New Thought Archives

[215] Blessed indeed is he who feels and knows that a single thought of a single soul can swing wide the portals that open from the animal to the divine.

Thrice blessed is he who in such thought can stand alone until the prejudices of an ignorant race, seeking to overwhelm him, have grown so tired that, like the wayward brood of the mother bird, they come to claim–under the hovering wings of an all-sustaining faith–that protection they fail to find elsewhere.

After all, it is he who can stand by his highest hope that the world is always waiting for, and waiting for the purpose of crowning him king, though it knows it not.

Every soul is seeking strength. There is only one way to acquire it, and that is by dropping forever the race’s accepted belief in its own limitations and trusting those castles in the air projected by the ideal. If my dreams are the best my nature yields, then to live in them is the most sensible thing I can do, even though they never should become real.

But to live in our dreams is to make them real. And this is true because Being is not limited. And every aspiration of the soul, stretching outward in the direction of good, of more life, if believed in, becomes bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. Belief in the ideal will turn all its hopes into muscle and tissue and blood and brain. The voice that speaks through the ideal is the voice of a higher, a more perfect life, and he who listens to it and believes in it will be led out of the inharmonies of our present hell, into a boundless place where our constantly unfolding faculties will express themselves in those never-failing activities which alone can make heaven for us.

We must find heaven in unrestrained growth; in the constant unfoldment of our faculties in the true line of our attractions.

But the race has scarcely unfolded any new faculty for hundreds of generations. A trifling advancement here and a slight step forward there has been all. The people have held the heresy that God made them just as they are, and that they are as perfect as they ever will be until death purifies them. They do not know that they are growing creatures, and have been from the first. If they did but know this, they would also know that there is no limit to farther continuance of their growth except the limit put upon it by their ignorance; an ignorance that constantly rejects the hopes held out by their ideality, and insists on clothing the manly future in the child’s garments of the past.

There are leaders among men because, though all men do not trust their own brightest hopes, yet they gladly follow the man who does. The true leader is the man who believes that something is possible for him that his followers do not believe possible for themselves.

He who is a great leader, and at the same time adds to his power as a leader the power of teaching the people [216] and healing their wounds, not only believes the (so-called) impossible is possible to him, but he believes that it is possible for every living soul also. And thus in elevating himself by his belief he elevates all others equally. It is in this way that the mind healers are doing their mighty work. They have ascended–through a serene and steadfast trust in the ideal hopes they find implanted in the race–from the world’s old belittling and hampering beliefs concerning race limitations, to a loftier place and a clearer mental atmosphere than was ever reached before. They see that the people’s implanted hopes were meant to be actualized in real life. And they see farther, that their actualization will remove every one of our liabilities and make us free citizens of the universe, with perfect control over disease, old age, poverty and death.

In the multiplicity of my duties there is sometimes an hour when I lose sight of my power to overcome disease, old age, poverty and death. At such times a sense of being alone and lost imperceptibly steals over me, and I question myself as to what is the matter. In a moment the whole line of thought in which I live–the thought that is slowly making me over–like McGregor–I find myself on my native heath once more, and at home in the broad fields and green pastures of my splendid possessions–the home unfolded to me through the ideal hopes–that because of my faith have become real.

And oh, what possessions! So clearly do I see the perfect mastery of man over all his hated environments, through the power of supreme trust in himself, in the unfoldment of the seeds of all great achievements now lying dormant in his brain and waiting for nothing but his own recognition of them and his beliefs in them to lift him bodily out of his present charnel house beliefs, and rescue him at once and forever from all his enemies.

For my part I hesitate no longer to proclaim in the boldest manner that the time has come that St. Paul spoke of. It is quite plain from his writings that he anticipated man’s final conquest over all things; a time in which he would say, “Oh, death! where is thy sting? Oh, grave, where is thy victory?”

The factor by which death and the grave are overcome is now being evolved through the faculty of ideality; that faculty whose wonderful creative power has been ignored so long; but which has steadily unfolded in spite of the contempt heaped upon it, until at last we begin to see it as a shining light; the light in each man’s brain that is to guide him to perfect freedom in all things.

In lesson ten I made it plain to the student that a mighty storehouse of the world’s wisdom lay behind his present perception. I said that the recognition of this wisdom, and an attempt to unearth it, as it were, would not be without its beneficial effect.

In lesson eleven I told of the power above the throne, and tried to account for its presence there, and also to hint at its uses. These two phrases–the power behind or beneath the throne, and the power above the throne–point most distinctly to the throne itself and to him who sits upon it as the executive of this power. The ability to use either of these two powers did not seem to depend upon themselves, but upon someone who had the right to govern them both.

The central point of all individualization is the “I.” What the “I” is no one can tell, any more than to say it is self-consciousness. It is certainly the very heart of the magnet man, and the full power of the attracting force is located in it. It ranges at will through the entire organism. It can drop for the moment its objective consciousness–this outside mind–and become submerged in the subjective mind–that wonderful storehouse of memories–lying back of our present earth experiences. It can ascend into the purely ideal mind and lose sight of all that lies [217] below it. It is in this condition that miracles, so-called, have been worked. In the great majority of the race the “I” is located centrally in what I have called the everyday mind, from which we have projected all the uses that now appear in the world.

Now, try to follow me. It is the privilege of the man to live in either of these chambers of the brain, and create from the material yielded him within these chambers.

I pause a moment, awed, before the secret but tremendous meaning of this last sentence. I told the student in the last lesson that man was creative. I told him that man had created himself all along the journey of life up to the present moment, though nearly all of his creation has been done unconsciously to himself.

But now I tell him a greater thing. I tell him that a man has the power to undo the present status of his personality and slip back, and down the thread of his life experiences, and express his life on a lower plane than he can now conceive of. That no man ever did this, or ever will do it, does not militate against the fact that he has the power to do it. Man is an individualized will, and there is nothing on earth to prevent him from doing what he wishes to do, provided he wills to do it, and understands the law of the doing. It is easy enough to understand the law by which this is done, but no soul can ever be found who desires to do it. All desire points to the future, because freedom is in the future, and the escape from the past has been an escape from many and indescribable bonds.

The temptation, then, is not to slip backwards down the stream of time, but to look ahead and strain to get on. Therefore it is the ideal that tempts us now. It tempted the Christian Scientist to the utter renunciation of the world of senses as represented by our objective minds. It filled him with visions not impossible of realization by proper methods, but purely phantasmal on his part, because cut off from the source of their actualization in flesh and blood–namely, the lower chambers of the brain that relate him to the earth from which the roots of his being draw their substance. The position of the Christian Scientist was like that of the lily enshrined in the bulb, and which believed it could spring to full bloom independently of leaf or stem; which believed indeed that it was in bloom even before it had emerged from the bulb. It took the spirit of the prophecy of its coming for its actual, tangible appearance. In this particular it quite ignored the Law of Attraction, which is the law of growth.

Christian Science is a sort of air plant. It is not rooted in the earth life by its many and varied past experiences. It is like a floating head whose body is dead. It is a species of insanity; an unbalanced condition that cannot last long. But it is a man’s privilege to live in this upper brain if he wishes to, and to create from it. That which he creates is phantasmal, like the condition from which it sprung, but the phantoms are real to him and to others in his position. A great deal of healing is done in this way. The scientist has lifted himself to a place in the ideal where he does not perceive the obstruction to his creative word; and so the word creates health, strength, or whatever it is spoken for. This form of healing is not invariable in its results by any means. The main benefit derived from it is in the fact that it points the way which underlies the power, the discovery of which enables us to create health with absolute certainty in all patients.

It points to man’s unfailing creative power. It says more forcibly than any words, “You can create any condition you please for yourself and for another who places his case in your hands. And you can make your creations endure permanently–recorded in flesh and blood–when you know how.”

Psychological healing endures as [218] long as the conditions in which it had its birth endure. A vast amount of this psychological healing is more imbued with the substantial force of the lower brain than it knows of. And in proportion as this is the case the healing is more lasting, and so is the creativeness of the healer. When I came out of the Christian Science school I was one of the most powerful of all psychological healers. I had no use of any part of my anatomy but the upper brain. I walked on air. My feet did not seem to touch within several inches of the ground. I went about pounding people over the head with the cabalistic sentence, “You are well.” Many of them acknowledged the impeachment, and miracles, so-called, resulted. A few were so ungracious that they refused to be convinced. This latter class, at first in the minority, came out largely in the majority later, as I began to investigate my condition. Life became a burden to me from the endless questions suggested by my untiring and unsparing mind. It was a worse nuisance than “Helen’s Babies.” I was fast developing into a mammoth interrogation point, and I would rather have been an ampersand, or anything else in the shape of a contraction of my condition. At last I saw there was no rest for me until I set myself to the task of finding the answers to my own questions. In doing this I found where the “I” is located, and gradually became acquainted with its marvelous power when acting strictly in the line of the Law.

The “I” is located in the objective mind, though it has the power at any time to visit either the subjective or the ideal mind. In fact, the “I” is king in the domination of man, but his throne is located neither at the highest point in his kingdom nor at the lowest. It is central, and its position is such that it commands both extremes of its dominions.

The business of the “I” is to lead all of its powers out into the objective world where they become operative in projecting uses upon the external and visible plane of life. There is no use for the memories and experiences lying behind the “I” except as they can be brought to bear upon our efforts of conquest in this present life here upon the earth. There is no use of the magnificent ideal faculties except as their grand conceptions can be built into substantial structure right here where we are living today. Man’s interests at this stage of his evolution are centered in the world we live in. And this will be the case for thousands of years yet. When he gets away from this world he will get away from it in a manner similar to the way he gets from America to Europe. He will have discovered the potencies and character of the ether lying between us and the other planets, and will have constructed airships to navigate it.

For as sure as nature exists, there is no ascension except by growth. There is no growth except by the acquisition of knowledge. There is no conquest over the obstacles that stand in the way of the realization of our desires except by individual effort. And this effort has got to be expended on that plane which calls into use the whole man; every faculty of his being and every atom of his person; and this plane is the plane of the earth life on which we now dwell.

To ascend into the ideal and live there means the cutting off of the “I” from this earth plane. It means death. Not annihilation–for such a thing is not possible–but it means death to the body and the cessation for the present time of effort upon the earth. If there was anything to be gained by the ascension of the “I” into the ideal, and the death of the body, it would be a pleasant thing to do and the right thing to do. But the death of the body–the objective or external intelligence–is not the right thing.

The right thing is the expression upon the external plane of the entire man. Externalization is the right thing. Externalization is expression of [219] the Law of Being. The Law might as well not exist as to exist and not be expressed or made manifest. The universe might as well be blotted out as that the Law should not be made manifest by that recognition of its existence which is expressed in all the myriad forms of nature, with man at their head.

We have had too much nonsense about the beauty and perfection of life on the invisible plane. It has almost ruined the race by causing it to postpone its efforts and its desires to another sphere of existence–an ethereal sphere, where there is no resistance to our wishes, and where everything comes without the expenditure of energy. We had as well learn the truth about ourselves now as at some future time; and I am going to put it plain and strong. The preachers are all wrong in trying to save souls apart from their bodies. They simply cannot do it. Souls are saved only inside their bodies, because souls and bodies are one. They are different apartments of the one mind that constitutes the whole man. And man can only be truly saved when he understands the fact that he is whole. This is what the Bible means when it says that in order to be saved a man must be whole, or “holy.”

Now, the body is simply one phase of the man’s mind. It is the objective part of his mind–the part that takes cognizance of external things. Cut this part off from the other divisions of his mind (as in death) and the man has sustained an almost irreparable loss. His throne is gone; his base of operations in the realm of useful effort is destroyed. He has become an air plant; a floating, rarefied spirit. And I believe that he must take on earth conditions again.

Of course, I do not know this, but I do know a good many positive facts that point to this thing as a necessity. In the first place, I know that a rarefied, ethereal condition is not the condition that yields strength. These bodies of ours, these eternal minds, are even now much too ethereal, too rarefied, too sappy, to yield us the strength we demand. Our sight is too imperfect, and so is our hearing and all our other senses. In fact, these bodies (ethereal minds) are only embryonic as yet. They are watery, diluted and weak. They have got to come out into the external with infinitely greater strength and power than they have ever done yet. The time is coming (it will be here when we get rid of our ideas of the desirability of spirit life) that our flesh will be so firm and yet so elastic that no substance on earth can compare with it in strength, and power, and beauty, and lightness. Our eyes will be composed of such substantial material that they will supersede the telescope and microscope. Our hearing, our touch and our taste will also be much improved as our sense of sight.

The only thing that ails us now is that we are not far enough out in the external world. Our external, or visible, development is too faint and weak. So much so that it yields to every breath of adverse or ignorant belief and suffers itself to be blown back out of sight again. Why, the wind blows through our bodies and chills us. Our bodies, our external perceptions, are so shivering frail, from a lack of recognition of what they might be, that they are at the mercy of things and conditions which are utterly negative to them, if they only knew it. When we drop these external perceptions (our bodies), will we be any stronger?

Strength is fixedness of perception. Perception belongs to the world of sense. Fixedness of perception is not the loss of perception, as by death, but its reverse. It is the constantly accrediting power to perceive more, and still more. Do not forget that perception is of the senses. It is the externalizing power. The stronger and better our senses are the more fixed and firm and irresistible will our bodies become, until they will be indestructible by any accident whatever.

[220] Mental Science teaches the road to life on the external plane. It teaches how to improve and strengthen these bodies. As the body is every particle mental this can only be done by an increase of knowledge. “Knowledge is power,” says the wise man. It would not be power if it did not add to man’s strength on the external plane. A man has no place to make use of his knowledge except on the external plane. Knowledge must be applied to uses or there is no need for it. Everything under the sun teaches us this fact. I accept nature’s teachings, and shall continue to do so until I am convinced that there are better and more reliable teachings somewhere else. It is safer to rest upon nature, and to learn from an observation of her methods, than to listen to the vaporings of men who have got so far away from her and are so ignorant of her laws that they are really insane.

All men want to know is the truth. They are not persistently mad in any desire to follow error. They want life. This is the leading desire of every organized creature, from a drop of protoplasm up to a man. They want life, and they will follow any trial, no matter how obscure, that leads in the direction of life. While they believe that life could not be perpetuated on the external plane they sought to perpetuate it on an invisible plane. So great was their desire that it should be perpetuated that they thought no sacrifice of present, external life was too great to make for it. Hence the mighty power of the various churches, and of the whole church as an institution.

Why, the church has ruled the world for many centuries. It has almost ruthlessly subverted the will of the people to its own will because the people believed there was life in it. “All that a man hath will he give for his life.” But slowly, slowly, and almost unconsciously to the people themselves, the truth on the subject has been growing. That this truth has not sooner manifested itself in thought and word is because it was a matter of growth. It is only with conception of the fact that a man is a mental creature, and that he is all of a piece, whole, or holy, that the gradually dawning idea has been able to be formulated into a spoken or written statement.

And who doubts men’s acceptance of this matter as soon as they perceive the truth? Even without perceiving the truth, but with only the faint, unconscious light of its first dim beams penetrating them from afar, they have ceased to cling to the church as their only hope. Their interests have been gradually drawing off from the unseen goal of their former hopes, and have become more deeply centered in the affairs of this external life.

It is the constant cry of the half-deserted churches that men and women are too worldly. And the preachers themselves are, in most instances, quite as worldly as their audiences. They chide themselves for this worldliness and promise themselves reformation, but they do not reform and cannot. Life is calling more loudly from the external side, and they have to hear. It is impossible for them to close their ears to the charm of the vital and vibrant sound. They are becoming more alive, instead of more dead; by which I mean that from the very nature of their progressive intellects they are coming forward more and more into the external world of uses. The external seems more inviting to them, and their visionary, subjective heaven less inviting and less real because they themselves are more wide awake by reason of the universal growth of knowledge. They cannot escape this universal growth of knowledge. And knowledge is tangible stuff; it is something that builds itself into blood and brain and muscle and bone on the visible side of life–something that prepares our bodies for doing more work and more play; that prepares our constructive faculties for building new uses. Something, [221] in short, that widens the entire range of life on the objective plane and makes it more inviting still.

And this is going to be the case right along from this time on, and to a much greater degree than ever before. The whole tendency of the age is toward an externalization of our latent energy instead of suppressing it or drawing it into the invisible world out of sight. This is the work of evolution. Every step in growth has been toward the time when man would express himself completely and wholly on the external or objective plane. Think of the majesty of grace and power that will be expressed when a man expresses himself–expresses all he is capable of expressing! Of course, this means the conquest of death, and nothing less.

How to conquer death is precisely what Mental Science teaches. It teaches the student, in the first place, that such a thing is possible. Having taught him this much, it has done a wonderful thing for him, because, let it be remembered, that a man is a mental creature; that, in point of fact, he is a mental statement that he himself has made. Previous to his knowing that death could be conquered, his mental statement (his body) held the belief of death as an unavoidable thing. The simple knowing that it is not an unavoidable thing is a change in his mental statement (his body) by which the seeds of death are cast out.

This knowledge, or this change in his statement of life, brings him at once to the realization of the “I,” and to a clear perception of where it must necessarily establish its throne. This establishment of a man’s throne is a new thing. The “I” has been so weak from non-recognition of its own power that it did not know it was a king. It did not know that it had any power. It did not know that its word was creative. It did not know that it was obliged to accept the race beliefs that have held all human beings in the bonds of disease and death. It did not know that it was a free thing; that it could deny its inherited life-statement and make a life statement for itself of a very different character. For these things were not to be known until the “I” had found out that it was a whole. It had imagined that it was at least three things, and perhaps more, and had not the faintest idea to which of its three parts it belonged.

But now it knows that it is whole; that its three chambers of mentality are all one, and it has established its throne in the center, and this central mind is the objective mind. And it is to this objective mind that the king on his throne intends to draw the mighty power so long concealed in both rooms of the subjective. He intends to draw all this wonderful volume of reserved force right out into the world of effects, and make it available for the working of miracles in curing disease; in developing the unknown external resources lying latent in nature; in constructing such appliances in locomotion as the brain of man has never yet imagined; in establishing systems of government in which all men shall have justice and opportunity of expression, or, rather, in making manifest such knowledge in individuals as will render the word “government” obsolete, and substitute “co-operation” in its place.

The king on his throne intends to make his own body represent his ideal of beauty and strength. As the sculptor works out his splendid design in marble so will the “I” work out his design, in flesh and bone; only the chisel with which he effects his work will be a tool a thousand times stronger than iron. It will be thought.