Chapter 20
THOUGHTS ARE THINGSCharles Fillmore
Teach Us To Pray
I am no longer like Lot’s wife, preserving evil in mind and body by remembering it. I relax and willingly let go of all effete substance, that the new, pure radiance of God may be made manifest in me.
My mind no longer clings to the complexity of mortal finances. I am open to the splendor of the kingdom of God within, and a flood of plenty follows.
ONE OF the axiomatic truths of metaphysics is that “thoughts are things.” That the mind of man marshals its faculties and literally makes into living entities the ideas that it entertains is also a foregone conclusion.
The word “things” expresses poorly the active and very vital character of the thoughts to which the mind gives life, substance, and intelligence.
We see so many inanimate “things” around us in the material world, and we compare our creative thoughts with them and thereby get a very inferior conception of the marvelous ability of our mind in its creative capacity.
Shakespeare says, “The poet’s pen . . . gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.” At the same time the poet’s mind forms in the ether a replica of his idea, and that replica takes up its habitation in his thought atmosphere and henceforth injects into it a tincture of the sentiments that the poets originally had.
This ability of the Adamic man to “name” or give character, form, and shape to ideas is symbolically described in the 2d chapter of Genesis, where Jehovah God brought before Adam the elemental ideas or “beasts” of the Garden of Eden (called by metaphysicians the “ether”). “And whatsoever the man called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”
We often refer in Unity literature to the discoveries by modern science of the ether and its stupendous properties as confirming in scientific terms what Jesus taught in symbols concerning the properties of the ether, which He named the kingdom of the heavens. The Garden of Eden is a symbolic description of that elemental realm which modern science has named the ether. Science says that this ether fills all space, is not molecular, and possesses an amount of energy beyond comparison with anything material; that all the complex phenomena of nature may be reduced to different kinds of waves of energy in the ether. Professor James Jeans says, “We live in a universe of waves, and nothing but waves.” He also says that it may be that our mind lays hold of the atoms of our body and so forms the world about us.
Here we see how very near to the teaching of religion scientific minds are approaching. They are virtually proclaiming the one life as the source of everything. Their next great proclamation will be that one directive intelligence is an essential cause of the harmonious universe.
Every experienced metaphysician knows that man’s mind molds from an omnipresent element whatever takes form, shape, and intelligence and becomes part of his thought world. That science in a measure confirms this is a source of gratification and a stabilizer of faith. Knowing that our world is composed of what we have idealized should make us more watchful of the activities of our mind. Are we still harboring thought forms that are impeding our soul’s progress? Are we preserving our evil thoughts by thinking about them with fear in our mind? Or it may be that we yearn for the pleasures of the past and like Lot’s wife look back, thereby subjecting ourselves to the things of the past or with the salt of the mind preserving them. There are always better things just ahead for those who build in mind the living thought entities that go before and open the way.
Man lives in two worlds, the world of cause and the world of effect. The world of effect is at present in a complex tangle. Panaceas without number are offered. There is but one panacea and that is the installation of an economic system in which human greed will be eliminated. To institute such a system will require men and women who have overcome greed in themselves.
If you would help the world, and incidentally yourself, to better economic conditions, begin to deny your selfishness and greed and affirm,
“I am open to the splendor of the kingdom of God within, and a flood of plenty follows.”
* * * * *
Teach Us To Pray
Table of Contents