New Thought Archives

[231] As these lessons are not a novel to be read and tossed aside, but a new system of thought to be thoroughly studied and then carried out into action, it is absolutely necessary to repeat the ideas over and over again in different words, so that the student will at last come into the clear and perfect understanding of them.

Lesson thirteen, therefore, will be a repetition, to a great extent, of the ideas that have been gone over in the former lessons. This is all the more necessary because no writer can go over the same ground twice without cutting deeper and leaving his work much more thoroughly done and in better shape than it was. I shall begin by asking a few questions:

What is God?
God is a principle.

Is this principle not sometimes called a Law?
Yes, it is called the Law of Attraction.

Why?
Because it is the drawing power inherent in atoms and worlds.

Is the Law of Attraction ever called anything else?
Yes, it is called Being, and it is called Love. Swedenborg calls it Love.

Is Love also an appropriate name for it?
Yes, because Love attracts.

What is nature?
Nature is intelligence, or mind. Nature is the manifestation of the Law of Attraction, or Love.

Is the Law of Attraction, or Love, a visible presence?
No, the Law is forever unseen. As the Bible expresses it, “No man hath seen God.” Nature, which is the Law in externalization, we all see.

In what form does Love, the Law of Attraction, exist in its broad diffusion?
It exists as sex, or polarity, in the atoms. Each atom has its positive and negative pole, or its males and female principle. Out of this male and female principle comes the Law of Attraction on which all motion and manifestation of life depend.

To say that each atom has its positive and negative pole is to say that each atom is both Love and intelligence–that is, both seen and unseen; both spirit and body–that it has an inner and an outer part; these parts being in reality one, as light and heat are one.

And indeed Being–the one life–in its dual principle may be compared to fire; the heat being like the unseen principle of fire, and the light being like its reflection in nature.

Take this statement: Life is Love manifesting intelligence, just as fire is heat manifesting in light.

All nature is intelligence. It is the recognition of Love. Recognition is intelligence. Therefore it is perfectly [232] correct to say that all nature is mind. If nature is the recognition of the Love Principle, then it is not the acknowledgment of mind, but it is mind. It is the acknowledgment of Love expressed in intelligence, and intelligence in mind.

Therefore there is no matter, and the so-called laws of matter are groundless.

This emancipates us at once from the death sentence supposed to hang over our heads from the beginning of the world; and why?

Because mind cannot be killed. It is diseaseless and deathless. It is the comprehension, or the acknowledgment of the omnipresent and infallible Law of Love that we call God.

If the Law is diseaseless and deathless, then the understanding of the Law, the mind that represents it on the external plane, is diseaseless and deathless also, for the seeming two are in reality one.

As there is but one Life, so there is but one Law of Life. That Law is the Law of Attraction.

Is there no law of repulsion?

No, none in the universe. We are not in the realm of matter, because there is no matter. We are in the realm of mind, under the Law of Attraction. Intelligence seeks what is desires, leaving behind it what it does not desire, but repelling nothing. Intelligence constantly reaches forth to the new, never troubling itself about that which it has worn out. It “lets the dead bury its dead.” This is the true method of growth. It constantly attracts the new, and by attracting it passes out of the region, or off the plane of the old, but it repels nothings.

Let us take the peach as an example. It represents a certain amount of intelligence, a certain amount of recognition of the Love Principle, or the Law. It does not repel its blossom, but it outgrows it, and goes on gaining more and more intelligence every day, showing forth more and more of the Law of Love, until it attains a point where its intelligence ceases to reach forward for any more. Then it becomes a helpless thing and is attracted to the earth by virtue of the earth’s superior force as a magnet; and we say the peach is dead. Why is it dead?

Simply because it has no power to recognize any further good or life. It has reached a limit to its intelligence. All things die or undergo a change of form (that the world calls death) at that point where they cease to recognize further good; or cease to recognize any more of the Principle of Being.

To cease to recognize good is to cease to desire it, and when this point is reached the vital intelligence that lifted the creature, whether plant, animal or man, above the earth is resigned, and the earth claims her own through the power of the Law of Attraction.

But the earth is a tremendous magnet, and what can ever overcome her attraction? How will it be possible for any of us to grow away from her ravenous clutches and remain away permanently?

As stated previously, we are in the realm of mind, and there is no matter. The world itself is all mind. Its mountains and its seas and rocks are all mind. But they are mind of the lowest possible grade of intelligence. The smallest blade of grass that grows has more intelligence than the whole earth, and proves it by its power to ascend above it. And so long as the blade of grass can recognize a higher good than the dirt beneath it, it can by virtue of this recognition overcome the earth’s attraction. For, do you not see that in the universe of mind it is intelligence that makes the strength of a magnet, and not what we call bulk, or dead weight? Therefore it is only when the peach and blade of grass have ceased to grow (to acquire more intelligence or recognition of the Love Principle) that the earth’s attraction can overcome them.

Every creature that obeys the Law of Growth without seeking to learn [233] what the Law is, is in unconscious obedience to the Law; and the visible lives of all creatures on the plane of unconscious growth die.

The Law of Being must have intelligent recognition, a recognition so full and complete as to render the creature a constantly growing exponent of its own possibilities and power. This involves constant growth; a constantly widening recognition of the Love Principle, which, being individualized in the man, becomes the overflowing fountain of Life within him.

The procession of enlarging growths on the animal plane–all leading up to man–are each of them more or less unconscious of the power they represent. Their recognition of the Life Principle is expressed through uses. The brain in them is not ripened to that point where they can say, from the basis of pure reason, “There is a supreme power within me that I recognize as being able to overcome all foes to never-ending growth, and to liberate me entirely from all false or misunderstood attractions, to the attractions of pure, unmistakable good.”

The movement of Mental Science is a race movement, and it is the most important step in advancement that has ever been taken. It is nothing less than the passage of the whole people from the stage of blind, unconscious growth to that of conscious growth.

Blind, unconscious growth, as intimated before, is growing like the trees and brutes grow–without a knowledge of how or why we grow. And, as a matter of course, all growths that do not expand to the full knowledge of the Law of Growth and learn how to do their own growing, must necessarily succumb to the earth’s attraction after a time. It is earth to earth and dust to dust.

The earth swallows up all of us unless we can develop a constantly increasing vitality that will bid defiance to her attraction.

There is only one way to develop vitality in a universe that is not matter but mind, and that is by the recognition of more and greater truths all the time. Man has completed his animal, or unconscious growth, which has developed him into a perfect organism, or laboratory, for the manifestation of intelligence. And he stands at this point now–at the point where there is no farther progression for him under the law on unconscious growth, or the method of growth as expressed blindly in uses simply.

He stands at the point of the new and great departure–that departure toward which all ages have been silently treading. And so important is his position and his responsibility that one backward step would now plunge the world into another dark age from which it would take centuries to recover.

Indeed, so important is the present situation that the failure to use it judiciously would, to millions of us, render the world a nonentity, and make life as if it had never been.

In order to show the student just what I mean by unconscious growth as expressed blindly in uses, I shall give a fuller explanation.

All growth is by desire. In the animal, desire seems not to soar away from the body, but to be expressed through it. Thus, the little amoeba, which is but a tiny drop of protoplasm, becomes hungry. It floats in the water, and in coming in contact with some other form of life which will serve it as food, it folds its body about it, holding it enclosed as you might hold an acorn in your hand, and when it has absorbed the substance from it, it unfolds its body from it and lets the residue drop out, as you would open your hand to let the acorn fall. The amoeba has neither mouth, hands, feet, eyes, ears, nor anything resembling a digestive system, but it has a desire for food. In a higher organization to which the spirit of this little creature passes, that desire increases, and the result of its increased desire is a compulsion upon nature to furnish it with a better digestive system. And so it goes on up to higher and still higher incarnations, [234] growing stronger in its demands with each upward step, calling louder and louder upon nature for better means of supplying its demands, until it has not only a digestive system, but eyes to see its prey, olfactory nerves to smell it, ears to hear it, feet to run after it, and claws to capture it.

This is the development of uses through blind or unconscious desire, and it is by this kind of development that the perfect organization of the man is built and his brain is ripened.

But he may stand at this point until the crack of doom and be nothing more than the animal man unless he begins to make his brain serve him in his further development. The very moment his brain does begin to serve him in this capacity he is passing out of the domain of unconscious, or unreasoning, or blind growth, into the realm of conscious or reasoning growth.

But there never was a time during the period of his unconscious growth when he could have escaped the penalty of unconscious life, which is death; and the reason for this is in the very nature of the Law.

Life is dual in the sense of being inner and outer, unseen and seen, love and intelligence. And intelligence–a word that represents the whole visible universe–can only perpetuate itself as it recognizes that it is the externalization of the Love Principle, because it is only by recognition of this fact that it becomes consciously one with it, and therefore as diseaseless and deathless as it is. The animals and plants are really one with the Love Principle the same as man, but they are not intelligently conscious of it; that is, their reasoning powers have not rendered them a substantial reason for their existence, and so they do not catch on by conscious knowledge to the Law, and therefore they die.

Intelligence and Love are one. Intelligence is Love’s expression of itself. When intelligence really and truly perceives that it is Love’s or the Law’s expression of itself, then it has become as deathless as the unseen half of itself which we call Love, or the Law. All nature, with man at its head, is the spoken word of Love. But the word spoke itself. At first it spoke feebly, like the unconscious babbling of the child; but it grew in further recognition of its power every day, and at last it speaks more nearly in accordance with the unseen and vitalizing principle of itself–the Law of Love, or Life.

This one universal Love! What a strange, strange thing it is! It fills all space and is absolutely perfect in itself. It seems to go to no trouble to explain itself, but flows into and vivifies every expression of itself, no matter how negative or inadequate that expression may be. This is why I have said that man is the spoken word, and that he spoke the word himself; for while intelligence, or nature, comprehends Love in ever-unfolding degrees of recognition, Love seems not to comprehend intelligence, or nature, but simply to manifest itself in proportion as it is comprehended.

Speaking of the matter in this way, it is almost impossible not to convey the idea of a dual Life Principle. But indeed there is but one Life Principle, which is Love, while intelligence is the showing forth of it, as light is the showing forth of heat. It almost seems as if Love bursts forth in tiny jets that expand by slow degrees, revealing more and more of itself, until these flames become conscious of themselves and their true character, and exclaim aloud, “Behold, behold, we are visible loves!”

The fact of our recognizing ourselves as visible loves, or visible wills, living exponents of the universal Principle of Love, or will, is in itself sufficient to banish disease and death, and establish ourselves as conquerors in the earth, thus breaking the power old earth has had in drawing us all back into her bosom because of our ignorance concerning our own power.

And now I must go back a little to where I began to speak of unconscious [235] growth, because there is a mighty truth connected with it that the student must never forget. This truth will become an inestimable comfort to him during every hour of his struggle toward the place where he is to feel himself conqueror of all things–disease, poverty and death included.

I spoke of the amoeba, the tiny drop of protoplasm, in its search for food. This little creature had begun to speak itself into an unending existence; a visible existence. It was–as to its own personality–pure intelligence; a tiny point of recognition of the one Love, and it wanted to recognize more. This desire on its part formed the basis of its individual growth.

Now, there are but two factors essential to growth. These two factors are desire and belief. Desire, when accompanied by belief, as it always is during the period of unconscious growth, gets what it asks for. Perhaps it may not always get it in the limited sense of its asking, but it gets it in a higher sense.

The amoeba asks for food, ostensibly. In reality, it asks for more intelligence, a wider range of conception. It asks in faith, not yet having reached even the negative pole of conscious life where doubts of the eternal Love, or Life principle, begin. The little creature asks in faith, I say, and the very universe hears its cry, and the Law itself stoops down, as it were, to put food within the folds of its frail organism.

Think of this. No cry for a wider range of thought, no cry for more truth, was ever uttered in vain. It is a demand upon the eternal Love, the universal soul, that is never unanswered. And according to the measure of faith we put in the asking will the answer be prompt and full.

Now, while the animal is crying for food, which means ultimately a more enlarged conception of Love, or Life, we who have reached a much higher plane ask directly, or demand of our own organizations, that intelligence which is the only food that feeds us truly. And if we demand, knowing the Law, it will come to us, because the supply is equal to the demand.

Intelligence to comprehend more of Love–which is Life, the universal Life, a recognition of which embraces all creatures, and establishes absolute justice and flawless harmony in the affairs of men–this is all we need. This is Being, without a flaw. It is life freed from all beliefs in disease and death. The more our intellects expand to a conception of this Love the farther away from all our fears and all the old wretched beliefs we grow. Life, eternal Life, opens up to us more and more as our power to recognize the Love Principle increases.

Now, I have not heretofore made the statement that Love and will are, in a great measure, the same. There is a difference, however, and I will define it. Love is the attracting power. It is the spirit of growth reaching forth constantly. It is the under strata of the will, and also of desire. Love prompts to desire and desire culminates in will. Desire culminates in will when it has obtained the sanction of the reasoning power. And it is at this point where the reasoning powers endorse the desire, that man discovers his own power to create conditions for himself, and turns his back upon his own beliefs, refusing to be held by them any longer.

In ascending from the animal to the mental plane we find that we evolve more and more truth from our own organisms; truth that is more positive than any previous truth our organisms have yielded us. Our “physical” food supplies the raw material for the truth evolved, but our growing thoughts constantly direct this food to higher results. The evolution of the Love man, or the will man, is through the animal man. There is no object to be achieved by the perpetuation in existence on the visible plane of the animal man. He is simply a creature that serves as the root of the divine man–by which I mean the creative or will man. If the creative or will man never germinates [236] in the brain of the animal man and springs upward to noble uses, then he might as well die. And the race will continue to die just as it is doing now unless redeemed by the new thought beginning to dawn upon it at this time.

That which serves its purpose passes away. For thousands of years the animal man has been a perfect creature in his animalhood. But because his splendid animalhood failed to generate the thought that would link him consciously to the source and fountainhead of his existence he has died, as he ought to have done, since the world has nothing to gain from animal men beyond establishing them as roots for the race of divine men now about to step forth through a knowledge of the science of being. The world has no use for unproductive seed, and it is right that they should rot in the soil if the vital principle that would lift them to a nobler growth be wanting.

And yet, let no student think from what I have just said that the spirit of man is not immortal, and that its chances are over with its failure to catch on to that consciousness of truth that would tide it over death and render it immortal right here in the flesh. For though this subject is purely speculative, I feel that I carry in my own organization latent or unfolded proof of the fact that a spirit never dies; that the desire for life perpetuates life in some condition or other, and holds it until another chance is open for it. The desire implies the “I.” The “I” is individually in essence, and cannot be wiped out without its own consent, and it never does consent. Why, the spirit itself is a growing thing. It was not created perfect at the hands of a personal God. It grows all the time by the recognition of still greater power resident in the Law of its Being. Remember that the spirit is not the Law. It is that finer and higher and more emancipated part of our bodies which becomes too big for the environment of the body–its negative self–and which slips cable and goes free from the environment that was too inelastic to yield to its growth. Nearly all thinkers at this time believe that it comes again and again into what we call earth conditions. If it does this, and I must admit that the theory seems more plausible to me than any other, why then the spirit means to establish its own authority upon the earth by eventually conquering the environments that have closed it out of our visible life so often.

If man had been projected perfect into visible life, he would have possessed all the knowledge there is, and would be the incarnate expression or manifestation of all truth. There would have been no further growth for him; for all growth is by gaining more wisdom. But instead of this he was only the tiniest and feeblest spark of intelligence at first, and his intelligence has constantly increased. And as it increased he took wider and still wider views of creation, until now he begins to see that all is good and always has been; only he did not know it. He begins to perceive that the Law of Being is, that no man and no power has ever added to it or taken anything away from it; and that all creatures were great or small in proportion as they could see this mighty truth. For, though the Law is forever unchanged, yet man changes constantly; and this, too, in spite of the fact that the Law and man are one. Take this sentence from man’s side, and it will read this way: Man enlarges always by learning more and more of the infinite greatness and unchanging goodness of the Law of Being, or the Principle of Love, within him. For the Love Principle is the unseen power in every man; and so mighty is this unseen power that all through eternity men will never be able to measure it. But the effort to measure it and constantly increasing recognition of its greatness will be our means of growth, and all the means of growth we shall ever have. The attempt to measure it gives man his own measure; for man is one with it. And since man’s appropriation of it is by his recognition of it, it therefore follows [237] that no one can rob another of his inexhaustible inheritance.

And it is because all growth is by the acquisition of knowledge, or the recognition of the Law of Being, that we are able to state with absolute certainty that the supply is equal to the demand.

On the physical plane (so-called, there is no physical plane and never was) this was not so. That it was not so was the natural sequence of our mistake in thinking that there was a limit to good; or, in other words, that evil had an existence.

It will be seen all through these lessons that man creates his own conditions, and that he has fixed his own limitation by his mistaken beliefs, and that this is why, on the so-called physical plane, the supply was not equal to the demand; in consequence of which some men have thrived abundantly at the expense of other men, and much poverty and sorrow abounded. All of which will cease so soon as men learn that they are mental and not physical creatures, and that the acquisition of mental wealth–recognition of the Law of Being, which is perpetual life–is the only thing that can enrich them; and that they can acquire these riches without defrauding anyone, since the source of supply to this kind of wealth is inexhaustible. And this is the wealth, too, that will bring its possessor such magnificent surroundings as he can never acquire while living in a belief of the physical, with its limiting ideas, and its false and foolish laws.

For the time has now come, so long prophesied in history, when the race should banish death from this planet, and by a deeper understanding of the Law should build it into an abode for deathless creatures.

To bring this about will not necessitate any combination of men united in an organized effort to overthrow the present monopolistic systems. All such efforts, while they are natural and manly on the plane of their operation–namely, the animal plane–are circumferenced by and included in the one effort of the day; the intellectual effort to grasp the greatest of all truths that all is good, or Life, right now, and that heaven, or harmony, is already with us though we do not as yet see it.

Anything more logically conclusive than the facts I am now stating has never been spoken or written, and the student will see this to be so before these lessons are done, and he will see it in so strong a light that no power can ever shake his faith in them.

For heaven is indeed here. All there is of personal life is in this seeing. That men do not see the heaven I speak of is because they have been seeing from a negative standpoint, and what they have seen has been, not the truth, but the denial of truth. They have seen evil when there was no evil. They have believed themselves to be citizens of a physical world, with a set of narrow laws beyond which one’s thought could not go, and thus shut up in the gloomiest prison-house of self-delusion, they have made no effort to look beyond, and consequently the light of this outer and most glorious mental day is in darkness to them.

Man believes in the existence of evil, and thus has become faithless of good and the power of good. And so, in his darkened intelligence, the universe is divided into two parts. It is a diverse to him, and its harmony is lost to his perceptions. It is because man has so divided the universe in his thought–the power to think being his one power–that we see the appearance of sin, sickness and death; and they seem very real to us indeed while we remain imprisoned in a belief of physical laws, before we have ascended to the freedom of the mental, and before the understanding of the Law of Being shows their intrinsic falsity.

It is because of these ignorant beliefs that life is called a battle-ground, where each advancing step is supposed to be through warfare; and it is these ignorant beliefs alone that produce all the world’s (so-called) inharmonies.

[238] When, by ascension from a belief in the physical with its limiting laws, we shall truly know that the universe is one, and that this one is all pure Love, whose only law is the Law of Attraction–thus banishing forever all ideas of force–there will no longer be any basis for inharmony in thought, or belief, and those beliefs (or conditions) called sin, sickness and death will dissolve and show themselves no more.

Now, the race, not knowing that it is pure intelligence, and that for this reason its beliefs are its conditions; not knowing that there is no law but the Law of Attraction, which is the Law of Love; being ignorant of the fact that the universe is one, and believing from the negative pole of existence such beliefs as are based on fear, has projected a thousand false beliefs concerning itself and is to all appearance–as seen from this plane–externalizing these beliefs in its experience.

When I say that the race is actualizing these beliefs in appearance only, I state the entire condition of the race today. We are living mistakes almost entirely, and it is time we should understand the truth and begin to live it. The truth being that in a universe of Love there is nothing to fear.

Fear is the result of ignorance. It is the result of not knowing that all is good and not trusting unreservedly to this great fact. It will be seen from this how utterly baseless our position today is in the world. We are living in beliefs based on a false foundation. Because we are all mind these beliefs are our conditions. That these beliefs are untrue is proved by the fact that all is Love, and that the kingdom of Love is not divided against itself, but is a unit.

Living these beliefs, we are living an utterly false life; living, as it were, in a nightmare dream induced by fear; a dream from which we shall presently awake to find ourselves housed in Love, and under no law but the Law of Attraction, by the knowledge of which we will create conditions to suit ourselves.

The Law of Attraction being what its name implies is purely an attractive power. As an attractive power it cannot bring us anything but that which we desire. And as we desire only good, that being the object of all desire, and there being nothing else to attract us in the universe of all good, the idea of evil is utterly annihilated. In reality, evil has no existence, no law, and we have no cause for fear, and as we advance in the knowledge of the possibilities of life now latent within us, we will see that the old beliefs are utterly groundless. We will see that the universal Love is all in all, and that we are expressions of it.

In all the following lessons there will be some repetition of the ideas contained in the first twelve lessons. This course is prompted by the experience of a practiced teacher, whose first lessons follow the leading ideas to their legitimate conclusion; and who then goes over them again in order to fill them out more completely, and often to show them up from different standpoints, so that the student may be at no loss to understand the subject from any point of view whatever.

It is my wish that one lesson should illuminate another; and that all the last lessons should throw light upon the statements of all the first ones. I want the lessons to assist each other in becoming clear to the student’s understanding. The best way I have found to teach is to go over the main ideas of the lessons frequently, and at each going over to incorporate something new; some thought that strikes both deeper and higher than the others have done. It is the most effective method I know of to eradicate completely old, negative beliefs and to establish new and positive knowledge in the mind.