Chapter 7 – Man Unfinished

Chapter 7
MAN UNFINISHED
Abel Leighton Allen
The Message of New Thought

“All parts away for the progress of souls,
All religion, all solid things, arts, governments,
All that was or is apparent upon the Globe
Or any globe, falls into niches and corners
Before the procession of souls along the
Grand Roads of the Universe.”

WALT WHITMAN.

MAN has ever stalked over the world like an idle somnambulist, in a dream of bewilderment, unconscious of the boundless resources of his own nature and the illimitable heights that the fully developed man may reach. Limitation always clouded his vision. Of the limitless reservoirs of mental life within himself, he was totally oblivious. He has been a stranger to himself, an unguided wanderer, ignorant of his own greatness and possibilities.

Man supposed he was made in an instant, the result of a fiat, and that his limitations were set by the divine decree that brought him into existence. He was never told that he was not finished or of the slumbering possibilities within himself. But he is awakening from his long dream, to the realization that “The full measure of a man has never been taken” and that the infinite path of progress stretches away before him.

Elmer Gates, who has given the profoundest thought to the human mind and has analyzed it as carefully as any modern psychologist, says: “That through consciousness we put ourselves en rapport with cosmic mind. Subconsciousness is the great ocean of mental life; our conscious states are merely the ripples that strike on the shore.”

I quote the following extract from the lectures on mental science delivered in Edinburgh by Judge Troward:

“We have experimental proof of the existence in ourselves of transcendental faculties, the full development of which would place us in a perfectly new sphere of life. . . .

“Universal intelligence subsists throughout Nature, inherent in every one of its manifestations. For the present, it will be sufficient to realize that the subjective mind in ourselves is the same subjective mind which is at work throughout the universe, giving rise to the infinitude of natural forms with which we are surrounded and in like manner giving : rise to ourselves.

“We never get beyond the law of cause and effect We externalize in our outward circumstances precisely our ideas of the universal mind.

“Man has depths which reach beyond all our philosophical soundings, with lights that no seer has ever revealed to us, with reachings of his being only divinely felt in his own soul and never revealed to others.

“Man is a religious being, not conscious of his greatness and infinite possibilities. To him all life is the reaching out for these possibilities. The search for the larger life is the endeavor to find himself.

“Whatever gives us larger being to life, whatever brings us to the goal, whatever solves our problems, breaks the clouds before our eyes, helps us to look up, teaches us to step forward, is a religious service.”

We feel the breath of inspiration at the realization that the subconscious mind within is one and the same as the Universal Mind that produces all things in Nature with which we are surrounded, and which produces also ourselves. Why should not man be a religious being, when a thought of such moment enters into his consciousness? It enables him to see a new meaning, nay, a kinship, in every object of Nature, from the grass-blade beneath his feet to the planets circling through endless space.

When this truth dawns on man’s reason and consciousness, he sees a religious meaning in all beauty, in all order, in all harmony, in all that opens the mind to truth, in every new revelation of Nature. It all enriches life and leads man upward and helps him in his struggle to see and know God.

“Why has the heart restless yearnings
For heights and steeps untrod?
Some call it the voice of longing,
And others the Voice of God.”

Victor Hugo remarks that “The religious fact is not the Church; it is the opening of the rose, it is the breaking of the dawn, it is the nesting of the bird. The religious fact is Nature, holy and eternal.”

Man has not yet conceived of his own greatness and possibilities. The evolutionary processes of Nature have culminated in the production of a being who walks the earth in an erect position, his brain at the summit, who is capable of thought, of emotion, and of abstract reasoning. He is the highest type that has yet appeared upon the earth. He is also a religious being, conscious of his own individuality, his own soul, and a mysterious longing for something, divinely felt, faintly dreamed of, but nor yet realized.

From the great soul within, man sometimes feels the surging of an inexpressible power, a restless feeling, welling up within him, seeking recognition and expression. We are all conscious at times of this divine unrest, a striving force within, a cosmic urge prompting us to effort, pushing us onward and upward to something greater. It is the great soul within seeking to find its true expression. It is the divine calling to the divine in man.

Carlyle says: “Man’s unhappiness as I construe it comes of his greatness; it is because there is an infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the finite.”

Emerson declares that “A Man is the facade of a temple, wherein all wisdom and all good abide.”

With all his powers, with a reason divine, an imagination bridging the infinite, man is not yet a perfect being. He is only in the process of creation, he is unfinished. He is undergoing an evolutionary development, he is still far from the goal at which in due time he will arrive.

As we take a survey of the world and the various types of plant and animal life, their change and development, as we study the rock and the mineral, and observe the workings of Nature, we discover that creation is yet unfinished. The master hand is still at work: Creation is now as rapid as in the six days mentioned in Genesis. Her processes never rest. The rocks are still building, glacial action still goes on, the rivers continue to carry silt to the seas. Nature’s laboratory was never more active, since the earth first swung into its orbit.

The theologian has always considered and spoken of creation as finished. Until science and reason demonstrated its impossibility, he contended that the world and all created things that dwell thereon, including man, were created in six days of twenty-four hours each. He also said God was satisfied with His work and rested on the seventh day. This was his conclusion because, he said, he had read it in a book. Man read a different account in the open book of Nature, in the rocks, the rivers, the lakes, and the eternal hills.

The same unseen forces that are building the rock and manifesting in new created forms, is also at work in man, developing new power, strengthening existing faculties, and pushing man onward toward a more complete and perfect state. Man has not been symmetrically developed. His advisers limited their efforts to the cultivation of his spiritual  side, and that mainly through the influence of the emotions. Fear was the incentive held before his mind. The preparation was not so much for this, as for a future life. His slumbering possibilities were not known. If he was to be great or strong, it would be in another state of existence.

Man is a triune being, and to make him a perfect man requires a three-fold development. That development only is normal and symmetrical that endeavors to perfect him physically, mentally, and spiritually. The development of one phase of his being and not the others is abnormal. The theologian was never able properly to instruct man, because he never understood man. What did he know of the subconscious mind in man? What understanding had he of the hidden forces and powers in man? It was the blind leading the blind.

Modern psychology has enabled man to discover himself. Through it he is gaining faint glimpses of the powers of the great soul within, of that reservoir of intelligence and wisdom to which he may find access when he has learned the way. He is learning the potency of thought: that thought is his empire, that thought is the avenue to the infinite treasures of the subconscious mind, and that thought can control his entire personality.

Man is only at the threshold of real greatness and real power, only with feeble taps is he knocking at the door of the great within. When he has awakened to the consciousness of the forces within himself, to build a perfect body, to develop higher mental and spiritual powers, he will look upon man as he is today as a pygmy and a dwarf. Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither has it entered into the imagination of man to conceive of the glories that await the coming man.

Henry Harrison Brown, writing on creative thought, says: “Man as thinker shapes the universal energy into forms of use and beauty, through his thought in mechanics and art. The absolute creates within itself by bodying itself forth in a universe cognizant to the senses of man, first as cosmic energy, then as matter. Man is thus the absolute, becoming cognizant of itself. Man is God thinking; elsewhere all creation is God working.

“Wind and wave are manifestations of the working of the absolute; the unconditioned and unindividualized. Here it manifests in lower octaves; in the rose and bird it has gained in pitch, still higher its rise in human thought. Thought is a form and a most potent form of universal energy. Man is God individualized. The kingdom of God is within you. Kingdom: power, thought is this kingdom.

“Man is the only individuality among all the manifestations of God that can think, can say ‘I am.’

“My power as an individual begins and ends with my power to create thought forms. These forms life takes as molds into which to flow and shape itself.

“This is the one and only great fact in human experience, the one fact which when understood will redeem the race from all slavery to matter and will give man control of his destiny. The great fact is by thought power to build ideals; man controls that subconscious divinity which he is. The conscious man controls the God in man.”

These are great words coming from a noteworthy modern thinker. They strike the keynote of modern psychology. They point man to the pathway of power and accomplishment. They show him how to reach the great subconscious, the source of all power. Like all great teaching his message is simple, concise, and easily comprehended. How unlike the impenetrable mazes theology has always set before man. Thought is the force that opens   the door to the store- house of wisdom and power. By thought power to build ideals, man becomes a builder, a creator; he controls the subconscious divinity which he is. Long ago modern psychology demonstrated that the subconscious obeys the mandates of thought, is amenable to the power of suggestion. Here the same truth is stated in another way. The discovery of the law of suggestion marks the birth of modern psychology, and modern psychology is the great revelation to man of his own masterful powers.

We can all follow the simple rules laid down for our guidance. We can create ideals if we desire. We can develop ideals of health, of mental superiority, of high moral standards, of power and success. When we have learned to form and hold these ideals, with confidence in results, we have opened the door  to the great within.

Christian D. Larson, who has written so understandingly of man’s hidden forces, says: “The destiny of every individual is hourly being created by himself, and that something that determines what he is, to create at any particular time, is nothing more or less than his ideals.”

The real secret of man’s power, then, is to create proper ideals or thought forms, and thus control the subconscious divinity within him. As thought controls the subconscious, the great reservoir of intelligent forces, so man directs his own welfare and destiny. The key, then, to man’s power is to think constructively, think positively, create ideals of health, of cheerfulness, of happiness, and of accomplishment. When he has learned this secret, he has become master over things and circumstances. At last we come back to the great truth, as a man thinketh in his heart so is he.

Science is finding evidence corroborative of what the philosopher has thought, of what the   idealists have always laid claim to, that thought controls matter, that mental images are molds into which cosmic life and energy flow; that matter is thus shaped into forms, corresponding with the ideals first created. Results have been published of an experiment by means of the infallible test of the camera, that would seem to bear out the claim that thoughts may be embodied in mental forms or images and that atoms and molecules of matter will shape themselves into forms corresponding to those images.

The materialistic scientist may view this statement with utter incredulity, but it is no more unthinkable or improbable than that thought and even the human voice may be carried over long distances by means of no other conductor than either that fills all space. It is not as mysterious as life or growth, which we know exist but do not understand and a thousand phenomena which baffle all understanding.

Professor Larkin recently said: “You can separate heat from light and use each separately, and do many wonderful things with both these totally unknown forces, in a suitable laboratory. ‘Unknown’ is used here purposely, for nothing is now known as to what anything really is.”

The experiments referred to, by which thoughts were transformed into visible forms, were conducted by Dr. Charles W. Littlefield. He asserts that he created mental images in solutions of inorganic compounds placed upon photographic slides, and the forms thereby created were successfully photographed and the photographs exhibited for inspection. Dr. Littlefield, in giving the results of his experimentation, says: “In the chemical analysis of all living things we find two classes of compounds, the organic and the inorganic. The former class is represented by albumen, sugar, starch, and oil, while the latter is represented by the compounds of soda, lime, magnesia, iron, potash, and silicon, as made up by the union of these with sulfur, phosphorus, chryoline, fluorine, and oxygen, making twelve mineral compounds, commonly known as tissue salts.

“These thought images were held in the mind while the attention was fixed upon a drop of the solution of one of the mineral salts of organic life upon a microscopic slide and afterward photographed.

“In other words, these are thoughts photographed through matter. Since these thought forms are fixed in the same kind of mineral compounds which are now known to be not only the builders of the human organism, but also the material medium of all its functions, both physical and psychical, they furnish us some very interesting and reliable data upon which to construct a rational system of psychophysics, not only embracing an explanation of every known form of mental manifestation through matter, but also suggesting possibilities in psychology almost beyond belief.”

These experiments would seem to bear out the conclusion that mind, external to matter, can control matter. If this is an established fact, its importance can scarcely be overestimated.

Someone asks how this can be done. What is the explanation of mind shaping matter, when matter is separated by distance from the person sending forth the thought? An impossibility, you say.

In answer to the expressed doubt, it might well be said this is the result of investigation, of experiment. Its cause is in the field of science and it is the business of the scientist to find it and offer it to the world. This suggestion, however, may be offered, not as a conclusion, but only as a hypothesis from which to reason.

Scientists tell us there are no solids in Nature. What seem to us the hardest and densest substances are not solids, but the electrons and corpuscles forming the same are separated and do not touch, but revolve around each other with certain great and specific velocities. All Nature is in motion, all is vibratory.

It has been well said that thoughts are forces. If they are forces, it follows that they can create vibrations and also that they can travel through space. If thoughts send vibrations through space, is it not possible for them to affect the atoms and molecules of which matter is composed, which scientists tell us are in constant and rapid motion?

The wireless instrument creates vibrations that travel through ether, penetrating and passing through what we call solid substances, to be again taken up by a like instrument and translated into language. Scientists sum up the recent results of wireless telegraphy as follows: “Boats have been steered to right or left, stopped, started, reversed, accelerated, retarded, and controlled in every way by an operation in a wireless plant on the shore. No wire from man to boat–waves of electric force only.”

Mental telepathy seems to be an established fact, which is nothing less than sending thoughts through space, which are received, understood, and translated by other minds. If thoughts were not forces, how could this be? If they did not create vibrations, it would seem difficult to understand how they could travel through space.

Professor Larkin, in an article on the power of thought, said: “it is natural for us to think that no object can be formed without a previously formed thought pattern. This would be as impossible as for an iron casting without a mold and a mold without a pattern.

“The word ‘matter’ as used in chemistry and physics cannot be applied to matter, cannot exist until electrons revolve around each other at definitive and fixed high specific speeds, specific velocities being a fundamental fact in Nature.” He then related that another photographic test had been made of thought images, revealing similar results to those above related.

That there is something in the life force which controls matter, uses it, and shapes it, is the latest utterance of philosophy.

Henri Bergson, professor of philosophy in the College de France, Paris, now attracting the attention of the philosophers of the world, is among the recent champions of these ideals. As he views it, the world and man are only in the process of creation; man is becoming and passing through an evolutionary process, a process of growth and development. He teaches that there is a super-materialistic or psychic element in life, as the vital force, which molds matter to its own use. He holds that wherever there is life, creation is still going on, and that creation is ever bringing something new into existence.

His philosophy will set new ideals before man and lead him to greater things, a life of  reality, growth, and development. When man becomes conscious of the creative and ever-renewing forces within himself, he will find the renewing hand of Nature, which is ever leading him toward the new and perfect.

The fact that scholars and students from every part of the world are listening to Bergson’s utterances proves that his philosophy has struck a responsive chord which is to have a marked effect in molding modern thought. It all leads to one central thought, that man is becoming conscious of the greatness of his own being and the illimitable powers of his own mind and soul; that he is constantly and forever evolving, passing through the processes of creation and growth, gradually reaching higher and higher levels, moving onward and upward toward the perfect man that he is yet to be. When the consciousness of this truth takes possession of his entire being and personality, he will make mental and moral strides such as man has not yet experienced in reaching out toward, the ultimate goal.

Chapter 8

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