparent only in matter or in movement, and always such matter or movement attains an intelligent existence or moves in an intelligent direction. The design and flow of all energy is such as to leave no doubt that basic and eternal in the universe are everlasting and immutable laws of action which alone account for the accumulation of substance into form. Inherent in these laws are movement and activation which set up the atom and the solar system alike, without regard to size. Indeed, lacking a specific viewpoint or a scale of relativity, the solar system and the atom are identical, as they assuredly must be in the Universal Subconscious Mind.

A LIVING UNIVERSE

This Universal Subconscious Mind, this first cause, this infinite plan and energy, then, is the stuff from which all things are made. In its pure form, if indeed it is ever perceived as such, it is represented only by intelligent movement, or by a word which seems much more concisely to describe it: Law. Its first intelligible manifestation is in a center of force which on the smallest scale we know is represented by the atom; and on the largest scale we know is represented by the Solar System. Nothing extraneous to the law calls into being these centers of force; it is the nature of the law to manifest them, for the law is one of life and movement and energy which by its own nature congregates itself into units of similar frequency in a vibrating universe.

To consider this further, let us attempt to visualize all space as consisting only of vibration. We need not ask ourselves what it is that vibrates, nor postulate as to what causes the vibration, for the vibration is intelligence alone and the force it exerts is of intelligence alone. The vibrations in pure universal intelligence are established on many different frequencies and all vibrations of one frequency are inevitably attracted together to form a unit. This unit, this center of corresponding vibrations, we know as an atom, or as the Solar System, the first sign of visible form, the first evidence of tangible matter, called into existence by the very nature of infinite law acting within and upon itself.

The formed atom also sets up a vibration and seeks out other atoms of a corresponding vibration, and in this coalescence of units vibrating on the same frequency there is formed matter as we know it in our physical world.

Thus matter is formed from intelligence; and more important, intelligence is in matter, in fact, intelligence is matter. Since intelligence must be conscious, it is an indisputable fact that we are surrounded by a living universe, that there is consciousness in all things.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE ATOM

Now you must bear with this very necessary discussion of the beginning of things and the nature of substance, for we are out to show that thought calls form into existence, that form is no more than a part of the very intelligence that each of us lives in.

Thomas Edison was extremely preoccupied with what he termed “the obvious choice of the atom” in its infinite acceptances and rejections of the myriad combinations of chemistry. When two chemicals were put together in solution and some of the atoms of one combined with some of the atoms of the other, Mr. Edison was forced to ask himself why those particular atoms and not some of the others, and indeed, why any of the atoms at all? The only answer he could possibly conceive was that the atoms of each chemical exercised a conscious choice whether they would or wouldn’t combine with the atoms of the other chemical. Now Mr. Edison certainly aired no views as to the self-consciousness of the atom, but only of the intelligence or consciousness of the atom; in other words, the ability of the atom to make a choice.

The atom, the building block of the universe, is a center of force, and the atom is conscious!

Working in accordance with law or universal intelligence, the atom seeks out other atoms which vibrate at a corresponding rate, and the coalescence of such atoms forms that which we designate as inanimate matter: water, earth, air, and minerals.

EXPANDING CONSCIOUSNESS

Now then, you may well say, this is all well and good as a plausible theory as to the formation of substance in a living universe, but how do you account for life?

Let us repeat: The entire universe is alive. There is nothing dead, nothing inanimate. When Jesus said, “God is not a God of the dead but a God of the living,” he was revealing the basic truth of all creation. For all is living and all is intelligence and all is conscious; and the great motivating force of all life is its attempt to expand its consciousness. In other words, it seeks to know itself!

Though we can safely attribute consciousness and intelligence to the atom, there remains not the slightest possibility that the atom is self-conscious. In fact, all evidence points to the consciousness of the atom being of the lowest possible order. It chooses, but its choices are within the rigid scope of operating law. When a certain number of atoms begin vibrating together on a certain frequency and form, let us say, a rock, there is created in the rock a kind of consciousness which is on an infinitely lower scale than that of the atom, for the rock exhibits practically no ability to choose. Yet there can be no doubt but that there is actually a certain consciousness in the rock, for a group of conscious units must of necessity form a group consciousness. The rock exists, therefore it must be conscious. It consists of conscious intelligence and must then have some consciousness of its own, albeit so far below our level of consciousness as to be indiscernible to us.

From the rock and sand and earth and water and air to the formation of the pain- pleasure responsive amoeba, a thing that grows and feeds and reproduces itself, what gigantic step is this?

Expanding consciousness! Only that and nothing more.

First, we have energy moving according to law, congregating into centers of force by its own nature, setting up polarization (nuclei of positive polarity around which revolve electrons of negative polarity). These centers of force, or atoms, have lives of their own, are conscious. The nature of these little lives is to congregate with others vibrating on the same frequency, and thus matter is called into existence, which is basically not matter at all, but merely units of intelligent energy. Secondly, we have all form consisting of many individual lives, building up to a conscious whole, building up to a conscious entity which attempts to work out its own purpose. From these two conclusions we go on to a third: the form which results from the union of many individual lives or consciousnesses is the result of the consciousness of the whole. In other words, the form of the rock is the result of the consciousness of the rock. The form of the amoeba is a result of the consciousness of the amoeba, and the form of the human being is the result of the consciousness of the human being!

LIFE SEEKS TO KNOW ITSELF

Now once again you may say, this all sounds reasonable enough, but where does this consciousness come from?

The entire universe is caught up in a mighty work of expanding consciousness, because it is the nature of universal intelligence to seek to know itself!

God knows himself only as a thing!

Before you shout blasphemy or irreverence, tarry a while and dwell on this premise.

Visualize space. It goes on and on forever and ever. If, in your mind’s eye, you retreat trillions of miles from the earth and draw a huge circle with the earth as the center and say this indeed is all of space, what, then, is on the other side of your circle? The only answer is more space. Space as we know it, or infinite intelligence as we know it, or universal law as we know it, or the Universal Subconscious Mind as we know it, cannot possibly have any limits or any boundaries. How is it possible for something which has no boundaries to ever know itself?

In order for it to know itself it must be able to say, “I am this.” And in order for it to say, “I am this,” it must become something with boundaries, something finite, a thing.

And that is exactly what the Universal Subconscious Mind is doing. It is becoming things. It is seeking an expanded self-consciousness. And that part of it which has achieved the greatest self-consciousness which we are able to observe is the human being.

What is evolution? It is life expanding to a conscious oneness with God. As time progresses and our consciousness expands, we are growing closer and closer to this attainment. Indeed, this is the clue to the mystery of life and evolution and the destiny of man.

Have no fear of your smallness in relation to the vastness of limitless space, for there are no limits to the mind and there are no limits to expanding consciousness. The destiny of mankind is that man’s consciousness will expand to the point where he is one with all creation. On this great day it will be as simple for one man to be in thought contact with another five thousand miles away as it is now to speak to a friend in the same room. On this great day, the mind of man will span space and time and the limitations of form, and existence will be solely of the spirit in one eternal now. The past, the present, and the future will be one. All space will be one. All form will be one. Man’s consciousness will be the consciousness of God.

SPIRIT INTO MATTER

All the great metaphysical and religious works speak of the evolution of consciousness as the descent of spirit into matter. The great allegory of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden is an illustration. The temptation of the serpent, the eating from the tree of knowledge, the final fall which culminated in awareness of self speak only of the beginning of self-consciousness. This awareness of self as a thing of free choice was the beginning of man’s conscious choosing of modes of action and methods of thought. It was the beginning of error, the start of evil, the beginning of sin and punishment—all natural results of man’s search for truth.

The great Universal Subconscious Mind acting upon itself according to the laws of its own nature sets up centers of force which are conscious and which attract other similar centers of force to form matter. This matter by the very nature of its overall consciousness (the sum total of the consciousness of all of its atoms) resolves itself into a particular form and seeks ever to know more about itself. As its consciousness grows, it becomes a living, expanding, feeding, and growing entity, that which we designate a living organism. As an organism its consciousness expands with ever- increasing rapidity, so that within a relatively short time the expanded consciousness or spirit can no longer tolerate the limitations of its form and abandons it. Thus is established the cycle of birth and death such as exists in all living organisms.

The process of evolution is now in high gear. The amoeba seeking to know itself unites with other amoebas and becomes a jellyfish; the jellyfish further develops its perception and consciousness and becomes a fish; the fish further develops its consciousness and becomes a mammal; the mammal further develops its consciousness and becomes a man. All along the path of evolution lie the many residual forms marking the way, for wherever consciousness reaches out to a higher level, there also consciousness remains behind. The very process of the conception and birth and growth of a human being, through the pollywog, the amoeba, the low scale vertebrate, the foetus and finally the human infant which grows into the magnificent consciousness of a man illustrates with remarkable detail the entire path of the evolution of consciousness.

COSMIC AWARENESS

Thus it can be seen that the purpose of life is the attainment of knowledge, the expansion of consciousness, a constant reaching upward and outward and inward toward a oneness with God.

Browning wrote:

Such men are even now upon the earth
Serene amid the half formed creatures round
Who should be saved by them and joined with them.

In Palestine nearly two thousand years ago, a man looked at his neighbors and said, “Who hath seen me, hath seen the Father.”

Adulterated and misconstrued, distorted and dogmatized, the magnificent consciousness of the man, Jesus, has been in the main but a confusing din on the ears of the deafened.

“I and my Father are one.” One, one, one! One with all men, all life, all things, all substance! The attainment of the consciousness of the whole. The attainment of the consciousness of God.

Form is but the result of consciousness, and consciousness is but the result of thought, and thought is simply a contact and a borrowing from the Universal Intelligence that pervades all things.

Thought makes form! Thought makes things!

EXPANDING SPIRIT CHANGES FORM

In this life, which ever seeks to know more about itself, which ever seeks an expanded consciousness, he who would i stop death would stay an infant forever. For as the spirit expands its consciousness it seeks new form through which to express itself. The body which you now occupy is but an instrument of your consciousness, an expression of your knowledge of yourself. By the very nature of your being, your consciousness must grow, and as it does, your spirit will gradually lay down your body and return again into the Universal Subconscious Mind whence it starts anew in its quest for a new expression.

This, of course, brings us to the subject of reincarnation. When you have truly understood that there is only one life, only one mind, you will understand that this life incarnates itself billions of times over in its search to completely know itself. When you have understood this, reincarnation will be as obvious as knowing yourself, for you will know that there can be no life without an incarnation of the one life, which is in you, which is altogether you. One, eternal and everlasting, that is the truth about yourself, and the terror that death holds for many is simply vain regret at losing the built up errors and illusions of the Conscious Mind, which is the silliest and most illusory fear of all mankind. We shall cover a great deal more of this in the chapter on immortality.

Law into units of force, units of force combining into matter, the consciousness of matter determining its form, consciousness seeking self-consciousness, self-consciousness seeking the consciousness of the whole, the consciousness of God— this is the diagram of all life.

For we are all one in reality, and our separateness is nothing but a necessary illusion in the plan by which the Universal Mind seeks to know itself by becoming a thing.

THE ETERNAL PRESENCE

Perception of the indwelling presence is often difficult to come by. The formative years of my own spiritual experience were certainly not spent in such knowledge. With chagrin I recall how sorely I must have tried the patience of Dr. Elton Trueblood, then Chaplain of Stanford University, when that gentle and erudite man tried to lead me out of the maze of my own circuitous questionings. Dr. Trueblood’s excellent books are legion, and even at that date I had read a number of them. It was on the common ground of these texts and his own teaching in philosophy that we met afternoons in his study in the Stanford Chapel.

Shafts of sunlight poured through stained-glass windows as we settled in our chairs and explored territory we had covered many times. To my openly voiced doubt of the existence of God, Dr. Trueblood offered the immense variety of religious experience undergone by men of high repute through the centuries.

“But they could have been deluded,” I insisted.

“By whom?”

“Why would they delude themselves?”

“Because they were afraid of their own smallness, afraid of oblivion at death.”

Dr. Trueblood smiled. “Strange that some of them were otherwise very brave men,” he said.

“But certainly if God exists, somebody in all the centuries would have seen him.” “Many people have.”

“Who?”

“I for one.”

“You’ve seen God?”

“Yes.”

“Then what does He look like?”

” Like everything.”

“That means nothing.”

“It means a great deal to me. I look at you and see God. Wherever my eye falls I see God. He is as real to me as you are, more real in fact, for He is the changeless in the changing, the immutable and ever-present spirit that inhabits all things.”

In my mind those words still sound on the quiet air of the Stanford Chapel. Somehow I sensed the meaning in them even then, though I did not understand them. And as the years gradually enlarged my consciousness, there came a day when I too looked on all things and saw God. On that day my faith, weak and questing as it might have been, was tempered by the steel of knowledge.

UNITY VERSUS SEPARATENESS

Mental healing and creation of circumstance and form through thought may never be accomplished by him whose consciousness is one of separateness. But he who achieves the consciousness of the whole, the consciousness of God, may change form and circumstance and promote bodily healing through thought, for all things then will exist within him. This is the truth about Jesus, and he who shuts his eyes to the miracles of the man from Nazareth is blinding himself to the greatest truth which has ever been revealed to a searching and doubting world.

For a man may walk upon the water, raise the dead, heal the sick, feed five thousand with seven loaves of bread, change water into wine, appear and disappear at will. Such is the destiny of man that these things will one day be commonplace. Such is the destiny of man that one day there will be no necessity for form, for separateness, for differentiation in the mind of God. All will be one, complete unity, a self-conscious Universal Mind.

At this point, we beseech you not to isolate yourself in your room and attempt to move a chair by thought power, nor indeed to attempt to exert any of the powers of the mind that your consciousness has not as yet grasped. You must understand at once that it is not the impression of your will or your thought that will cause a chair to move without a physical force; it is only the final all-encompassing consciousness, a oneness with the intelligence in which you and the chair both exist. This consciousness has been achieved already by a very few individuals on a very few occasions. There is good reason to believe that these individuals and occasions are on the increase. Certainly on the lower echelons of demonstration, such as the healing of the human body through mind power, there have been a multiplicity of authenticated and accurately recorded phenomena such as to remove all doubt of the supreme power of the Universal Subconscious Mind.

THE SECRET DOCTRINE

There is in existence today a body of esoteric teaching which is aptly termed “The Secret Doctrine” and which for many centuries has been in the keeping of small groups of studious men who have learned its tenets and passed it down largely by word of mouth, though many allegorical texts exist in which it is described. This doctrine holds that the evolution of man will proceed through seven principal races and that we are now living under the great Fifth race, which began with the civilizations in Persia, Egypt, and the Orient. According to the Doctrine, the first race of man was largely spiritual, the second began to take on form, the third produced a race of giants that inhabited the continent of Lemuria, the fourth inhabited the continent of Atlantis, and the fifth sought refuge in Europe and Asia after the deluge (referred to exoterically in the Bible in the allegory of Noah’s Ark) to produce the materialistic age of today from whence man will revert once again to spiritual unity through the sixth and seventh races.

Those who attempt to substantiate this Doctrine maintain that the continent of Lemuria existed in the South Pacific Ocean and offer as evidence the gigantic statues which can be found on Easter Island. These statues are between twenty-seven and thirty feet high and show no evidence of having been built by scaffolding, but appear to have been molded by beings whose stature was approximately the same. As the old testament of the Bible says, “In those days there were giants in the earth,” so the adherents of the Secret Doctrine maintain that colossal beings inhabited the continent of Lemuria which was swallowed into the sea during a great upheaval in which the earth reversed its poles, leaving nothing above the surface but Easter Island and an archipelago of volcanic rock extending from the Marquesas Islands to New Zealand.

These same adherents maintain that the continent of Atlantis was the home of the fourth race of mankind and that this continent existed in the Atlantic Ocean, its easternmost part where we find the Azores today and extending westward for several thousand miles. The men inhabiting this continent were supposedly eighteen feet tall and their civilization was such as to put our present one to shame, all of our present scientific advances having been made as well as the development of a culture far exceeding our own. As the Secret Doctrine has it, Atlantis was destroyed when the earth again reversed its poles. The water rose, Atlantis was swallowed into the sea, and its survivors (biblically Noah and his wife and their animals) found their home at the eastern end of the Mediterranean.

THE TENETS OF THE SECRET DOCTRINE

The proponents of the Secret Doctrine do not advance any reason for the periodic destruction of the various races of man’s evolution, their evidence of the existence of the races is sketchy to say the least, and they fail to be clear about the author of this plan which they say has been irrevocably laid down for mankind to follow. But this much they are very firm about: that intelligence and law are the only realities, that mankind is evolving toward spiritual oneness, that it is within man’s grasp to attain universal consciousness and thus control over all things.

The history and course of man’s future, as expounded by the Secret Doctrine is difficult to accept, but we shall neither affirm nor deny it. Certainly, recorded history takes us scarcely to the doorway of mankind’s past, and if the Secret Doctrine is not correct it is perhaps as allegorically correct as need be. It is safe to say that man’s evolving spirit has inhabited other forms than we know today and that the process of evolution has gone on for perhaps millions of years. It may even be that the earth turns over every so often, for the precession of the equinoxes is known to every astronomer, which is simply another way of saying that the earth is slowly wobbling as it spins on its axis. Anyone who has observed a spinning top knows what happens when it begins to wobble in its spin.

The Secret Doctrine also holds that there are superior beings in the universe who are watching and guiding man’s evolution on earth, that these beings send their messengers or teachers to our world in the form of Adepts (those whose evolution has progressed sufficiently to be able to gradually reveal the eternal truths to mankind). According to the proponents of the Doctrine, Jesus was one of the Adepts, as was Gautama Buddha, as was Plato. No information is given about what part of the universe is inhabited by those who send their Adepts upon the earth, but it is safe to assume that the inference is that these Superior Beings occupy the planets of our solar system, or else the stars.

LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS

Now it would be sheer blindness to maintain that higher evolved beings than man do not exist on other worlds in space. Indeed, since our premise is that all form is merely manifold differentiations of one supreme mind, since we believe that all is life, and consciousness is everywhere, it logically follows that life exists on other worlds. Has this life evolved to our level or beyond it?

We know already that some of the stars as well as a few of the planets are much older than our sphere. We know that some of the stars have climate conditions that may approximate those of the earth. As each year brings us closer to the day when space travel becomes a reality, it also brings us closer to the time when many riddles will be answered.

How the horizons of man will expand when he reduces the millions of miles of space to a comfortable journey, how his thinking will change when he looses himself from the pull of gravity, when the unimpeded acceleration of action in space sets up such blinding speed in his vehicles as to even affect the passage of time. Then, indeed, must man look at the physical worlds about him and know of his unity with the only intelligence and law there is.

THE RELATIVITY OF MATTER

Principal among the provocative phenomena man will encounter when he reaches new worlds is that of the relativity of matter. Today our spectroscope reveals the existence on far-flung planets of elements that may weigh as much as hundreds of tons per cubic inch! Consider that man knows matter only in its relative density to his own body. We judge all substance according to its varying degrees of hardness and softness, in other words, its density; and that substance which is least dense and which is still perceptible we call a gas. The air around us is such a gas. As we move about in it, we are aware of it, but we move unimpeded, so relatively scarce is its density in comparison to the density of our own bodies. A being whose bodily density was such that he weighed several hundred tons per cubic inch would move through our own bodies with even more ease than we move through the earth’s atmosphere! He would not even be aware of us, for his physical perception would of necessity be on an entirely different plane of matter!

Such beings may conceivably exist on other worlds than ours. Others whose density is so slight as to be negligible in comparison to our own, may also conceivably exist on other worlds. Matter is purely relative to the senses that perceive it. In its essence it is pure intelligence, and it combines into such form as to be perceptible to whatever consciousness is attempting to perceive it.

The element which weighs hundreds of tons per cubic inch is made of the same basic stuff as our own atmosphere. Intelligence molds it into form, intelligence causes its form, intelligence is its form. Basically, it is neither more nor less than a conception held in the Universal Subconscious Mind.

THE RELATIVITY OF TIME

Spaceship travel offers another startling promise, that of extreme speed and an entirely new concept of time.

In free space, beyond all but a negligible attraction from interstellar bodies, a space ship would float, orbiting on some gigantic circle around whatever principal interstellar body it happened to be closest to. If a rocket were fired from the rear of this space ship, with such velocity as to create a reaction that accelerated the ship to a speed of one thousand miles per hour, the space ship would continue at this speed forever, unless some impeding obstacle or attraction or friction were put in its path. If another similar rocket were fired from the rear of the space ship, its speed would then reach two thousand miles per hour. If another were fired, speed would increase to three thousand miles per hour. If a thousand such rockets were fired, the speed of the ship would be one million miles per hour! Indeed, if sufficient numbers of such rockets were conceivably available, the speed of the ship could eventually be accelerated to 186,000 miles per second or 669,600,000 miles per hour! Since this is the speed of light and according to Einstein a limiting speed, we cannot go beyond it; nor, in fact, can we ever reach it exactly. His conclusion is that an object increases in size with its speed and though the effect is negligible at lower velocities it becomes startling as a mass approaches the speed of light. At this speed, Einstein maintains that a mass would become infinitely large. He also maintains that a minute becomes longer to those who travel at increased velocities; that at the speed of light, time actually stands still! Perhaps this is simply another way of saying that man cannot achieve the speed of light. Perhaps, even more than that, it is a method of scientifically describing the complete basic unity of all things in a world where time and space do not exist. One thing is certain, new concepts of space and time and distance and substance will be in sore need the day man becomes free of the pull of earth’s gravity on his first adventure into space.

The promise is there. The promise is within the expanding consciousness of the mind of man, who will bridge all space and time, who will truly understand that he is the focal point of all creation the day he discovers that all things exist within him!

GROWING INTO UNDERSTANDING

We may, at this moment, seem far adrift for those of you who seek the solution to some specific problem in your life. But you must first understand what mind is. There are no words or formulas that must not first be understood. The Key itself is as concise as a diamond, but we must be sure your consciousness has been expanded to the point where you recognize that conception and thought are the alpha and omega of all existence. Patience is the virtue you can best exercise now—patience and practice of the meditations—and thoughtfulness with the conceptions you are now entertaining and evolving. Concern with space and time and the nature of matter and form are as essential to you in expanding your consciousness as was your original resolve to realize peace and power. Be assured. The road is well planned and charted!

REALITY VERSUS DELUSION

What remarkable phenomena are the myriad forms about us. Mountains, trees, brooks, seas, meadows, the infinite varieties of animal and vegetable life, the innumerable combinations of minerals, the astounding mechanistic forms made by the hands and ingenuity of man—their variety and number are awesome. Yet we pass them by, regarding them as natural and normal in the scheme of things, giving little or no heed to whence they have come and of what they are made. How sure we often are in our little moments in our little lives in our little material worlds. We attach our fleeting securities to the forms around us, vainly try to build up a sense of permanence in a constantly changing material world, forgetting the enigma of our births and the inevitability of our deaths as we put our main goals on the accumulation of wealth and goods. Yet all form is made of the same basic substance as ourselves, pure and eternal intelligence, the Universal Subconscious Mind; and that mind and all it contains lies within each of us.

To a being that weighed three hundred tons per cubic inch, the chair in your living room could not exist. He would brush it aside as if it were not there. If he stepped upon it, he would crush it but would never notice it. If the chair simply consists of atoms with more space between them than in the atoms, and if the atoms themselves contain more space than matter, if we regard matter as nothing other than pure intelligence, if certain matter, such as the chair, which is such a concrete thing to us, cannot be perceived by a being whose density is millions of times greater, then it is inescapably true that form may exist even though it is not perceived.

FORM IS CONCEPTION

This is an interesting and important point. Simply because the presence of the chair is not discernible to the being who weighs three hundred tons per square inch does not obliterate the existence of the chair. Such a being would perceive only such vibrations of light reflected from substances with a density comparable to his. He would hear only violent vibrations of sound. If one of his fellow beings told him that the chair existed, he would snort and say that if it did, he could see, hear, feel, or smell it. If one of his fellow beings pointed out to him that the place where the chair stood caused a slight variation in the quality of the light, he would insist that it was all just a crazy idea.

But he would know that an idea was involved!

That close to the truth he instinctively would come. The chair would exist for him, but only as a conception! To him the chair could be only an idea, a thought, which is all that the chair actually is in the first place, a conception in the Universal Subconscious Mind, made of the same substance as the Universal Subconscious Mind.

Now what we are attempting to illustrate is that form is no more than conception, that form is no more than an idea, that form always involves consciousness and that it is entirely representative of thought. In its pure essence form is constructed of exactly the same material from which a thought is constructed!

DUAL MIND

Thus has evolved the duality of our lives, and we live upon two planes at once: the plane of mind and thought; and the physical plane of things and circumstances. Our education and inhibition have been such as to teach us that thought has evolved in our attempt to deal with things, while the truth is that things are no more than images that represent our thoughts!

Such a parallel was drawn by Plato in his cave which represented the world. The men who lived within the cave, by their very nature, could look only on the wall of the cave, where they observed their shadows cast by the fire behind them. These shadows they believed represented the truth about themselves. When one of them turned about and noted that he was being gripped by an illusion, his fellows objected loud and long, labeled him deluded, and continued their observation of the flickering shadows.

All truth exists within man and never in the world about him. He who studies the world studies effects. He who studies his own mind studies the cause and source of things as they really are!

THE FOURTH DIMENSION

The world of science has long been working along the premise that we fail to grasp the full significance of form, that we do not see and observe a thing for what it really is. This extra quality of things science has labeled the fourth dimension, and many the tome and treatise have been written in an attempt to tell us in which direction the fourth dimension extends.

Since the first three dimensions are each perpendicular to the other, science has insisted that the fourth dimension exists perpendicular to the other three. With our present conception of space, such a fourth perpendicular is obviously impossible; yet science continues its patient attempt to place a fourth perpendicular in space, for it knows that three dimensions cannot possibly answer the cause and the existence of the things it is studying.

In a gigantic and complex volume entitled Tertium Organum, the Russian writer P. D. Ouspensky postulates that life is evolving to the recognition of possibly seven dimensions, that each dimension, when unknown, represents itself as movement. For example, he says that the amoeba lives in a one-dimensional world, that each thing that crosses the line on which his consciousness lives, represents to the amoeba only a point. On the next higher scale, the dog lives in a two-dimensional world, seeing and recognizing only width and height; where the dog observes the presence of the third dimension it is apparent to him as movement. To round out his conclusion, Ouspensky says that we three-dimensional human beings are perceiving the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh dimensions as movement also, and when man has evolved the full way along the path he travels there will be revealed to him an immobile universe possessing seven dimensions.

Thus Ouspensky is able to posit four dimensions more than the normal three, and he finds them all existing in what we know as time, for movement is synonymous with time.

Who dares dispute him? The world’s greatest mathematical thinker has come to essentially the same conclusion, for he finds matter elongating itself according to its velocity, until, at the speed of light, it is everywhere at the same time, which is all time and anytime, for time will then stand still; which is simply Einstein’s method of saying that time and space and matter are one when the velocity of movement has reached infinity.

A QUESTING GOD

What are these two outstanding thinkers driving at? Basically, they both see the same thing: that beneath the illusion of separateness there lies a great unity of all things, a unity in which space and time and individual form are all combined into one, an underlying infinite spirit or an intelligence, the Universal Subconscious Mind!

Here it is reasonable to ask: if this is so, what is the purpose of the illusion of separateness, what is the purpose of individual lives and individual things? And the only reasonable answer at which it is possible to arrive is that the Universal Subconscious Mind is seeking to know itself by becoming things, that, in effect, it cannot know itself as infinity.

The only possible conclusion is that there is only one purpose behind evolving life and that purpose is an expanding consciousness!

God seeks to know himself by becoming a thing!

Thus human evolution is destined to expand self-consciousness to infinity! VIEWPOINT

The riddle of the universe is a riddle pure and simple. Like any other riddle, the true answer depends on a shift in viewpoint. If someone proposes a riddle to you, you put yourself in the place of each of: the persons involved in the riddle; you attempt to get each of their viewpoints. When you have gotten each viewpoint, you translate them into one central viewpoint. Then the answer becomes apparent.

It is viewpoint that gives us the illusion of separateness in life. It is this trick that consciousness plays on us that is forever provoking us into believing that we are negligible in the vast scheme of things. We sense that our consciousness is imprisoned within the fleshy limits of our bodies, and we presume that our personal “I’s” are forever limited to the few feet of cubic space that our bodies occupy.

We see ourselves at the center of a tremendous universe. As far as we can see in all directions there is myriad form and infinite variety. The very grains of sand upon a beach refuse to be counted through sheer number. Yet something within us keeps insisting, “If I were not conscious and able to observe this, it would not be so.” We analyze this statement somewhat sheepishly and admit that somebody else would be observing it even if we weren’t, so it would still have to exist. What we fail to analyze is the personal, restricted, bodily-contained “I.”

WHO IS “I”?

Bill Smith, Jim Jones, Mary Stuart, every conscious organism and thing that exists refers to itself in exactly the same way: “I.”

When anyone says “I” he may think that he is referring to his name, where he was born, what he has done, every experience which he has ever had, but what he is actually doing, no more and no less, is simply saying, “here.” He means: that thinking consciousness which is in a certain place is having certain thoughts and sensations which it wishes to express through speech or movement. “I am hungry”—that consciousness which is here wishes to be fed. “I wish to go for a walk”—that consciousness which is here desires to move somewhere else.

More than that, each “I” is far from being a stable entity, but rather represents hundreds, perhaps thousands, perhaps even millions or billions of “I’s.” Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players, . . . and each man in his time plays many parts.” Millions of parts are the lot of each person, and every part represents another “I” on an expanding scale of consciousness. You are not the same “I” as you were ten years ago, nor are you the same “I” as you were one week ago. You will not even be the same “I” when you have finished this chapter. You are only a particular “I” at a particular moment, and the very next thought that traverses your mind makes you a different “I” on the succeeding moment. You are always a product of your thought, and represent at any time the sum total of your thought to that moment. Each new thought adds to or detracts from your consciousness. Your “I” is different from anyone else’s in the world, for only you have had the exact train and sequence of thought which make you you. It is a practical truth that no two people have ever had nor ever will have the exact same train and sequence of thought until human consciousness has been expanded to the conscious of the Universal Mind.

THE ILLUSION OF ISOLATION

One of the biggest barriers in the explanation of the unity of life is that a person will say, “If true mind is universal and in all things, why am I me and not someone else or even everyone else?” And the only answer which it is possible to give is that you are someone else-and even everyone else basically. The differences you perceive between yourself and others is simply the difference between the thoughts they have had and the thoughts you have had, for each person is only what he thinks.

It is true that your consciousness tends to lock itself within a finite body. And because you tend to say, “My consciousness is here and nowhere else,” it is difficult for you to perceive that you and your neighbor are one. How much simpler it would be if each thought affecting you and each thought you have had were identical in number and sequence with your neighbor’s. Your consciousness then would have to be the same. Could there be any doubt in your mind that you then would both occupy the same body? No two completely identical things exist in the universe: no two grains of sand, no two snowflakes, no two trees. For the universe is engaged in making numbers of unlike things from a basic oneness. By its very nature, it cannot make two things which are completely identical. If two conceptions are completely alike, there is only one conception that will produce only one thing!

THE UNIQUENESS OF YOU

You are what you are only because of what you have thought. Because this thought is different from any person who has ever lived, you are a unique and separate thing in the universe. Most of your thinking is prompted by the sensations that come to you through your five senses, and since these belong to your finite body exclusively, you are constantly building up experience and thought that keep you locked away from oneness with the Universal Subconscious Mind. You tend to see all things about you as being external and different from you. You are, at this stage of evolution, acutely aware of self as a separate, isolated being. But be assured: the path upward leads to expanding that self-consciousness to include all things and all life.

THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS WITHIN

We must understand that all form and matter represent I only the same intelligence that is in us. We must recognize that all of this intelligence is ours to draw upon and to understand and use. We must know that thought makes form, that thought makes things, that thought makes us what we are. We must know that our separateness is only of evolving consciousness, that basically there is complete spiritual unity in all life. We must strive constantly to expand our consciousness by identifying ourselves with everything and everyone about us. We must search in our quiet hours for contact with the Universal Subconscious Mind, where all information and all thought have been indelibly impressed, which can guide us unerringly along paths of attainment and knowledge. We must understand the invincible power of thought, how it makes us what we are, how it creates form and brings circumstance, how it underlies and moves the universe. We must guard ourselves from being exposed to negative thinking; we must refuse to accept negative circumstance. We must, in our complete and positive expansion, in our soaring knowledge of the mighty work of the mind, teach our children to control their thinking, teach our neighbors to control their thinking, teach a suffering mankind that the way out of each of its dilemmas lies in the vehicle of its own thought, that the millennium is here, that the Kingdom of God is within everyone of us.

MIND IS GREATER THAN ALL

As you look about you at the panorama of your life, at the things that concern you, at the circumstances that involve you, expand your consciousness to include them as living parts of the fluidic medium in which you live. See through your own eyes a manifold living universe which is constantly expressing itself by becoming an infinite number of things. Sense your complete oneness with each of these things, know that the only real truth is intelligence and the only real form is thought. Somewhere, behind the barriers established by your habits of thought, there exists the consciousness of the whole, the intelligence that knows all things, the Universal Subconscious Mind. Nothing is impossible to this mind. All of its guidance and power are available to you. When you have fully realized that thought causes all, you will know that there can never be limits on you that you yourself do not impose.

As we work more and more with intelligence and consciousness, we will learn to disregard size in relation to our own bodies. By simply understanding that physical form and physical size have little or nothing to do with expanding consciousness, we may look on the vastness of space and the eternities of time with utter composure, in the knowledge that mind alone is the answer to all things and mind need never be limited by space and time.

Because a star lies a million light years away does not mean that you are small in the scheme of things. Does not your mind traverse this tremendous distance in an instant? See the power and scope of this mind of yours. So swiftly it dwarfs your body. With such great power inherent in his very being, is it not the worst of all evils for a man to place “no trespassing” signs on all avenues of thought and thus limit himself into poverty, disease, limitation and lack of every kind?

Nothing is impossible. All things are probable. Whatever the mind can conceive, the mind can do. Whatever the mind conceives the mind does. There is only one way the path of evolution leads—upwards! There is no limit to the heights to be assailed, short of union with God.

MAN IS THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE

Our home is a whirling ball amongst whirling balls in ringed space. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, eternal captives of the Sun, move in the immutable paths of infinite law. They are only specks in space. If the sun were a mile in diameter, Mercury would be fifteen feet across and thirty-six miles away; Venus would be thirty-eight feet across and sixty-seven miles away; Earth would be forty feet across and ninety-three miles away; Mars would be twenty feet across and one hundred forty miles away; Jupiter would be four hundred feet across and four hundred eighty-three miles away; and the last of the planets, Pluto, would be twenty feet across and three thousand seven hundred miles away! And this is but one of an infinite number of Solar Systems!

He who is a materialist and would account for life as an accident amid the immeasurableness of material form, is accounting for nothing, so small is man relative to the universe. Such a one may feel and touch his physical possessions each day, much as Midas counted his gold, but when his spirit lays down his physical form and departs he knows not where, it provides no entourage or vans or railroad cars for the transport of those things upon which the materialist has founded his truths. Matter and substance and form are but instruments of our thought, but pawns in a reaching game of expanding mind, much as chess players might play their game in their heads were it not so much easier to do it with a playing board and chess pieces.

Man is the center of the universe! Not in physical size assuredly, but in mind! For the Universal Subconscious Mind in everywhere at the same time, and all of it is at any place at any time, and all of it is in man, now!

THE MIGHTY TOOL

Form proceeds from mind, and mind controls all, and this knowledge properly applied can change your life. No longer need you batter at circumstance and things; no longer need you rail at the dealings of fate or frustrate your life against unwanted circumstance. Everything proceeds from mind, everything proceeds from thought; and miracles are wrought in quiet hours in still rooms when awakened souls harken their divinity.

You, as a person, know you exist because you think, and these thoughts of yours are far and away the most important thing you do; they are, in fact, the only thing you do. These thoughts of yours are the essence that makes form, that brings circumstance; they are your sole tool with which to expand your consciousness. Accordingly, there is no more paramount thing for you to do than carefully select those thoughts that you will think, those beliefs you will adopt, those attitudes you will take for your own, for by them you will be what you will be; by them you have arrived exactly where you are today. If you mean for your life to be progressive and full of achievement, vigor, love, and abundance, you will abandon each negative thought the moment it is presented to you. You will refuse to accept on the plane of mind any conception other than those that are in tune with good. You will think only positively! And the universe will shower you with more good than you ever dreamed.

REVIEW

1.Basic and eternal in the universe are everlasting laws of action.

2.A vibrating universe, acting upon itself, evolves centers of force such as are represented by the atom and by the Solar System.

3.These centers of force seek other centers of force with similar vibrations, and by their coalescence matter is formed.

4.Since intelligent law makes up the center of force, the atom, which is the building block of the universe, is conscious.

5.We have our beings in the midst of a living universe.

6.There is no such thing as inanimate matter, for all form is made from universal intelligence and is but a conception in the Universal Subconscious Mind.

7.That matter which we call living is simply that which has evolved sufficiently so that its consciousness is discernible to our senses.

8.That process which all life is caught up in is Universal Intelligence seeking to know itself by becoming a thing.

9.Evolution is the path of expanding consciousness.

10.Developed self-consciousness, such as is now possessed by man, is a necessary step toward the development of universal consciousness.

11.Man’s destiny is to expand his consciousness to complete unity, to a oneness with God.

12.Form proceeds from intelligence, for form is intelligence. Therefore form proceeds from thought, and thought makes things!

13.All life is but an incarnation of the one life, therefore there are innumerable reincarnations until unity with the Universal Subconscious Mind is obtained.

14.The Secret Doctrine has been held inviolate by esoteric groups for many ages and teaches that mankind is evolving toward spiritual unity.

15.The Secret Doctrine lays down the past and future of man’s evolution but this cannot be accepted as substantiated.

16.Matter is only relative, and is nothing more than a combination of centers of force or moving intelligence.

17.Space and time are also relative and represent concepts in the Universal Subconscious Mind.

18.Man lives upon two planes at once—the plane of mind and thought and the plane of things and circumstances—but actually these two planes are only one.

19.Your “I” is a product of your thought and is never the same from one moment to the next, except insofar as it is confined within the fleshly limits of your body.

20.The real “I” is eternal, everlasting, only one, and contains all things.

21.The Kingdom of God is within us.

22.You are what you think, and thoughts are things; therefore select your thoughts with care.

PATIENCE

Still we have not come to grips with concrete problems in concrete lives. And two more chapters are to be read before we undertake to teach specifically how to apply the laws of mind to the realms of love, success, and health. We modems are an impatient people, and always the first thing we want to know is what does it do? Then, the minute we find out, we want to get on with it as quickly as possible. We would like to be laymen one day and Doctors of Medicine the next, unnoticed one week and famous the following; and even when we recognize this sort of thing as a possible miracle, we forget that the workers of miracles must serve their apprenticeships also. It would be foolish to teach the powers of the mind without first getting it thoroughly understood what the mind is. It would be folly to undertake the vast and exciting subject that engrosses us without recognizing that if such answers were obvious they would long ago have been in widespread use by all mankind. Bear with us; the groundwork must be thoroughly laid.

THE INFALLIBLE LAW

You must understand that the teachings of this book are not to be regarded as patent medicines or wonder drugs, things that work most of the time, or some of the time, or not at all. The law this book teaches works all of the time and nothing or nobody on the face of the earth is big enough to stop it from working. We didn’t make this law. We neither start it nor stop it. Our only purpose here is to impart to you a knowledge of its existence and methods of using it. The law works one hundred percent of the time. It never fails. If you apply it to achieve success and you meet with failure, it isn’t the law that has failed—it is you! You have simply failed to do the one thing it is necessary for you to do to obtain the slightest good and that is to think only positively of that good. If an opposite develops, it has developed because you have been more convinced of it than you have o£ the good you want, and the law has still worked as it always must.

The cynic is his own worst enemy. It requires far less skill to run a wrecking company than it does to be an architect. The world has been built by builders, and those who destroy have no alternative other than to dwell in desolation. Throughout the world there are working groups who are envisioning the arrival of the Kingdom of God and Man, who see in the thinking mind of man the object of his own liberation. Thoughts are things, they say. Things are thoughts. Awaken, man, to your sovereignty over all. Cast aside your enemies: doubt, morbidity, fear, and guilt. Ask and it shall be given; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened to you. You cannot dream a dream too big, nor aspire too high. Nothing is impossible.

In our fourth meditation, we are recognizing that all form and circumstance are but manifestations of the Universal Mind, that everything and everyone is made from and has his being in universal intelligence.

Everything which you can conceive and accept is yours! Entertain no doubt. Refuse to accept worry or hurry or fear. That which knows and does everything is inside you and harkens to the slightest whisper.

RECOMMENDED READING

The Consciousness of the Atom by Alice A. Bailey, Published by the Lucis Publishing Company.

FOURTH MEDITATION

I know that all of life exists within me. Here in my heart and mind, in the recesses of my being, there is utter calm, a place of unruffled and placid waters, where the truth is apparent and the clamor of the world does not exist. I see about me the thoughts of all mankind, for these thoughts have become things. Whatever is good among these thought-things I accept; whatever is evil I ignore; for my concern is only with truth and understanding, which is forever the lovely and the good and the expanding. My mind moves easily to the furthermost reaches of space, in all directions, and just as easily moves back to me once again. I am the center of the universe. God, the Universal Subconscious Mind, has made Himself manifest through me. I know that my purpose in life is to reach ever upward and outward, to expand in knowledge and love and unity. I place my future in divine hands. I turn over each problem of my life to that great all¬knowing mind to which all things are possible. I do not tell God how to bring these things about. I have complete confidence that every circumstance that comes my way is part of a perfect plan to convert the image of my faith into physical reality. Even now the universe seeks to answer my every need. As I believe in my heart, so shall it be done unto me; this is the law of life and of living. There is greatness in my friend and in my enemy, for we are all brothers seeking the same high mountain along many paths, God, who made all creatures, made no poor creature, for He made only of Himself. I am prosperous for God owns everything. I am vigorous for God is all vigor. I need only open my mind and my heart, keep my thoughts in the path of truth, and I am filled to overflowing with the power and abundance and love of the universe.

Chapter 5 – INTUITION

A mighty epoch of man draws near What wondrous things there will be Thy heart in place of thine ears shall hear Instead of thine eyes thy mind shall see

INTUITION DEFINED

We are using the word intuition to cover a good deal more than the occurrence of “hunches.” Under intuition we are classifying all the mysterious and apparently unexplainable phenomena which pass largely unnoticed in our world: clairvoyance, thought transference, materializing and dematerial-izing objects, levitation, contact with the spirit world, in addition to an instinctive grasp of the laws of construction (such as in mathematics and music). Intuition describes our recognition and use of the great truth that mind is greater than matter and that the Universal Subconscious Mind contains the knowledge of all things and all times, is the substance from which everything is made, and is responsive to thought and desire.

THE STUDIES OF DR. RHINE

Dr. J. B. Rhine, through the work of his Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University, has proved that the mind of man has the power to affect inert matter. Dr. Rhine had a machine throw dice. The frequency of each number appearing was strictly in accordance with the law of averages. However, when a subject sat nearby and concentrated on a certain number, this desired number appeared much more frequently than chance would allow. To test precognition, a machine shuffled a pack of playing cards, and subjects wrote down their predictions of the exact sequence of the cards from the top to the bottom of the deck. Again, the number of correct predictions ruled out pure chance. Dr. Rhine injected time into his test and had his subjects predict the sequence a week ahead of the shuffling of the cards. Once more, the correct “guesses” were far greater than the law of averages. Testing for telepathy, subjects were separated by an eighth of a mile, one looking at one of fifty-two cards of a playing deck, the other attempting to visualize the card and name it. As many as nineteen out of twenty-five cards were named correctly! Subjects have been separated by oceans and still the percentage of successes remains equally high. Clairvoyantly, the prediction of what card would come next from the deck has been successfully forecast twenty-six times in a row!

Now what Doctor Rhine has proved in his exhaustive scientific and statistical inquiry is this: the mind of man can affect inert matter; the mind of man can see into the future; the mind of man can receive and transmit thoughts, regardless of the amount of intervening space between minds. Dr. Rhine is now turning his research to spiritism. He feels that he has proved that the mind is independent of the bounds of space and time; thus, there must be survival of some kind on the other side of the grave.

These are the conclusions reached by a scientific study, using all the modern methods and statistical classifications that have evolved our gasoline engine and atomic energy, conducted at one of the finest universities in the world under the surveillance of an internationally known and respected scientist!

Dr. Rhine’s measurements and investigations are proving the same truths that a man spoke on the plains of Galilee many hundreds of years ago: The greatest power in all creation exists within the mind of man!

PSYCHIC PHENOMENA

Had we not been blinded we should have seen it long ago. Many have shown us the way since Jesus, just as many lighted the road before him. And the truth has not always chosen the wise for its instrument.

A peasant girl from Lorraine liberated France. The voices of the Subconscious Mind revealed the future to Joan and cast her in one of the greatest roles ever played by a woman in the human drama. The young Bernadette knelt before a vision of her Subconscious Mind in the town of Lourdes and to this very day such faith imbues the sick and ailing who pilgrimage there that hundreds of cures are effected each year. The same applies to Fatima, Portugal, where three shepherd children beheld in the Universal Subconscious Mind a vision of Mary, the mother of Jesus.

Plato proved the existence of the great world beyond the flesh. The Universal Subconscious Mind possessed Leonardo Ha Vinci so completely that everything he touched was wrought by genius. Shakespeare clothed the eternal truths in the parable of human drama. Einstein and Edison applied mathematics and chemistry to arrive at God. Mahatma Ghandi visualized the great Unity in the brotherhood of man.

And this is far from all. Our world has daily demonstrations of the miraculous powers inherent in man’s Subconscious. There are those who dispute, who scoff, who ridicule, those who would tear down the monument of man’s Universal spirit to place in its stead the pygmy of physical man swallowed in unimaginable space and time. But the record will not be denied.

Saint Joseph of Cupertino could fly without wings. No less a personage than the Holy

Father himself, Pope Urban the Eighth, testified to Joseph’s remarkable nights. Daniel Dunglas Home, the celebrated psychic, also was able to perform levitation. The great physicist, Sir William Crookes, testified to it, so did the Earl of Dunraven, Lord Lindsay, Captain C. Wynne, and many others. Through a lifetime of amazing psychic phenomena, under the strictest conditions imposed by all judging tribunals, under the minutest surveillance of the finest scientific minds of the day, no one ever was able to account for Home’s miraculous demonstrations on any other basis than his having access to some tremendous power that was able to abrogate physical law.

Harold Sherman kept in contact with Sir Hubert Wilkins by mental telepathy when the famous explorer set out to the Arctic to rescue some stranded Russian flyers in 1937; this, when Sir Hubert could not obtain radio communication. Abraham Lincoln dreamt of his death in the exact manner in which it occurred, and he left a letter behind, written ten days before his death, to prove it. Robert Louis Stevenson, at death’s door, testified when he recovered, that for a while he had got up and walked away from his body. For many years, Mrs. John Curran automatically wrote prose and poetry under the direction of Patience Worth, a personality adopted by her Subconscious Mind. Dante Gabriel Rossetti remembered a previous life when he wrote:

I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell
I know the grass beyond the door
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

A skeptical world cannot look away any longer. If records were kept of all such phenomena, they would overflow the nation’s libraries. The mechanistic and material age is passing. Man is evolving into the Age of the Mind, wherein his dominion over the universe will shortly be achieved. Mind over matter; mind over time; thus will come a future of many dimensioned proportions with man at the center and yet encompassing all.

GENIUS

Thought transference, clairvoyance, the affecting of matter and circumstance through mind power, contact with the spirit world, remembrance of previous lives are all results of the duality of the mind of man and the fact that the Universal Subconscious Mind responds to suggestion. All the powers which might fall under the heading of intuition are possessed by the Subconscious Mind alone, but they are available only when controlled by the Conscious Mind. The Subconscious Mind may see without eyes, hear without ears, leave the body to elicit information and return again. It may see into the future, see into the past, form circumstance and matter. Its existence is independent of the body, for it lives in all things and encompasses infinity. It is the soul of each man and the soul of the universe.

Inherent in the Subconscious Mind are the fixed laws of nature; and it is the perception of these laws, as embodied in our “geniuses,” that we will undertake to discuss first.

One of the most remarkable mathematical prodigies was Zerah Colburn. Born in 1804, educated in nothing more than the grade school of a rural community in Vermont, he still was able to perceive immediately the correct answer to every , mathematical question propounded to him when he was not I yet eight years of age! He was able to raise numbers up to the sixteenth power, give the roots of numbers down to the same power, and perform all manner of number magic such as was not possible to a single mechanical contrivance of the day. And his answers were immediate. The remarkableness of his feats is all the more apparent when it is realized that the sixteenth power of eight is 281,474,976,710,656, a figure which it is extremely unlikely could even be read by our eight-year-olds of today.

Blind Tom, an idiot from birth, had a prodigious musical capacity. Even as a child, he could reproduce on the piano any piece of music he heard, no matter how long or how difficult. With equal facility he improvised an astounding array of musical composition. Beethoven was another such one, composing entire symphonies when still a child. Milton applied the fixed laws of the universe to the rhythm of his poetry.

PERCEPTION OF UNIVERSAL LAW

These laws of construction, or rhythm, or movement, are inherent in each of us, for they are part and parcel of the Universal Subconscious Mind. Time moves in accordance with these laws, and who is there who has not been able to wake himself from a sound sleep at an appointed hour simply because he consciously desired to before he went to sleep? Some never-sleeping presence within us keeps an eye on the clock or simply on the movement of the universe, and if we desire to be awake by six, so we are. Nature has thus fashioned the most reliable alarm clock of all, but our dependence upon mechanical contrivances dulls this faculty as it has dulled so many others.

Great artists perceive intuitively the laws of the combinations of colors. Great engineers perceive intuitively the sweep and scope of a building, bridge, or highway. Great writers perceive intuitively the innermost depths of the characters and stories they create and thus bring them into three-dimensional life from out of the printed page. Great scientists perceive intuitively the paths to new discoveries in physics, chemistry, and electronics. Did not Columbus himself sail toward the edge of a world which everyone said was fiat? What else sustained him but his intuitive perception that the world was a sphere?

The universe moves and combines and builds according to certain fixed laws. These laws are part of the Subconscious Mind and are available to our perception if we will but clear away the doubt and skepticism and logical illogic that is forever cluttering up our Conscious Minds. The bud of perfection and the seed of genius dwell within each of us. It comes to everyone in some quiet hour and whispers of the truth. Who has not felt the excited certainty of an impending event, a new idea, a useful business, a new invention, a theme for a novel, a sunset that demanded to be painted, the precognition of a friend’s devotion, a loved one’s high regard? Who, in his quiet hours, has not looked at the stars and felt peace, as deep within his soul the magnificent order of the universe’s laws was for a while apparent?

THE INDWELLING BUD OF PERFECTION

Can we, then, be geniuses, even as those the world has known? The answer is that we not only can, but we are! Great genius lies dormant in each of us, waiting to be awakened. We have only to take down the bars, unlock the door, invite our silent dweller forth. It is ourselves who nave locked him within his prison, and he aspires to be set free. We build his cage and bars and lock each time we say, “I’m not good enough,” “I don’t know how,” “It’s too hard for me,” “I’m poor,” “I’m sick,” “I’m tired,” “I’m nobody.” We make of this mighty mind a pygmy, cowering in his cell, forced to act and create all our negative fears and doubts into actuality and thus to reduce the temple of the universe to a sorry, fumbling, fear-ridden speck upon the earth.

Geniuses we all shall be when we know and recognize and practice the truth. Not geniuses begotten by a whim of fate, but geniuses because we have controlled our destinies, geniuses because we move in accord with the invincible power of an expanding universe.

THOUGHT TRANSFERENCE

Mental telepathy or thought transference is today perhaps the most widely known and discussed attribute of the Subconscious Mind. Scientific men, concerned only with the observation and statistical classification of phenomena, now tell us that if one man concentrates on an idea and another concentrates on attempting to determine what this idea is, it is very likely that the latter will grasp what the former is thinking about. There have been those who have attempted to prove that each human mind is like a radio transmitting and receiving station and that one man may “tune in” on another man’s frequency.

The parallel is very weak. What manner of radio frequency curve could manage to support the billions of different frequencies assigned to the earth’s population? And since it has been proved that the higher animals respond to thought, there are also these frequencies to consider. No method of measurement has ever been devised that showed more than the very weakest brain radiations, yet thought transference may span all measurable space.

No, thought transference means that we are thinking into or with something that is everywhere at the same time and is used by all manner of life. It means that the Universal Subconscious Mind is moved by a thought and this movement is perceptible to each living organism. Thus we are not actually transferring thoughts, but rather we are thinking them into and with the only mind there is; and they are then apparent to anyone who grasps the use of this mind, even vaguely apparent to those who do not grasp it. This mind is as big as infinity. Each person lives in it. Thus a thought impressed upon it is everywhere at the same time. We are not transferring thoughts. We are all one, with one mind, and our thoughts are community property, if only we can perceive.

CLAIRVOYANCE

Clairvoyance is an understanding or a vision of things to come. In no sense must this be considered as meaning that our lives are ordered or that our fates are predestined. Each of us is a product of his thought. The sum total of this thought determines our actions or opinions in any given circumstance. The next succeeding thought adds to or detracts from or alters what we are. In considering your own future you need only be concerned with the conviction you have concerning it. Whatever your conviction is, there is your future. Even the paths you will tread toward it may be determined by simply considering your convictions about each possible road. The thing of tomorrow is the thought of today, and he who sees the future needs but understand his thought.

But there is a great deal more to clairvoyance than this. A barrage of cases is reliably recorded in which dreams forecast certain events which came to pass. People from all walks of life have testified to visions in which they saw themselves involved in some action in a strange place, only to later find themselves actually doing this same thing in the very place in the exact manner they had envisioned. Professional clairvoyants whose mechanical instruments are the crystal ball or the deck of cards or the palm of the hand or the movement of the stars (though often times they are little more than shrewd psychologists), take from the Subconscious Mind an impression of their clients’ thought and translate it into the future. There is no time in the Subconscious

Mind. Everything that has happened, everything that is happening, everything that will happen are all happening at one time in this mind and that time is eternally now. For this mind, being infinite, contains an infinite number of possibilities all of which are actual in an eternal now.

SUBSTANCE AND SHADOW

Materializing and dematerializing objects and circumstances verge on our conception of sorcery or we relegate it to the realm of witches’ tales, yet once again we are dealing with that which has been reliably recorded and which must be, from the very nature of the Subconscious Mind, one of its inherent powers.

Jesus walked upon the water, fed five thousand with seven loaves of bread, turned water into wine. The Mate of the S.S. Vestris met a stranger on board his ship who told him to steer northwest, where this same stranger was subsequently rescued from a stranded ship. A hypnotized man may be told there is no chair in the room other than those occupied, and he will not see the chair. The thought, or idea of the chair, is gone from his mind. He may stumble over the chair, proving it is still there, but it is there only because it still exists in the Universal Subconscious Mind, planted there by the minds of those observing it, or every mind that ever has observed it. Is the chair not, in the first place, only a thought, conceived in the mind, made into physical reality by a man who thought he made a chair? Is it not true that if the thought connected with the creation of the chair had never existed, the chair would neither? The chair is naught but consciousness, resolved into form only by thought, made of the eternal substance of which all things are made, which is not substance at all, but merely intelligence.

God appeared to Moses; the blessed Virgin appeared to St. Bernadette; the ghost of Pickfair appeared to Mary Pickford; Jesus appeared to St. Paul; and the bridge which he builds appears to the engineer, in his mind, as a thought, even as all the things of this world must first appear as thoughts!

Similarly with levitation. Will Urban the Eighth be denied in his testimony that St. Joseph of Cupertino could fly? Will William Crookes be denied that D. D. Home could levitate himself from the ground? They were seen to do these things. Those who would dispute it can do so with no other argument than “It isn’t possible,” and the sorriness of that particular defense has been proved a million times.

THE SPIRIT WORLD

Contact with the spirit world also is one more manifestation of the power of the

Universal Subconscious Mind. We need not go so far as to say that those who have passed beyond the veil make themselves known to us only through certain “mediums.” Rather, it is enough that we remember two primary attributes of the Subconscious Mind. 1) It responds to suggestion. 2) It possesses the power to manifest physical reality from thought. All the phenomena of the seance can be accounted for with these two facts in mind.

All the great mediums were and are possessed of another personality who assertedly dwells in the spirit world and makes contact with those departed souls who have something to say to friends and loved ones who have remained behind. In the trance, this spirit possesses the medium’s body, usually assumes a drastically different personality from that of the medium, and proceeds to render acute and detailed information regarding present, past, and future events in the lives of people with whom the medium is barely acquainted or indeed has never met. Such information is often accompanied by disembodied hands and wraithlike faces hovering about the room, as well as objects moving and floating, seemingly under their own power, and accompanied by unaccountable rapping s.

Now essentially what the medium does is to put himself or herself into a self-imposed hypnotic trance, during which the Subconscious Mind is exposed and is quickly responsive to any suggestion offered it. When it is suggested that it is the spirit of one who has been taken by death, it becomes so, and the information it is able to offer is proof that it actually believes this. Many investigators would have us believe that this is simply an illusion of the Subconscious Mind of the medium, that the departed spirit has not been “contacted” at all, that the medium has simply used the Subconscious Mind to elicit certain information that normally would be beyond his or her knowledge.

This is sheer nonsense. There is only one mind after all, and we are all living in it. Whenever this mind becomes Dick Roe, it is Dick Roe, and that is an end to it. What the complete details of existence are on the other side of death it will probably remain for one who actually returns from there to tell, but Dick Roe having been absorbed once more into Universal Mind still exists in Universal Mind. Whatever Dick Roe was in Universal Mind while alive, he must remain in Universal Mind when not alive, for the conception has already been placed there. Thus when the medium evolves from the Subconscious the personality and identity of Dick Roe, she is actually dealing with the spirit of Dick Roe, the conception which exists in Universal Mind of Dick Roe, for two absolutely exact conceptions are not two conceptions at all but only one, and the Dick Roe of Universal Mind responds to his call.

The phenomena of the seance have been exposed many times in dealing with those mediums who resort to trickery or legerdemain, but there remains a vast body of undisputed proof of moving and floating objects, ectoplasm gathering into hands and faces, spirit rapping, and the like, so as to leave little doubt but that the Subconscious Mind is often moved to perform these minor miracles at the medium’s behest.

It is interesting to note that the “spirits” are always quite vague as to what kind of life exists in the afterworld. They say it is quiet there, that it is peaceful, that they are happy, but beyond that there seems to be a big breakdown in their communication. This would lead us to believe that the spirit conceived by the medium can effect no better description than the medium herself, or perhaps existence on the other side is so drastically different from that in the physical world that no words or conceptions can be communicated from the Subconscious to the Conscious. More likely, the whole practice of spiritism is the wrong approach to dealing with the Universal Mind and those who practice it are not armed with sufficient knowledge or concept of what they are doing to be able to effect any kind of perfect union.

This much we can say: Remarkable phenomena have been produced. The mighty power of the Universal Subconscious Mind is once again revealed. Once more we see the grandeur of man’s destiny, how he is caught up in and is part of the entire power of the universe.

THE GRADUAL AWAKENING

What are all these phenomena? We shall gain no insight into them by calling them trickery or hallucination. Too many scientific inquiries have set out to do just that and gotten nowhere. This body of evidence exists, has existed for many centuries, tucked away in musty archives and pathetically labeled, “Can’t be explained, so probably didn’t happen.” The startling thing is that man has been content with his fumbling examination of the physical world, deriving some strange satisfaction in perceiving order about him, always recognizing that the monument of irrelevant facts he accumulated was his own headstone, but seemingly extremely reluctant to pursue any type of inquiry that might expose his own divinity and power.

Only now, when scientific inquiry has had to reject its own notions of physics, of electronics, of time, space, and matter, only when physics has had to evolve a new quantum theory which is much more philosophical than scientific, have men reawakened to the possibilities inherent in the invisible world about them and turned once again to the examination of what lies within the mind of man.

The great British physicist, Sir James Jeans, has summed up the extent of scientific inquiry by saying, “It has become clear that the ultimate processes of nature neither occur, nor admit of representation in, space and time.” Bertrand Russell says, “The distinction between mind and matter is illusory.” Thus, like it or not, all investigation of man’s nature and his control of his environment must take up for study those phenomena which have always been classified as the supernatural.

It seems strange that it has not been widely done before. Since natural events and things by their very nature give no clue to the truth of man’s destiny, it would seem that long ago the physical would have been labeled the unnatural and men would have turned to the so-called supernatural for the truth about things. Whatever the purpose of the former by-road, it is upon this latter path that man has embarked today.

THINGS ARE THOUGHTS

We have said that thoughts are things, but the premise that we are forced to adopt now is that things are thoughts. In other words, every object and circumstance and form in this world is purely mental and represents nothing more than an idea or a thought.

This position will find many arguments directed against it, but they all will have the same basis. The disputer will maintain that if the clock in your kitchen is only a thought, then you only think you see it, which means that it will not be there in the silent hours of night when you are asleep; yet you wake in the morning and find that the hands of the clock have moved in accordance with time, which proves that the clock was there all night. Similarly, he will say that you may only think you see a red flower, but a camera can be rigged to photograph the flower when no one is around, and the photograph shows the flower to exist and still to be red, even though there was no one to perceive it.

Such a disputer makes a fine argument in proof of a point that we have no quarrel with whatever. We are not saying that the physical objects of our world would cease to exist if there were no one around to perceive them. Of course they would still exist, for they are not merely our conceptions any longer; they are conceptions in Universal Subconscious Mind. What we are saying is that these objects are only ideas given form by the Universal Subconscious Mind. As long as the idea persists in Universal Mind, so will the form persist. When the idea is altered in Universal Mind, so will the form be altered. When the idea disintegrates in Universal Mind, so will the form disintegrate.

And most important of all, we are saying that the original idea and all evolutions of the idea are placed in Subconscious Mind by Conscious Mind!

THINGS ARE CONCEPTIONS ROOTED IN UNIVERSAL MIND

A conscious thinking entity, or a group of conscious thinking entities, places an idea in Universal Mind, which by its very nature creates that idea into physical reality. Thus things are thoughts. They need no one around to perceive them in order to exist. They are rooted in Universal Mind, which holds them in form as long as the idea behind them persists. But this idea, this conception, this thought, was placed in Universal Mind by a thinking, conscious entity living in the physical world.

Thoughts become things. Things are thoughts held in form by the great creator, the Universal Subconscious Mind, but a thing only becomes a thing as a result of a conscious thought!

Thus man has ordered his world about him. Thus he lives .surrounded by an environment of thoughts become things, lie may change that environment by altering his thinking, but it most certainly will not change simply because there is no one around to observe it.

We all live in the same mind. There are a vast number of conceptions and ideas in this mind, placed there by every organism and life force which has preceded us. These ideas and conceptions once firmly implanted and crystallized are made known to us through our five senses as things which we perceive in the physical world around us. This world, in its essence, is purely mental, and all exists in mind.

What man concludes, God knows. What God knows, God creates. What God creates, man perceives. What man perceives he believes to be outside himself, existing in the world around him, but the truth is it exists within him, for it exists in Universal Mind and all of this mind is within man when his consciousness has expanded to encompass it.

Pascal said, “The narrow limits of our being conceal infinity from view,” which is simply another way of saying that to understand how all of life lies within us, we must abandon our sense of separateness and isolation and expand our consciousness to include all things.

THE ILLUSION OF TIME

Now we needn’t regard the law of thoughts becoming things as being attached to the supernatural. It would be a mistake to assume that what we are driving at in totality is simply a man sitting down and thinking, “I have a new car,” with the result that, presto, the new car materializes out of thin air. Though without doubt this type of immediate result lies somewhere in the future of man’s evolution, has indeed been accomplished occasionally by a very few persons who have evolved ahead of their times, it is nonetheless true that very few of us will reach it in our lifetimes. But exactly the same result can be achieved by each one of us, if we allow for the lag of time.

Wherever we see the logical procedure of physical events, we discount all that might be miraculous. If you sit down and quietly say to yourself, “I am going to get a new car,” and keep assuring yourself of this over a period of weeks or months, you will first find yourself somehow getting the money to make the purchase, somehow visiting a number of new car showrooms, somehow finally arriving at the car you want, somehow buying it and driving it home. You may then return to the chair in which you sat when you first had the thought and be assured that you now actually have a new car. You thought you were going to get one; it is now outside in your garage. The only difference between its coming to you and to the man who might immediately materialize it by a miracle is the difference in time! And time, we know, does not exist in the Universal Subconscious Mind.

THOUGHT IS THE ONLY TRUE ACTION

Look around you. See your desk, your sofa, your bed, your refrigerator, your home, your radio, your television set. Each of these things is a thought. Somewhere, a man sat down and visualized each of them and said, “I am going to make this thing,” and presto, here is the thing in your home, a thought a short time before, a thing now; and the only reason we do not see the miracle of it is because of the lapse of time when motors and machines moved and were guided to form the component parts, assemble the thing into a whole, and ship it to us. If we all live in Universal Mind, are we not simply daily creating into physical reality through this mind those very thoughts and ideas of which we think? We form every physical thing from a substance which is not substance at all but simply pure intelligence. We give this intelligence the form of our thought. We can neither start nor stop the process. We can only start and stop our thinking and our conceptions. As soon as we have crystallized the thought and adopted it, we are moved by the Subconscious Mind to perform those things which will give the thought physical reality.

Beyond the point of having had the idea, we are moved by a power greater than we are to give this idea reality. We needn’t drive ourselves or worry ourselves or fret about the problems. These will all be solved by Subconscious Mind, and we will be moved in the directions we must be. Our only free action is our thought. We are what we think, we do what we think, we become what we think, and thus it always must be.

WHAT JESUS KNEW

What then of the miracles? What of Jesus turning the water into wine? Granting that Jesus conceived that the fluid in the bottles was wine instead of water, certainly he would in the normal course of events have been prompted to empty each bottle of water, proceed to the winemakers and procure the wine, and subsequently to pour this wine into each of the bottles. We know that he did none of these things. He simply conceived that the bottles contained wine, and all of the acts necessary to perform this transition were performed immediately, and the water became wine. What did Jesus know to be able to condense time and physical action in this manner?

For one thing, he knew that time (as has only now been proved by our scientists) is a dimension, and he undoubtedly was able to perceive each event along this dimension in response to each of his convictions. Secondly, he understood that the physical actions ordinarily necessary to resolve a thing from a thought are merely the movement of the Universal Subconscious Mind, or his Father, as he put it, and he knew this Mind needs no instruments other than itself to effect manifestation. Thirdly, he understood that this Mind by its nature is every-place at the same time and all of it is any-place at any time, so he knew that all of it was within him, and thus his consciousness was expanded to include the wine, the water, and the bottles. With such perception, along with his own magnificent conviction, he was able to transcend time and the movement o£ bodies in space, and to change the water into wine in an instant.

A miracle to us. The truth of things as they really were to him. He did nothing that any of us couldn’t do, except compress time and circumvent the interaction of physical bodies moving through space.

Time is a variable, says modern science. The movement of bodies in space is purely mental, says modern science. Jesus has replaced Newton on the shrine of physics!

This then is where we are heading, into the unknown to make it the known. Those who cling to their little established worlds are holding onto mere dust. We are after the cause and source of all things. We are after true knowledge. Maeterlinck says, “The one sorrow of the mind is the sorrow of not knowing or not understanding, which contains the sorrow of powerlessness.” Not knowing is powerlessness! We are after power; we want to know. Again Maeterlinck says, “He who knows the supreme causes becomes one with them and acts with them.” Can there be any doubt that understanding the causes of universal power and moving in accord with universal power can give any less than universal power?

THE PROPERTIES OF LIGHT

Let us return to this ephemeral physical world of ours. One of its interesting phenomena is light. Light always takes the path of least effort. Least effort is ordinarily the shortest distance between two points, but where light encounters resistance, it simply reflects off in the mathematically most perfect angle so as to maintain its maximum energy. Light is inherent in the universe, and the universe doesn’t fight and strain and snarl. It does things the easy way.

There are also some very interesting theories about light, which indicate that that which it reflects need not necessarily be true. Light consists of a stream of photons moving at 186,000 miles per second. These photons, of course, are invisible, but might best be described as approximating the shape of a silver dollar, though infinitesimally thin. One theory holds that these photons move perpendicular to the pull of gravity. Illustrating with a silver dollar, the dollar always must remain upright relative to the earth’s surface. Thus, if the photons come at us from an angle from above or below, they appear smaller than they actually are. For example, a man standing twenty feet away and thirty feet above you appears much smaller than he actually is. It is this quality of his appearance, plus your own instinctive balance on the perpendicular to the pull of gravity, that allows you to determine how high he is above you. According to the theory, what has actually happened to give the man this appearance is that the photons streaming toward you look smaller, the man has not changed in size. For example, place a silver dollar at arm’s length, face toward you, and perpendicular to the ground, then, keeping it perpendicular, move it upward until it is two feet over your head and still at arm’s length. The dollar now will not only appear smaller, but will be an ellipse instead of a circle. Thus the photons of light streaming from the man who is at an angle above you cause him to look shorter; his breadth will be normal at his feet but will gradually taper towards his head. It is this aspect of an object in space that we perceive with “perspective,” and it is the photons of light always moving perpendicularly to gravity that communicate this quality and relation of things to us. So says the theory.

WHAT DO WE SEE?

Now, the photons, moving at the speed ot light, have no measurable depths. In other words, looked at from the top or bottom, they are invisible. Here the theory takes an interesting twist. If, through some disruption of the pull of gravity or the imposition of some outside force, these photons could be made to lie on their sides so that they were parallel to the earth’s surface, any object emitting them would be invisible to the eye. Scientists have worked along these lines for many years, with the thought in mind of disrupting the stability of the photons so as to make our machines of war invisible to the enemy. What man sets out to do, man does. Indeed, it will be difficult to remain attached to the final reality of the physical world the day man is able to cast any of his physical objects into invisibility simply by throwing a switch.

To this very day we do not know what it is we see in the world around us. We know it is something, but what we can determine about this something only convinces us that we know very little about it. Our postulate is that these things are thoughts made manifest, and when we are able to cast them into visibility or invisibility at will, who will dare maintain that they are things of themselves and completely apart from man?

Thus the shimmering ephemeral world about us is not a group of hard and substantial facts at all, but merely a world of shade and shadow, dimly perceived, flickering distortions on the walls of Plato’s cave, vague indications of a mighty truth not seen.

HEIRSHIP OF GOD

Mental telepathy, clairvoyance, physical manifestation from thought, mental healing, any and all of the so-called supernatural phenomena of this world are possible to each man. He need not sweat and aspire and strain to achieve these things; he need only expand his consciousness to include everything around him. Through the unity of Self thus achieved he will perceive the laws of the universe as they are; and operating through and with them he will attain ascendancy over space and time and the limits of matter.

Jesus of Nazareth was clairvoyant; Jesus performed mental telepathy; Jesus healed through mind power; Jesus performed physical manifestation from thought. Jesus was a man and merely a man, but his intuitive perception of the laws of the universe was such that his wondrous works were regarded as miracles. Yet he invoked no new laws. He simply worked in accord with the highest laws, laws of such infinite magnitude and scope as to set our laws of the physical world to nothing by comparison.

Even as Zerah Colburn intuitively perceived the laws of numbers and mathematics, so did Jesus perceive the laws of the entire universe. Even as Blind Tom perceived the laws of music, so did the whole heavens open their secrets to Jesus. The power that transcends reason is the power of intuition. Instances of its amazing perspicuity could be multiplied a thousand times, but still, in comparison to the vast numbers of human beings, its instances are very rare. Yet this is not strange. Locked in the fleshly limits of our bodies as we are, puppets driven by the five senses, victims of the constant beat, beat of sensation which is always convincing us that the first reality is the world about us, it is a wonder that instances of highly developed intuition ever have come about at all. But still they come. Hardly a week goes by without another “un¬explainable incident” finding its way into mankind’s history. The power is breaking through, making itself known, confirming our heirship of God, our joint heirship with Jesus Christ!

ALL THINGS INDWELLING IN GOD

It is thus intuition upon which we must primarily depend in order to arrive at the wonderful gate. Only through conscious contact with the Universal Subconscious Mind will the truth be revealed. The discourses, arguments, and postulates of this book will help break down the barriers in the Conscious Mind, expose fraudulent convictions, cast off the limits shadow thinking and hopelessness, allow you to look upward into the heavens and perceive God as He is. You’ll not need reason and argument to convince you then. You will see, intuitively perceive. The end of all searching will have arrived; the power of the universe will be yours.

Jesus of Nazareth was an educated man, taught secretly in the laws of mind by the most learned men of the day, gifted with such amazing powers of intuition that the lessons he learned were living tools in his hands. That which he knew he divulged only through parable and demonstration, for he knew the world was not ready for it. “Seeing they see not, hearing they hear not,” he said to his disciples, “but to you it is given to know the Kingdom of Heaven.” Every law he voiced, every work he did, regardless of how clothed in parable, regardless of how phrased to meet the mental grasp of those to whom he spoke, was yet an illustration of the universe’s immutable laws—laws which each day our scientific studies are bringing to light and declaring to be fact two thousand years after this man from Nazareth spoke them on the plains and hills of Galilee. He intuitively grasped them. He needed not test tube nor laboratory nor cyclotron. He saw that the laws were within him, were part of him, were his very foundation and essence; and he placed in them his entire trust and confidence, made himself one with them, achieved the consciousness of the Universal Subconscious Mind, utilized the power far greater than he was, told a world astounded at his works, “It is the Father who dwelleth within me. He doeth the works.”

It is the unity of all things indwelling in God which Jesus saw. It is the intuitive perception of that unity that we strive to communicate in these lessons. This unity was perceived before Jesus by Gautama Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tze, by the writers of the amazing Upanishads who said, “He who beholds all beings in the Self and the Self in all beings, he never turns away from it. When a man understands the Self has become all things, what sorrow, what trouble can there be to him who once beheld that unity.”

This is a world in which the heart rules and never the head. The Conscious Mind of man has concerned itself with the frivolous ends of existence and has created a great Lock against the powers of the Subconscious Mind. The heart knows the truth of all things. It is the heart that is the seat of intuition, man’s hope to arrive back home in the midst of and encompassing all the magnificent truth of his unlimited power. Heed the voice of the heart. Close your ears against the promptings of the Conscious Mind. The heart knows the way. In the innermost depths of your being it whispers the truth every minute of every day. Intuitively it perceives. Intuitively it communicates. Leave to your Conscious Mind the doing of that which is Caesar’s; leave to your heart the doing of that which is God’s.

Thus it is that as you proceed, you will find yourself being led more and more by your heart. The truth of a feeling that rises within you will ask for no argument or examination. It will come to you as a whole thing, and you will ask of no man whether it be fact or fiction, truth or fantasy, a good idea or poor. It will be a light that never was on land or sea, and you will follow it, for it will have penetrated to your soul. It will be a great deal more than that which up to this point in your life you may have termed a “hunch.” It will be a great deal more than what you might formerly have thought to be a “lucky guess.” It will take root deep within your being and become one with you, and you will take the paths of your life with unshakable vigor and faith to see that it is effected in the world about you. Thus success will come, thus health, thus love, thus peace, thus a grander purpose and sweep than ever existed on earth alone, for it will proceed from the heavens.

TRUTH VERSUS DELUSION

The duality of mind and the apparent duality of our world is a trying thing to cope with. If things are but thoughts and in true essence merely intelligence cast into form, what then of the ghosts of haunted houses, the disembodied faces and hands of the seance, the specters that we often attribute to the night; what of the fearful visions of our waking hours and the distorted images of our nightmares? What of the deluded and lost souls who people our lunatic asylums and fancy themselves to be Napoleon or Marie Antoinette? What of our psychotics and neurotics who dwell half in this world, now assuming one personality, now another? Where is the fine line drawn between thoughts becoming things and thoughts becoming delusions, even insanity?

Among the insane there will be found those who think they are birds, those who think they are persons from the past, great persons of our time, various kinds of animals. Among the insane will be found people suffering from all manner of fantastic delusion, which, in view of our saying that a man can become whatever he thinks,

might prompt some persons to ask, why has this man, who thinks he is Napoleon, not become Napoleon, but only insane instead?

The answer to this well-taken question is that the very opposite of correct procedure has taken place in the mind of the insane man. Instead of his Conscious Mind controlling the Subconscious Mind, it has lost all control. The man is a victim of any passing fancy that may lodge for a moment within whatever conscious facilities he has left. Since there are billions of impressions available in Subconscious Mind for him to perceive, he simply grasps one according to its attractiveness and adopts it temporarily. He does not become the thing he fancies; his Conscious Mind flits too rapidly. He is buffeted about in the lap of intelligence by every movement of his Subconscious Mind. Control is gone. When control goes, there comes insanity.

Very often we are witness to the same thing in our very aged or infirm. The Conscious Mind becomes affected and begins to lose control, and before our eyes we see great changes in personality taking place. Such a person becomes helpless, his thoughts move at random, scattered and haphazardly, casting him now into irrationality, again into extreme lucidness.

THE CORNERSTONE OF PERSONALITY

We must remember that the Conscious Mind is the cornerstone of personality. It fills our lives with order and controls the Subconscious Mind in its great creativeness. When control by the Conscious Mind disappears, the individual disintegrates, becoming insane or infirm. That is why it is balance we strive for, balance between the Conscious Mind and the Subconscious Mind; therein lies the truth of genius. When the Conscious Mind vastly subordinates the Subconscious, we find an individual who lives beset by all manner of insurmountable problems, for he sees himself living in a world where all things are greater than he. When the Subconscious Mind subordinates the Conscious, we have an individual who is irrational, sometimes insane, even though on occasions he will exhibit some remarkable powers.

It must be remembered that the Universal Subconscious Mind responds to suggestion. The more ordered and authoritative the suggester (the Conscious Mind), the more ordered and clearcut are the manifestations of the Subconscious Mind.

TOWARD THE SUPERMAN

We need not set immediate goals for ourselves in the realms of mental telepathy, mental healing, and manifestation from thought. As William James so aptly stated, “All consciousness is motor,” and immediately you become possessed of an idea or a desire, you will find that it sets you into action which inevitably results in its creation in the outer world. For the while, there is no point in attempting a shortcut through time and space by mind power. It is enough to free your thinking of its negative bonds, to allow yourself to take free part in the creation of your own wishes and desires, and thus to fill your life with achievement and good. But let us not forget that the possibility is there—the possibility of astounding shortcuts to all things, which will be ours the day we have rightfully claimed our places in the universe.

We are evolving toward the superman. We are evolving toward undreamt-of powers. The bud of this future lies within us now. We have only to loose it and it will begin working in our lives as a tangible vital presence for good.

In the words of Walt Whitman:

From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines
Going where I list, my own master total and absolute
Listening to others, considering well what they say
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating

Gently, but with an undeniable will divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.

OUR GOALS

It is our intuitive perception of the laws of the universe that reveals to us God as he is. We need only put all wishful thinking aside save the desire to know the truth. Expectation and desire will light the way. In the quietness of our meditations the inner eye will see and the inner ear will hear, and the truth shall be revealed to us, and the truth shall make us free.

We shall sense the future dwelling within us, know the thoughts and hopes of all mankind, know that the way we lived our yesterday has determined our today, know that the way we live our today will determine our tomorrow. True intuition will be ours—the light that never was on land or sea!

The soul of all life is your own soul. Wherever your eye falls it sees naught but a reflection of yourself. The mighty mind in which you live is all things to all life in all places, and it is the same to you. You are fashioned from the intelligence of God. You are one with the intelligence of God. You need only rub the mote from your eye, clear the wax from your ear, and there becomes apparent a universe which has cradled you in everlasting arms, a universe that responds to your every mood and need and desire.

We know where the path leads—ever upwards to a oneness with God. We know that the purpose of life is a constantly expanding consciousness, and we know it is within our power to expand our consciousness to encompass all of the life about us. We know that this is the secret of Jesus, that he saw the universe dwelling within him, that he intuitively perceived the laws that made up his being. This is our destiny. We may aid it or obstruct it as we wish, but we cannot stop it from eventually arriving. We may use it to fill our lives with good, or we may use it to fill our lives with error and evil; it matters not to the Subconscious Mind. For every soul who falls behind, another steps ahead. He who seeks will find; he who abandons the search as hopeless will find at once a hopeless life. It is a question of courage and effort; a question of desire. We either work in accord with the power within us or by opposing it destroy ourselves. It is for each man to decide.

We seek wisdom and knowledge. Our goals are power with pity; wealth with charity; health with temperance; love without lust. We accede to these goals through no moral pressure. They are true goals because they are truth. We are embarking on man’s greatest age—an age wherein the first movements are apparent to banish disease and suffering and poverty from the face of the earth—an age wherein the brotherhood of man finally will arrive in all its magnificent peace and harmony.

REVIEW

Here for ready reference are the principal points covered in this lesson:

1.The studies of Dr. J. B. Rhine have proved conclusively the validity of extra¬sensory perception.

2.All the truths that Jesus taught are now being proved by scientific investigation.

3.The overwhelming evidence of the super-physical power of the Universal Subconscious Mind has been recorded in all times by extremely reliable persons.

4.Genius perceives the fixed laws of nature in at least one aspect.

5.Jesus perceived the fixed laws of nature in entirety.

6.The bud of perfection, or genius, dwells within each of us.

7.The thought of today is the thing of tomorrow.

8.Things are thoughts, ideas implanted in Universal Mind.

9.We do not perceive the things around us in their true nature.

10.Our world is but a bare indication of the infinite possibilities of all things and all life.

11.The so-called “natural” world is the unnatural. The so-called “supernatural” world is the light of truth.

12.Space and time are illusions of man’s locked-in viewpoint.

13.Things do not depend for their existence on being perceived, but on being implanted as ideas in Universal Mind.

14.Creation of any type is the manifestation of a miracle. We only regard it as natural because we see the processes of formation moving through space and time.

15.Expanded consciousness perceives time as a dimension and space as existing within.

16.Intuition will reveal the laws of the universe.

17.Intuition is not merely a “hunch” but an irresistible light which must be followed.

18.Jesus, as an example of expanded consciousness, compressed time and space to perform his miracles.

19.It is enough for us now to effect creation through the established chain of physical movement. This we can do by refusing to accept doubt and fear.

20.Follow the heart; it is the seat of intuition.

21.The Subconscious Mind must always be controlled, for it proceeds irrationally of itself and depends upon the planting of ideas.

22.Lack of conscious control of the Subconscious Mind is insanity.

23.Denial of the Subconscious Mind is the birth of fear and futility.

24.Genius attains balance between the Conscious and Subconscious Minds.

TRANSFIGURATION

Slowly we are moving through the maze of complexity that surrounds our existence. Slowly we are dissolving the illusions and half truths that inhibit our minds and our powers. Gradually the clutter is being cleared away so that we may perceive the great and edifying truth in all its simplicity. The age is at hand; the dawn is near. In the words of Edward Carpenter, “When the individual is no longer under the domination of the body and its heredity, but rising out of this tomb becomes lord and master of the body’s powers, and identified with the immortal Self of the world—such is Transfiguration. The whole of man’s evolution is preparation for it.”

This is our path and our goal, the purpose of this study. Long and persevering as it may seem, it is but a negligible flash in the history of man. To him who through it perceives that sublime feeling and power by which he is able to identify himself with the immortal Self, all the ages of nun will have directed him to that moment. There is no greater goal or undertaking within the realm of life and endeavor. What is a year in its attainment? or even a lifetime?

May we once again urge you to the assiduous practice of the meditations. Unless you put the meditations to work for you, this entire book becomes naught but philosophy. If you are studying only for mental exercise, it would be better that you turn to logarithmic tables or higher calculus. It is your immortal reaching soul that will find food here, and lest you provide it with the living tool of the practice of the meditations, the secret will pass you by, leaving you once again in the void of limitless space and darkness. Only in proof is there conviction.

Our meditation this time is aimed at intuitive perception of the unseen and unheard forces that surround us. Through reliance and immersion in Universal Mind we shall become aware of the directions our lives are to take; we shall perceive i lie purposes of our tasks and the manner in which they must be performed; we shall find guidance through each day to the appointed hours when we shall fulfill those destinies that only we can fulfill.

Put your faith and trust in the mind of God, and follow the dictates of your heart. Quoth Shakespeare, “To thine own self be true, and it shall follow like the night the day, thou then canst not be false to any man.”

RECOMMENDED READING

Law of Psychic Phenomena by Thompson J. Hudson. Published by A. C. McClurg and Company.

FIFTH MEDITATION

I listen to the voice of the universe as it speaks within me. It is the voice of truth and it guides me unerringly along the paths of my life. Somewhere deep within me, in the perfect bud of my soul, there stands an immobile universe where all things and all law lie revealed. I reach within to this place of peace and quietness. I harken to the voice of my heart. I close my eyes and sense a living, breathing universe dwelling within me, and I dwelling in it. I am one with all people and all life and all things. I move in accordance with divine law. All the limitless power of creation is mine to draw upon, for it is in me and one with me and I am a part of it. The answer comes with the question; the path is lighted with the first step; the way is cleared with the looking; the goal is in sight with the desire. I know that I am fulfilling the fondest wish of God, for I place myself in His hands, taking each step of my life boldly and strongly, for it is God who prompts me, and God moves with sureness. I see tomorrow for I know today, and this day is father of tomorrow. The things of my life are the children of my thoughts, and my thoughts of today are even now hearing the children of tomorrow. All that is good I desire; all that is evil I refuse to accept. By attaining, I do not deprive. All that is and ever will be is available to every man; he need only ask and it shall he given, I bind myself to the power for good that surges heavenward all around me. The limits and inhibitions of my past are gone. Each day is a new birth of my soul. Each day is another step on ray journey to a oneness with God. I do not seek, I know. I do not strive, I am guided.

Chapter 7 – Attraction

Like unto like doth the universe cry
What thou choose to accept thou wilt see
Skim the wide ocean, split the deep sky
Relentlessly bound on a meeting with thee

THE ENDLESS PRAYER

The human being is a center of life force, attracting some things, repelling others, according to his conceptions and beliefs. Universal Mind differentiates into centers of life force or atoms, which congregate with others vibrating on a similar frequency. And it is the nature of any unit built from Universal Mind to attract unto itself those thought-things that answer the mental vibrations it exudes.

We have seen that all the things of our world are nothing more or less than pure intelligence, cast into form by a concertion in the Universal Subconscious Mind. Intelligence responds to intelligence, and thought creates vibrations which inevitably attract the thing in the image. The one mind in which we all live contains an infinite number of possibilities all of which are capable of becoming manifest in space and time when the conception has been planted in Universal Subconscious Mind. Therefore whatever you choose and accept must develop in your experience, for it is attracted to you by in irresistible and immutable law, a law which isn’t working me of the time, or occasionally, or most of the time, but every second of every minute of all the time there is.

Whether we like analogy or not, we are literally praying every minute of our lives, and every single one of our prayers ire answered. There is no escaping this wheel of answered thought and belief. It is the law of life. Whatever has developed in our experience has not been brought to us by luck or fate or coincidence, but is simply a physical manifestation of our thought and belief. Whether it has brought us good or evil, it is in effect an answered prayer.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote:

And though thy knees were never bent
To heaven thy hourly prayers are sent
And whether formed for good or ill
Are registered and answered still.

You are what you think; you attract what you think; your life is a product of your thought and belief; and nothing in the world can change this fact. To alter your life

THE PRIMAL FORCE

Since the shepherds of Asia Minor thousands of years ago discovered that the iron crooks of their wooden staffs were attracted to certain hard black stones (lodestones), the world of science increasingly has come to understand that behind all form and substance in the universe is a subtle but powerful attraction. This attraction manifests a high order of design and intelligence, and science has chosen to call it the Laws of Nature while religion has chosen to call it God. We, for the purposes of new definition, call it the Universal Subconscious Mind.

Studying the lines of force of a magnet, science has discovered that these lines never cross. They either repel or attract, one or the other. No matter how far a magnet is displaced from the lines of force in a free field, it will always return to its point of balance. So it is with the mind that sets up certain patterns of thought. Everything contrary to this thought is automatically repelled. Everything allied to this thought is automatically attracted. No matter how far such a mind is displaced from those things which it seeks, it will return to them as it must.

For example, such a mind as has built up habits of thinking aimed at poverty or lack must inevitably create such a physical situation, no matter how much prosperity it is thrust into. If the owner of such a mind suddenly finds himself with a hundred thousand dollars, he will shortly be dispossessed of it and return to a state of want, directed there by the thought habits of his mind and what they are attracting for him. It is never money makes success; it is the thinking of the man.

A conditioned habit of prosperity-thinking is usually ingrained on the mind of a person who is born to wealth and plenty. This habit of positive thinking in regard to money is as much a part of him as is the negation of money a part of the thinking of one who is born to poverty. As a consequence, those who are born to wealth seem to attract further wealth to themselves effortlessly. But it is not the money that accomplishes this; it is the pattern of thinking. Similarly, those born to poverty must exercise the greatest industry and perseverance before wealth smiles on them, for they must gradually condition their minds to think positively of money before money will be manifested. Each small success that comes their way contributes to building favorable thought patterns of confidence and faith, and so finally they achieve success and prosperity through being able to think right.

The subtle but irrevocable fact is this: those things that a conscious organism believes are always returned by the Universal Subconscious Mind.

ATTRACTION IS EVERYWHERE

The proton, vibrating in pure intelligence, attracts to it electrons of such frequency and number as to form an atom of a particular atomic weight: hydrogen, oxygen, iron, gold, uranium. The very earth itself exudes a magnetism that steadies the needles of compasses at sea and delicately counterbalances the centrifugal force of the earth’s path around the sun. Dynamic attraction is everywhere present in the universe. Call it what you will—magnetism, polarity, electricity, thought power, moving intelligence—it is everywhere attraction. Like unto like, the thing to the image, the circumstance to the vision, the answer to the prayer—on this law and this law alone are all things constructed from the atom to the solar system.

A magnet may attract iron and have no effect on aluminum, and you yourself may attract disease and repel health, but there ends the comparison between physical and mental law. For the magnet by itself cannot change its properties of attraction and repulsion, while you, by changing your thought and belief, can set up an entirely new field of magnetism, and attract those very things that you were repelling before. Thus by refusing to accept ill health, and attaching your beliefs to the perfectness of spirit, you may banish disease from your experience.

STEPPING STONE TO THE STARS

Jesus spoke of the law of attraction and the habit patterns of the Conscious Mind when he said, “Unto him who hath shall be given, and unto him who hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” He knew that the image and faith of the Conscious Mind was always materialized by the “Father.” He knew that a person who saw abundance around him was by that very act calling into existence even more abundance; and he knew that a person who saw lack all about him was by that very act calling into existence an even greater lack. “As ye believe, so shall it be done unto you,” he said, and in this simple sentence he stated the law of attraction more truly and concisely than it is ever likely to be stated again.

Every thought you entertain and accept becomes a part of you and inevitably will bring you the physical reality of your image. All choice is made in the mind, and all acceptance is made by the spirit, and there are not billions of minds in this world at all, but only one, and it is in every one of us.

It is sheer vanity to bemoan your fate for having been born into lack and limitation and disease, while some other person has been born into abundance and health and is, as a consequence, scarcely touched by evil. When you truly have come to understand that there is only one mind which is every place at the same time and is in all things, you will know that the differences between you and any person on earth are purely illusory. Your “I” may have known lack and limitation, but when you cast these negations out and take on the knowledge of abundance and health, your “I” has changed and you are no longer the same person. True, you still occupy the same body, but even as your surroundings will swiftly change, so your body will become vigorous and unafraid, erect and purposeful, animated by the greatest power in the universe. You can be anything you want to be, do anything you want to do. Born high or born low makes not the slightest difference. Exposed to the veriest evil in the world, you may use it as a stepping stone to the stars, for the Kingdom of God is within, and all the power of the mighty Universal Subconscious Mind awaits your choice and your belief. No more is given to kings than to beggars. We are all born equal for we are all one, and he who disputes this point suffers from vanity, and vanity kills quicker than the hemlock of Socrates.

VANITY—THE KILLER

It is vanity, isolated ego, which is always our undoing. It’s “I have to do this,” “I have to do that,” “I, I, I” when the truth is that “I” does nothing but choose and accept and all things are done by the Universal Subconscious Mind. Popular opinion to the contrary, vanity is more likely to be found among the failures and the diseased and the poverty-stricken than it is among the successful and healthy, for vanity is no more nor less than a sense of personal responsibility, an acute sense of ego as being separate and isolated from the Universal Subconscious Mind.

A person who falls prey to disease believes that he must take constant precautions against the invisible microbes which are constantly threatening him. He believes that the whole matter of his being free from ailments depends upon his taking the proper physical precautions at the proper times, and the ritual with which he calls forth the God of Health is contained in bottles and boxes of powders, liquids, and nostrums. It is true that very often these medicaments produce the desired result, for the very obvious reason that the person taking them believes they will. If he in the first place would simply have faith in the perfect spirit that has made his body manifest, he would let go of his sense of personal responsibility, invoke the power of the Subconscious for physical vigor, and never fall prey to disease at all.

THE EVIL OF ISOLATION

It is the same with failure. A man who sets out to achieve anything on the basis that it is all up to him will shortly be engulfed by myriad problems and decisions. No man alone is big enough to do anything. He didn’t put himself upon this earth; he cannot save himself from departing. All the ingenuity of science cannot make so much as a single blade of grass. As long as a man carries with him a sense of having to do anything all by himself, he will inevitably fail at what he attempts to do. But when he lets go of his vanity, sees his unity with all life and all things, rejects personal isolation, then he invites the great power into his life, and all things are arranged according to the good he desires.

Vanity is an acute sense of separateness. Vanity causes us to see all things and all people as obstacles in our path. Vanity would have us believe that all things are arranged in the physical world rather than on the plane of infinite mind. It draws us in. It closes us up. It causes us to lend reality to evil and negative circumstance. It gives birth to resentment, to belligerence, to hate, and even to violence. How silly and even stupid it is, and yet how difficult to abolish.

The two ends of life are equalizers. Into life we enter naked, and naked we depart. Yet the majority of us act as if the most important thing in all life is to get the best of our neighbors—better clothes, better cars, better jobs. We frustrate ourselves with our isolated egos and spill out our energies on the relentless blade of competition. We set out to deal with the world as if it were an enemy aimed at thwarting us, and the world turns out to be exactly what we conceive it to be, as it always must. The more opposition we see, the more frantic we become, hung on the endless wheel of our own thoughts and conceptions.

In Ecclesiastes we find the remarkable quotation, “Vanity of vanities—all is vanity.” The writer of this most astute metaphysical observation knew that man’s gravest error was concerned with isolating himself from God, or the Universal Subconscious Mind, in which all things have their being and in which all power is contained. So sad it is to see vanity in the high places or the low, for vanity preludes disaster, as “pride goeth before a fall.”

ACKNOWLEDGING THE SENIOR PARTNER

The successful and vigorous person cannot be vain; if he becomes so, he is shortly reduced to failure and lethargy. A man sometimes repeatedly climbs the heights only to fall again to the bottom with a resounding crash. Each time he seems buoyed to the top by a “stroke of luck,” and each time that he arrives at the top he chortles, “I did it all by myself, what a great man am I,” and down he comes again. Humility regained and the Subconscious again allowed to enter his life, he once more begins the ascent, through another set of “fortunate circumstances.” Some men have ridden this whirligig eight or nine times and still are no wiser for it; vanity is a sin so close to the human heart.

This you can rest assured of: The really great and outstanding people of our world have a constant partner, God or the Subconscious Mind, whichever you will; and this partner is consulted on all matters and is acknowledged to be the doer of all their deeds. They, like Jesus, attune themselves to all the power of creation when they acknowledge, “It is not I who doeth the works, but the Father who dwelleth within me.”

LET GO AND LET GOD

Overcoming vanity and relaxing into mental attitudes of trust and confidence often have been expressed in the metaphysical saying, “Let go and let God.” Yet it would seem from observation of many who quote this saying that they haven’t absorbed it. On the one hand, they say, “I trust in God,” and on the other, they act as if God were quite untrustworthy. They set out for certain goals, create the attainment of these goals on the plane of mind, and accept the image. But the very first time they observe that the path they are following doesn’t coincide with the route they believe they should take, they are convinced that God has made a mistake or hasn’t heard them in the first place. “I am not going to get there” is their first reaction, and naturally the Subconscious Mind then sees to it that they don’t.

You can’t predict the Subconscious Mind, and you can’t outguess the Subconscious Mind; and if you try, you defeat those very things you have set out to do. It is strange that any of us ever try to tell God how to do things in the first place, since most of us will readily admit that we don’t know everything. The Subconscious Mind always works with the perfect knowledge of all times and all places and all people and all things. It must answer billions of different conceptions. Only God knows the way a thing may be done; and man never will, not until his evolution has brought him complete unity with the Universal Subconscious Mind.

But whatever you conceive and accept with faith will be yours, regardless of the apparently circuitous paths and byroads you must follow to its attainment. The road you are guided to take is the only way, there is no other, and as long as you work with the Subconscious Mind your steps and routes are perfect.

TRUST THE ALL-KNOWING MIND

Each of us embarks on life’s projects like a man who stands in front of a forest and desires to go through to a lake on the other side. Before the man starts, he hasn’t the slightest idea which trees he will pass on the left and which trees he will pass on the right. He cannot foresee the culvert he will meet, or the mucky lowland, or the creek that must be forded. He sees in his mind only a straight line leading from his side of the forest to the lake, and along this line he starts as the shortest distance between two points.

A tree lies fallen across his path; he skirts it. He conies to the swamp; he walks around it. He comes to the culvert and again swings off his straight route to avoid an obstacle. Does he become discouraged each time he must vary from the straight line which he has projected as the shortest route to the lake? If he does he will say, “I can’t get there,” and the Subconscious Mind will turn him around and march him back to his starting point, and he will have failed. But the Subconscious Mind won’t have failed. It will have answered his most recent conviction as it always must.

The man who says, “I can’t,” is a failure and unhappy, but he nevertheless arrives back at his starting place unharmed, guided to return there by the Subconscious Mind. It is the man who cuts himself off from God, the man whose vanity isolates him from the Subconscious Mind, who is in the real danger. He says, “God made a mistake and doesn’t know how to do this, because I know that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Therefore I will climb over the fallen tree and proceed on my way.” He does, and the tree is rotten and collapses on him, and the fall breaks his leg. Or if he safely passes the tree and proceeds through the swamp, he is caught in the quicksand. Or if he passes the tree and the swamp and walks through the culvert, he is bitten by a rattlesnake. Thus the man who predicts the way the Subconscious Mind must work is never following anything other than his own dictates, which will surely visit limitation and lack and even disaster upon him finally.

For our traveler by himself cannot know of the rotten tree and the quicksand and the rattlesnake, but God does; and he who conceives his goal with faith and never falters no matter the bends in the road will surely arrive at his destination; and always by the most perfect path.

THE INVINCIBLE GUIDE

From the twenty-third Psalm: “Lo, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for thou art with me.” God is wherever you are, always guiding you. He forever guides you to each of your conceptions, for He answers in physical reality that which you conceive and accept in your mind. If you conceive and accept good you will be guided along the most perfect path to its attainment, no matter how winding and circuitous the route may seem to your limited knowledge.

Thus “Let go and let God” means to trust God, to trust in the perfect knowledge of the Subconscious Mind, to know whatever paths you travel toward your goals are the right ones, the only ones, the perfect ones, for you have been set upon them by the omnipotent mind of God, which makes no mistakes and will deliver you safely and prepared at your destination.

“Let go and let God” means to recognize that you do nothing but observe and accept, and whatever you accept is delivered to you by the Subconscious Mind. There is no personal responsibility for anything but thought, for accepted thoughts become manifest in the physical world.

AWAY WITH VANITY AND GUILT

Cast aside your vanity. You do nothing by yourself, and you are never alone. All things are done by the Universal Subconscious Mind, which is always right where you are. You are not isolated from the world; you are a part of it and at the same time the whole of it. The world is your friend if you are friendly with yourself. If you make it your enemy, you fight only yourself. Be humble in the fact of accomplishment, for you do nothing but conceive and accept it. God does everything. He writes all the books, paints all the pictures, builds all the bridges. His instruments are those who attune themselves to His presence and allow the power to flow through.

Cast aside your guilt. Who does not make mistakes? Do not feel guilty for mistakes in thought and subsequently in deed, for it is this path man must travel to become one with God. Guilt has no place in life. Mistakes are for learning. Guilt holds onto mistakes and makes them happen again. Guilt isolates you from the Subconscious Mind. Guilt brings about vanity, the vanity of being alone, without God. Vanity and guilt are the destroyers of attunement, errors of growing self-consciousness, creators of illusion and evil.

Feel your unity with all things and all life and you will see vanity slip away. Know only the eternal now of the Subconscious Mind, no past, no future, only a present that is always existing, and you will feel guilt dissolve. God is in you, has done what you have done, and God does not chastise himself, nor destroy himself.

Be born anew in the words of Emerson:

On this altar God has built I lay my vanity and guilt.

Be done with it! Shame and remorse are poisonous weeds to plant in the Subconscious, and vanity isolates you from the power of the Subconscious Mind. Be alert for these harbingers of evil. Allow them to enter your life no more.

GOD KNOWS HOW

The law of attraction is the law of the manifestation of beliefs and desires, and the method by which this law may be controlled so as to produce only good is by refusing to accept evil. When you have envisaged a goal and created its attainment on the plane of mind, nothing can stop you from realizing that goal but the creation of your failure on the plane of mind. You may run into setbacks, into circumstances that appear to be preventing you from arriving at your destination, but these are not setbacks at all; they are steps forward. In fact, they are the only steps forward possible for you 10 make and still arrive at your goal. Since you don’t know as much as the Subconscious Mind, you cannot predict the path by which it will take you to your destination.

In your limited knowledge of the things and circumstances and motives of the world, you may decide that in order to arrive at your destination it is necessary for you to take a certain step at a certain time at a certain place, when the truth is that such a step actually taken would result in disaster. When you are frustrated in taking this step, you visualize the defeat of your plans and come to believe that evil has been visited on you instead of good. Thus you lose your trust in God, in the Universal Subconscious Mind and the immutable laws of the universe. You start thinking defeat and evil, with the result that they inevitably will be visited upon you.

There is absolutely only one way to make the law work in your favor, and that is to trust it completely and not predict it.

IN EVERY OBSTACLE—OPPORTUNITY

The moment you start predicting the path you should take toward any goal, you will find your faith challenged at every fork in the road, at every by-path, at every apparent obstacle. But when you have learned to trust the law completely, you will begin to see every delay and every obstacle as opportunities whereby you may become fit and ready for what awaits you when you arrive at your destination.

For example, a young man decides to become an engineer. Were he to be given the job of building a bridge the next day, he would fail miserably. But as long as he holds his image and desire and faith clearly, the Subconscious Mind will deliver him fit and ready for his appointment with bridge-building. In the interim there may be five or six years of engineering education, perhaps several jobs in which he fully masters his science. And lo, the day arrives when the assignment is his and he is outfitted with the tools to conquer it, and every step of the way he has been in the hands of the omnipotent and omniscient Subconscious Mind.

There is no such thing as failure unless it is accepted. There is no such thing as defeat unless it is accepted. There is no such thing as evil unless it is accepted.

Let go of your feeling of personal responsibility and turn everything over to the Universal Subconscious Mind. Don’t predict the way this Mind shall work. Accept your appointed tasks and circumstances with complete faith that they will provide the perfect path to the attainment of your desires. Evil and failure and defeat and disease cannot touch you if you will refuse to accept them. Only what you accept comes to you finally; all else is but temporary and merely a step to your goal. Such is the law of attraction, a law that never fails.

One more warning. Do not keep examining your goal to see if you have attained it. “A watched pot never boils” for the simple reason that you are watching it when it isn’t boiling and this is the thought that you project into the Subconscious Mind. Rest assured of the eventual accomplishment of your goal and take pleasure and wisdom from each experience along the way. If life were only moments of victory, it would be very short indeed. Learn to enjoy the journey.

TRIUMPH OVER CIRCUMSTANCE

A middle-aged man in a midwestern city resigned a secure job and invested his life savings in a small manufacturing plant. Shortly afterward the aircraft parts for which his machinery had been designed became obsolete. There seemed no alternative other than to close his doors and face the loss of his investment. “Oh, but I was bitter,” he said. “I felt the whole world was an injustice.

“Then one morning I read three words: ‘Nothing is wasted.’ I went down to the plant alone. It was quiet inside, and I wandered around. I picked up one of the gadgets we had been making, and it seemed different, as if I had never seen it before. It would make a terrific toy, I thought. Immediately I was certain of it. I rushed to the nearest phone and called my foreman. We worked all night on plans. Next morning we gave them to a sales agency. Within two weeks we were m production. Believe me, I’ll never accept defeat again.”

Today his toy manufacturing business is worth more than a million dollars!

A married woman with two school-aged children was near the verge of hysteria at the arrival of a third child. “To think, she wailed, “that I’ve gone through eight years of diapers, formulas, inoculations, laundry, meals, cleaning, and baby-sitters, always looking forward to the day when the kids would be in school and I’d have some time of my own. Now I’ve got to go through it all over again.”

“Not unless you want to,” she was told.

“Of course I don’t want to,” she said.

“Then try this. Make up your mind that the greatest thing that ever happened to you was the birth of your third child.”

She was doubtful, but promised to give it a try.

Before a year was out her husband had made an astonishing success in his business, and they were able to afford help in the house. She herself was successfully operating a small mail-order business. She was playing golf once a week. She had just returned with her husband from a trip to Mexico City. She was brimming with enthusiasm and joy.

“What a tremendous lesson!” she said. “Now I know that everything depends on one’s own attitude!”

An energetic business executive was disconsolate at being retired on his sixty-fifth birthday. He felt he had been “put on the shelf,” that life had no further use for him. He used his leisure only to brood.

“I’ve been scrapped,” he complained. “Life has passed me by.”

“Not surprising,” he was told. “Life usually passes by those who suffer from P.L.O.M.”

“What’s that?” he asked,

“Poor Little Old Me,” was the answer.

He scowled, as if to take offense. Then he smiled. “Is there a cure for it?” he asked. “Just quit feeling sorry for yourself.”

His chin jutted out, and the cure was effected that moment. Today he and his wife have a busy stamp store and are so active in philatelist societies that he no longer has time to brood. And how pleased he is to prescribe the never-failing cure for a severe case of P.L.O.M.

A young clerk was struck by a trolley car and lost the use of his legs. His family and friends were horrified, certain he would eventually become a ward of the state. Only a short time later they were very surprised to find him operating a thriving advertising agency.

“However did you manage?” they asked him. “You can’t even get out of bed.”

“My mind can,” he said. “That’s all that’s necessary.”

THOUGHT ATMOSPHERE

It is an inescapable fact that each human being who lives is surrounded by a subtle but powerful thought atmosphere. We are accustomed to believe that thoughts are invisible, yet we mark the existence of thousands of them with our very eyes each day. The thought of each man stands written on his face, on his brow, in the expression of his eyes, in the set of his lips, the carriage of his head, his posture, his bearing, his demeanor, in the tone of his conversation, his character, his successes, his failures, his very life. Let a man walk into a room where you are, and you immediately are conscious of the thought atmosphere that surrounds him. Your very first reaction is that you either like him or you don’t. It isn’t the man that prompts you to this instinctive decision—it is the kind of thoughts he thinks! His mental atmosphere reaches out and contacts yours immediately. If it is similar, you are attracted to him. If it is opposed, you dislike him. Only a modification of thinking on the part of one or both of you can change this, for like gravitates to like in the Universal Subconscious Mind and throughout all nature.

Each of us seeks for good to enter his life. Even when we become negative thinkers and hopeless and defeated, it is still good we seek. The reality we have lent to evil has brought us to the final imbecility of thinking negatively and hoping for the positive. Patterns of negative thinking seem our only means of coping with a world which appears bent on denying all our goals and aims and desires. These are our Prompters, the crosses we bear as we go through life. Karma it is called by the Indian religions— that which would deny us the unlimited abundance and good of life. And it is sheer idiocy.

The Universal Subconscious Mind denies us nothing. Nature denies us nothing. We always get exactly what we have asked for. There is no lack, limitation, failure, or despair which we do not create for ourselves in our own minds. And it is just as simple, in fact downright simpler, to create abundance and success and health in our minds and thus experience them in the physical world.

NO LIMITATION

There are no limitations for God. There is no lack in the Universal Subconscious Mind. Whatever you dare ask for will be given; and you need only ask and have faith.

Hast not thy share? On winged feet Lo! It rushes thee to meet;

And all that Nature made thy own Floating in air and pent in stone Will rive the hills and swim the sea And like thy shadow follow thee. —Emerson

The great lesson we all have to learn is to think only positively of good. For in seeking good and thinking evil, we destroy our very lives on the sharp edge of the law of attraction and manifestation. Each negative thought that finds root in our acceptance brings upon us the very opposite of that which we seek. Frustration, illness, defeat, hopelessness, despair—are all the result of our desiring good and thinking negatively, for we have not the slightest chance of attaining good as long as we are creating evil with our thought.

Thus it is that we have embarked upon the thirty-day mental diet. Thus it is that you are advised today as Jesus advised so long ago: “Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven and all things will be added unto you.”

THE CENTER OF CONSCIOUSNESS

The Kingdom of Heaven is the center of consciousness. The Kingdom of Heaven is that place of utter calm and serenity within the depths of your soul where your “I” becomes fused with the immortal “I” of all creation. It is the place where you no longer are the “doer” but instead become fused with the observer, the great contemplator, at the place where there is naught for you to do but choose and accept, where whatever is so chosen and so accepted becomes manifest in the physical world about you.

Communion with your center of consciousness, the practice of the meditations, the thirty-day mental diet will provide the tools with which you may banish negative thinking from your mind forever. Through these tools you will build strong habits of positive thinking that will be your bulwark against every negative circumstance that crosses your path. And negative circumstance will cross your path. That is, circumstances that appear to be negative will cross your path. They will appear to be negative for they will be detours from the path which you have projected for yourself, but they actually will be perfect steps toward your goal in the infinite wisdom of the Universal Subconscious Mind. It is only when you accept them as evil that they become evil; otherwise they are but temporary and dissolve immediately when they are refused the impetus of conviction.

Habits of positive thinking, firmly ingrained, strongly built, will sustain you no matter the height of the seas, the strength of the tempest, or the fury of the storm. “Peace! Be Still!” will be your order, and the seas will abate in the face of your faith.

Lowly faithful, banish fear
Right onward drive unharmed
The port, well worth the cruise is near,
And every wave is charmed. —Emerson

Know your center of consciousness. Retreat into it in your time of meditation until you know! Here is the place where all things in this world and the next are done, and once having arrived at it, there can be no terror or fear or disquiet for you ever again. Remember, the center of consciousness, the Kingdom of Heaven, is the place where you become the observer, where even thoughts are things to be observed. It is a place of complete calm and quiet, a place of absolute sureness, a place of communion with the Universal Subconscious Mind.

FIRST CAUSE

We have said a good deal about all first causes being mental and everything being first created on the plane of mind. We have said that each of us has no responsibility other than for his thoughts and his beliefs. And so the modern day Sadducees and Pharisees come to us and say, “Man is a builder and a doer with his hands, and it is falsehood to say that man can achieve by taking thought.” Or perhaps you have confided to a friend that in your meditations you are treating yourself for some particular goal, and your friend has said, “What foolishness! If you are after what you say you are, then quit mooning around with that mumbo-jumbo and go out and get it.” And many a man on the right track has been led off the path by such false counsel.

Nobody achieves anything by “going out and getting it.” The very premise insinuates at the outset that he believes whatever he is after belongs to somebody else and he has to “take it away.” When a man has created on the plane of mind the conviction that whatever he is after is already his, he will be guided in the proper paths and in the proper action that will achieve his goal. Action of itself produces nothing. There is true action and there is false action, and false action will not remove a molehill, while true action will dissolve a mountain. True action is neither more nor less than true thought, for action follows thought. If your thought is true, your action will be impeccably guided by the Subconscious Mind.

HOW TO USE YOUR WILL

We have previously raised cautions against willing things to happen, on the premise that will is usually directed at overcoming physical objects and circumstances which may very well be part of a perfect plan by which Universal Mind is guiding you to your destination. The danger of exercising will to attain specific things is that of isolating yourself from the power for good which you have invoked. On the one hand, you have called upon the power with faith and conviction; on the other, by the exercise of will you may easily deny it, or set it to working in another direction. Consequently all effort should be aimed at attunement with Universal Mind, at arriving at a point of consciousness where you have complete faith and trust that the infinite power of universal intelligence will deliver to you the image of your faith. Any subsequent attempt to direct your will at the circumstances that come your way is an imposition on the plan of Universal Intelligence. You are not bigger than God. Willing against the plan by which He is delivering your desires will abrogate that plan at once and set the power to moving in a different direction.

Do not direct your will toward the physical world. It avails you nothing, and in the end defeats you.

However, there is one very important place for you to exercise will, and that is in your choke of thoughts. When you retreat into your center of consciousness, to the place where you become but an observer, you may will the type of thoughts that cross your consciousness. Here is the basis of the law of attraction. Whatever you will to think, you think. Whatever type of thought you choose is automatically attracted to you.

It is therefore will which is the basis of the law of attraction, but will to think right only, and not will to change the objects and circumstances of your physical world through thought power or physical action.

Deliberately guard your thoughts. Deliberately choose to think only those thoughts which are in the image of your true desire. Refuse to accept any others. By this correct application of will on the mental plane, the outside world grows into the image of your desire.

From the Dhammapada: “All that we are is the result of what we have thought; it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts . . . Let the wise man guard his thoughts; there is no fear in him while he is watchful.”

ATTRACTION IS MENTAL CHOICE

It is will to think right that attracts the proper thoughts. These thoughts move across your center of consciousness, are taken unto you and accepted. From that point the law of creation is invoked, and whatever you have accepted will be created for you in the physical world.

The law of attraction is neither more nor less than the law of attracting thoughts; and it is done by a process of choice. Whatever you choose to think is sent to you from the limitless reaches of universal intelligence. These thoughts, once having been accepted by you, will manifest in the physical world.

Willing to think the right thoughts is the basis of all accomplishment, all vigor, all success, all health, all happiness. It is from here, this point of first choice, that everything in the universe starts. It is first cause—consciousness making a choice. It is the primal question of all creation. What will you think? Once the choice is made, your life is but a reflection of your thoughts made manifest; you choose every circumstance and thing about you in that first choice when you decide what you will think.

Pascal says, “Thought constitutes the greatness in man.” Schopenhauer says, “The world is my idea.” The Vedanta philosophy of ancient India says that matter has no existence independent of mental perception. Mind is the mighty mover!

What will you think? The choice is yours and yours alone, the only true choice which you have in your life. Through it all things will be delivered to you, for good or evil, according to your choice. For the mighty power of the Universal Subconscious Mind will create in the physical world the image of your thought; such is its law and its nature and it can do nothing else. Hell or heaven are choices you make for yourself. The Universal Subconscious Mind knows neither; it only answers your thought.

THE PATH TO ILLUMINATION

Pascal says, “All dignity lies in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time, which we cannot fill.” He says further: “These are only two kinds of people who can be called reasonable; those who serve God with all their heart because they know Him, and those who seek him with all their heart because they do not know Him.”

The first man is both reasonable and happy. The second is reasonable and unhappy.

But a man who neither knows God nor seeks him is foolish as well as unhappy.

Thus the greatest adventure in life is to come to know the Universal Subconscious Mind for its infinite power, and to learn how to use this power to fill our lives with good and abundance. At the end of such a path lies a magnificent spiritual awakening, a transfiguration, a key to life’s mysteries, an understanding of the meaning of “All things indwelling in God, and God dwelling in all things.”

The Key itself is only three words, words which have no magic of themselves but contain such astounding significance that only a fully prepared mind may grasp it. You will do well to ponder on what this Key might be. Search the quotation above for possible meanings and dwell on them during your meditation periods, when you retreat into your center of consciousness. Illumination may come before the final chapter, is sure to be yours at the end.

Life is dynamic. All about you are the manifold evidences of nature’s eternal process of becoming things’. Nothing remains static. Wherever you look your eye sees movement and flow and change. Birth and death are the rhythms by which Nature reaches ever upward, seeking, constantly seeking. Know! Learn! Build! These inexorable commands issue from every bud, egg, flower, bush, tree, in a crescendo of evolving life,

In view of this busy universe of ours, perhaps it seems strange that you are told that the path to power and accomplishment lies in getting your physical body quiet and working only with your mind. Perhaps, like so many others, you feel you should thrust yourself into the midst of the fray, take and grab and fight for what you want. When Jesus said, “Those who take up the sword die by the sword,” he wasn’t talking about soldiers only, for whoever enters aggressively into life with the aim of taking by force or cleverness will find himself dealt with the same way. Since life is bigger than he, the final victor is obvious.

Do not be concerned with action. Action is natural. Life and movement are synonymous. Concern yourself rather with guidance for your action. Know that all action springs from thought, that when your thought is true so will your action be. Action which is governed solely by stimuli received from the outer world is false action and can result in nothing other than the frustration of your desires. You dissipate your energies every time you attack an obstacle or a circumstance as a purely physical thing. No man is big enough to do anything by himself. The most frantic of your energies cannot change a wave of the sea, or the color of the grass, or the spread of a tree. Man who made himself not, who knoweth himself not, who liveth among phantoms he knoweth not of, what imbecility possesses him that he should attempt to mold the world by force? Wherever he looks he sees the work of the power greater than he is. He cannot fight this power. He can only attune himself to it, work in accord with it.

Thus it is true action we are concerned with, and not action for action’s sake. True action springs from true thought, and true thought springs from a man’s cloistering himself in meditation with the Universal Subconscious Mind. He who moves with God moves with power, and his action is rewarded. The great men of this world accomplish in an hour what other mortals accomplish in a year. Yet they are not more active. Their activity is guided, powerful, sure, because they are directed to their objectives by the unlimited resources and power of the Universal Subconscious Mind. To such men, lack and limitation and failure and disease are barely possible of understanding. They can scarcely conceive of them.

This world of ours does not belong to the “go-getter.” It never has and it never will. The frantic man who throbs out his life chasing power or prestige or fame is assured of one thing only—bad health. The worlds he fights he can never subdue; ulcers eat holes in his stomach, tired heart muscles give way, taut nerves come unstrung. Nobody can beat the universe, and that is what the “go-getter” sets out to do. He cannot be successful because he is too vain. Having no humility, he does not know that all things are done by a mighty lord, an unknown sage that inhabits all places and all times. Without this knowledge the “go-getter” is a molecule, vibrating and rebounding crazily in the limits he has imposed upon himself. He has no design to his life because he does not see the design of life itself.

Disdain the life of a “go-getter.” Move with God, with dignity and surety. Give no thought to action, for thought produces action, as naturally as light comes from the sun. All things are decided in the mind, and all decisions are carried out by the invincible Universal Mind.

There is only one life, one mind, one “I,” one Self manifesting an infinite number of things and beings. According to your awareness, you approach the power of this Self. Know that first cause is within, first decision is made by choosing which thoughts you will think. Whatever you think will manifest in your life. Think only positively; refuse to accept negative circumstance as having any final reality; keep your thoughts steadfast on the good; maintain your image with the fuel of your faith; and you will discover a universe of limitless supply and limitless reward, constant adventure, and everlasting love.

Know that every idea produces itself on the physical plane, in an effect exactly like the cause. Place no limits on your thinking. All things are possible. The moment they are considered probable, they become certainty.

Space itself is only that which accommodates movement. Matter itself is only that which illustrates movement. Space and matter and movement are nothing more than intelligence working with, through, and upon itself. Everything is made of this intelligence. It becomes all things; it can become anything.

THE REAL YOU

Don’t confuse what you seem to be with what you really are. To the real you, the indwelling Self, the observer in the depths of /our soul, nothing is impossible. Give heed to this Dweller. Give Him homage and respect and humility. Your body is His temple. Would you surround it with evil and disease and want and lack and failure? Refuse to accept these limitations; they are illusions. The universe is all vigor and all health and all abundance. What you choose to accept and think you will see. What you seem to be is but the barest fraction of what you really are,

Refuse to think of yourself as a name, as a holder of a job, as a person who resides in a certain town in a certain country on a certain date, as a person who has had a certain history. That is what you seem to be. In the solitude of a silent room, in a shaded glen, on a hillside, in a meadow, or on a crag overlooking the ocean, turn your thoughts within to the real you. Slow your breathing until you feel complete peace and relaxation. Retreat into the depth of your being until your very thoughts are things to be observed. Ask yourself, “Who is this that observes?” The real you is a mighty truth, a clarion call in the greatest age of man.

Let the spiritual element rule your life. Give each of your problems to Universal Subconscious Mind and listen for the answer. When the answer comes, accept it with complete confidence and faith. Do not allow negations to steal into your mind like thieves in the night, for they will rob you of your greatest treasures. Close your mind to all evil, to all lack, to all limitation, to all disease. Into your consciousness come the most important of all things—your thoughts. They come not merely to visit with you; they come to take root and make themselves known as the physical things of your life. Bar the door to all negation. Post a permanent sentinel in letters bold and black: “None but the positive and the good shall enter here.” And thus will your life be.

MUTUAL EXCHANGE IS THE LAW

See the movement and flow of life as a great exchange between all beings. All things must be paid for; mutual exchange is the law. You get because you give. You sell, but only so you can buy. There is no such thing as independence; it is a hallucination of the most foolish sort. We are all dependent upon one another, for we are all component parts of a great whole. You cannot live without your neighbor, and he cannot live without you. What you contribute to him, he will return in measure to you. Perhaps the measure is money; perhaps not. But whether the price is in dollars, or pesos, or francs, or bushels, or quarts, the price is there still. And what you receive you must pay for, and what you contribute you will be rewarded for. There are no bargains. The exchange is always equal, regardless of how it may look at the moment.

Retreat daily into communion with the Universal Subconscious Mind. Find your center of consciousness in the quietness of your meditations. Only in this way can you truly know yourself for what you really are and thus absolve any confusion with what you seem to be. The knowledge of what you truly are is at the center of your consciousness, the “I,” the observer, the Self, unto whom all things are possible.

We mustn’t pursue these studies with long faces and melancholy. Life is laughter and excitement and joy. Life is singing and dancing and fellowship: The melancholy mien and the grave countenance are never worth whatever wisdom they might produce. They defeat the God in man because they cannot laugh. Nietzsche says, “Let us slay the spirit of gravity—not by wrath, but by laughter.” He who laughs is full of hope, but he whose countenance is stony has given way to despair, and thus has defeated himself no matter what he has learned.

This is an adventure, a great excitement, that fills the heavens with its grandeur. “The good news I bring you,” said Jesus, “is that the Kingdom of Heaven is within.”

Can we possibly be morose or melancholy on learning that the entire power of the universe dwells within each of us? Can there possibly be anything saddening in learning that we can use this power to fill our lives with good and abundance? This is good news, big news, a news that calls for celebration, for singing, for dancing, for elation. The universe cradles us in everlasting arms. We are eternal, immortal, everlastingly one, and the nature of our true being will work for us here on earth even as it does in heaven.

AFTER THIS MANNER PRAY YE

Let us, for the moment, transpose the Lord’s Prayer into the language of this study, so that we may thoroughly understand what Jesus knew when he said, “After this manner therefore pray ye.”

I know the Universal Subconscious Mind dwells within me and is all-powerful.

May the truth of this power be revealed to me, and may I work in accord with it, for it is perfect.

There is no limit to abundance, and the universe will provide me with all that I need.

I let go of vanity and am not tempted into thinking evil through seeing evil.

I know the real truth and the real power is within me—one, eternal, and everlasting.

All things are made from universal intelligence. All things exist in universal intelligence. All form proceeds from thought, and thought is the first cause for all things. We are able to choose what we will think, and once having chosen, nothing can stop our decisions from becoming real in the physical world. Thus the law of attraction is the law of choosing thoughts. Whatever we choose to think we will think; and whatever we think becomes real in our lives. Choose to think calmly that which you really desire; refuse to entertain any thoughts of what you fear; and you will find you are unerringly guided to your goals by a power greater than you are.

REVIEW

1.Every center of life force attracts those thought-things that answer its mental vibrations.

2.Because we think and desire, we are praying every minute of our lives.

3.To alter your life you must alter your thinking.

4.Every form and substance in the universe exudes a subtle attraction, powerful in proportion to awareness.

5.What man accepts, God creates.

6.Vanity is a sense of independent ego, and isolates a man from the Universal Subconscious Mind.

7.Vanity breeds a sense of personal responsibility, and personal responsibility denies the power of the Universal Mind.

8.A human being has no personal responsibility other than for the thoughts he chooses to think.

9.He who lives by a doctrine of personal responsibility sees the entire universe as his foe.

10.He who lives by a doctrine of attunement sees the entire universe rushing to do his bidding.

11.Make your decisions in the mind, and trust the Universal Mind to carry them out. Refuse to accept apparent delay and detour as anything other than the perfect path’.

12.Don’t predict the manner in which Universal Mind should carry you to your goals. It has the knowledge of all things and all times and thus automatically knows the perfect path. The human being has only a limited knowledge of a certain place and certain time and thus, by himself, cannot know the perfect path.

13.Don’t batter and rail against unwanted circumstances, but “let go and let God.” Denying the power that guides you will leave you adrift with insurmountable problems.

14.A man by himself is a microbe. A man attuned to his inner Self is a universe.

15.Mistakes are for learning and not to carry around with you as a burden. Refuse to accept guilt. God is in you, and God is not guilty.

16.Do not keep examining your goals when they are not yet attained. If you keep projecting lack of attainment into the Universal Subconscious Mind, you can expect nothing else in return.

17.When you have created something on the plane of mind you must know that it is done. Nothing can stop it from manifesting in the physical world. Keep your faith and conviction no matter the apparent obstacles. Look for opportunity in each obstacle.

18.The Kingdom of Heaven is the center of consciousness. Know it, and all things will be added unto you.

19.Action of itself produces nothing. Only true action creates, and true action springs from true thought.

20.The one place the human can exercise will is at the center of his consciousness, where he can will to think whatever he wishes.

21.Take more heed to your thought than to the world about you, for your thought brings the world about you.

22.In meditation ponder the meaning of “All things indwelling in God, and God dwelling in all things.”

23.Be not busy or in a hurry. There is nothing to fight and nobody to beat. These are only things to learn and awareness to be obtained. God moves with sureness.

24.Don’t confuse what you seem to be with what you really are. You are never what you seem to be, and always what you really are, which is within you, at the center of your consciousness.

25.Let the spiritual element rule every decision of your life.

26.Refuse to accept melancholy or sadness. The universe sings and dances.

27.Choose the thought. Once you accept it, the thing in its image will be yours.

Be sure that you successfully complete the Thirty-Day Mental Diet. Only in this manner will you be able to completely demonstrate the power of positive thinking. Do not forget to seek your center of consciousness daily, just prior to your period of meditation. These procedures are living tools. Use them.

Each of the meditations in this book are spiritual treatments, aimed at bringing your life into harmony with good, into harmony with the power of the Universal Subconscious Mind. You may use these meditations to give spiritual treatments to your friends or loved ones, or to any one you wish to help. Simply substitute “he” or “she” or the person’s name where “I” is used in the text, and you will shortly make demonstrations. Our Prompters are lulled when we give a treatment to someone else, and very often we are able to demonstrate for them before we are able to demonstrate for ourselves. Don’t hesitate to tackle any of the problems of your friends or loved ones, but do not confide that you are treating for them. “The wise man doeth his alms in secret.”

RECOMMENDED READING

Thought Power by Annie Besant. Published by Theosophical Publishing House.

SEVENTH MEDITATION

I do not confuse what I seem to be with what I really am. I am never what I seem to be, and always what I really am — host to the indwelling God. I quiet the movements of my body, slow my breathing, and glide deep into the recesses of my being, to the very center of my consciousness. Here in this place of infinite calm I become one with the immortal Self of the world, and I observe. My thoughts cross my consciousness in a never-ending stream. I do not create these thoughts. They come from the infinite reaches of the Universal Subconscious Mind and are directed to my consciousness, for I have attracted them. I may choose any thoughts I desire. I have but to decide, and the ideas and images I have chosen are directed to me. As I accept them so will they manifest in my world. I alone decide what I will think; thus I decide my entire life. I bar the door of my mind to negative thoughts or thoughts of evil. The door is always open to admit the positive, the good, the beautiful and the aspiring. I have complete confidence in the wisdom and the power of the Universal Subconscious Mind. I do not predict the manner in which each of my thoughts will manifest; I have complete faith that God moves in the most perfect manner. There is DO such thing as lack unless it is accepted; the universe has infinite supply. Vigor and health, abundance and success are mine, for I choose only such thoughts. Love abounds in a universe where I am one with the immortal Self, the Universal Subconscious Mind, God. My every decision is answered from a perfect and inexhaustible source of power.

Chapter 8 – Love

No gate too strait, no journey too far
When the path is lit by the gleam
Of the radiant rays of the guiding star
Of love, the law that’s supreme

LOVE GOVERNS ALL

Much has been written and said of love. Poets have extolled it; musicians have sung about it; ballad and play and story are ever unfolding its many-sided drama. “Here is the truth about love,” they say, and present romantic love, a half-truth only, and nearly all the world is deluded. The surging, welling, emotional searching that throbs within the breast of each human being can never be reduced only to a rapport between the sexes. Our literature and our education have inhibited us into believing that the end-all of love is the finding of a mate, and our divorce courts and psychiatrists’ offices play host to multitudes of unhappy and disillusioned people who have discovered that this is not so. Into one of his strongest “physical drives, man has channeled his strongest emotional drive, and while there is riot the slightest valid reason that they shouldn’t work in conjunction, it is apparent that often they do not. The home and marriage provide simultaneous release for man’s sexual drive and the reproductive necessities of society, but neither of these very admirable institutions is in any way a school for love. For no person cart love another unless he loves humanity first!

Love is all. God is love. It is the nature of our basic unity, the underlying dim remembrance of complete spiritual oneness, that keeps us forever seeking union with others. From Universal Mind we have been differentiated into separateness, isolated within a fleshy prison, and throughout our incarnation in life we reach out to receive and to give and to commune —to return again to complete unity. Beauty, courage, loyalty, perseverance, creation are all born of love successfully given and received. Distortion, fear, iniquity, hate, resentment, violence, and failure are all born of love frustrated. Thus it is love that governs all—the supreme law of life.

Spake Jesus, 
“Thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself.”

THE CONSTANT SEARCH

We are evolved from pure and eternal spirit, from a place where space and time and

number do not exist. From infinity we are thrust into finiteness, perceive space and time and number and separateness and other things and beings. Is it any wonder that the terrible longing grows within us, to have and hold, to take and be taken, to give and receive, to share, to reach for an earthly realization of that complete sense of belonging that can only be known in absolute unity? Love we seek above all things, for we have known absolute love and are lost without it; and all our hurts are received when our reachings for love are rejected; and all the Prompters of the Subconscious Mind are planted by the buried pain remembrances of our love rejections.

The Apostle Paul wrote:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not Love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though 1 have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that 1 could remove mountains, and have not Love, I am nothing. And though I could bestow alt my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not Love, it profiteth me nothing.

Love suffereth long, and is kind; Love envieth not; Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

Love never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect shall come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then I know as also I am known. And now abideth Faith, Hope, Love, these three; but the greatest of these is Love.

In this life we are isolated from the Universal Subconscious Mind. In our separateness, we see through a glass, darkly. In our separateness, we long for the unity that rests at the crux of our Subconscious, and this is our motivating force, love. According to how we are able to give and receive it, all things in life come to us. The time will arrive when face to face we shall know as we are known, for the Universal Subconscious Mind is complete unity and thus is love itself, and we shall return to it.

The negation of love is fear, and fear is the father to hate, and fear and hate through all their varying degrees are the seeds from which all evil grows. Is it any wonder, then, that love will overcome all, for with love there is no fear, and with love there is no hate; with love there is no opposition.

True love, then, is simply recognition of the spiritual unity of all life. Once you have realized completely that you and your neighbor are one, it is no longer possible for you to perform an unseemly act against your neighbor; it would be as if you performed it against yourself. Nor can you hate your enemy, for your enemy is also one with you, as like unto you as your very self. All life and all matter are but manifold manifestations of the one immortal Self, the Universal Subconscious Mind. It is not the nature of this Mind to chastise itself, to fight with itself, or to destroy itself. Anyone who regards life as a battle, who seeks to beat others or destroy them, is doing neither more nor less than beating himself or destroying himself. One! One! One! sings the Universe. We are all sprung from one intelligence. We all return to one intelligence. There is but one immortal underlying Self to all creation. Separated from it in our physical bodies, we desire to know this complete unity again, and it is to this emotional drive that we give the name of love.

The child in his crib desires all things, asks for all things, has complete confidence that all things shall be delivered unto him for the asking, so recently has he come from the unity wherein there never was denial. Only slowly does the child come to know that there are other beings than itself who must be considered. Day by day the child learns it cannot have this, it must do without that, it must conduct itself this way and that way. If the child perceives that these denials are directed to it with love, if it is aware of care and companionship and tenderness and concern, it rapidly becomes accustomed to consideration and mutual exchange. But if the child is aware of malice or anger with each denial, then rejection and fear take root. Once reality is given fear, hate is born; for people fear that which they think may hurt them, and once hurt, they hate the hurter.

Thus fear and hate are reactions to frustrated love. Fear is directed at that which we anticipate will reject our love, and hate is directed at that which has already rejected it. But always our motivations are aimed at finding fulfillment of the urge to unity that wells forever in our Subconscious.

HATE AND LOVE

So hate is akin to love and is the working of the exact same force. Hate is the negation of love, just as poverty is the negation of abundance. There is only one force at work

in love and hate; in love it works positively, in hate it works negatively, and in fear it doesn’t work at all, but chatters unfulfilled and undecided in one spot, now moving tentatively forward, now moving tentatively backward.

Few will dispute the power of love, but the vast majority of us have great difficulty bringing it into all aspects of our lives. Hundreds of buried pain remembrances, or Prompters, have set up coping mechanisms within our Subconscious so that we automatically are directed to greet certain circumstances or things or people with belligerence, aggression, cruelty, fear, timidity, or a thousand different other negations that backfire on us daily. Yet all of these Prompters can be dissolved by meditation at the center of consciousness, by finding the Kingdom of Heaven. At this magic center, where all things are known and understood, absolute love will banish fear and hate. ‘

What of these two great cripplers? The greatest is fear for it proceeds phantom-like out of our darker thoughts, has no substance and thus is difficult to deal with. It hovers its distorted shadows in our dreams and in our waking consciousness. Its many demons lurk around each corner of our lives. It paralyzes, prostrates, immobilizes, bleeds off the stream of dynamic life like a monstrous parasite. It is fear that vanquishes our goals before we have even set out for them. It is fear that tarnishes the looking-glass of life. It is fear that squeezes our arteries, restricts our circulation, visits lethargy upon our energies, dulls the brightness of the day, casts a pall of murky foreboding over all the events of life. For fear is but the negative use of faith. Fear is faith in negative things and negative circumstances. Fear believes we are surrounded by a hostile universe and hostile beings all bent upon preying upon us and destroying us. All of which is sheer idiocy.

LOVE DISSOLVES THE PROMPTERS

How many buried pain remembrances does each of us have—a dozen? a hundred? a thousand? Psychiatry has shown us that they form an almost never-ending stream on the time track of subconscious memory, extending from this very day back to the dim perceptions of prenatal experience when egg and sperm were but recently united in the womb. A great deal of good has been done by psychiatric treatment, but the tedious search for and exposure of each of these innumerable sore spots with the end in mind of building a psychologically sound person is a gigantic and unwieldy process indeed. It is like a farmer who year after year harvests crops which have been afflicted with the blight. From the great mound of wheat he accumulates, he patiently examines each stalk for evidences of disease, discards those that are affected and stores those in the barn that are whole. Much more time does he consume with his examination than he does in planting and harvesting his entire crop, and what a pitiful supply of whole wheat he has to show for his labors. How much more sensible for him to take care with his planting, to exercise caution against the disease of his crops by keeping them adequately sprayed and watered and cultivated. He will work far less and harvest far more.

Thus it is with the Prompters of the Subconscious. They must be dealt with en masse, at the roots of their beings, and all negative thinking and fear and hate must be cast out of the mind by choice at the center of consciousness.

We are jealous of our love. We are fearful that we may lose our love objects, and our love objects are our very sustenance in life. They have so much power over our happiness that sometimes our love for them runs negatively and turns to hate for the space of an hour, a day, a week. We become fearful and apprehensive that we may lose the things we love, or they may turn against us, and resentment grows within us, and we strike out in our blindness.

Oscar Wilde wrote:

For each man kills the thing he loves Though each man does not die.

And so the gallows and the barred cell are constant hosts to a procession of lost men and women whose love has run to hate, so close akin are the two when they are without the firm and solid foundation of unity with the Universal Subconscious Mind.

He who loves God and understands that God is love, loves all things. His love does not rest on the shifting sands of the world, nor does it wax hot and cold as the -winds that blow; but he knows his complete oneness with the Father whose very essence is love. He seeks not, for he has all. Wherever his eye looks, he sees but a reflection of himself. All things return his love, and his prayers move the very foundations of the world.

He prayeth best who loveth best all things both great and small.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

ABSOLUTE LOVE LIES WITHIN

Love is the supreme law, for through it we throw off the bonds of separateness and perceive the great spiritual unity in which we have our being. Through love we attain a rebirth of consciousness, unity with the Universal Mind, such as Jesus spoke of when he said, “I say unto you that unless a man be born again he shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.”

We need not drive for love. Love is in us, complete and absolute. It cries out for expression from the very depth of our being, but we lock it in. We consider it smart and adult to build a fence around love and submit to loneliness and pride and vanity. How dear to us our vain little errors are, and how smug! We hurt only ourselves. He who deprives himself of the expression of love, deprives himself of all things. He hurts no one but himself, for love moves through all the universe, expresses itself through every bud and bush and flower and rain drop, and needs no man for its fulfillment. Loves makes the world go. It will make you go too. Just let it!

CREATION SPRINGS FROM LOVE

Life is creation, and all creation is a labor of love. Nothing springs full-bodied from the vast creativeness of the Universal Subconscious Mind unless there is first a desire to contribute to humanity. The essence of creativeness is love of life, for such love guides a man to do something better or bigger or more enlightening than has ever been done before. Such love catches a man in the great unity and the great purpose, and he instinctively perceives the direction in which life moves, becomes one with its efforts, contributes, and creates.

Life seeks for knowledge, and creation is the measure of what has been learned; thus creation is the purpose of life, and creation springs from love. Each of us has a talent, sometimes several, given especially to us, for through us God has become something unique in the universe. Love develops our talents, sets us free to do the special work that we can do. No matter what else we do in life, we are never completely happy unless our talents are developed, unless our destinies are fulfilled, unless we enlarge the vision and knowledge of God for which all humanity strives. By allowing love to work in our lives as a power for good, we become free to develop our special gifts in accord with an expanding and seeking universe; we become free to contribute. This contribution, when it is individualized and expressed in such manner as is unique with each of us, advances all humanity along the road of knowledge and thus moves in accord with the very nature of life itself.

The most pitiful spectacle of our time is presented by those people who do not realize that failure and unhappiness are their own fault. He whose cries of outrage and resentment are heard along life’s pathways has yet his greatest lesson to learn. It is not fate or luck or an angry God that has dealt him his unsavory condition—it is himself! The perfect seed of success and happiness lies within each of us, and there is a channel in each of us through which it may become perfectly expressed. This channel is as manifold as there are numbers of people, but in every case it is opened only by love, and nothing may close it but the lack of love.

LOVE OR DIE

Love is the motivating law of life. On all sides of us we see the inexorable command of the universe: ”Love or die. ” Through love we serve, and by serving we multiply abundance and good and knowledge and beauty and comfort; but through lack of love we grow selfish and bitter and complain ing, and we sow the seeds of hate and destruction, and we wither and die and detract from life. By working with love we add all things unto ourselves, add all things unto humanity.

“God is love,” said Jesus. “He dwelleth within me, and I in Him. He doeth the works.” Thus the great teaching he left us is that all humanity dwells in love and love dwells in all humanity, and all things good, great and small, are wrought by love.

It avails a man little to recognize the law of thoughts becoming things, if he has not love. Despite all his will to think only positively and to accept only the good, he will find his thinking warped into patterns of selfishness and bitterness and resentment every time he is faced with a crisis in his life. I£ love has not made itself fully known to him, he sees a hostile world about him and regards other people as hostile creatures bent on beating him or destroying him or taking from him. As long as this type of belief lies at the crux of his subconscious, he is creating an environment exactly the opposite of that which he wishes to have. “Love never faileth,” said Paul, but faith and knowledge and prophecy wither and vanish with time.

OPEN YOUR HEART

It seems so difficult for us to open our hearts to love. We are so mindful of our petty little hurts and rejections, so super-sensitive to the opinions and circumstances about us, so steeped in our own self-centeredness, so pulled in on our own little problems and victories and failures. We isolate ourselves from the great unity; like hermits we retire into our caves; like hurt animals we lie in lonely retreat and lick our fancied wounds; and always we build our walls—walls to protect us from further hurt. Far from protecting us, our walls visit upon us the greatest hurt of all, for by them we slowly kill ourselves, not only physically, but mentally and spiritually as well.

Open your heart. Allow love to enter. What matters a hurt when it is but a step toward fulfillment? Life is for living, and some experience of pain and sorrow is essential even to distinguish pleasure and joy.

Wrote Walter Chalmers Smith:
There is no gain except by loss
There is no life except by death
There is no vision but by faith.

Love heals the body, comforts the lonely hour, illumines the darkest path, redeems from sin and evil, brings prosperity, overcomes fear, builds character, and reveals the

LOVE OR SUFFER

As individuals in this great God-seeking drama we know as life, we have but two main choices: Love or suffer!

Every moment of every day we are engaged in the spiritual force of creating. We hope, plan, consider, desire, act, speak, fear, use our will, love, hate, are joyful, embittered—always we are creating. There is only one force in the entire universe; it creates all things according to what we conceive, accept, and allow. The right use of this power creates a blessing; the wrong use creates a harm, even a disaster. This power pervades the universe, is in all things, is all things. It serves us or masters us according to our perception. But the choice is always up to us.

This power is accessible to all men, and all of it is accessible to any man. It works for evil through hate and resentment and bitterness and coldness. It works for good only through love. Love recognizes that all things are accomplished through the many manifestations of God. Love sees that all things are the One Thing that lies back of all creation. Love knows that your neighbor is yourself, that your enemy is yourself, that there is only one power behind all space and time and form. Love understands that God is sought by everyone, each working in his own way toward his own vision, and each sustaining the other through his discoveries. Love knows that each man advances all men. Love knows that the only activity worthy of man’s heirship of God is creation. Love fuses all beings and all life into a great common purpose: to share and contribute and advance along the common path toward God. God is love; love is life; we are love. He who denies love denies himself and destroys his part in the human drama.

All the evil Prompters of the Subconscious Mind are buried memories of love rejections and love frustrations. They form dams that prohibit the free flow of love through our consciousness; they engender bitterness and fear and hate as subconscious hostilities, and they bring evil into our world in opposition to that which we consciously desire.

Love or suffer; love or die; for the lack of love attracts evil, but the presence of love attracts good.

THE FRUSTRATION OF LOVE

Humanity strives for love from the cradle to the grave. Every moment of every day, every task we undertake, every word we utter, every opinion we have, every pose we assume are all aimed at achieving the feeling of being loved, or coping with the feeling that we are not loved. Each neurosis and psychosis has its roots in love frustration. Every disease, illness, accident, revolution, war, and disaster has its roots in love frustration. Blindly, all humanity searches for a love object. Sensitively, we recoil from each rebuff. Silently, we withdraw our love within the fortress of forgetfulness, and post sentinels of hostility, despair, ruthlessness, and cruelty at the gates to be sure that love will neither enter nor depart. And so we kill our hopes and our very lives.

How unattainable love seems to most of us; how complex our spiritual natures and our emotional drives. Yet the answer is appallingly simple. Lower the barriers! Love is God, is the Universal Subconscious Mind, and God dwells within each of us, constantly seeking expression and outlet. The perfect seed of love is within. Said Jesus, “Be thou perfect, even as thy heavenly Father is perfect.” Said John, “Love lies in this, not in our love for him but in his love for us—and love for him is complete in us.” Perfect love is in each of us, constantly seeking outlet. All we have to do is let it!

Banish false pride and vanity. You are neither better nor worse than anything that exists. We all depend on each other for our very existence. Men have not advanced by fighting and hating and competing, but by being brothers at labor toward a common goal. Love is the unfurled flag at the head of the ranks—by it we survive and progress—without it we perish!

We must love and we must accept love. If we fail in either, we defeat ourselves. If mankind fails in either, the purpose of life is defeated. Love is the power for good that surges heavenward all through the universe. It is forever trying to express infinite good through you.

Give over all things to the goodness and greatness of the perfect Self that dwells within you. Release all feelings of hatred, bitterness, unhappiness, and depression. Surrender your will and your guidance to God, Love, the Universal Subconscious Mind, with complete trust and perfect serenity. Look with the eyes of love, listen with the ears of love, speak with the tongue of love, think with the mind of love, feel with the heart of love. On all of life’s pathways you walk hand in hand with God.

LOVE AND SEXUALITY

The most important love expression of mankind is sexuality. In this relation between a man and a woman, in the sexual act, is expressed the complete physical, psychic, and spiritual hunger of one being for another. No other activity or expression of mankind provides such a total outlet for love” as the sex act. Yet how little it is understood, and how abused!

Physical love provides the basis for most of our literature, art, music, drama, and has given birth to endless tomes of stilted and inhibited expositions on the place of sexuality in life. Humanity foists upon itself a false attitude toward sex, and each man is secretly ashamed that he varies sexually from what he assumes his fellows to be.

The end and aim of the sex act is not procreation—it is the expression of love! When the world has finally thrown out the window all sham and deceit and maliciousness and self-chastisement, it will finally come to understand that the conception and birth of offspring are incidental to love between a man and a woman and never the cause of it. It is indeed very obscure why mankind has saddled itself with the painful belief that the sex act is only morally right when it is for the purpose of procreation. Animals are bred that way! The emotional search of each man and each woman, to give and to receive, to possess and be possessed, is fully realized in the sex act when there is a free flow of unimpeded love between the partners. It is sexuality that provides us with a human outlet and a human expression of divine love. According to how a person is possessed by love, his sex life will be uplifting, indifferent, degrading, or agonizing. It will be an expression of love or it won’t be. I£ it is not, he is out of tune with life, and his sexual dissatisfaction is but a symptom.

THE DESIRE FOR FUSION

Love is the recognition of our true being and the dim remembrance of the complete unity from which we all have sprung. Love is the great motivation to re-experience this unity. Love is the desire for fusion. We desire this fusion because it rewards us with pleasure. Thus there is an erotic basis for all love, whether expended on art, beauty, other persons, or even inanimate objects. All love is sexual in nature, for love is the desire to give pleasure and receive pleasure. No work of art, no bit of prose or poetry, no spellbinding speaker, no bridge or building, no scientific discovery or medical advance has ever inspired in a single human breast but a fraction of the pleasure that is known by millions of people daily through the simple act of sex. Thus it is again Nature which has provided the best mechanism of all for the understanding of love, but as always man sets about attempting to thwart Nature before he has the good sense to cooperate with her. Active and vigorous sex lives, unimpeded by inhibition and witch’s tales, express the fullness of love that dwells within every human heart.

There is no such thing as licentiousness, debauchery, and lasciviousness when love is present. Sexual excesses are the product of the absence of love. Promiscuous sexual contacts are always the symptom of a person who is lost from love and is endlessly seeking fulfillment through varied sexual experiences. He is doomed to external disappointment until he discovers that satisfactory sexual experience is the result of love, and never the cause.

Man is a monogamous creature because he needs an object for his love—an object that not only accepts his love but returns it as well. Because of the sexual nature of his body he fastens his affections on some person of the opposite sex. One of the great satisfactions of life is finding a mate and obtaining the great human expression of love through sexual union. Without this very primary love fulfillment a man pursues countless wraiths through all of his days in search of a fusion that has escaped him. He may turn his love to art, to business, to science, to endless numbers of activities, but in the end they all pall on him and he becomes sad and pessimistic and defeated, for he has denied his own humanity, which is physical, and thus his love has never been complete.

The poet Shelley wrote: “That profound and complicated sentiment which we call love is the universal thirst for a communion not merely of the senses, but of our whole nature, intellectual, imaginative and sensitive . . . The sexual impulse, which is only one, and often a small part of those claims, serves, from its obvious and external nature, as a kind of type of expression of the rest, a common basis, an acknowledged and visible link.”

No one will deny that sexual intercourse can give pleasure. What unholy masochism prompts us ever to believe that such pleasure is sinful or wrong? We didn’t make our bodies and couldn’t if we tried. Do we presume to state that the great Creator made a mistake by accompanying sex relations with pleasurable sensations? It is just as sensible for us to say that it is sinful for eyes to see, and to set about forming organizations for the putting out of peoples’ eyes.

Oh, the prophets of evil and shame and fear and hate have made their inroads when they have woven into our racial thinking the hideous tendency to believe that everything painful is good and everything pleasurable is evil. We have martyred ourselves too long.

SEX IS LIFE EXPRESSING LOVE

When people have learned to love, when they know that love is divine and fills the whole universe and themselves, when they realize there is no fulfillment in life when love is denied, the world will see an end to the failure of marriages. For when love is free to enter a man’s world through his heart, it will pervade all the things he touches. It will find perfect expression in his sex life with his mate, for we are all of the same nature and all seek the same fulfillment, and we shall all find it through love, for love never fails.

Sex is an outlet of love, and left to love will be good and great and joyful. In the words of Havelock Ellis, “It is passion, more passion and fuller, that we need. The moralist who bans passion is not of our time; his place these many years is with the dead. For we know what happens in a world when those who ban passion have triumphed. When Love is suppressed, Hate takes its place. The least regulated orgies of Love grow innocent beside the orgies of Hate … It is passion and ever more passion that we need if we are to undo the work of Hate, if we are to add gaiety and splendor to life, to the sum of human achievement, to the aspiration of human ecstasy.”

The universe dances and sings and buds and blooms and builds. All of life clings one to the other, serves one another in a great common purpose. Love pervades all, love is behind all, love is the great goal. God is love, and there is nothing sinful or shameful about God. All the universe is caught up in the work of love, in the work of fusion, in the work of sex.

Sex is life expressing love!

Thus your sex life, your relationship with your mate, expresses always your own understanding of love. But love never proceeds into the understanding solely through the relationship of a man with his mate. The understanding of true love comes only from the relationship of man with his spirit, of man with the Universal Subconscious Mind, of man with God. No human being can truly love another unless he first knows of the love of God. The Kingdom of Love is the Kingdom of Heaven, and exists within each man and woman. A man who loves God loves life, loves himself, and the nature of his lovingness will eternally come back to him; his marriage will be a perfect fusion of his understanding of love, and all the things of this world will shower him with goodness. In the words of Emerson, “Love asks nothing but does all receive.”

THE TRUTH ABOUT HATE

Ours is a world of many conflicts because we are still ignorant. On all sides of us we see the contending forces of good and evil. Many people would have us believe that evil is as much a reality as good; they would have us believe that there are two opposing forces at work in the universe—God and the devil. Such people are accepting opinion evolved during the darkest ages of mankind, when all things were judged by appearances. The slightest thought on the matter makes it apparent that both God and the devil could not exist. There can only be one Creator. God couldn’t make the devil, and the devil couldn’t make God; there is only one truth behind the universe. If you accept the devil as being this truth, you are forced into believing that truthful things are hate, violence, robbery, murder, war, ugliness, poverty, disease, and chaos, and all goodness is false. If you accept God as being this truth, you are perceiving that truthful things are love, peace, work, constructiveness, neighborliness, beauty, abundance, health, and order, and all evil is false. The choice is obvious. All evil is false, is illusion.

Then what is the truth about hate? The truth about hate is love. Hate is simply love moving in the wrong direction. Hate is simply love turned upon itself. In the ancient Dhammapada we find, “Hatred does not cease by hatred; hatred ceases by love.” Thus it is that Jesus advised to “turn the other cheek” and to “love your enemies.” Love always overcomes hatred, for love is the truth about hatred.

Find a man who hates and you will find a man who believes he is hatred. Find a man who resents and you will find a man who believes he is resented. Find a man who is bitter and you will find a man who believes life is treating him bitterly. Find a man who is hopeless and you will find a man who believes that no one cares for him. The common belief of all who deny love is their conviction that life does not love them. So it is that all evil is born of rejected love. So it is that a man must first know that he is beloved of God and of life before he allows love to operate through him.

Love creates, produces, heals, comforts, guides, illumines. He who makes himself one with love makes himself one with with God, and God works through him.

TRUST LOVE

We exist in a world which is striving to know and understand itself. Each of us is a miraculous manifestation of that world. There is a great and unknown spirit working in and through every man, woman, and child in the universe. This spirit is seeking to know. We serve the ends of Almighty God by living and loving and learning, by lifting up our eyes to the stars, by asking questions, by searching for answers. Life is the supreme adventure. The deathless, sleepless spirit within us leads us ever onward to a higher good. We cannot fail if we keep our hearts filled with love and faith.

Trust love, for when you trust love you trust God. We are all children sitting at the knee of a loving Father whose purpose we will fathom in time. What is going on is a great and good thing, and we are a part of it; we shall always be a part of it; we shall finally be one with it. We need not be perfectly happy every minute of every day, for perfect happiness only comes with perfect knowledge. But by trusting in the great and good ends of life and by knowing that the door to the mystery swings on the hinges of love, we shall never lose faith in our divinity and our ability to build a heaven here on earth.

Know that truth is always the great and the good and the Beautiful and the aspiring. Close your eyes, your ears, your mind, and your heart to all else; it is illusion. Says the Bhagavad-Gita, “There is no existence for that which is unreal; there is no non-

THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE

One desire pervades the universe—the desire for love. Through this desire all things are created—our songs, our stories, our paintings, our engines and machines, our cities and schools, our churches and stores. The hunger of mankind is to know the love of the great Creator. In all lands men are supplicating God to join with them in some enterprise. Each of two warring nations calls on God to aid it in the fight. But men are beginning to realize that God doesn’t join anybody— people join God. God is love moving according to law. We must move over on God’s side rather than ask him to move over on ours. God’s side is the side o£ love. When man moves toward love, he moves toward God, toward the foundation on earth of the brotherhood o£ man, peace, happiness, and knowledge.

This adventure of ours, this life we live, has caught us in the miracle of all creation. We create by our thought and our desire. How precious are the chambers of thought within us. Whatever we think is visited upon us in this world. Learning how to think and how to love, how to create through the use of Universal Mind are the main businesses of our lives. According to how we learn these laws all things come to us.

Every thought we think, every desire we have, every mood we invite, each emotion we undergo is projected into the great creative substance of the Universal Subconscious Mind to be manifested in the world about us. What a miracle! But also what a responsibility. We as easily visit evil upon ourselves as we visit good, for according to how we think and believe so is it done to us. Every minute of every day we are using the greatest power in the universe for good or for evil. Only a fool or a madman would deliberately use this power for evil.

God’s will is love, and by following love as the guiding law of life, we follow God’s will and thus have infinite power. Every thought attracted by love and accepted by faith will create good in your world.

THE MIGHTY MEDICINE

Society is love expressed by groups. Men living together, working together, building together, helping each other, seeking common goals, attaining knowledge, are all brought about through love. We depend on each other for our very lives, for we are all one in reality, and are nothing without each other. The cities and schools and institutions of our world have all been built through love, one man for the other, one neighbor for the other, husband for wife, parent for child. Every step we take toward the divinity that is ours is guided by the illumination of the love of God for man, and the love of God is complete in man through each step taken. Wondrous things are at work in the universe, and we need not see into the reaches of infinity to grasp their mighty import. Wrote Nietzsche, “Behind thy thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a mighty lord, an unknown sage—it is called Self; it dwelleth in thy body.” What a vision of splendor, what a mighty fate awaits each of us when we have returned once again home, to know as we shall be known.

There is no limit to love in the universe, and all of it is available to you. Put this mighty medicine to work in your life, and you will see such a healing and prospering and peace as will dazzle your very eyes.

In your meditations, in the silent times at the center of your consciousness, remember to think all things with love, and negative thoughts will be banished from your mind. Love bars the door of mind to the evil and the negative, and opens the door to the good and the positive, and from mind all things proceed. Yet the heart rules, always has ruled, always will.

Whatever takes root in mind is first attracted by the heart, by love or hate, one or the other. Thus by letting love into your heart, you bring good into your mind and into your life. By letting love into your heart you banish hate; hate cannot live with love. Trust in love, trust all things to love, think all things with love, do all things with love; in this manner you will walk with God, in tune with the infinite power of the universe.

REVIEW

1.Love is the underlying unity of the universe.

2.Love is the supreme spiritual law. Love is God.

3.Humanity seeks love above all things.

4.True love is recognition of the spiritual unity of all life.

5.Frustrated love gives birth to fear and hate, gives birth to evil.

6.The absence of love is fear. The rejection of love is hate.

7.Love will cast out the Prompters of the Subconscious Mind, and never fails.

8.He who knows and believes in the love of God loves all things both great and small.

9.Complete and absolute love is within each of us.

10.All creation is but an expression of love.

11.On all sides of us we see the commands of the universe, “Love or suffer. Love or die.”

12.Faith and knowledge are nothing without love.

13.By our fancied hurts, by our sensitive egos, we isolate ourselves, develop fear and hate, create evil in our lives.

14.All unhappiness, every neurosis, every psychosis, all illness, accident, disaster, all evil are born of rejected love.

15.Love works for all who surrender their hearts, and works only with surrender.

16.Spirit is always perfect and love is always perfect. The imperfect things of our world are the result of our imperfect knowledge of love. We are growing to perfect knowledge.

17.Sexuality is mankind’s most complete expression of love.

18.A satisfactory sex life is the result of love and never the cause.

19.Throughout the universe sex is life expressing love.

20.Love of man for woman and woman for man is a manifestation of the love of God for all mankind.

21.Love creates, produces, heals, comforts, guides, and illumines.

22.Man creates through his thought and desire projecting into Universal Subconscious Mind. What he thinks and desires with love creates good. What he thinks and desires in the absence of love creates evil.

23.By becoming one with love we become one with the power of the Universal Subconscious Mind.

THE CONQUERING IDEA

These are the tools we deal with: we think; we love; and we believe. Through thought we attain knowledge. Through love we attune ourselves with Universal Mind. Through belief we transform thoughts into things. These three tools, understood and

Slowly the world is awakening to the truth. Gradually the light of man’s spiritual splendor and destiny is penetrating into our schools and social institutions, into our business houses, into our governments. A common Father binds all men together in a great and irrevocable bond. Through love alone will we be guided to our destination, make our lives on earth great and good and abundant. This is the message that Jesus brought. It will win the universe for man!

In the words of Albert Schweitzer: “Sooner or later the idea here put forth will conquer the world, for with inexorable logic it carries with it both the heart and the head.”

RECOMMENDED READING

Change Your Life Through Love by Stella Terrill Mann. Published by Dodd, Mead and Company.

EIGHTH MEDITATION

The truth about life is the infinite love of God for all things. Each man is my brother, bound to me by immortal and everlasting ties. I love all people; they dwell in my Father and my Father in them. I surrender my heart to humanity, and humanity serves me with love. I surrender my heart to God, and the love of God becomes complete in me. I am one with all the power and vigor and knowledge of the universe. I let go of fear and confusion; they are illusions and cannot live with truth, which is love, which is complete and fulfilled in me now. The great reality of Universal Subconscious Mind is forever present at the center of my being. I draw from it perfect intelligence, perfect health, perfect peace, perfect happiness, perfect love. I surrender all the built- up inhibitions that have been impressed upon me by the illusions of the world. I refuse to accept anything but truth, which is always the good and the positive. I move in accord with Divine Intelligence. I accept the will and the love of God, which I express in laughter and joy and pleasure and service. Only the good, the great, the significant, and the constructive do I add unto myself. Nothing else is allowed into the creative depths of my being. The surging desire of each man is to know the fulfillment of love. The way to this fulfillment is through contact with the center of consciousness, through communion with the silent dweller within. I surrender my doubts and confusions and fears. Universal love is complete in me. I am united with God, move with God. I am serene and sure, joyful and achieving, confident of ultimate splendor.

Chapter 11 IMMORTALITY

Each soul slumbers a little while On this shadowy side of the stream And waking remembers life with a smile As a tale once told in a dream

SPIRIT NEVER DIES

All too often those who search for the soul’s immortality do so in answer to the question, “Will a man live again?” and they cloud the issue, for if a man be immortal he never dies; nor is he ever born; he simply is. That which has no ending can have no beginning, and that which has no beginning or ending is timeless and infinite, is pure being, exists forever.

It is apparent that the body is not immortal; it has an obvious beginning and an obvious end. What we expect to be immortal in man is thus invisible, is spirit, a mysterious presence that animates body with consciousness. Each of us knows this presence very well, for it is what we feel ourselves to be; it is what we refer to when we say “I,” This “I” then, this consciousness we know to be ourselves, is what we expect to be perpetuated after the death of the body.

What and who is this “I”? Is it the accumulated memories of a lifetime? Is it the knowledge each of us has attained? Is it some central perception station at the nerve endings of the five senses? Perhaps it is all of these, but it is a certainty that it is consciousness, for only that which is conscious is capable of referring to itself as “I.”

And consciousness is invisible!

True, we mark consciousness in another being by observing that it is animated, but we never see this consciousness, never touch or hear it. It exists within the very depths of the creature, and we understand it at all only by understanding the consciousness in ourselves. There are not different kinds of consciousness. Consciousness is consciousness. The sense of self that peers from behind your eyes is the same sense of self that peers from behind the eyes of your neighbor. Though this awareness is never at the same identical stage of development in any two beings, the difference is always one of degree and never of kind. One self pervades the universe, and differentiating in an attempt to know itself better, it attains to finiteness and uniqueness by becoming multiplicity instead of unity. Each creature is thus an expression of the immortal self. There is that within it which was never born and which will never die.

What is this deathless, ageless spirit that each of us senses within himself? How ephemeral it seems and how difficult to understand. Like mercury it slithers from under our fingers the minute we try to grasp it. For a second, a moment, we have a flash of insight, so that we seem right on the verge of discovering some mighty secret, then we begin to think about it and it disappears, leaving us wondering if we haven’t imagined it. Something blocks us away from the discovery. Some false habit of thought bars us from true knowledge of self. The culprit is the ego, the erroneous sense of self which we accumulate during our lifetimes. The death of the ego, which we fear so much, is the very thing we must achieve before we take unto ourselves the consciousness of immortal self.

Let us reconsider the timeless, spaceless qualities of Universal Subconscious Mind, which has no beginning and no end, which is conscious but not self-conscious, and which is immortal being. Self without beginning or end incarnates and in so doing becomes something with a beginning. Anything with a beginning must have an end, and so the cycle of birth and death of physical bodies is established. With the birth of the physical body there is gradually built up something subtle and deluding, the accumulated experience undergone by Self within body, which gives rise to a sense of separateness and isolation, and is ego. This is memory of the beginning o£ physical experience, and we are deluded into calling it “I.” In this manner we fail to perceive our true being, identify ourselves with the shallow and transitory little ego, and are shut away from the infinite and immortal intelligence from which we have sprung.

Nearly everyone considers his ego to be his true self, and as a result is totally unable to comprehend a life after the death of the physical body. He remembers the birth of his ego, in his first experiences and thoughts, and thus he senses the ego’s inevitable end. Since he identifies himself with ego, he either looks forward with fear to undesirable oblivion or refuses to consider the matter of eventual death at all. If fear has been sufficiently ingrained in him by the practitioners of masochism, he even fancies himself faced by the possibility of providing an eternal roast for the fires of hell.

REBIRTH OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Ego, the tinsel trapping of self-awareness, is the undoing of us all. It bars us from consciousness of universal Self. It perceives all things as existing outside of consciousness and thus deludes us into believing that things originate on the physical plane. It loads us with a sense of personal responsibility, engenders bitterness and hate by its fancied wounds, sees itself as a speck in a limitless universe and blows itself up all the bigger in an hopeless attempt to fill infinity. The question is not how the ego shall live, but how the ego shall die. For only when the ego dies do we truly begin to live.

The ego is mortal. It has its beginning and it has its end. When death overtakes the body, it overtakes the ego also. Freed at last from delusion, self knows Self and sees its immortality.

The fear of death, then, springs from the ego’s fear of dissolution, but only because we cling to the ego as our true selves. He who perceives at the center of consciousness the Great Self which is buried there, lets go of the ego forever and moves in tune with the infinite. The death of the physical body frees us all from the bonds of the ego, but the unshackling of these bonds during our lifetime brings power.

The death of the ego, then, is not a thing to be avoided, but a thing to be welcomed, a spiritual awakening that illumines all things, a transfiguration wherein the soul becomes fused with immortal Self. It is attained through humility, through love, through non-resistance, through fusion with Universal Subconscious Mind at the center of consciousness. Who achieves this consciousness perceives immortality.

Walt Whitman:

Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there. I walked unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist.

And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon. Long ago I was hugged close—long and long. Immense have been the preparations for me. Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen.

For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings. It avails not, time nor place,— distance avails not. I am with you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence.

Jesus:
Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.

IMMORTAL SELF

One mind, one spirit, one Self pervades the universe, and its purpose is to know itself. It is primal stuff, first cause of all things, and is engaged in a work of expanding consciousness. Neither space nor time exist in it, for it is infinite, nor does it adhere to any form, for it is all form. It is becoming things; it becomes all things; and each form

it creates is an expression of its knowledge of itself. It is eternal now, which is all times, past, present, and future. It is one place which is all places and anyplace. It is invisible. It is spirit. It is intelligence. It is mind. It is God. Incarnating into form, it becomes that form, and when the form dissolves, the spirit again becomes universal. It is this in man which is immortal, not the body, not the ego, not the personality, but the Self. He who attains to awareness of the Self in life, attains to power.

From the Upanishads:
The one Self within all beings becomes different, according to what it enters, and exists also without.

Self is Universal Subconscious Mind, which is infinite. All of it exists within each of us, and all of it exists without, for infinity is absolute unity and cannot be divided. It is this that Jesus meant when he said, “The Father in me, and I in the Father.” Therefore if we would perceive our immortality, we must perceive the timeless being that exists at the center of our consciousness. But whether we attain to this illumination or not, we are immortal still. Everlasting life is not given to some and taken from others, for we are all one in reality. To him who is held firm in the bonds of ego, the veil will yet be lifted when the physical body dies and the ego ceases its delusion. Then he shall know as he is known, shall see self in Self, shall perceive in an instant the vast reaches of infinity. But a degree of this power and perception can be ours in this life if we can only forsake the ego and take unto ourselves the mantle of God.

FORSAKING THE EGO

Ego proceeds from Conscious Mind, though they are not identical. Conscious Mind is the reception station at the nerve endings of the five senses. It is a classifying, tabulating, analyzing machine governed solely by sensory stimuli and perceiving all things as existing outside it. It builds habit patterns of work and a mass of experience and perceives the movement of time. Thus the ego is compounded of memory, and prompts us to act always in the light of experience. According to the ego’s conception so our lives become. This thing we falsely call “I,” this ego, sees its limitations and brings those limitations into our lives. It fears and hates and envies, for it seeks constantly to puff itself up, by vain posturing, by blind attitude, and it brings into our lives the physical results of these mental causes, and keeps us constantly in chains.

So it is that a man must first be meek and humble before he can enter the Kingdom of Heaven, before he can become fused with immortal Self. Sometimes he comes to it through great suffering, sometimes through despair, sometimes through pain, but always the ego is reduced to nothingness before the portal swings open. And the ego does not surrender lightly. This posturing little elf with its blind delusions would have us believe it is our true self, and when we attempt to cast it aside, we feel its struggles in the very depths of our souls. So great is its resistance that men mortify the flesh, practice celibacy, abstain from all sensual pleasure in an attempt to ignore the evidence of the senses so that the ego might leave and the center of consciousness be revealed.

The ego is what we seem to be; the knowledge of what we truly are lies at the center of .consciousness. Such knowledge is perceived only by him who strips the ego bare, casts it aside like a worn-out garment. There is a kind of death in this, because we are accustomed to regard the ego as our true self, but the ego shall die anyway, and he who achieves its death in life attains power. Said Jesus, “Unless a man be born again, he shall not enter the Kingdom Of Heaven.”

Seek the death of the ego, and be born anew in the knowledge of Self.

It is the Self that is immortal. It is the Self, Universal Subconscious Mind, which we truly are. All men have everlasting life, and it is not a question of whether we shall live again, but the insistent and glorious fact is that our real selves shall never die, just as they are never born. The spirit is birthless and deathless and changeless.

THE AFTERLIFE

What will the afterlife be like? It will be like stepping from the consciousness of a gnat into the consciousness of infinity. With the death of the physical body we shrug off the bonds of Conscious Mind and ego, lay aside the limitations of flesh, and become one with Universal Subconscious Mind, pervading all times and places. We shall have no bodies in the hereafter, for we shall be all bodies. We shall be in no specific place in the hereafter, for we shall be in all places. We shall not meet old friends and loved ones in the hereafter, for we shall all be one, unified and indivisible, one Self, one mind, one eternal “I.”

The question is sometimes asked, “What good is a hereafter like that? Unless a man have a body and five senses and things to accomplish and friends to meet with, what good is it? Wouldn’t oblivion be better?” And the only answer possible to this question is that oblivion is inevitable for the part of any man that asks this question, for it is the ego that poses it. It is Conscious Mind, built up of the experience of the five senses, that seeks to perpetuate itself, and it is no more than a flower, a bud on the everlasting shoot, flowering in season and withering out of season. Life with its give and take, serve and be served, strive and accomplish, cannot in any manner be compared with existence in the hereafter. Life is the ego’s day in the sun; the hereafter is the eternity of the Self.

Space and time and body are the means by which Universal Subconscious Mind seeks an ever greater self-awareness. From infinity immortal Self incarnates in space and time, and what it becomes is an expression of its knowledge of itself. As its idea of self enlarges, it withdraws from body and incarnates again in a higher expression. All evolution follows this path, constantly upward, always increasing in self-awareness.

To everyone at some time in his life has come the startling magnitude of his own consciousness, perhaps for a second only, and he has been overcome by the question, “Why do I live at this particular time, in this particular place, in these particular circumstances? Indeed, what miracle has caused me to exist at all?” And at that moment he stands very close to the veil, almost sees through it, but not quite, almost understands what is beyond it, but not quite. He is startled, and a little uncomfortable, seized by a strange sense of vertigo, wondering whether life itself is not die dream, a sleep he has fallen into at some dimly remembered place, from which he will awaken at any moment. But usually he shunts aside this rare moment of mystical experience and concerns himself again with the workaday material world, taking assurance from the solidity of physical objects and the sharp definition of sensory perception. Thus he lives like an ostrich, burying his head in the sands of life and refusing to examine the most miraculous thing of all—his own consciousness—where it has come from and where it is going.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
About the growing boy.
—William Wordsworth

Sprung from the everlasting Self into life, there is in each child the remembrance of Universal Subconscious Mind. But as his ego develops, as he attains memory of sensory experience and the Conscious Mind grows, the memory becomes dimmer and dimmer, until at last he can recall it no longer, blocked from its view by the posturing ego which clutters the vision of the spirit. So it was that Jesus said, “Unless ye become as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

THE ANIMATING PRESENCE

That which is, was never born and shall never die, is the very being of each of us. One Self, one mind, one life is in everyone. There is no difference between your neighbor and yourself except that of ego, of Conscious Mind. The difference you perceive is

the difference brought about through thought, for your neighbor is a product of every thought he has ever had, even as you are. Since it is impossible for two reactive beings ever to have the exact same kind and sequence of thought, there never has been nor will there ever be two identical humans, short of union with God. And union with God is achieved by all when the worn house of the body is laid aside at last. It may be achieved in life only when the individual ceases to think in response to the stimuli of the senses and originates thought at the center of consciousness. Then free of the bondage of the flesh, he achieves power, control over all the circumstances of his life.

Everyone knows that he exists, and not simply because he observes other individuals responding to him. That which he feels himself to be he knows as consciousness, lying within his body, yet not his body. He observes other animated beings around him and correctly supposes them to be possessed of the same kind of consciousness as he; and he further observes death overtake the bodies of a few of these beings, and notes that the animating presence has departed. He does not see where the presence has gone and is mystified, for he does not know if it has simply left or has suddenly ceased to be. He further observes that this condition of death, or departure of the animating presence of the body, is inevitable to all forms of life and thus is inevitable to him, and he vainly tries to peer beyond that event in order to determine if he might not still continue to exist after his body has ceased to function.

Alas, the veil is too great for him, for he cannot imagine an existence without his body, and so at last he throws up his hands in despair and decides that his consciousness resulted from the fantastic array of circumstances that produced his particular body and that on either side of birth and the grave there is nothing but oblivion.

But no man completely accepts this delusion. No matter how vociferously he may proclaim it, no matter how valiantly he assumes to face this horrid assumption, there is something in him that knows differently. That something is Self, the presence that animates his body. Birthless, deathless and ageless, it knows its immortality.

SELF IS NOT BODY

Your body is not you. If it were and your leg were amputated, pan of your consciousness would be lost with your leg. Neither are you simply brain. If you were only brain, then the rest of the physical body could be stripped away, and the brain would continue to live. Actually, the brain itself does not even think. Some invisible thinker merely uses the brain as a central reception station for sensory perception.

Someone, something, is dwelling in your body, peering through the windows of your eyes, listening at the portals of your ears, using your brain to receive impressions. Invisible, hidden, gowned with your particular form but an instant in the eternity of its being, it uses your body as an idea, then discards it and departs to whence it came. This is immortal Self.

People want to know where they will go when they die, and the answer to that question is that they will go everywhere, for they don’t truly go, they simply expand. Self, freed from the limitations of body, becomes Universal Self, the consciousness of all time, all space, all form. Since Self is free of all limitation and multiplicity, it leaves behind personality and ego and conscious memory, which become immersed like the tiniest drop of water in an infinite sea. Ego goes, limitation goes, the inconceivably small “I” is replaced by the great “I” of infinity.

A very intelligent but very egotistical man once said, “I cannot stand any conception of the afterlife in which I cease to be me and become somebody else, even if that somebody is much greater.” And there are plenty of people whose idea of the hereafter hinges on there being plenty of social life, good food and good fellowship, lots of money and pleasure, and no pain. When it is pointed out to them that they will need to take their bodies along in order to enjoy these things, they nod with equanimity, apparently convinced that an exact replica of the one they leave behind will be furnished them in the hereafter.

BEHIND EVERY PAIR OF EYES

It is always ego that blocks immortality from view, for ego cannot see beyond its own finiteness. It needs a body, needs separateness, for from these conditions it has sprung, and it projects a hereafter that revolves around bodies and personalities. Body and personality and Conscious Mind change throughout life. How shall they exist then in the hereafter of the ego? Will they be those which we possessed in the prime of life? Then what of the infant taken in death? What of the cripple and the chronically diseased? And how shall our characters and minds be in such a hereafter? As they were at the peak of life? But what of the feeble-minded and insane, and the murderer and the robber and the depraved? A strange hereafter, of confusion and injustice, with individuals longing for better bodies—such is the hereafter of the ego. But we needn’t worry about it. It doesn’t exist.

Beyond the advent of death, body does not persist, nor personality, nor ego, nor Conscious Mind, for all these are the illusory trappings of finiteness, for which we have no further use when we return to the infinite. The great Self enters into each body and becomes different according to what it enters, but upon leaving again becomes absolute infinity and unity. “The infinite,” says Emerson, “lies stretched in smiling repose.” And so does the immortal Self, eternally One, the true being in every

REINCARNATION

One of the interesting theories held by those who demand a body as a prerequisite to any existence after death is that of reincarnation. Because Conscious Mind is a finite instrument and useless in dealing with infinity, even great religious thinkers of the past have been led into the trap of believing in reincarnation, because they could not, with their Conscious Minds, conceive of any kind of existence at all without a body to accompany it. Only the Brahmans felt that true existence was unity with Universal Subconscious Mind, but even they felt that a man must consciously come to this illumination, holding that he would go through successive reincarnations on earth until he attained it. No religious teaching has ever surpassed the enlightenment of the Hindus, with their Vedas and Bhagavad-Gita and Upanishads, but even they could not forsake the illusory and transitory ego altogether, and thus were led into believing that individual men went through successive reincarnations before attaining to Brahma. It is immortal Self which is incarnating in search of self-knowledge and only when knowledge of Self is complete will reincarnation cease. The real you, the immortal Self, will reincarnate to be sure, short of its attaining to complete self-knowledge, but the transitory you, the built-up thought habits and memories of the Conscious Mind, will incarnate no more, for it is only illusion, just a tiny instant in the eternity of evolution, whose very purpose is change. Ego will neither reincarnate nor persist after death. It is not the real you. It is scarcely even a microscopic part of the real you.

Every incarnation is a reincarnation; every child born is a reincarnation; for only one Self enters into each body and looks out of all eyes and is conscious. Each of us is a reincarnation of every person who has preceded us, and the knowledge of all that has preceded us lies within us, in Universal Subconscious Mind, which has been all things and all people and all events, and will be forevermore.

INFINITE SPIRIT

Is there spirit communication? Not in the way we are accustomed to think. Those who have departed are no longer contained by the limitations of personality and ego and Conscious Mind, but have become one with immortal Self. Yet the knowledge of all things lies in Universal Subconscious Mind, and may be revealed to Conscious Mind when a contact between the two is made. So it is that the stance is often witness to unexplainable phenomena, for the Subconscious always responds to the Conscious and nothing is impossible to it. Therefore the conceptions we have of loved ones, projected into the Subconscious, are capable of becoming manifest in the physical world. We see ghosts, faces, hear words, sometimes in the seance, sometimes without

the seance, which bring the dead back with us for a moment. But this is always a physical projection of a conception held in mind, and is just as often recorded of the living as of the dead.

There is only one contact we may make with the hereafter, and that is with the one immortal Self which dwells there. It contains all knowledge, all love, all peace, and is the true being of everyone. There are not billions of personalities circulating through it willy nilly; such finiteness has been torn from it and left it pure and unadulterated and just one:

Never the spirit was born;
The spirit shall cease to be never Never was time it was not;
End and beginning are dreams Birthless and deathless and changeless Remaineth the spirit forever Death hath not touched it at all Dead though the house of it seems.
—Bhagavad-Gita

NO PUNISHMENT IN THE HEREAFTER

It is one of the strange facts of history that the words of one of its most enlightened men, Jesus of Nazareth, have been misconstrued to saddle mankind with a vengeful God who vies with the devil for souls. Conceive if you will of a God who gives men sex organs that provide pleasurable sensation, then promises to burn everyone in hell who doesn’t use them within a strictly prescribed manner. Conceive of a God who gives men eyes but still remains invisible to them, then threatens to burn everyone in hell who doesn’t believe in him. Conceive of a God who made the devil and his fires because he knew in the first place that he would burn certain souls. A mighty unsavory fellow, this God, this figment of the masochistic imagination. One cannot help but prefer his equally imaginative evil counterpart, the devil, who seems like a pretty jolly fellow after all, considering the very poor job he has been given.

Immortality is not something to be won by good conduct, nor will good conduct send certain souls to heaven, nor bad conduct send others to hell. Only one Self manifests throughout the universe, and it neither punishes itself nor rewards itself. It is eternal, and though it becomes a billion mortal things, its eternity is not touched. It passes into and out of myriad forms but always remains one. Obviously it neither sends itself to heaven nor sends itself to hell, for nothing exists outside itself.

Have no fear of hell—there is no such thing. There is only heaven, consciousness of the immortal Self, which each of us shall eventually attain, whether it comes to us in life or not.

EVERY SOUL IS SAVED

Misapprehensions concerning sin and punishment and hell and the devil come from a lack of understanding of the message brought by Jesus. Jesus taught that the truth about each man lay in his spirit and not in the physical world. When he spoke of sin he referred to errors o£ thinking, buried guilts; and the punishment he alluded to was the inevitable physical manifestation of such negative thinking. By hell he meant the human bondage undergone by each person who simply reacts to the physical world and fails to perceive his inner consciousness, the Kingdom of Heaven. He did not concern himself with immortality, for he knew that each person was immortal regardless and nothing could alter this. He sought only to awaken men to their spiritual power, to turn their eyes from the physical world onto the consciousness that lay within, so they might free themselves from lack and limitation and disease. He preached no afterlife. “I am come,” he said, “that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more abundantly.” The immortality of all men was obvious to Jesus. He was primarily concerned because they did not know how to live.

The very guilts and limitations which Jesus besought us to become free of have been adopted as dogma by many facets of society, and they have thrown mankind into deeper bondage than ever. We must come to realize that God is kind and just and loving and is in us, and there is no punishment in the hereafter, and every soul is saved. We need not fear God, we need only love him. We need not supplicate for forgiveness before an altar, for God’s altar is our very selves; we are with him night and day. Religions and temples are built by man, but God’s temple is man, and wherever we are, we are always in a place of worship. We need only turn to the Self that dwells within.

THE ART OF DYING

Birth and death are the great transformations. The ego does not fear birth, for there is no ego at birth. But the ego indeed fears death. As long as we identify ourselves with the ego, the fear of death shall have its hold on us, and we shall regard it as a great calamity. But once we have freed ourselves of the ego and have perceived at the center of consciousness the immortal Self, death will become an adventure, for by it we shall be freed of illusion, return to absolute truth, know as we are known, become united with God.

Life is the medium through which the great Self seeks to work out its purpose, and each of us as a part of that purpose has his appointed tasks and work. When these are fulfilled it is time for us to return home once again, but not before. Though the hereafter may be a mightier existence than any known on earth, we nevertheless shall not return to it until we have worked through space and time in search of the knowledge that the great Self is seeking through us. Our jobs are here in life, and we must do them before we depart.

Many men poison their lives through fear of death. Since death is known to be inevitable for every man, it is indeed very strange that so little is known of the art of dying. For dying is an art, to be performed expertly or crudely according to our knowledge. To most men death comes when the body has worn out and ceases to function, and is preceded by a period of time in which the body perceptibly begins to break down. As the hour of death approaches, the human soul has only two ways to turn; outward for the solaces of the physical world or inward toward the universal Self. A painful death, violent, and full of suffering awaits him who turns toward the outer world, for he is prompted by the ego which seeks to hold on to that which must be let go. Indeed, all that the ego needs for perpetuation, the memory, conscious intellect, animal faculties, the functions of the bodily organs, are gradually being wrested away, sinking into lethargy, ceasing to function; and the ego becomes confused, terror-stricken, full of panic. There is no escape for the hounded little “I,” its doom is upon it. The very material world which is responsible for its existence, is gradually fading away. He who identifies himself with ego undergoes a confused and suffering transformation.

But he who has glimpsed the greater Self takes death calmly. Assured of immortality and the changelessness of spirit, he passes easily from one world to the other. His spirit lays down his body because it is finished with it, and moves into the great expansion where it becomes lord and master over all things. Self meets self, the personal becomes the universal, and a new and greater existence in the infinite reduces the just finished life to nothingness, to a second in the endless time of eternity.

And so we die as we have lived, with faith or without it, with spiritual knowledge or without it; and according to the wisdom we have attained, we meet death gracefully or crudely, but each of us is immortal nonetheless.

So live that when thy summons comes to join the innumerable caravan, which moves to that mysterious realm, where each shall take his chamber in the silent halls of death, thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed by an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave, like one who wraps the drapery of his couch about him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
—William Cullen Bryant

REVIEW

1.Though body is mortal, a man is never born and never dies.

2.The presence that animates body is invisible even in life, and leaving the body on death, is invisible still.

3.One Self incarnates in all bodies and is deathless, ageless, eternal spirit.

4.Ego shuts us away from the knowledge of Self. Ego deludes us into believing it is “I”

5.The death of the ego must precede awareness of universal Self.

6.Ego is as mortal as the body, and at death we all become Universal Self.

7.He who banishes ego during his life achieves power, for he moves with God.

8.Neither space nor time exist in the hereafter, nor does form. There is only consciousness, absolute and indivisible.

9.Body is merely used by immortal spirit as an expression of an idea. It is not Self, is but the tiniest expression of Self.

10.The Self enters into each body and becomes different according to what it enters, but upon leaving becomes infinite and absolute and only one.

11.There is no reincarnation for the ego, but constant reincarnation for the Self.

12.There is only one form of spirit communication and that is contact between Conscious Mind and Universal Subconscious Mind.

13.All men are immortal. There is no hell, no punishment.

14.Jesus taught that the power of immortal being could be used in life.

15.He who perceives self in Self will find death an easy transformation.

There is an answer to every question, a solution to every mystery, a key for every lock. Throughout this book we have prepared for the final revelation. Now it is upon us.

RECOMMENDED READING

Drama of Love and Death by Edward Carpenter. Published by Mitchell Kennerley.

ELEVENTH MEDITATION

I know that I am pure spirit, deathless, birthless, changeless, and eternal. I am not body; I am not Conscious Mind; I am not ego. I am sense of Self only, consciousness, awareness, unadulterated being. The presence that animates all life is within me, is altogether the real me. I am using my body for a purpose,. as an expression of an idea, and when the idea is fully expressed, through my work and my mission, I shall return again to unity with universal Self, leaving body and ego behind. I do not confuse my body and my ego with what I truly am. My body is simply an instrument for my expression, and my ego is simply memory of physical experience. Returning to infinity and unity, I shall need neither body nor ego. I am free of the domination of the ego. It is not my true self, is simply an illusion necessary to finiteness and the perception of apace and time. I turn away from the ego, withdraw into the depths of my being to the immortal consciousness that lies within. Here in this magic center my word is law. I need only speak it with faith and conviction, and it will manifest in my life. I am calm and serene, sure and unfaltering, for my roots are in eternity. All the things of life shall change and pass away, but I shall never pass away, for wherever life is I shall be, one with Universal Subconscious Mind. I need not strive or strain to attain immortality, nor fear punishment, nor aspire for reward. The Kingdom of Heaven awaits all, the wise, the foolish, the sinner, and the saint, for we are all one in reality, clothed in different forms in this moment of incarnation. I do not fear death, for by it I attain the consciousness of higher Self. Neither do I invite death, for it must wait until my work is done. I forsake the ego, perceive self in Self, see the majesty, the grandeur, the immortality of the power that dwells within.

Chapter 12 – THE KEY

That which from Self made each mortal Self unto each mortal must be Thus the key that unlocks the portal to God is thyself—thou art He

YOU ARE GOD

THE VEIL REMOVED

This is the ineffable secret, the ultimate illumination, the key to peace and power: You are God. If you will accept this towering truth, dare to stand atop this magnificent pinnacle, universal consciousness will be revealed to you from within. God is there. It is He who peers from behind your eyes, who is your own consciousness, who is your very Self. You are not just a part of God; you are altogether God, and God is altogether you.

Upanishads:
The personal self and the ultimate imperishable impersonal Self are one.

Vedanta:
Not a part, not a mode of That, but identically That, that absolute Spirit of the World.

Jesus:
Who hath seen me hath seen the Father.

God is Universal Subconscious Mind, the intelligence that pervades all times and places, the design and order and consciousness of all things. God becomes things; He becomes all things; He has become you. God is not your body, not your ego, but your sense of being, your “I.” There is only one “I” in the universe. The same sense of Self is in everyone. It appears to be different in life because it clothes itself in different forms. These forms wither and decay, but the Self is always one and indivisible and changeless. Every person that lives, every person that ever will live, every creature and thing, are all one in spirit. All are God, and each is altogether God.

Each of us is altogether God because infinite intelligence cannot divide itself. It makes a seeming division in flesh, but never in spirit, for infinity is always one and indivisible. God manifests completely in each thing, and each thing is a manifestation of God’s knowledge of Himself. Your consciousness is God’s consciousness. Your idea of yourself is God’s idea of Himself. The ideas you accept are automatically manifested in life, for what God knows He creates, and what you know is created, for you are God.

UNIVERSAL CONSCIOUSNESS

God is consciousness and awareness and order and design and knowledge and intelligence and spirit. He is infinite. He cannot know himself as infinity, but only by becoming something finite. Thus God seeks to expand His sense of Self by becoming things, and each thing says, “I am this.” What you believe yourself to be is what you believe God to be. The limitations and lacks you impose upon yourself you impose upon God. No one can possibly believe there is any limitation on God, thus the magnificent truth is that there is no limitation on any man.

Through each of us God attains self-consciousness, and each of us is God incarnate. In our lives we accept the limitations of the flesh and the inhibitions of the ego, and thus we fall short of God-consciousness. We ask ourselves where we have come from and where we are going, for we have lost the remembrance of having always been, just as we cannot see that we will always be. The development of our ego thrusts upon us a precarious duality of mind, wherein Conscious Mind over-runs Universal Subconscious Mind, and we come to regard ourselves as ego only, instead of universal Self which we truly are. “How can God possibly be the poor thing that I am?” a man will ask himself, identifying himself with ego and failing to perceive that he is consciousness only. Free yourself from the bonds of the ego, and you will forget the poor thing that you thought you were, and become one with God.

ILLUMINATION

This far you can be guided but the attainment of enlightenment is yours to achieve alone. Words and logic have never yet provided the great illumination, which must come to each man in his own way. If you will accept with perfect faith the premise that all truth is spiritual, if you will discard the promptings of the ego and the noisy sensual stimuli of the material world, if you will search for revelation at the center of consciousness, then the Kingdom of Heaven will be yours. Letting go of ego may seem like letting go of life itself, and so it is, even as Jesus said, “Who loses his life shall find it.”

Illumination, the arrival at God-consciousness, the spiritual perception that you are God, will come to you through meditation. As an experience it is universally the same, but perhaps has never been as well described as by Edward Carpenter:

The brain is stilled. It does not cease from its natural and joyful activities. But it ceases from that terrified and joyless quest which was inevitable to it as long as its own existence, its own foundation, its own affiliation to the everlasting being was in question or doubt. The man at last lets thought go; he glides below it into the quiet feeling, the quiet sense of his own identity with the self of other things—of the universe. He glides past the feeling into the very identity itself, where a glorious all¬consciousness leaves no room for separate self thoughts or emotions. He leans back in silence on that inner being, and bars off for a time every thought, every movement of the mind, every impulse to action, or whatever in the faintest degree may stand between him and That; and so there comes to him a sense of absolute repose, a consciousness of immense and universal power, such as completely transforms the world for him. All life is changed; he becomes master of his fate; he perceives that all things are hurrying to perform his will; and whatever in that region of inner life he may condescend to desire, that already is shaping itself to utterance and expression in the outer world about him.

In such a manner does a man come to the realization that he himself is God. In such a manner does he learn to turn his attention from the material world and originate all things on the plane of mind. By forsaking ego and finding his true Self, whatever he thinks, conceives, or desires will manifest in the physical world. He becomes die doer, the knower, the creator, makes all things from Self, is the Self of all things.

That boundless power, source of every power, manifesting itself as life, entering every heart, living there among the elements, that is Self.
—Upanishads

FIND THOU BUT THYSELF

Though this knowledge is not new, it has been exceedingly rare and held among a very few men. All the ages of life’s evolution, up through the slime and mist of a fetid and newly formed earth, have pointed toward it. There is only one consciousness in all things, one consciousness which assumes countless forms in search of ever greater knowledge about itself. The infinite Self becomes the finite self, and the day when finite self recognizes itself as infinite Self is the day that exposes eternity. This little hour, this little life where we are focused now, is but an instant in the aeons of our being. We are that very power that constructed the heavens and the earth, and when we have cast out ego and the limitations of our thinking, the multi-dimensioned heavens are revealed to be in our own souls.

We have looked in the mountains and. He has not been there. We have looked on the plain and He has not been there. We have searched the sea and the air and the earth and the sky, and He has not been there. How should we find Him when we looked outside? He dwelt within, was in truth our very selves.

But what thing dost thou now Looking Godward to cry,
I am I, thou art thou,
I am low, thou art high?
I am thou, whom thou seekest to find him Find thou but thyself, thou art I.
—Algernon Swinburne

LOCK AND KEY

The lock that bars us from the recognition that we are God is the creation of the ego in the first memories and inhibitions of Conscious Mind. This lock may be undone through meditation, through taking unto ourselves universal consciousness, through arrival at the spiritual Kingdom of Heaven; and the key that unlooses all power is the revelation that each man is God.

Mind is consciousness, is intelligence, and there is only one mind, which is the mind of God. All things are made from it, are ideas manifested into form. As ideas change so does form, but the spirit never changes. It is limitless, one and changeless.

Universal Subconscious Mind creates in the physical world those ideas that Conscious Mind adopts as beliefs. We create evil by false thinking, by ideas of lack and limitation and pain and sorrow and disease. Such evil is illusion because it proceeds from the errors of Conscious Mind, and may be banished by donning the mantle of immortal Self at the center of consciousness.

The physical world is but a tiny extension of a vast spiritual realm. All physical law is subordinate to spiritual law, for the physical world is a secondary chain of effects, while the spiritual world is first cause. When man’s consciousness expands beyond ego, beyond conscious mind, beyond the limitations of the Prompters, thoughts are immediately manifested on the physical plane. Thought transference, clairvoyance, mental healing, and creativeness are all evidences of the super-physical power of Universal Subconscious Mind.

A man adds all things unto himself by taking a position with impregnable faith. Faith moves Universal Subconscious Mind to creation, but it is only the ego that must use faith. When the ego goes and God-consciousness comes, thought is immediately followed by the thing, for there remains nothing to overcome. All conceptions of limitation and lack and guilt and pain and shame and remorse are cast out with the ego. Nothing but God remains, and whatever God knows is created.

We attract into our lives the physical manifestations of the thoughts we think, and in order to attract good instead of evil we must learn to control our thinking, to think positively instead of negatively. We must be able to choose good thoughts. If a man thinks only in response to the stimuli of the outer world, he remains ego only, an automaton; but when he originates thoughts at the center of consciousness, he creates his own life in the image of his desires and dons the mantle of immortal Self.

TWELFTH MEDITATION

I turn away from the world about me to the world of consciousness that lies within. I shut out all memories of the past, create no images of the future. I concentrate on my being, on my awareness. I elide deep into the very recesses of my soul to a place of utter repose. Here I perceive fact in the making, am conscious of the one being from which all beings spring. I know that this is immortal Self, this is God, this is me. I am, I always was, I always will he. All men, all things, all space and time and life are here in the depths of my soul. Smaller than small, greater than great meet and unite in me. That which I thought I was, ego, I never was at all, for it was a changing thing, mirroring the seasons and the tides, a thing to be born and grow and die. I am not a thing of time or circumstance. I am spirit, pure and eternal, birthless, deathless and changeless. I am patient, for I am all time: I am wise, for I contain the knowledge of all things. I know not pain, for I see there is no beginning and no end, and who suffers pain must see beginning and end, I am rich, for there is no limit to the abundance I may create from my very Self. I am successful, for I need only think to achieve. I love and am beloved, for all things are myself and I am all things. I unite, I fuse, I become one with Universal Subconscious Mind. The mask of vanity and ego I shall never wear again. I perceive the magnificent Dweller at the center of my consciousness, and I know Him to be my very self. Time and space, shadow and substance, what matter these? I am God.