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Title: Freedom Talks No. II
Author: Julia Seton
Posting Date: February 11, 2015 [EBook #8414]
Release Date: July, 2005
First Posted: July 8, 2003
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FREEDOM TALKS NO. II ***
Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, Curtis A.
Weyant and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
FREEDOM TALKS
No. II
JULIA SETON, M.D.
AUTHOR OF "CONCENTRATION," "FREEDOM TALKS NO. I,"
"MARRIAGE," ETC., ETC.
Contents
I The Secret of Healing
II The Risen Self
III Transcendentalism
IV Psychology of Insanity
V The Law Eternal
VI The Outside and the Inside of Life
VII The Measure of Ourself
VIII Perfect Liberty
IX Cosmic Therapeutics
X Absent Treatments
FREEDOM TALKS
NUMBER II
The Secret of Healing
"_In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word
was God_."
"_And the word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his
glory full of grace and truth_."
Ever since the birth of the human race there have been health and
disease. Everywhere we find those who live at levels of comprehension that
cannot express in flesh the perfect power of the word and these must by
natural law take on the form of whatever they have power to comprehend.
Health is man's immortal birthright; it is eternal in the universal plan,
and it can be made to become eternal in the life of men in just the hour
they understand the laws of their own being.
There are two expressions of energy in the universe; one is called the
constructive, the other the destructive; the one builds up, the other
tears down. This must forever be so, for only as matter is destroyed and
passed back into energy can the energy pass out again into finer forms.
Living in these great universal currents of construction and destruction,
man relates himself constantly with one or both through the simple law of
his own consciousness, and only as he learns the laws of his own being and
consciously places himself in a position of power can he ever hope to
escape the results which the negative, destructive currents produce in his
body and his environment.
Today we know that the world in which we live is nothing but a great sea
of energy which, in the undifferentiated, is called God, and in the
differentiated is called matter or form, or, to make it more simple, we
can call one the energy that creates, and the other the things created
from and by this energy.
Man and his environment are created by this energy: He is a localized
center of force and he becomes the expression in form of just whatever he
relates with under the law of cosmic correspondence.
We have found that this great energy is also _intelligence_ and is
nothing but mind with its various manifestations. We know today that the
atoms of the atmosphere are intelligence, and as they touch one another
throughout space, it is through this atomic mind that messages are
carried, and currents are generated which can heal patients at a distance.
Everything in the universe is in a state of intelligent association, and
when the atoms become expressed in human form, they pass into that
expression of the universal mind known as _human_ consciousness.
All human life is simply different tastes of consciousness brought about
by the different vibratory rates to which our atoms respond.
The physical body is composed of a group of atoms attuned to move at a
certain vibratory rate, and within this physical body is another body of
finer atoms attuned to a still higher vibration and in relationship with
the higher electrical currents of the universe. There has not been much
told about this finer body, but it is time the sick world knows this law
of being, for then it will be in a position to control its own life. This
finer body is the "thought body" or psychic body and it is upon this that
the physical body depends for its power, just as the very best instrument
in the world depends upon the player for its expressed melody.
All sight, all hearing, all function is in this psychic body, not in the
physical one. What many of the psychologists call the subconscious mind is
only the registered intelligence of the psychic self. This psychic self is
in direct communication with the cosmic self and with the physical self,
and it is through this we become cosmic in our human consciousness.
The psychic body manifests through _idea_ centers of the human brain
and it is directly related with the cosmic currents through the solar
plexus of the physical body. The higher _concept_ centers of the mind
are the switchboard where connections are made, and it is in this way that
the psychic body registers its vibrations in the physical, and the
physical registers in the psychic--there is a circle of consciousness
established by the two minds.
This would be of no particular value to us, if it did not prove to us the
source of disease, for when we look scientifically and psychologically at
disease, we must see that it is simply disassociation between the psychic
and the physical selves, and comes as the natural loss of poise, either
physically, mentally or psychically.
Watching the play of human disease around us we can soon see that there
are two distinct ways by which disassociation of these selves begins;
first, through the mind by negative thinking, and second through the
emotions by negative feeling.
Our thoughts and our will are the great avenues by which we admit anything
into our psychic self, and are also the means by which we exclude all
things.
The whole poise of an individual can be destroyed by thoughts of fear,
hate, grief and anger; fright has killed and all these states of emotion
are simply grades of vibration, setting up inharmonious, psychical
activity, and leaving their corresponding effects upon the physical cells.
It is known only too well today by those who seek to know, that back of
all such physical conditions as nervousness, prostration, temporary
insanity, nervous disorders, pains resembling rheumatism, hay fever, heart
troubles, mental symptoms, nervous chills, morbid forebodings and mild
mania, there lurks the abnormal activity of the psychic or "thought body"
caused by thoughts and feelings acting abnormally upon the vital centers
of the nervous system and mind.
New Thought declares that all diseases, except accidental wounds and
fractures begin in the psychic or "thought body" as _energy_ and then
are registered in the physical cells as organic or functional disease.
We might follow this farther in order to satisfy science, but suffice it
to go this far, and then seek the value of knowing this: We can see that
the only thing that naturally follows is, the healer and patient must be
taught how to restore the lost equilibrium of the centers and again poise
the life in a creative thought vibration. This is done simply and surely
by teaching everyone the _correct_ use of the _idea_ centers of
the human brain and through this he is taught to form such thoughts and
produce such ideas as will allow a normal amount of energy to register on
both planes, and not permit the psychical mind to drive the human engine
on to destruction in a wild waste and explosion of physical, mental or
psychical energy.
This is not a long or wearisome task for in the cortex of every brain
there are distinct _idea_ centers whose business it is to take up
ideas built from thoughts, and _will_ must follow the idea, and by
constantly selecting the thoughts which will produce harmonious vibrations
within the psychic and physical selves, we join with the great creative
energy of the universe and it flows through us, healing and harmonizing
every atom of our body.
The very first step toward healing is to teach the patient to build for
himself a _health_ consciousness, and this is done by giving him the
positive ideas of health instead of the negative ones of disease. We build
for him the _idea_ of health, hold it firmly in our minds, and
project it into his _idea_ centers until it registers in his psychic
mind; then this is followed by his own increased power of willing, and
finally this passes into action and is registered in form.
_Ideation, willing_ and _doing_ is the great _health
trinity_, and when this is produced, healing must follow. This is the
_law_ and there is no appeal from it.
When we first meet a diseased person we find his field of consciousness
full of all kinds of negative thoughts of disease, worry, fear and
anxiety--these have been persisted in so long that they have weakened both
the idea centers and the power of willing. We at once create for him the
positive idea motor-form, and if his conscious mind is too weak to receive
the impulse, we project it into his psychic mind, helping him hold on to
the new idea until his own mind is able to grasp it, and it becomes
registered for him.
After he has learned the truth of the abundance of health energy within
and without to be aroused into action by the simple law of his own
thoughts and feelings, he sets to work to regenerate himself, and he finds
that he can really breathe the breath of life into his own nostrils.
After we have seen the scientific side of the real power of healing, then
if we want to get health and keep it, we set about studying how to live
our life so as to be able to generate thoughts and feelings, at all times,
which shall always move us at a creative health vibration. The very next
thing for anyone seeking health is to get easy in his everyday life; no
one can ever be well and live with every nerve on a tension. We need to
know the higher law of life that teaches us that no one put us anywhere
but ourselves; that no one is to blame but ourselves for what we have or
have not; we get and have in this world just what we have the power to
relate with and will get free from the thing we do not like in just the
hour that we build something better for ourselves. All we need to do is to
cease resisting conditions and agree with our adversary quickly. Freedom,
liberty and happiness are not things of the external world; they come from
within and we are sad or happy, bound or free, sick or well, not by our
external but by our internal conditions.
The sick, nervous, peevish, worrying mind sees everything as positive to
itself and must be taught that there is nothing in all the world that has
any power over us except that with which we endow it, and it must begin to
live under this idea rather than the old foolish one of being controlled
by every external condition.
"God hath not given us a spirit of fear but of love and of power and of a
sound mind," and with persistent thought culture we can soon form a habit
of thought and feeling that will build us away from our old consciousness
of disease and pain into a higher law of health and strength.
Good, positive, strong health thoughts are a certain preventive and cure
for every kind of disease. Disease and health have absolutely no relation
with each other; disease is the expression of a faltering, undeveloped
soul life, while health is the expression of a consciousness that has not
broken its law of universal recognition.
There are very good people who are sick and very many so-called bad folks
who are well; health is not bestowed as a reward of merit, it simply is by
the natural universal law, and it exists for those who know how to fulfill
the law within their own being. There are many so-called wicked people who
live in greater harmony with their wickedness than some so-called
Christians can ever do with their religion and goodness. Wholeness or
holiness means simply harmony, and harmony inside and outside gives
health. Anyone who has health has earned it by obeying the laws that
produce it.
Another great factor active in producing inharmonious vibrations and
registering destructive energy, is the old thought habit of living under
the laws of opposites, thinking thought of health today and of disease
tomorrow; to be passing daily between hope and despair. This is sowing
mixed thought seeds and cannot help bringing mixed vibrations.
The path to a health consciousness is to get the strong, positive idea of
UNITY and live under the law of similars. To begin at once to affirm UNION
with all the health and strength of the universe and stick to it in the
face of all the opposing negative thought vibrations generated within
ourselves, or thrown into our minds by others. This can be done by
resolutely substituting a health thought for a diseased one; no matter how
fast negative thoughts crowd in upon the mind, they can be antidoted by
the strong positive affirmation of HEALTH.
In order to register _health_ vibrations we must _think, feel_
and _be_ health in mind. The words of health, peace, power and
strength do not unfold into radiant flesh and dwell among us through a
faltering idea of fear, or vague "perhaps," or "I do hope I shall be
well," or "I want to get well," but it demands the eternal I AM HEALTH
NOW.
Courage, zeal and consecration to the laws of health and freedom from the
law of death are not kindled by the halting consciousness full of the law
of opposites, but they are the results of _knowing_ and _abiding_.
When we can in very truth and full of believing say to health, "Thy
kingdom come," it _will_ come.
Our daily thoughts then become the wires over which there passes into form
a finer substance, and our body is rebuilt and fashioned from the
indestructible _substance_ of the Universe.
The mortal body as we know it in the old thought world, is a thing of
earth and lives and suffers earth's calamities, but through the
understanding of this New Thought _union_ it can be made to become a
portion of the _cause_ as indestructible as _life_ itself, and
live and glory in omnipotence.
We are then in the resurrection of the _life_, and the _word_
that was _with_ God and _was_ God, is made _flesh_ to dwell among
us in glory and full of grace and truth; then we know what Jesus meant
when he said, "I tell you of a truth, there be those standing among you
who shall not taste of death till they see the Kingdom of God."
The Risen Self
"_And entering into the sepulchre they saw a young man sitting on the
right side clothed in a long white garment, and he saith unto them, be not
affrighted, ye seek Jesus of Nazareth--He is risen! He is not here_!"
When we read the Bible with its story of human lives and their great,
wonderful mysteries, we find among them, the greatest of all--the
marvellous one of the Christ birth and death, and as we read we are amazed
at the many confusing ideas of Jesus and His teachings. His disciples
themselves did not understand Him, though He sought always to clearly
interpret Himself; often when He spoke metaphysically they interpreted Him
physically.
There was throughout all the Christ history something so great, so holy,
so inclusive that it was too large for them to comprehend, and for all
eternal ages, the developing minds of men will be the same. They will keep
busy with their attempts at explanation of His life and His words.
Jesus quitted the world in benediction, and He left to those who followed
Him and His precepts, a great inextinguishable hope.
It matters little to those who really understand Truth, whether Jesus the
Christ lived, or whether He was only a symbol worked out by the
imagination of men and priests; be the origin what it may, Christianity
_still_ stands; and Religion still holds sway after centuries of
ridicule and generations of secular and scientific analysis. Something
unknown and uninterpreted beats and surges in the hearts of men, and
brings into expression in every age the clinging to a great mysterious,
wonderful, unseen agency that somehow works its way along the silent
avenues of the human soul.
The man Jesus may or may not have lived. Humanity may keep its birthright
of contradiction forever on this point, but higher than the limited
understanding of the few there lives the Truth of the great Christ spirit
which the name Jesus embodied, and which for centuries gone, and centuries
to be, will wax strong and flourish in the consciousness of men, as they
pass one by one into recognition of it.
Great and sacred was the day of Jesus' birth, and great and sacred was the
day of his death, for both revealed the stages of our human selfhood, and
both point our minds to deeper meanings of existence.
Jesus' life as we follow it from the manger to the cross was the
unmistakable story of the pathway of every human life and each little
action was a part of the great mosaic which each life is setting for
itself, and from which it shall one day read its own great AT-ONE-MENT.
The birth of the Christ consciousness comes to each soul as the dawn of
self-awakening. It is the first faint glimmer of a new world, and the
first hint the soul of man has of union with its source.
This first dawn of consciousness is purely a possession of the inner self,
and those who feel it only follow first by faith. This faith is buffeted
and attacked by the things of life until it is tried and becomes
steadfast.
In this first dawn of consciousness of the Christ self we are always
strangers to ourselves and asleep in the manger of natural things and
natural senses. We go on for years, and as consciousness grows stronger we
search and search for we know not what; craving pursues us, we go hither
and thither seeking, seeking--finding and losing.
The world and the things tangible are never wholly satisfactory in
themselves; we know instinctively that they are not all there is, there is
a deep, vital something in us that speaks its hidden messages into our
being, and we are driven on from sensation to sensation, crying for that
open sesame of union which will bring peace to our soul.
Then passing into deeper unfoldment we come into the real work of life, we
meet with responsibilities and its experiences; we are baffled again,
buffeted, besieged by the perplexities of doubt and fear and human
discontent and we feel that, strive as we will, we are not yet at home.
The ten thousand things of the human life entangle us,--the touch of
sickness, the expressions of so-called sin,--the baffling consequences of
our seeming mistakes,--all these draw us from the cradle of
unconsciousness out into the vital power of a self-conscious life, and
push us onward to our union with Cosmic Consciousness, or the risen
Christ.
On the self-conscious plane life goes on, driven on every side by human
experiences and at last turns back upon itself, and then in the Gethsemane
of its own making, it stands where earth and its perplexing joys are lost
and heaven and its hidden joys are yet unknown, and then facing the
expressions of its now half-revealed consciousness it cries out from the
depth of its soul's despair, "If it is possible, let this cup pass," and
it does not see the purpose in Gethsemane.
Human life at this stage of unfoldment has _fixed laws_, and the soul
meets in them the inexorable command to pass on to its own crucifixion,
the worked out sentence of its own judgments, and it goes onward bearing
its own cross which is built from the consequences of the laws with which
it has related.
The laws of human self-consciousness are hard to work out; each life faces
sometime, somewhere the proof of itself. There comes a day to all when
anything that is less than the truth slips off, and the soul stands bare
at the bar of the universal justice ready to be judged by the laws which
it has made for itself.
There are hours of human crucifixion that it were well to die on, for the
soul that wanders back from these fierce Mounts of Transfiguration has
paid the price of human transgression of law by human pain, and is purged
and cleaned by the fierce fire of its own igniting.
The path of human living out leads every life up the steps of Calvary
carrying its own Cross and it plaits the thorns and pierces the side of
"Him who in our life again is spit upon and crucified" until, at last, the
great human God-self within us is released through transmutation, and the
grave clothes of our dead self no longer entomb us; then the resurrection
day is at hand, and the Consciousness of God bursts into the
self-conscious mind, and the stone is rolled away from the sepulchre.
The human mind bursts forth in illumination and it passes with the Christ
birth on to the table-land of human comprehension and revelation of its
infinite union.
In this moment of glorified illumination we feel and know that every
moment behind us has been that this hour may be; we feel then that every
moment is a special moment; every life a special life, protected by the
ALL LIFE, and that everything on our human pathway, high or low, has led
us on to this supreme moment of conscious union with our God.
When the Christ Consciousness is risen within us, we feel the universality
of life written everywhere on everything; there is but one starting point
for all thought--God. There is but one ending place for all human
faith--God.
We are filled with a keener sense of the ONENESS of life, and we are
thrilled again and again by the nearness and greatness of God in the world
which He projected from Himself.
The Father which we sought in self-consciousness has become real and
tangible, and the sense of everlasting UNITY is in our hearts.
With this great God-self alive within us, we never fear that God will ever
pass away from any part of his Creation. We know too well, then, the truth
that "as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without
end," earth is destined to become a heaven in the lives of men as fast as
they develop to the place of understanding, and find the real holy ground
within the center of their own being.
God, or the Universal Cosmic Consciousness, has always been revealed to
men through the risen Christ consciousness within the self. The men of old
who walked with Him were those who had lifted their personal mind to the
level of the Universal Mind, so that from the shores of the Infinite
Wisdom great thought waves of Love, Truth and Peace beat in on them and
filled them, and their lives became a center of illumination for all.
There never was and there never can be any conflict between the power of
human consciousness and God consciousness. Truth is always Truth, and
Truth in the hearts of men build them back into the Great Harmony.
The Absolute never contradicts itself; as fast as lives are unfolded to
the Christ Consciousness, they leave the old thought life like an empty
tomb and push themselves into a glorious human expression, just as the
Easter lily rising above the dust and mould of earth, pushes itself upward
into the clear sunlight of a world where flowers are revealed, just so the
soul pushes on through consciousness and self-consciousness, into the
glory of the risen Godhood.
We can hear the voice of the Universal calling us through our Christ
Consciousness today, just as it called to men throughout the ages, and we
know that everything that throbs with natural life or comes into objective
expression in our human world, is really only the voice of the Universal
Cosmic mind speaking in the holy language of the human heart.
Every experience, every heartache, every joy, every despair, every
pulse-beat is only the text by which the great child mind of the world is
spelling out _God_.
The Risen Self comes into realization of the great white light of the
soul, and it enables us to see _all_ life in its completeness. Human
effort and human endeavor glow with an unexpected radiance when seen from
the table-land of the risen truth.
The human soul then rejoices in its Divine possibilities. Jesus said: "I
do always the things that pleaseth the Father," and the voice from heaven
said: "This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased."
When we turn to those who ask for proof of the risen Christ-self within
us, we have only to point to them the empty tomb of the old lives which
men everywhere leave behind them. If we desire we can go farther and point
them to the production of those in whom this great consciousness is
waking; all human life that is alive with thought and faith and deed, is
vibrant with a great vital spiritual force.
The signs of God Consciousness and the conscious union of God and men is
rampant everywhere in the natural world. Every factory, every steamship,
every invention, every composition, everything in form sets its seal upon
the genuineness of the existence of the spiritual exaltation of the minds
of men, and higher than the things of the natural world, there stands the
achievements of the mental and inspirational souls; the libraries with
their tens of thousands of written pages, the art museums and galleries of
precious dreams; all over the world there are hung on walls and chiselled
into glistening marble the story of the glory-gazing of some
Christ-illumined soul. And again sounded forth from thousands of churches
each Sabbath morning, there is swelling out majestic songs sung by
myriads of voices now, but sung _first_ in the silence of some dim,
deep soul-dream, in the Christ consciousness of some risen mind. That
grand harmony was born on the table-lands of human illumination,
registered on the human brain, and worked out into tangible form here on
earth to bear witness to the home-land of the God-man.
Christ consciousness is the final destiny of every soul; it is what we
really live by and today we know, as never before, that in order to
advance and grow, we must consecrate and bring it here and now, into its
fullest expression in our life.
There are bound to be born, at first, many things on this table-land of
new understanding that will be worked out indifferently by our limited
brain, and when challenged by the strain and stress of life they will
depart because they will be unable in their present form to answer to the
great world's need. But increasing consciousness makes everything more
powerful, and as we go on we learn to build sublime and lasting things, to
stand the test of time because they have their root, not in the old
thought self, but in the unfolded risen self, and they are grappled to the
heart of the very Rock of Ages.
Standing, then, risen from the dust world of our old defeats, our human
minds receive new illuminations and rejoice in them. Law becomes the
essence of our daily living and the mind of man the direct inspiration of
the Almighty. We dare to trust our risen mind to the uttermost for in it
is GOD himself enshrined.
In this new spiritual perception we rely more and more on our intuitions,
illumination and revelation, for it is human Godness, backed by the
strength of unnumbered hosts of higher consciousness.
We know at last that all our daily living is not a matter of outward signs
but of inward sight; all external things may contradict us, yet in sublime
confidence we shape our way while the Christ voice within us speaks forth
its messages, telling us all the holy and uplifting stories of our daily
life. Over the trials and wreckage of our common years we follow it; out
from a silence that is known only to ourselves we bring the lessons that
have burnt their truth into our souls.
In the power of this risen self we stand with our faces upturned, with our
whole life opened to God, and human effort, human growth, human hope,
love, joy,--all are joined in the sense of Divine resurrection.
This is the consciousness of God in the human soul; this is the
Resurrection morning and it makes us NOW the Sons of God, and from the
darkness of our Old Thought growth we lift our hearts away into a new Life
Divine. We open our eyes in the radiance of a light that never grows dim,
then standing with an all-seeing soul vision, we can point to the long
years behind us through which we have worked out our soul's salvation and
closing the door on the empty tomb of our dead self we say with all the
serenity of our new-found God-consciousness:
"I know whom you seek. He is not here. He is Risen!"
Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism is today the one subject which is demanding the greatest
attention. The race mind is beginning to think in words of transcendental
language rather than in the old law of science and philosophy, and all the
light of modern investigation centres round the one who declares himself a
transcendentalist.
We may say that a man is a scientist, a philosopher or a materialist, and
the world will know at once what we mean, but if we say that he is a
transcendentalist we leave an open doorway for investigation; there is
something yet to be learned about him, something that no one knows about
but himself.
Anyone can easily define a scientist, a philosopher and a psychologist,
but they halt in more or less indecision when they are asked to define a
transcendentalist, and it is only when we understand that a
transcendentalist is one who has extended his normal consciousness into
relationship with the deeper laws of the universe, so that he uses
naturally these laws and is perfectly familiar and at home in states of
consciousness which the rest of the world call supernatural, and with
which they are entirely unfamiliar, that we can come to a true definition
of the transcendentalist.
Transcendentalism has been a part of race unfolding since time began, and
will continue to be throughout all race evolution.
In the old civilization we studied the transcendentalist and
transcendentalism from an entirely different view-point than we do today.
Transcendentalism is a state of consciousness and man evolves into it out
of the natural states of his own mind. No one is to blame that he is, or
is not, a transcendentalist. He becomes one not alone because he wills to
become, but also because he is one with the divine law of creation and the
God-consciousness within him pushes him on through one state of unfoldment
to another.
There are two expressions of universal and finite mind, one is the
objective, the revealed, the apparent, and one is the subjective, the
concealed, the absolute.
The objective side of mind belongs to the surface consciousness of man,
and is in itself a distinct state of existence, it is bounded on every
side by its own laws, and commands its own obedience. The subjective side
of life belongs to the inner side of mind and is also a distinct state of
existence bounded by itself and the laws of its own kingdom, and without a
deep knowledge of universal law, man has little power of connecting these
two strong zones of consciousness.
Studying life in the light of our modern understanding, we find that man
passes by natural law through the objective, the surface zone, then on to
the subjective or inner zone, and then to a centralized position between
both zones where he lives, moves and has being in both zones, uniting the
laws of the two kingdoms into a new zone of consciousness, then using the
laws of both, he passes at will to the very edge of matter, and back to
the very center of the cosmic mind; standing here in life's master
position, he is lord of both zones. This middle zone of power and mastery
is the path of the modern transcendentalist, and the one who walks it and
lives in unification with its laws is the _modern transcendentalist_
of the new civilization. It has been written--
"_For wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leadeth to
destruction, and many there be who go in thereat" because_
"_Straight is the gate, and narrow is the way which leadeth unto
Life_."
We know today that this is true, for on the broad path of the objective
life man must pass through the law of change which destroys, that it may
create again and through which he is crowded on to seek the narrow path of
subjective senses which are built on the law of verities.
Man's first lessons are in the objective zone of mind, and he remains
positive in this zone until he masters its laws and the lessons which they
bring.
In this objective zone of mind we find the mass man of the old
civilization, he is in the _broad way_ of the surface consciousness,
and in his midst there dwells the specialized individuals who are
approaching the central zones of mind; they are called the scientist, the
physicist, the materialist, the agnostic, the mentalist, the reasoner, and
the atheist, all true and perfect for their type but all more or less
unconscious of the latent states of mind within themselves and the
universe to which they must some day respond.
As human consciousness intensifies through use, man finds himself passing
on through his surface zones to the concealed states of mind within
himself, "the narrow way," and slowly, almost unconsciously at first, he
begins manifesting the law of these zones. In these states of mind we find
the philosopher, the idealist, the emotionalist, the psychist, the
sensitive, the intuitionist, the revelator, the transcendentalist and the
seer.
Watching race evolution we see that the day of surface consciousness and
its power is waning only as it is controlled and manipulated through the
subjective states of man's mind. The hour for subjective research and
subjective introspection is at hand,--men have mastered the external world
and its laws, and are now following the cosmic urge which is pushing them
toward the center and away from the _apparent_ to the _absolute_
laws of life.
The external evolution of form is complete for this hour; men go down into
the bowels of the earth, they sail the seas, they mount the air on wings,
and the external world has seen "the son of man coming in clouds of glory"
and now the eternal man must have his hour, and come in "trailing robes of
power and brightness," to pour new revelation through the external world
and its laws.
Books, paintings, pictures, science, music have all had their day in
external exaltation, and now the attention of man is mounting higher and
turning inward; the study of the surface and sub-consciousness has been
transferred, and while part of the world's eyes are yet peering through
the microscope at the _sub-life_ and plenty are looking at the laws
of life around them, the transcendentalist with these truths locked fast
in his mind, is turning to the undiscovered states within himself, and is
everywhere launching out into the unfathomed states of the supra-mind of
man.
Man has evolved like a planet through the stone age of mind and today with
the planet in the vibratory zone of water and _air_ he has risen with
it into the transcendent states of his own being.
Many transcendentalists are living so naturally in the beginning
manifestations of the supra-mind that they hardly recognize them as
uncommon and the world is becoming peopled with a race of supra-men and
supra-women who are using the subtle laws of the transcendentalists of the
past, but not using them _alone_, or in _hidden cloisters_, or
through separate states of living, but using them as simple human
attributes of their own mind, and using them in the common marts of the
surface life with more real understanding than did the olden
transcendentalist in his specialized separated environment, assisted by
_secluded study_ and _special opportunities_.
The modern transcendentalist is a post graduate of the surface
consciousness, and uses it as simply a wireless machine with which he
registers his deeper perceptions, and with it links himself and his
revelation naturally to the natural world. He stands in natural communion
with both zones, and in this communion with deeper laws he attains a
supra-power, he walks his human pathway in human form, but he manipulates
his surface life with the power born of his supra-wisdom.
The modern transcendentalists form the corner-stones of the new
civilization. "For the new age will come quickly to its birth when this
His world, will know itself divine" and in this new civilization the mass
man will have for his surface consciousness, the deep subtle union of both
zones, and the specialized teacher, leader and messenger of this new age,
will forge ahead on the great white way of prophecy and seership which is
born from the union of the finite and infinite mind.
To the mind of the old civilization this will not seem true, for it is
still in the swaddling clothes of its old inheritance; in the thoughts of
the past, man and God, matter and spirit, finite and infinite have been so
long divorced and separated that it will be found difficult to accept the
union of incense and worship and reverence in the same breath with the
real, the apparent and the formed, but this is the hour for higher
prophecy, and that hour when the "lion and the lamb shall lie down
together."
To those who are really able to read the signs of the times, human
consciousness everywhere offers the greatest proof of this truth, for
looking with eyes that can see, we find that every individual is in
possession of eight distinct states of consciousness with which he can
operate in the subjective and objective zones.
There may be still greater stretches of the human mind into union with the
universal which the oncoming races will discover, but that there are eight
distinct levels of mind activity many know because they have touched them
and know them within themselves.
Some minds are active in one, some in two, some in three, and some in
four, and some are more or less distinct in all.
The mass man of the new civilization is awake in the _third_ and
_fourth_ dimensions of his mind, and those in higher reaches are
awake in the _fifth_ and _sixth_, a few are in the _seventh_ and
_eighth_, but the rank and file are familiar to some degree with all
these states.
The first or surface mind of man is in itself only cell consciousness,
touched by man's own intellect, and it is known as _instinct_, his
second expression of mind is known as _reason_, the third is
_emotion_ or _feeling_, and the fourth is instinct, reason and
emotion blended into one, and called _intuition_. The fifth and sixth
are above the plane of thought and feeling and includes them in a still
higher intensification; here thinking ceases and _registration_ is
the law, and here is where _revelation_ is born. The seventh and
eighth are still supra reaches of man's mind, and include the union or
surface consciousness with the higher states, in which the brain becomes
the wireless machine, through which flashes of divine wisdom comes; this
is called _Prophecy_ and _Seership_ and this is the product of
the "mirror-mind."
There are bodies and atmospheres to fit each transcendent state of mind,
and the transcendentalist can suspend any, or all of his states of mind,
one after another, and pass into direct atonement with any level with
which he wishes to function; he can at will live in a new world, and speak
with a new tongue, and fill his surface mind with a glory not its own,
"but which it had with Him before the world was."
These new states of mind in action extends man's world into the wider
reaches of the universal and adds to him new levels of wisdom and power.
There are reaches of intelligence far below and beyond the common
intelligence as the microscope and the telescope have shown, and at the
fourth and fifth dimension of consciousness man dispenses with all
material aids and uses the adjustments of his own being. He has found the
eyes, the cars, and the understanding of the supra-self, and by suspending
his surface mind through concentration and meditation he can enter any
sphere of thought at will and be in the land of clairvoyance,
clairaudience, and in the astral and atmospherian, or pass farther out and
register in his surface brain the wonders and laws of etherian, and
celestial worlds. He is at one with the world of the sensitive, the
impressionist and the medium, and in the deeper states of vision he can
see and read the memory tablets of the universe. In the higher
registrations he becomes cosmo-voyant and cosmo-audient, he can see and
hear through space and through ethers as the common eye looks through air.
These are not special gifts from God, but simply the gifts man gives
himself through the conscious use of what is already in his possession.
The power to extend sight and hearing far above and below the so-called
senses is latent within every individual and when the point of
transcendental development is reached he uses it naturally.
There are some people who can see birds in the air, ships at sea, stars in
the sky, while others standing beside them see only empty space. Just so
there are many everywhere on life's pathway who can extend their normal
vision and hearing to such an intensified vibratory rate that it not only
includes all the things of the physical plane but the things of the finer
ethers.
The transcendentalist standing on the streets of New York can extend his
vision and look at a street or building in Chicago or Cairo or London,
while the surface man alongside of him can scarcely read the signs on the
other side of the street.
The modern transcendentalist does only what the surface man does--he looks
to see and brings one hundred percent of his vision to bear upon his
desire, while the surface man has less than ten percent of himself in
action and that _only_ on one plane.
There are enough people on the planet today who can use these deep states
of mind, and induce the extended vision and hearing at will to make it
more than a mere hypothetical conclusion; there are X-ray beings among us
who have come into contact with a great fundamental principle both within
and without themselves.
The time will come in the near future, when the operator with the Roentgen
ray will stand beside his machine and look with wide open eyes and find
the X-ray in his own vision, and will work unlimited by the bondage of his
material machine.
Comparing the modern transcendentalist and his pathway with that of the
olden transcendentalist with his ascent of travail and pain, we find a
profound satisfaction in the picture of power, peace and love of the
modern supra-man.
The pathway of the elder supra-man was one of crucifixion, self-denial,
renunciation, affliction, poverty, disease and self-mortification. He
found the steps to the higher consciousness and its power only through
slow self-conquest and comradeship with pain, and this was the inheritance
he handed down through the centuries. To think in terms of mystical wisdom
meant human denial of all sentient life. Unification was bought through
total consecration to the subjective and the absolute, in which the
diverse could have no part.
Today "we are free where our sires were serfs, we can see where He left
them blind," and we know that God-consciousness is man's immortal
birthright and that the son of man must somewhere on his pathway become
the son of God, and as he passes on in his unfoldment he will contact
every atom of God-mind in all lines of expression, and from the world of
matter he will turn in time naturally to those levels of mind which lead
him into reverence, illumination and worship, and through this he finds
the whole of life.
Man in his immersion into cosmic consciousness puts forth profound tests
of his oneness and faces life in larger and larger proportions, and as he
ascends he carries all with him, so that he can give back to all a
profound and heroic response.
Every man is transcendent when the hour dawns for his transcendent self to
tremble into action.
With these wider reaches of consciousness the modern transcendentalist
finds the larger LIFE and the true way of living, and in this brings the
new message of the "One life in all and through all" into the mass mind,
and the new song of joy and thanksgiving into their hearts. He is never
sad, never agonizing, never renouncing; he has made contact with all life
and through this with the universal joy; there is no denial, no
separateness,--there is "no more crying," he conquers and ascends not
through separateness but through increasing degrees of union. He lives in
glad comradeship with God, in joy and perfected self-expression, both in
the objective and in the subjective world.
The ancient transcendentalist was always sad, always separate, always
worshipping in beatific loneliness, in seclusion and renunciation of the
world; the modern supra-man passes from end to end of the pole of being
and stops at any point and functions normally. "He stands and works, then
kneels and prays." He is lord of the outside external world and partaker
of all its divine joys and pleasures, and he is lord of all the deeper
reaches of subjective consciousness within himself and the absolute in
which he lives, and he brings out from these deeper levels all the
intensified power of illumination and revelation, and pours it over his
daily pathway illumining it with a glory not its own.
Many olden transcendentalists lived on in entranced states of divine
wisdom with diseased flesh and bodies that shrieked with pain, while they
mortified and rejected that divine wisdom. The modern transcendentalist
brings all his God-consciousness to bear upon his flesh and raises it to
the transcendent heights of his own mind and heals it until bone and
muscle and tissues gleam and scintillate with a new found beauty and
youth.
The olden transcendentalist dragged on in barren cells and dreary poverty
in order not to divert his glorified vision of the formless by the beauty
of the _ever present form_; the modern transcendentalist brings his
higher laws into play, conquers his poverty and commands around himself
the beauty and luxury and freedom of the world of form, and it speaks to
him in matchless raiment, luxuriant flowers, gems, material comforts and
soft ease. He lives in rapturous companionship with the glory and beauty
and majesty of God in the world _He has projected from Himself_, and
with this beneath him, he can rise to the very pinnacle of infinite
selfhood.
The olden transcendentalist, ascending into the transcendental heights of
his own mind, ascended alone, and from these obscure heights he shed his
wisdom back upon the evolving race; he was pioneer in the lands of cosmic
consciousness and the first revelator of the path; he showed the race that
the path was there to tread, and his messages have fallen as a benediction
on the race mind even while he himself bought his wisdom with pain,
renunciation and suffering built from the limited recognition of his own
mind.
The path winds onward and upward still, but the feet of those climbing it
today are led by still waters and in the paths of righteousness. They are
no longer in the part but are in the middle of the Divine Channel of
God-consciousness. To know _one_ part was the mission of the _past_;
to know _all parts_ and join them in a divine unity is the mission of
the _present_.
The modern transcendentalist does not love life less, he loves it more!
The world is alive with a new majesty; the passing multitude, the passing
face, every human attribute of life calls forth from him a deeper
interpretation; he walks out into the race mind, and with the power of a
new word, and a new touch heals it from its infirmity. He does in truth
give "absent treatments," and his word is accomplished; the old diseased
flesh transmutes in answer to his command. He speaks to the barren walls
of poverty and they stretch away into stately halls, for he knows that
wherever man posits his consciousness, substance must gather round it; his
new words of power and majesty fall like a benediction on the heart of the
listening multitudes, and they turn round to face a new tomorrow with a
new hope born of a larger understanding.
The transcendentalist walks often in our midst; sometimes he assumes the
simplicity of a child to disguise the larger stretches of power within
him, but he is out upon the pathway strong and beautiful, wholly replete
with promises of perfection, doing the work of the human.
There is a royal road from _appearance_ to _reality_, from
_objective_ to _subjective_, from the limited to the absolute.
Difference is merging into one _great white way_ through which the
new civilization is thronging, led by the intensified vision of the
supra-minds.
Unity has carried man above all things of human law, and he has found that
Mighty Force of which all is a part, and he is out into the land of "naked
visions" and _knows_.
He dwells securely upon the height and has ceased the long fight with the
objective half of himself; he is one with matter because he has
transcended and absorbed it; he is centralized in the formless and
spiritualized in the formed, and can say from the level of his own Christ
consciousness:
"_I and my Father are one."
"All that my Father hath is mine_."
The Psychology of Insanity
With the ever present increase of insanity, it is not only interesting but
important that the subject of insanity should be studied from all
view-points, and anything which can be contributed that will help in
controlling or curing it, should be accepted as good material.
It is an apparent fact that the multitude knows very little about the
cause of insanity and less about the cure. Investigation has in the past
been directed to the physical side of the disease, and many of the insane
hospitals are examples of physical comfort and perfect physical attention,
but they are also living examples of the fact that to house, feed and
clothe the demented does not necessarily mean a cure, and a call for
deeper understanding is imperative.
Civilization needs each individual as a unit in the great working force of
life, and those who need to be taken care of by a State take away a
legitimate support and add just that much more to the burden of the State.
A civilization which can increase the independence of the individual and
lessen the responsibility of the State is one to be directly desired.
Insanity calls for a closer study than has ever been given and only
through a deeper realization of its cause, can a cure be brought about and
individuals rendered of value to themselves and the country.
Insanity is nothing more or less than disassociated states of mind and
need not in reality be any more serious than errors of refraction of
vision, faulty locomotion or lack of coordination. It comes because
individuals know nothing of the psychology of themselves or their own
minds and is the result of over-intensified mental and physical activity
and loss of poise, physically, mentally and psychically. The insane are
not capable of understanding themselves, and up to the present day there
are very few who are able to understand them.
The nurses, matrons and physicians of a great asylum are powerless to
assist them because of their own ignorance of the true laws of psychology.
The cases which simple, natural, physical methods will assist, are cured,
but thousands of others are allowed to drag along with the dreadful
stigmata of "hopelessly insane."
Insanity is increasing because civilization is changing, and conditions
are changing. As conditions change the minds of men change and today
subjective states of mind in the individual are becoming intensified.
Instinct, reason, emotion, intuition, revelation and prophecy are all
struggling for expression; unrelated and misunderstood they become
disease; related and understood they can be made to bring forth a new race
with new extensive reaches of intelligence.
There are few people so stupid but that they can testify to the
conflicting states of emotions within themselves and there are many people
who are perfectly familiar with states of consciousness with which many
other people are entirely unfamiliar.
Wherever we go we are continually confronted with what the world calls
"freaky" or "eccentric" people, and these people are found in all degrees
from the slightly odd folks to those filling the asylums, and strange as
it may seem, no matter how queer they may appear to other people, they
never seem so to themselves.
There are many families with members whom the rest call irrational,
irresponsible or "black sheep." Again, there are many families who have
one child who, from the time of its birth, has called for methods of
management entirely different from those used for the other children.
There are many little sensitive creatures who are afraid of the dark and
who have queer ideas and odd ways, and there are delicate little people
who have bodies so finely organized that they are nearly broke into pieces
with the natural things which the other members never notice. They are
born sensitives and remain sensitives to the end of their lives, and only
as they can be taught the truth about themselves can they be rescued from
some form of mental disturbances.
These people as they grow older, become what is termed "psychics"; they
are over-intensified in some of their deeper states of mind. They are not
alone the product of civilization, but the product of race evolution. Many
of them pass on in semi-normal states of self-support, but they are a well
known class, and they are more or less unsuccessful in supporting
themselves along natural lines of labor, and if they inherit wealth they
run into vagaries and often degenerate lines of living; they squander
their all and die in charity.
The common business world is full of psychics and it is correspondingly
full of failures for this is not a faculty that makes for success or power
with material things.
Psychics who are only slightly disassociated are always a source of
annoyance to their friends, and often looked upon as irresponsible, and
have to be looked after by some one who has patience enough to be with
them, and often they are passed along as having an artistic temperament.
As long as their peculiar development does not interfere with normal
action they are unmolested by the public. It is only when deeper states of
mind become so over-intensified that they lose their normal relationship
to normal things of the world that they are put under control. They are
called paranoics, melancholics, demented and insane. A correct mental
training would teach them to re-associate their mind and to live a
moderately normal life, at least. All drunkards and drug fiends are
psychics; degenerates are also psychics. These conditions are simply the
result of loss of polarity of normal mind centers, resulting in the
conflict of states of consciousness within themselves.
There are also many psychics in the ignorant and undeveloped classes. The
witch women and seers, and many of the colored races are psychic. In the
past, these people were looked upon as witches and their words and works
were known as "witchcraft."
There are many psychics who are also great geniuses. Lord Byron and the
"Mad Painter" of Belgium were psychics. History is rife and galleries of
art and temples of literature stand as testimonials to some of the
constructive productions of their minds, but beside them run dark stories
born of their psychic uncertainty.
Criminals of certain types are psychics with no power of physical control
and they pass into subjective control and live and do the things that are
given them to do from the psychical mind and are often ignorant of their
own condition.
Those whom the medical profession call paranoics are simply psychics,
over-developed in the subjective faculties--a prey to all the disembodied
forces of the subjective plane, and also to every floating thought on the
physical plane; they are obsessed by ideas from within and without and
their actions bear witness to this statement. Some very meddlesome women,
and those who are the terror of a quiet community, are nearly always those
who are in the control of the slower psychic forces and unable to
consciously direct their own normal states of mind.
In science the psychics are called diseased. Science gives all actions a
physical basis, but it is time to know that abnormal states of
consciousness, that are only changes in the functional side of the mind
and which have no apparent physical basis, are found in thousands.
Neurasthenics and psychasthenics present the mildest picture of disordered
states of mind. All neurasthenics and psychasthenics are psychics and
their diseases can only be fully understood by the psychologist. The
scientist has long ago exhausted his knowledge of the cause and cure of
these diseases and this is why all branches of metaphysical healing are
overcrowded.
To understand this abnormal thing called "insanity," one must fully
understand the normal, called "sanity." There are four distinct states of
consciousness in every individual; these must be kept co-related and all
of them manifest through the common everyday mind. These four states of
consciousness are _instinct, reason, emotion_ and _intuition_.
These four states of consciousness are _functions_ of the normal
mind. When a patient becomes over-intensified in either one of these parts
of the mind, mental disease results. The psychic is over-intensified in
the emotional and intuitional functions of his mind, thus rendering his
common sense states _uncommon_, and according to the degree of
over-activity, he is either a "freak," a creature of "temperament," a
"genius" or a "dementia."
The ordinarily insane individual has lost all relationship with his
natural, instinctive and reasoning mind. He is disassociated. Reason,
instinct, emotion and intuition are all in conflict within him. The
emotional and intuitional faculties overfunctioning distort his common
understanding. His idea centers are not able to distinguish between the
real and the unreal in thoughts. He becomes possessed and obsessed by
ideas born of emotion and intuition that have no foundation in fact, and
as time goes on, he loses complete control of his idea centers.
Every individual has definite idea centers within his own brain, and it is
through these centers that ideas are coordinated, received or rejected. As
over-intensification of feeling and emotion goes on, the normal action of
the idea centers is interfered with and the individual has superinduced
emotional and intuitional states which are no longer guarded by reason and
thought. The emotion senses a purely imaginary condition and the idea
centers have no power to reduce it to truth. As time goes on, all power of
association is lost and the individual passes along, the plaything of his
subjective states of mind. As he becomes more and more intensified
subjectively, he opens the deep psychic currents both within and without
himself, and loses his connection with his common mind and his physical
body, and becomes a prey to all the psychic currents.
There are lives everywhere open to subjective thought currents, and all
unknown to themselves they are allowing themselves to become disintegrated
by the daily and hourly response they are giving to the stimulus of a
plane they should master instead of allowing it to master them.
The psychic plane may become a pathway to power, or it may become the open
doorway to a body and mind full of disease, insanity and absolute loss of
power and poise.
There are many patients confined in the asylums today, who would never
have been there, and who would be released and cured, if those in charge
fully understood the truth of this unnaturally natural development and
directed their attention to its control.
The first truth is, people are born into what is to them natural
relationship with this psychic plane and go on for years misunderstood,
pained and repressed, unable to rescue themselves from what they do not
understand, and in the end the physical body does become diseased by the
continual inroads of strain and repression; functional disorder and
anatomical changes result. The farmer's wife loses her mental balance
through repression of the fine emotional, intuitional side of her mind
which finds no expression in the dull environment of the farm. The
over-worked mother loses her mental poise; disassociation follows
over-stimulation of the practical and repression of the artistic; and in
emotional patients exaggerated states of feeling go on into greater
disassociation for lack of strong sensible thought control.
And the second truth is, that many are born so close in relationship to
the unseen plane and in such psychical correspondence, that some slight
thing which weakens the will-power--sorrow, a disease that devitalizes the
physical, some shock, or some prolonged or strained mental condition,
breaks down the remaining law of separation, and the life is astray in the
psychical world, manifesting abnormal, physical laws.
There is one great connecting link between the physical and the psychical
through which all abnormal conditions can be corrected, and this is will
power. When this power of will is broken, the life must become a
manifestation of error, according to the generally accepted idea of normal
relationship.
The will-power of an individual is dependent upon his ideation. Weaken his
power to carry an idea, and his will grows correspondingly weak; the
_will_ must _follow_ the idea; it is not a separate entity--_will_
only exists in _partnership_ with the _idea_.
_Ideation, willing_ and _motion_ are the great human trinity
from which everything else originates. When we inspect our minds, we find
that a voluntary motion is always preceded by the idea of that motion. The
idea is first and the will follows the idea. Ideas have definite sensory
centers in the cortex of the brain and conscious ideation may be induced
to produce a particular form of willing. All voluntary action depends,
first, upon the ideas of action, then the willing to do, then the doing.
The will-power, in its accelerating and restraining impulses, is modified
by the degree of the intensity of the idea. Grief, fear, worry, anger,
despondency, anxiety, hate, resistance are all negative ideas that weaken
the idea centers and produce weakness of willing. These ideas persisted in
at first produce indecision and after a while absolute inaction because
the patient has lost the perfect co-relation of his idea centers, which
associate instinct, reason, emotion and intuition.
In order to get complete control of the will we must get complete control
of the idea centers and induce strong, positive ideas which the will
cannot refuse to follow.
When we associate all states of consciousness--instinct, reason, emotion,
and intuition, in one strong, centralized idea, it is impossible for
physical expression to do anything else than follow this idea.
When one has come into certain conditions of negativeness in any part of
his mind, and continues in it for any length of time, it takes more than
his own power to modify these intensified conditions and bring about an
inhibiting power of mind which will crowd them out, and allow the idea
centers to receive a new thought-form and intensify it so that the will
can pass it into action.
The abnormal individual is always weak in obeying his ideas and carrying
out his impulse because there is a dissociation of idea centers and his
mind becomes mixed in its responses and he cannot make for a true,
harmonious expression on all of the planes of mind within himself--this is
the condition of the neurasthenic and psychasthenic, and he needs some
mind stronger than his own to hold his ideas true to what he knows to be
true.
The first lesson for the diseased mental patient to learn is that if he
wants to keep his mental balance or restore it, he must first inhibit all
negative ideation and refuse to allow himself to be driven into wild
bursts of psychical or mental energy along any one line. He must force
himself to interest his mind in other things and to inhibit the
over-active states of thinking. This is best done by a complete change of
environment, and often a change of friends. Friends and environment, more
than any other things, have the greatest power of keeping the mind
intensified in its old thought ruts.
There is little hope of receiving a new ideation and acting upon it, when
one allows himself day after day to drag through the same central
sensations and receive the same nerve impulses, and register the same
responses. By removing to a new environment, and substituting new mental
and psychical vibrations the old states of consciousness are allowed to
rest while a new unworked state of mind begins.
Psychical development is not a disease; it is an attribute of individual
growth; no one is to blame if he has it or has it not; all that anyone
needs to know is the truth about it and just how to control it and direct
it. Subjective hearing and vision come just as naturally to us as life and
death--they are a part of the great plan of unfoldment.
In teaching man to co-relate his many states of developing consciousness
into one powerful state of mind, we use our everyday common sense. We give
him a place of mental power and after such training he opens or shuts his
mind to suit himself; he can live in either extension of consciousness at
will and extending his understanding into the transcendent side of his own
mind, he can become the modern mystic or seer. He can function in the
purely material side of himself or he can become an intensified psychic or
mystic by simply suspending and intensifying different centers within
himself.
Concentration, centralization in ideas, conscious mental substitution,
creation of strong mental ideas, and psychic displacement of the negative
with the positive, both by the patient within himself and from the
attendant or physician without, will bring insanity under control.
When men fully understand their own mind's scope, they will find that what
the world calls un-natural states of consciousness, are only cerebral and
psychic disassociation.
The greater freedom of the race, and the cure and control of insanity will
be found in the deeper study of _all_ levels of mind rather than the
one or the few. Only as physical science unites with metaphysical, and
these both unite with scientific psychical investigation, will humanity
pass toward a solution of its insanity problems. Insanity, delusions,
hallucinations, the so-called mental diseases will pass just because they
have been naturally displaced by our higher scientific preventive
psycho-therapy.
The asylum doors will only open as a place of refuge where men and women
will be taught the psychology of the self; there will be _schools_
not _cells_. Outside the asylum doors there will be an ever
increasing crowd of intelligent men and women psychologists, who will be
awake to the first hint of psychic disassociation in an individual. With
keen insight and scientific direction, they will teach the beginning
paranoic, melancholic, neurasthenic, clairvoyant and psychasthenic the
truth about themselves and the first hint of disassociation will be
replaced by association, and rest homes, asylums and sanitarium doors will
close forever!
The Law Eternal
"_For since the fathers fell asleep all things continue as they were
from the Creation_."
Whenever we read the stories in the Bible, our minds are held with a deep
interest, for through all its pages and in all its words, there breathes
out the history of the hopes, dreams and aspirations of human hearts, and
above every other story or hope or dream, there stands first in absorbing
interest the history of the man Jesus, with his wonderfully inspired life.
This wonderful Christ life as given in history is a benediction to the
world, and his teachings have given us a great inextinguishable hope. In
all his history there is one profound principle that never becomes
obscured, and that is his eternal adherence to the Law of Life. He never
forgot to speak the word that should show the true laws of Cause and
Effect.
Nearly all the people of his day followed the letter of his word and not
the spirit. When he spoke in parables they interpreted in fact, and even
when he said: "I go to prepare a place for you, and if I go and prepare a
place, I will come again and receive ye unto myself, that where I am,
there ye may be also," they believed and interpreted it to mean really
material facts, and began to build up their finite hope for a future
kingdom, totally blind to the deep subjective law of his spoken word.
They really believed that if they waited a few years, at most, Jesus would
return unto them, and in triumph and power gather them together and raise
up a community of peace and love in this earth plane. They believed that
through this they would become monarchs of a new world. Nothing in their
minds revealed the impossibility of material form without fundamental
facts beneath them.
The sick and suffering and discouraged of every class, knowing nothing of
the higher laws, laid this hope to their hearts, and filled with a courage
built on this belief, they taught themselves to stand silent beneath scorn
and persecution, feeling inwardly, that when the hour of Christ's return
came, their life would suddenly become powerful through some new
dispensation.
The years came and went, one after another the apostles died with their
hope still in their hearts; at last, only the lengthened life of John was
left on which to hang expectancy, then he, too, died and the Jesus of
their hope had not returned. Even then the church was reluctant to give up
its teaching of the letter and it still held, that even while a few
followers remained whose term reached back to Christ's time, it was not
too late for his return, and the son of man might yet be sustained in his
earthly kingdom.
Time went on until even the oldest memories of the promises passed; change
after change came, and man could no longer find a finite place for his
faith and trust, and then, as human life was pushed on by the great
resistless ebb-tide of the Infinite, those who were still clinging to this
false hope, broke forth in a wail of despair, and they cried, "Where is
the promise of His coming?" "For since the fathers fell asleep, all things
continue as they were from the creation."
We who read their history today and know the truth of Life's finer
relationships, cannot but feel a pity for their failure, and the lingering
death of their expectancy, even while we see that it was built on
superficial human understanding.
In the great unrelated, ignorant hope of these people, we can read in
letters of fire, the proof of the certainty of disappointment of every
human hope that has not its conscious union with the great universal Laws
of Life.
We can see now with the calm vision of those who have no part in their
superstition that their hope was never built on the understanding and
wisdom of creation, but upon weak, human desires and narrow personal
expectation.
It can easily be seen that under the great Law Eternal it was not
possible, that after training only a small part of the human race-thought
there could be a return, a king of any sort, or that there could follow
the perfecting of the race in any such a narrow, limited, personal way.
When Truth has become revealed to the minds of men, they at once see that
laws remain, and that the human race is bound to fit itself to these, and
looking back over the centuries, and on into the future, we find that
Jesus taught us when he said, "I come not to destroy the Law, but to
fulfill it."
Today we see how everything waits upon its own cause, and how change is
only brought about by the processes of regular unfoldment. We know now
that the Whole can only come into expression through the Part, and that
the fulfillment of an individual, a nation, or a race must come under the
silent operation of those spiritual laws of human understanding which
neither the race nor the individual can outstrip.
GOD is LAW, and LAW began when LIFE began and only a deep union with the
finer relationships of Life can ever bring us into DOMINION of power.
There has ever been and ever will be many expressions of LAW, and between
the Absolute expression and the finite results there must ever be the
grinding to dust and ashes of things which oppose either the lesser or the
larger unfoldment.
When we look at life from the limited, personal view we can only see from
the boundary line of the unfathomed self; but as we come into deeper
consciousness, we learn that expectation and promise built on personal
hope is one thing, and expectation and promise built on universal
understanding of universal action is another.
We are a part of everything in the universe and as we come to look through
the personal to the universal, we see clearly the inseparable ONENESS of
God-consciousness and man-consciousness, and as we understand and master
this relationship, we can read the real answer to our question: "Where are
the promises?"
Human life has always been, and always will be, only the unfolding of the
personal mind into recognition of the Absolute Mind.
The Universe is under the Law Eternal and in the degree that we know this,
we stop our limitations; mankind is free in the Absolute Law, and only
seemingly bound in the finite one. Not one jot or tittle of the Law ever
passes away; all laws exist to be fulfilled, but human life evolves from
level to level of consciousness, and through relationship with higher
understanding it escapes the primitive expressions of the lower laws and
unites itself with the higher.
The very first truth, then, for any life to learn is, that in this
universe of law and order, we get just what we relate with--no more, no
less! Nothing happens; everything is the natural expression of the action
which produces it.
Jesus came into the world under the law of his own life; he was born to
pass along and die expressing the forms of his higher knowledge; he came
and went under his own laws, but these were too obscure for the minds of
that race to comprehend, and they lived, hoped and died, ignorant of his
great Cosmic relationship. Jesus was a son of the planet and his mission
was to set laws of race consciousness into activity which would act as a
spiritual fulcrum throughout the ages.
What was true in these olden days is still true today; we often go on
hoping that fulfillment will come, when by the very nature of what we are
doing, we cannot get the higher expression. Take the simple things of our
everyday life, our hope of health or our hope of love, wealth, place,
happiness, success and usefulness; often we really do hope to be well, and
plan in a way for that end, while really at the same time every breath we
draw builds for the transitory and fleeting. Like the Christians of old we
do not understand higher relationships, and at last, worn out with
disappointment we cry, "Where are the promises?" and do not see that until
we have perfect thought relationships, we cannot hope for perfect results.
It takes deep perception to find the immutable law that all physical
phenomena is mental arrangement.
We get everything we find expressing in life through the law of conscious
or unconscious thinking! We have, and hold and keep only the things we
create for ourselves; there is no other law; no one can take our own away;
no one can give us anything, for only what we create is our own, and we
alone must create it in consciousness before we can possess it. When we
create it in consciousness we really set the law in operation for
ourselves and this law will pass it into form.
We make our relationships through the thoughts of our mind. Our mind is
the universal mind, and it is inseparably connected with everything in the
universe; and whatever we have or have not is a signal of just what we
have related with in consciousness. This is the unwritten action of the
LAW; no one limits us but ourselves; the Universal Life stands ready with
its many levels of relationships to give to every one according to the
power he has to create for himself and he is really and truly judged
"according to the deeds done in the body."
Jesus could not give an ignorant and undeveloped race the gift of a
glorified kingdom; nor could they give it to themselves until they had
related in consciousness with the laws that would produce it, the thing we
want and our point of attraction must be equal.
We come into life under correct laws; one is not born a Jew, an Assyrian,
an Englishman or an American by chance; nor is one born well and rich, and
another sick and poor by chance, but EACH is the expression of the LAWS
with which he has related in his own consciousness.
Thoughts are things and it is a part of the Universal plan that thoughts
from the human mind reach out into the Universal, or Cosmic mind, and
there generate an ENERGY which must in time embody in FORM and become the
world picture of just what has been stimulated into expression. When
thinking passes into a _fixed power_ in our life it can be used to
destroy or construct the body or the environment and every thought spoken
or unspoken is registered in thought forms in our atmospheric environment
and must some day pass into material form.
Health is the expression of a law brought about by a certain line of
thinking and disease is another expression. Wealth is one law, poverty is
another, and any life can choose this day _which_ he wishes to be
under, and choose this hour which law he will serve, and Jesus said,
"Whomsoever ye yield yourself servants to obey, his servants ye are,
whether it be sin unto death or salvation unto righteousness."
Jesus did not return to his disciples as they expected, because there was
no Universal Law for such return. Just so with Health, Wealth, Love, Joy
and Happiness. They can never come into expression for us so long as there
is not established within us the Law of Natural Relationships.
We are learning at last that "Since the fathers fell asleep all things
continue as they were from the creation," and it takes more than a fond
imagination to pass our life from the law of inharmony, desire and pain,
into the higher one of peace, power and happiness.
The moment a life desires anything it instantly becomes related with that
thing, but it does not become a possession until all the conditions are
fulfilled. Some minds think so _lightly_ of everything that nothing
ever becomes steadfast and certain. They drift aimlessly between loss and
gain, health and disease, crying out, "Where are the promises," never
realizing that promises are only fulfilled when the whole selfhood becomes
grappled to the rock of understanding.
Human life is only a _growing_ time, and each life will remain just
where it is and express the laws of its level of consciousness until it
develops out from them into others.
Sickness, poverty, wretchedness, disappointed hopes are common in the
journey of Life; despairing human lives are common too, and lives full of
rebellion can be found on every hand, but all these are the products of
thoughts that produced them and show just where the consciousness has
lingered.
Freedom from all these negative human experiences comes as the reward of
inner growth; it can only come through unfoldment and transmutation into
higher understanding. Human pain and loss, despair and disease, and the
heart-breaks of life, are all the fruits of the Tree of Life whose root is
_Truth_.
When sickness, sorrow and unhappiness have taken the place of health and
joy in our life, we have no one to blame but ourselves; we can know that
through a long line of perverted thinking, both inherited and acquired, we
have become related with the laws in consciousness, and these laws are
thoughts of self, hate, jealousy, strife, condemnation, resistance, etc.
We have thought it unconsciously in the past, but until we stop and get up
new thought relationships, these old things must go on. When we know the
higher truth of New Thought Relationship, and the power of constructive
thinking, we can begin then and there to change things and we instantly
can clean out all the distorted thought energy, and pass the simple act of
thinking into a creative form, quitting forever our response to the
negative things around us.
We see the truth of "Whatsoever a man soweth, that also shall he reap,"
and we see, too, that this harvest field where we reap is the human life,
and the seeds are thoughts, and we then and there fill our field of
consciousness with thought-seeds of Health, Strength, Peace, Love, Joy and
all the ten thousand beautiful constructive things, and we soon are living
in a perfected thought world, surrounded by the dream pictures of our soul
consciousness. We become like mystical seers, we can prophesy then about
everything in our life without fear of contradiction, for knowing the Law
that on the path "Like produces Like," and knowing the thought-seeds we
sow, we can be certain of the future harvest.
Under the Law Eternal we cease to consider ourselves related to anything
that we do not want. These things we do not want have ceased to exist for
us, in the moment we have forgotten them in consciousness. We must refuse
even to connect with them in memory. Sometimes this is a hard lesson: The
Law of Memory is a peculiar force, it is the expression of fixed
thinking--that which we cannot forget has made deep inroads into
consciousness. Memory often keeps us related in strange ways, and hinders
our unfoldment. Memory is the connecting link between the yesterday and
today; it makes the past always the present and it remains the master of
many lives and pours what it will into the field of consciousness until
it is conquered.
We cannot go on to peace, power and divine unfoldment while we are wrapped
around with olden memories, olden idols, fears and bondage.
It is an unwritten law that we pass on as we become fit, and any life can
at any moment come away from the thought law of sin, sickness and death,
into the law of peace, power, happiness and joy.
The great God-life wants us to have whatever we want, and will help us to
get it and keep it. We have been told for ages to "ask and receive, seek
and find, knock and it shall be opened." The Universal waits upon our
recognition of its presence and before we ask it is given. The moment we
know what we want and ask for it under the higher law of recognition, it
is ours, then we only have to wait until we can manifest it. Over the same
thought line which we pass out our desires, there passes back to us the
answer to our prayers and our human pathway blossoms with the fruits and
flowers of our deeper understanding.
The law of bondage will never become the law of liberty, but each one of
us may come away into this perfect law of creative thinking as soon as we
teach ourselves the simple act of picking out thoughts that relate us with
the higher things of life. The kinds of positions, friends, conditions and
environment we attract to ourselves under the positive conscious
relationship are entirely different from the ones we will attract under
the negative destructive thought laws. Good friends, happy environment,
peace and love, are not made from the material of mind that recognizes
only lack, loss, envy, despair, fear, condemnation and resistance.
When we want health, we must think health thoughts and become _one_
with the laws that make for health and live at health's heights; when we
want wealth we must create a wealth thought vibration and link our lives
with the levels of wealth. All the grand, good things of earth can only
come and gather around us when we have lifted our consciousness to the
level at which they can be touched.
In the light of this higher understanding we can see that in just the
proportion that our human nature rises towards the Universal Wisdom, our
human perception becomes widened, until, at last, we include all the laws
of higher living, thinking and being, and we bring from the hidden center
within ourselves a profound knowledge. As our life grows more and more in
the power of perception, we retire farther and farther from the personal,
the pessimistic, the limited belief of selfishness, condemnation,
resistance, and we begin a new thought life filled with moral,
intellectual and spiritual glory, and even though "since the fathers fell
asleep all things continue as they were from the creation," we see the
true laws of creation, and making pur minds one with these laws we pass
with them and through them on to perfected human wisdom, we turn to the
daily life then with a higher, holier and more glorified purpose and out
from all the gloom of the past we find the promises have all been answered
and that God has provided some better things for us, which without us
could not be made perfect.
The final word, then, to the sick, discouraged and diseased world is this:
"The righteous are in the hands of their God (the LAW) and their life is
full of immortality," and knowing this anyone may recognize their
conscious union with whatever they desire; create it in their human
thought world and project it into form in the Cosmic Consciousness; then
with wide open soul eyes walk calmly on, expecting it and never laying
down their demand until it manifests for them.
The Outside and Inside of Life
"_Jesus said unto him, go and wash in the pool of Siloam. He went his
way therefore and washed and came seeing_." ST. JOHN IX, 7.
When we read the history of the ages behind us we cannot help but see that
through every phase of human evolution there has run that subtle something
which men call "the power of the unseen."
Matty of our forefathers lived in self scrutiny and subjective
investigation, and many lived in lawless expression of their objective
selves with no idea of life in its subjective action and form. As humanity
advanced in its reverence it came to where lack of attention to
regeneration and self-comprehension was followed by an inner sense of
guilt, and those who know the power of the two states of consciousness,
the outer and the inner, have grown to where they look upon it as abnormal
to higher progress, to only enter these finer courts of being just to rest
and renew the physical body.
Men instinctively know that life is too serious and mighty to pass along
on the objective side of living without now and then going into the center
of being and holding an earnest deep contact with the silent
consciousness.
In the old thought world it was not strange for master men in every walk
of life to pray. The powerful warrior turned his eyes from the field of
battle to the strength of Heaven; the trusting mourner turned his eyes
from the loss of earth to the gain of dying; even Milton gave himself to
the discords of politics in action, and the symphonies of the seraphims.
In the silence great lives everywhere have mingled the meditations of the
Absolute with the thoughts of the discordant, differentiated and apparent
_now_.
There is not a family anywhere that does not possess at least one person
who in himself holds the proof of how real and earnest a thing are the
exercises and consciousness of the solitary vigil.
There is something of reverence yet in many lives as they recall the
blessing given at meals and the evening hour of prayer. To the wayward and
those living in the control of the outside things of life, it was an hour
of bondage, but to those who were at all awakened to the call of the
inside life, it was an even-tide of peace and power and rest.
It cannot be denied that the years have brought great changes in the
methods of human worship. The contempt with which some of the later
educators treat worship and religion betray an ignorance on their part
both of the true office of revelation and reverence, and this blinds them
to the real, innate, fundamental longing of human life.
There are many who come away from the old thought and who believe in the
promulgation of a new truth, but they attempt to build up the new through
the destruction of the old, and pass along as Iconoclasts seeking what
they can destroy. These lives are the lawful product of the undeveloped
human comprehension, and the only safety for the race is in the fact that
only a few ever take them seriously, and these soon see that they are not
inclusive enough to help more than the few, and that after a while, in
order to meet the demands of their own increasing individuality, they must
themselves pass into wider union, into worship and get away from their own
limitations.
Humanity must forever pass between the outside and the inside of life, and
only as each soul becomes awake in both conditions can it understand and
unite with the laws of perfect being.
New Thought is conscious of the open door between the inside and the
outside of life, the earth and Heaven, and it knows that each soul may
live from choice in either state of consciousness and pass in and out at
will.
Man instinctively knows the difference between the inside and the outside
of living; he can easily detect the laws of action, and the laws of
silence. The tendency of our New Thought development is to teach lives to
pass more and more into the inside power or, in other words, to come into
the unseen laws of being and work consciously with the energy that creates
and which is unmanifested, while at the same time they manipulate the
manifested, external things, and through the understanding of the finite
are able to bring into expression the absolute power.
It is slowly dawning upon the present day intelligence that through this
inner side of mind we can become more and more capable of controlling and
directing the outer states of human consciousness and men are recognizing
more and more that all physical objective form is inner spiritual
arrangement.
Today humanity is looking at the cant and form and creed of the crowd, and
giving them their own rightful place, power and function, but it is also
looking at the unseen and daring to affirm that an audience with God is
attainable, certain and possible and productive of its own natural
expressions in its own realm of higher recognition.
Today more than ever before new strength is being born into what the world
calls the devotional element of humanity and it is being born on a sane,
healthy plane of understanding which bids fair to revolutionize the world.
It does not take long to see, when we look with a clear vision, that those
who display most power today, and who are productive of the greatest good
to the developing world are not those who are living in fixed relationship
with the outside of life; it is true that those on the outer rim may boast
of perfect physical strength and a perfect brain and a physical beauty,
but the victory today is not from the without, but it is rather for those
who are psychologically practical, mystically enlightened and subtle with
a deep scientific relationship with all nature's finer forces and who know
life not alone as a science or as a philosophy, or as a religion, but as
an art.
The truth must some day beat its way into the developing minds of men that
we are now alive in a great age, and are coming to where the inside power
must become externalized and that those who today stand masters of life,
and those who will continue to become masters of life and leaders in power
and helpfulness, must do it by a development that is not so much
characterized by their objective knowledge as by their subjective holiness
or wholeness.
We must learn what we never seem to have learned before, that the moments
we spend in the external world are not wholly our strongest or sanest
moments and that all external outside action is the crudest form of
energy, and that when we want the _real_, we must turn the clear deep
eye of our nature toward the inner, the silent, and then all our power
seems to well up and meet us, because it is called in from the apparent to
the Absolute of being.
The next great truth is that all the old ways of life are never thrown
away until we have something to live by in the new; old truths never die,
they are always existent, but their methods of expression must be changed
to suit the developing intellectuality and spirituality of man.
In the old thought life prayer was the pathway to the interior world of
power, but today we know that recognition must be the guide to the
interior world of power. Prayer was the pathway of the old forefathers and
prayer in its first inception was a straight road to the center of divine
union, but after the minds of men, befogged between the glamour of the
external and the power of the internal, evolved a form of prayer that led
the race away from its center out into the rim of living, the power
ceased; prayer became full of cant and form, words became meaningless and
non-mystical; the truth that "God is a Spirit and they that worship Him
must worship Him in spirit and in truth" was lost in the increasing
bewilderment of the mind.
After a while humanity, seeing the futility of objective kind of prayer,
ceased its praying, not because it had worn out prayer, not because it had
wandered from its desire of worship and soul communion, but because it had
worn out the old useless method, and found the dross of the letter; no one
stood developed to where he could push faith into a new interpretation.
Self examination and supplication is natural to every life as soon as it
develops to a finer knowledge of what passes within itself. Until the last
man of the earth is dead this natural cry for the communion with the inner
states of consciousness and the union with the great absolute God-life
will rise up and flourish and wax strong in the souls of men.
We have learned now too much of the inside of living to ever be happy with
the outside form alone, and we have seen too much of the unseen forces
within us to ever yield ourselves servants completely to the external
powers. Our spiritual analysis is too fine to permit crude interpretation.
Men are leaving the old just as the seed must forever leave the mould and
dust of earth, and push its stalk up into heaven's bright sunshine.
Today we stop and in close self questioning and with a desire to know the
truth, and nothing but the truth, We ask what is it that has rendered the
old thought piety of our fathers unnatural and impossible to us? It does
not take long to answer this if we look with eyes that have clearer sight.
Men have turned away simply because they were too developed to be fed on
the husks of a worn out expression that was no longer large enough to
satisfy their developing thirst for Truth.
Our New Thought methods have come because men built them with their
desires; they called for methods that would fit the increasing spiritual
comprehension of developing humanity.
Today mankind is instinctively recoiling from every sense of separation
from God which our fathers felt; human life has become more human; the
outside of life is known at its real value, the inside of life is given
its place and power; Love has become vitalized; human affection has become
sweet and natural; human duties are blessed privileges and life is
elevated to a pinnacle of power before unknown; social interests are now
beginning in all and ending in all; the whole scheme of man's natural
moral and religious existence has a true worth and dignity of its own, and
humanity is listening, accepting and delighting to honor and obey. Only
the life in the outside ranks of living will ever condemn this new rise of
power, and only the cowardly can despise; it is whole, sane, sweet and
divinely human and humanly divine in its application and privileges.
We lost, perhaps, a great part of the old time manner of communion with
God because we first lost the old time spirit of supplication and the
groveling spirit of the outside world, but we have not lost communion or
devotion.
Today we are at home in the center of being, and feel and know ONENESS. We
have union now just as those who _know_ truth have always had, but
the method differs, and Silence has taken the place of the spoken prayer,
meditation and silence is the new pathway to the Cosmic heart, and through
this the developing children of men walk into perfect union, receiving the
messages of the Divine Host. They come into a grand comradeship with God,
not in the old time spirit of supplication and service, not asking, not
seeking really, not even penitentially suppliant, but in the new found
glory of a faith that looks up in perfect confidence of its ONENESS, and
which speaks from the very depth of its own glorified selfhood, and knows
that "I and my Father are _one_ and all my Father hath is mine."
The new race will keep all that is vital in the old one of prayer and
communion, and it will add to it all the great power of its own awakened
consciousness. We are awake now--wide awake to the despotism of the
outside world and its laws--and we are equally awake to the law of the
inner side of life and the dominion of the world of pure Being.
Today the silence of our new understanding has become for developed humans
the pathway of God, and it is indeed the pool of Siloam in which all may
bathe and be healed.
The Silence becomes for those who seek it a well of living water that
springs up into everlasting life.
It is promised that "the pure in heart shall see God," and anyone who
comes away from the outside of life and comes stripped to the soul into
the inner side of his own being will find God there, for like the vision
of the monk, He is always there, waiting to be manifest.
The outside of life is beautiful and sweet and has in it many forms of
self-realization; it is part of the plan of human development, but it is
only a part and the lesser side of living, and after we have mastered its
secrets and understood our own relationship to it, it is natural to turn
inward, and read the other side of our life's picture, and when we do this
it will be strange indeed if we do not feel the Eternal presence so close
upon our soul that we will long to say with bated breath, "Thou God seest
me."
The silence of the inner side of life and the power it produces cannot be
put into words; it is the pathway to the Absolute and the _language_
of _that_ land is not spoken in the outer world of sense and sight.
_Know_ the inner side of life, then _live_ it--this is the
pathway of peace and power and along this way there is found that strange
vital, vibrant glow of spiritual illumination sanctifying our senses, and
filling our soul and leading our mind into the fulness of Him who fills
all.
Life then becomes for us a something divinely sent, no longer distraught;
no longer to suffer; nothing but reality and a reality that has been known
by millions throughout the ages and will be known by millions yet unborn.
Do not think that this turning into the inner side of living is weakness
and cowardice and fear of the external world and its happenings; it is
not, it is simply all energies united; it is not fear nor halting power,
but it is rather the strength of the superhuman; it is not illusion, not
self-hypnotism; it is a divine reality; it is God's witness to those who
seek after his illuminated heights.
This living in the inner side of life each day is essential for the
preservation of equalization of our daily life. The outside of life cannot
help but become wearisome, and when we come away into the silence of our
inner self, we find the thrill of life and we find the human made radiant
with the glory of the Divine.
The inner side of life answers all the questionings of our mind, and as we
learn this truth we depend less and less upon the things created, but live
constantly in the energy that creates, and through this operate our whole
life.
Silence was first in the scheme of creation. Remember this: "The darkness
and the silence knew. So is a man's fate born."
There is no creation that will last that is born on the plane of external
action for the law of that plane is change. In the hush of the valley of
silence we accumulate the inward power which pushes our external
expression into bloom. In the inner side of living the soul enlarges its
dimensions and when it comes back into the earthly things it gilds them
with a glory not their own.
The inner side of life and its power is not a mysterious thing, it is only
the finding of God, and when we meet Him face to face, we speak in a new
tongue; we live in a temple not made by hands, eternal in the heavens, and
we live in the truth of the olden mystics and say with the power of our
new consciousness: "Our Father, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom has
come, Thy will is done on earth, as it is in Heaven."
The Measure of Ourself
"_And he that talked with me had a golden reed to measure the city, and
the gates thereof and the wall thereof. And the length and the breadth and
the height are equal_."
The building of a glorious perfected selfhood, this is the work of every
life.
We all come into existence equal in privilege, we are all born equal in
latent power, which, if developed, will keep us shoulder to shoulder in
this game of living out; but not until this latent power is developed and
brought out into external manifestation can any life really declare its
mastery.
Life has one grand prize for all, and this prize is life's master
position. The chance to compete for this prize is given to all at birth,
but the power to push forward in the pursuit of it is only developed by
those who know that it is really within them, and knowing this begin
systematically to unfold it. Not everyone is equal in the externalization
of this latent energy, and no matter how much or how little any life may
possess it, still it has its own point of contact for power, and it can
come forth in its own way in wisdom of conquest.
Life as we find it here on earth is like a great garden; each soul comes
into this world garden and its place and keynote is struck upon the harp
of life and the registration is made in the universal harmony; then it
must work out its own part until it comes into perfect tune with the other
parts of the great universal chord.
Not a life is born into expression here, but in the unseen realm an angel
or higher master ministers at its birth, and its name is written in the
Lamb's book of life (or the Universal Cosmic Mind). Each life drops into
its own selected and appointed place; it has its own special mission to
perform, its own lessons to learn, its own part to work out, and its own
grand privilege of development.
In essence all life is _one_, and all humanity is the same; the
_One Life_ is in all and through all, without regard to class, creed
or color, but in manifested expression we must forever be different; some
lives are younger in their unfoldment--they are unfinished; some have
finer bodies through which to manifest consciousness; some are born into
positions where there is more required of them than of others, for the
price of usefulness is the ability to be useful; some are never useful and
live idle aimless lives because they have not yet incorporated within
themselves the power to be of use to others.
The nation, the race, the individual and the environment are simply
signals which we hang upon ourself of just what we created and unfolded
within our own consciousness.
We come the reaper of the things we sowed, and just where we find
ourselves here is the picture of how well or how ill we have used the
years behind us, but the privilege of new use and new development is still
within us; we stand each day on the threshold of a new lifetime, ready to
begin over and over again our new unfoldment.
Around each life is the _All Consciousness_, and it can fashion for
itself a new world, made of the cosmic substance with which it is
connected.
The great unfolding mass of humanity pass along, taking themselves as a
confused bundle of states of being, acted upon by the external force of
people and environment, and in turn acting back with no conscious idea of
creation, never knowing that with what measure we mete it shall be meted
unto us.
This process of being acted upon and acting back unconsciously, produces a
type of energy that cannot fail but bring forth masses of individuals who
are in bondage, body, mind and spirit, for spirit has not sensed its
eternal birthright of liberty.
Looking at this world garden full of natural wild flowers, called the
"human race," New Thought sees clearly that whatever response an
individual gives to his environment is the evidence of his own special
power, and that this personal power may, by conscious control and
direction, give him complete mastery, and through this he passes
uninterrupted into possession of life's master position and the prize of
peace and power and wisdom.
The individual is always the actor; the environment is always acted upon,
and this acting and acting upon again gives forth an expression, and the
exchange and inter-exchange between the two produces what the world calls
the character of a life, and looking upon the product of this play of
forces, we say "he is a genius," "he is a thief," "he is a God-man," or,
"he is a degenerate," measuring with the example that is hung before our
eyes.
Up to this point all men are really equal; they are simply alive in
consciousness, but just as the gardener takes the flower and transplants
it to specialized soil, and causes it to bud and bloom with all the energy
within it, just so man's own consciousness can take his soul and teach him
how he can lift himself into states of specialized human power and show
forth all the glory of a divinely developed man.
Everyone can take his place at any level of living that he chooses just as
soon as he knows that there is no one to say "no" to him but himself.
Strong positive thoughts put truth into the hearts of men, and this builds
them upward and inward towards harmony.
This great universal law of harmonious consciousness is the reed with
which everyone may measure himself and with which each one is taught to
take his own dimensions and never lay it down until his city of character
stands equal in height, breadth, and depth, and length.
When we measure ourselves by the golden reed of consciousness, we find by
the signs of ourself and our environment if our city of self is right, and
if it is not we can rebuild it in finer architectural fashioning.
There are many lives that have neither breadth, nor height, nor depth,
they have only length; they pass along through life tied to one idea or at
least a few ideas; they are narrow, bigoted, selfish and careless about
the other dimensions of themselves; they see through their glass darkly,
the things of their own immediate knowledge are enough for them; they are
exclusive and powerful in one direction, and humanity might break itself
to pieces just outside their narrow life for they neither hear nor care;
they are all right, secure in their length of narrow, personal endeavor.
They are afraid of anything that is outside of their own field of vision,
and their life is altogether too small and straight and strained, for any
but a few of their own kind to hold on to; their days are full of anxiety
and worry, for their hold on truth is too weak to bring them to power, and
wisdom.
Again, after we see how we measure in length, we can turn the golden reed
upon ourselves for specialization in breadth, and often again we find a
shortcoming. The breadth must also be equal; we cannot fail in our breadth
and come into true wisdom, true breadth means inclusion--this may vary in
degree, but there must never be exclusion of anything in the well-rounded
character, there is conscious selection, but never exclusion; there is
nothing _in_ or _under_ or _above_ the earth but that is companion
with us on our journey toward divine unfoldment.
To make the breadth of our life measure up in fulness, we must look with
wide open eyes at everything and everyone in life, and take it at its own
point of unfoldment. Not in every life is found true wisdom of thought and
expression, but if we know the truth we will see past all the undeveloped
things within, to the beautiful God-self it is becoming and with wisdom
and power and love include it in our own consciousness, waiting patiently
for its development.
To have breadth we must open our ears and our life to the call of the
world voice and live to answer it. We must hear it socially, ethically,
individually, financially, politically, religiously, spiritually, mentally
and physically not only in our own way, but in every way can that one find
God within himself before he can find it through humanity; but when
measured by the golden reed for the building of the new self, we must find
God or Good in and through every living creature.
All people love themselves and most people love their own families; and
this is right and good that it is so, but the breadth and height and depth
must be equal and that means inclusion of the universal as well as the
personal self. Jesus again told this when he said to the man who asked him
"What shall I do that I may have eternal life?" And He said unto him:
"Keep the commandments" and, "Thou shalt not bear false witness:" "And the
young man saith unto Him, 'All these things have I kept from my youth up;
what lack I yet?'" "Jesus saith unto him: 'If thou wilt be perfect, go and
sell all that thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure
in Heaven and come and follow me.' But when the young man heard that
saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions." So when
Jesus measured him by the reed of breadth and deeper inclusion, he
followed him no more, for the height, the breadth and the depth were not
equal.
To give to ourselves and to our own, or to those who seem to have a claim
on us for anything, is good, but, to give to those who have not claim or
kinship nor power over us is _greatness_. To include them in our own
world, not by might or force, but through recognition of union with the
one life--this is consciousness of breadth that remains immortal.
Again, the depth of a life must be equal, and how do we lack in this?
There are thousands today who flit along on the crest of the wave of
life's current, butterfly-like; they never really have a conscious
thought. If "it only does not affect me" is their watchword, and freedom
from anything serious is their only really serious problem. They know in
an indifferent way that hearts break, that tears fall, that there are
prayers that stagger upward through life's storm, but the froth and foam
of life is in their eyes; they look out on the rim of a life where they
see only self-indulgence, and when now and then they are hushed long
enough to listen to the world cry, they turn away quickly for fear they
will actually touch lives with the common people.
So long as they keep afloat they are content, their lack of depth does not
disturb them, but often after they have wasted their all in riotous
living, and the realities of life fall upon them, they cry out from the
depth of their own self-made despair; their life was like a palace built
on sand which the first fierce flood tide could destroy; it had no root,
no place in consciousness when measured by the golden reed--the height,
the breadth and the depth were unequal.
Unless the soul has root in soil divine, it cannot face earth's
overwhelming expressions of the working out of the human laws which it
sets in motion in the round of human living.
The life that would build sublime and lasting things to stand the test of
time, must drop its consciousness into the Absolute, and sink the string
of thought into the fathomless!
Lights and shadows are strangely blended all along the human pathway; so
from the very center of the deeps of life the incense of our illumined
selves must still send up a faint sweet breath outward and onward,--then
the breadth as touched by the golden reed is equal.
Again, the height of the perfect self is also measured. No house so low
but it must have a window opening to the sky.
Again, there are many lives that touch the golden reed as it measures
outward, downward, but are insensible of upward power.
Above the surge and din of life, amid its sorrows and its strife, the soul
that comes under the glory of the golden reed, must lift itself to the
hills of specialized wisdom greater then the common consciousness.
We can find many noble, moral, natural lives equal in length and breadth
and depth, but the height is lacking. Within many minds is lack of great
sublime ideals, ideals that should be born in the illumined centers of the
self. There are many who have no communion with their source; they are
kind, sociable, natural, humanitarian, but lacking in that great wonderful
psychological essence which makes the human half divine; the height of
their life is unfinished, the golden reed is broken; they walk on superior
in their knowledge until in some supreme hour of human grief, their soul
is forced through some Gethsemane and opens its eyes to the need of a
strength beyond their own. Death, the grave and love teach them to look
up, and hope higher than the earthly kingdom.
And once more the measure of our soul goes on, and we find that often all
is equal, but the height is _over-reached_; there are many forgetting
breadth and length and depth who measure into the very hill-tops of
illumination, making their whole expression a dream of no value to
themselves or others. They are pure children of spirit; they live in a
world peopled with the dream-children of their mind and everything they
produce is vapid and useless in the world in which they live and have
being; everything seems to pass away from them and their productions are
as nothing under the crush and strain of life around.
_Use_ is the world's great test of anything; unless it can be
utilized by some one it is valueless to aid humanity; everything that
comes forth into form from any state of consciousness must prove its own
power to persist, or it vanishes and is forgotten.
Nothing too high, nothing too low, nothing too wide, nothing too narrow,
too shallow, but all perfectly adjusted--this is the measure of self, and
when we know this the illumined life works out its own unfoldment, passing
at will to any degree of consciousness.
This is the finished product of the life that knows how to specialize in
consciousness and it is made possible through deeper illumination. It
gives to everyone the glorious physical, a depth of perception, radiant
with a refined energy and alive with all the latent power of instinct and
harmony, and with this the brilliant mind with its breadth of unanswerable
logic, its fine facts, science of order and laws of physical adjustment.
And added to both these we find the dream vision of the psychic, with the
poet's soul of inspiration, sublime ideality and the gentle tender heart,
alive with all the common human emotions; and at last, blended and
transmuted and made vibrant by that great spiritual insight born on the
heights of human revelation we find ourselves whole, grand, developed,
humanly divine creatures, walking in glad comradeship with God.
This is the "Holy Grail" of selfhood and in the light of our higher
understanding we look downward and outward and upward, and the length and
the breadth and the height are equal. We pass from the old race thought of
limitation and live in a divine atmosphere, and can say with a wisdom born
from this fuller comprehension:
"_We know that if our house of this earthly tabernacle were dissolved,
we have a building of God--an house not made with hands, Eternal in the
heavens_."
Perfect Liberty
"_No man liveth to himself and no man dieth to himself_."
The more we look at humanity and study its expressions, the more we become
convinced of the truth of these words. It is not hard to see that our
human ties are closely knit with everything and everyone, but it is not
always easy to understand how they have come to their sometimes almost
hopeless tangle.
We are a part of everything in the universe, seen and unseen, and as we
have within us a response to every emotion, hope dream, impulse of any
kind known or recognized by the human race. As we study and understand our
relationship to people, things and expressions, we cannot help but grow
deeper and deeper into the clearness of the great truth, namely, the
universal and abiding one-ness of man and God.
Some of our relationships in this one-ness are very indistinct and
obscure, while some are very distinct and painfully objectified.
The first Truth for us to take up is this--we _have_ and
_express_ in our being and our environment just these things with
which we have related ourselves, either through inherited or acquired
lines of thinking; no one gives to us but ourselves, no one takes away
from us but ourselves, no one is to blame but ourselves whatever we have
or have not; we, and we alone, are the architects of our own fortune or
misfortune.
We get everything in life by the law of conscious or unconscious
relationship with it through the simple act of thinking; our thoughts are
lines of transference over which may pass to us not only the things which
we desire, but also those which our fear brings down upon us and which we
do not desire.
Unconscious relationship differs from conscious relationship and brings us
the things with which we have connected through the law of omission;
conscious relationship is union, and brings everything into expression
under the law of commission.
Both of these lines are constant and their results undeniable, but one
brings us the whole, the constructive, while the other opens our life for
the control of the destructive, the limited.
When thinking passes into a fixed power in our life, it may be used to
perfect or destroy the whole mechanism of our present and our future. Long
lines of conscious and unconscious thinking bring about certain
expressions, and these expressions in time become a part of our very
existence, and our environment, good or bad, bears witness to this
relationship.
One day upon the streets of Boston I saw an old woman selling newspapers;
her hair was gray, her skin brown and wrinkled, her clothing shabby and
only half sufficient for the chill of the hour; she was simply
poverty-stricken, and her old, thin, piping voice trembled as she called
her papers in an effort to compete with the crowds of newsboys around her.
Many bought her papers, drawn to her through pity, and her evident need. I
felt sorry that with her gray hair so near the grave life should have only
this to offer her, and I sought a reason for it. I asked her to tell her
story.
She was the daughter of a minister; her mother had been the proverbially
meek little woman of history, perfectly fitted to be her father's wife.
Her grandfathers on both sides of the parental tree had been ministers;
she gave me a graphic sketch of the long line of concentration which she
had been born into and in which she continued.
There was a long line for concentration and relationship with lowliness of
spirit, for grace, for the utter sinking of self; lack of demand for place
or power; lack of self-righteousness, absolute submission sown through
generations, sown for her in her own life. It had to bring forth its fruit
and it did bring it forth in the form of that gray-haired, beautiful,
ragged old woman, who, in the days of her declining years, gathered her
harvest on the cold streets of a rich city, underfed, poor and alone.
She was still true to her inherited concentration, for while I questioned
her she said, "Health, money and happiness were not for her," and that
"her family had borne the cross of poverty and sickness all their lives
and borne it nobly, and some day the Father would give them their reward."
Don't you see that the mind that is poised where her mind was, and where
her family's mind had been for generations, could not escape the law which
they had built for themselves.
Here was an example of unconscious relationship; can't you see how
unwittingly she hourly and daily made anew her relations with the very
things which must by their very nature divorce her from the things which
she never sensed belonged to her. The fixed thinking handed down to her
from the past, bound her like a galley-slave and kept her life held
against the law which was daily destroying her; she was unconsciously
related and she remained unconsciously related to the laws which made for
loss and lack in her life, unable to see the paths where she turned aside
from her Father's house, and His universal abundance; blind to her power
of new creating.
When we begin to study our lines of unconscious relationship we find that
we are appalled almost at the ten thousand little tendrils which bind us
to our old relationships; we think ourselves "good easy man" this moment,
and the next moment sees us opening the door of our life to thought forms
which if entertained, will certainly become for us a poor relation, and
demand our support for ages. We daily open our lives to endless tramp
thoughts which dwell with us and in the end beggar us.
We need hourly to set a guard on our field of unconsciousness, and
absolutely refuse to admit into our daily mind any thoughts less than
those which distinctly relate us with all the beautiful things of life,
and we must never forget the truth of the power of our own personal
creations. We can be what we _will_ to be; we can be related to
whatever we choose to be related to; we can choose this day whom we will
serve and start the hour of our rebuilding.
Whatever we have or have not is a positive picture of our relationship and
tells to every passer-by the story of just how well we know how to
control, and direct our own thoughts, and whether we are living
unconsciously or consciously.
The way to get the Perfect Liberty for ourselves is to understand fully
the secret of relating ourselves with it through the power of conscious
thinking.
The moment that a life desires anything, be it health, wealth or love, it
becomes related with that thing, and the thought establishes a line of
direct transference; desire is the first out-reaching for the things which
are necessary to fully develop our life. It is the God-push within us
trying to get our consciousness into expression.
In the past, the educators often called this power of conscious
relationship, "persistency"; have you not seen people whom the world
called "hobby riders" or "freaks"? These people are only perverted in the
expression of conscious relationship; they hold their relationship to one
thing to the exclusion of every other thing in their life.
It is just as much a form of misdirected energy to sink everything in life
to one idea; to sacrifice health, friends, position, peace, everything, in
order to gain one thing, as it is to have a diverse, indefinite, faltering
idea of relationships and purposes. The true position is between them: ALL
things work together for the final good of man, and union with _all_
things, not _one_ thing, is the law of _universal_ development.
Once we have decided what we want to be related with we can afford to let
everything take its own appointed time and place in our life, bringing
everything up in its appointed place. All that we have to do is to keep
our fixed point of attachment with it and this attachment is made through
power thoughts.
Substance is always changing and so is our position to it under the common
law, but under the conscious law of creation we change our position over
and over again, but we keep the same hope until in some expected hour we
stand face to face with our hope manifested in form.
There is no use running after anything; no use straining after it! We gain
liberty not by resistance, denial or renunciation, but through union;
under the old law we worked on the plane of competition; in the perfected
imaging or thinking we are living under the law of divine attraction, and
whatever we relate ourselves with in thought must come and join us.
When we are under this law thousands of unseen hands reach out to lift us
into peace-crowned heights, and into relation with what we desire.
When sickness has taken the place of health in our life, when disease has
crowded out our ease and comfort, we can know that by a long line of
perverted thinking, perhaps both inherited and acquired, we have become
related with those things which are under the law of pain, destruction and
disintegration. We may have done all this thinking unconsciously in the
past, but there is now no excuse for us to go on with this old
relationship; it is senseless to again fill up our field of consciousness
with the old thought concepts.
When we know the truth of this transference into form through thought
relationship, we have perfect liberty; we look at ourselves in a new
light, and begin to then and there pass this simple act of thinking into
lines which will connect us with just these things which we desire; we
quit forever our thought relationship with conditions which speak for lack
or loss or limitations.
We fill our field of consciousness with thoughts of the strong, and the
health of life; we shut out the diseased, the dwarfed, the imperfect. We
force the pictures of hospitals and sanatoriums out of our mind; we look
at our bodies no matter how they look, or how much of disease they are
then expressing, and we see only the _whole_, the new, the complete.
We force ourselves to _know_ nothing but the great ALL HEALTH
thoughts; we go back again and again to our relation with the abundance of
health; we make ourselves deaf and blind and dumb to the absence of
wholeness and our body slowly swings into line, and begins to express for
us the nature of our conscious thinking.
We cease to consider ourselves related to anything that we do not want.
Disease, pain, lack of health may have its place in the lesser
relationships of the human plane, but it is not found in the kingdom of
consciousness--the all-health within us; it cannot exist in this new world
of spiritual chemicalization with which we have taken up our relations.
When we want this perfect law of liberty, we do not recognize the
existence of the old, we simply occupy our whole thought time with the new
things with which we wish to make union.
Every condition of life that we consider desirable for ourselves we
convince ourselves is already ours, we reach out and lay hold of it, and
give it a line of transference into our life. This is not castle building,
this is Divine Relationship--the Perfect Law of Liberty!
We see the truth that the strong, the healthy, the happy, the powerful are
living in the same world, in the same universal energy that obtains for
the diseased, the weak, the sick, the unhappy; there is no reason why they
may not have every good and perfect gift.
There are almost as many healthy as there are sick in every hospital--the
doctors, nurses, porters, cooks, and servants, all hale and hearty,
putting in their whole time caring for those who are half dead with
disease. What makes the difference? Just the difference of relationship.
They have not accepted mentally the same conditions, and even surrounded
as they are with the sick and diseased, they refuse to be bound by the
laws which these patients have endowed with power over themselves.
They have learned the two great truths: There is nothing in all the world
that has any power over us except that with which we endow it, and there
is nothing in all the world of which we need be afraid. Disease and
sickness are signals of great negative conditions of mind which we have
recognized in thought, and exalted to the _king_ chair in our life
and endowed with power to hold us in bondage.
We may escape in just that hour that we sense the power of our own
personal creation, and set up a conscious relationship with the positive
constructive things in our own consciousness. We become lords of our
physical conditions and our environment just as soon as we cut out all
thought relationship with the laws which make for loss and lack. "The
spirit beareth witness with our spirit day by day that we are the Sons of
God," and as soon as the soul knows this it senses its divine
relationship, and is born again on the planes of a higher consciousness,
and in the wisdom of its understanding it builds itself new conditions,
and lives in a new world, surrounded with the objects of its own creating,
at first subjectively, but in time manifested on the objective plane, to
bear witness to the truth which its soul knows and obeys.
When this is done we live in a new world made perfect by our own inspired
workmanship; we know nothing of disease and pain, we have never a morrow
of fear, "our today of content is eternal."
There are many who have mastered health, because it was the first thing
they demanded, and after they have done this, they find that they are
still related to the laws which make for poverty and lack in material
possessions; they have liberty in flesh but not the perfect law of it in
environment. There are those who have known the grinding hand of need, who
have stood with crushed lives, hopeless; with courage dead and the devil
of despair crouched on their shoulder, whispering words of disappointment;
there are those who are homeless in a land of homes, and those who are
starving in a world of plenty; what can we say to them? How can we comfort
them and point them to the hope of a new endeavor?
The world is full of these half-fledged lives and we must answer them. In
order to meet this expression we must go back again to our first truth,
our first statement:--"We _have_ and _express_ in our being and
our environment just these things with which we have related ourselves,
either through inherited or acquired lines of thinking; no one gives to us
but ourselves, no one takes away from us but ourselves, no one is to blame
but ourselves whatever we have or have not; we, and we alone, are the
architects of our own fortune or misfortune."
As soon as we can teach a life to know the truth of its own power of
conscious thought relationship, it can face about and begin a new line of
attraction and accumulation. It is an unwritten law that we pass on as we
become fit, and we can at any moment begin a new thought attitude which,
if persisted in, will relate us with everything which we conceive to be
opulence or abundance.
When we want to come into perfect liberty for wealth, we must never
recognize poverty or the things which make for it; we must refuse to sense
a separation from whatever we desire; the universal abundance is for all,
and we get and express just the amount we have power to connect.
The ALL WILL wants us to have whatever we want, remember this! And it will
aid us to secure what we want and help us to keep it just so long as we
show we can make intelligent connection with it.
We must believe in our divine kinship with supply, and the divine kinship
of every other soul with it; over the same line which we send out our
desire for abundance there will pass back to us the answer to our prayer;
the things we seek are seeking us; this is a great psychological truth
which we can prove to ourselves if we try. Under the lines of the higher
spiritual affinity the lines of transference never cross; our gain never
becomes another's loss, and _vice versa_.
The whole scheme of life is for freedom; it is only the perverted building
of the minds of men that have externalized lack and bondage. We have
forgotten the eternal promise, "With what measure ye mete it shall be
meted unto you," we have related with lack of supply, never knowing the
truth that no one limits us but ourselves.
Under the law of liberty, we place ourselves in the very heart of divine
opulence and though at first we cry abundance from the very depth of
poverty, if we hold our life servant to this relation, all lack will
slowly slip away from us, and we can, and _do_ walk out into new
relations of attraction, and become one with all that our Father hath.
This, then, is the truth of perfect liberty:
"To him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be
taken away even that which he hath."
Those who have laid hold of the Divine truth of abundance of supply and
related themselves with it through the power of conscious thinking may go
on in calm security from demand to supply, coming each day deeper into the
universal cosmic opulence of health, wealth, love and usefulness.
The word, then, to the sick or poverty-stricken or loveless is this:
Recognize your union with whatever you desire; reach out and make relation
with it through the power of conscious thinking; look with wide open soul
eyes straight into the face of the Universal Being, and taking your wants
firmly into your mind walk on in your daily life demanding them and
expecting them to manifest; never lay down your consecration until it does
express for you.
Make every conscious relationship one with health, wealth, love and
usefulness, accompanied by peace, power, plenty and divine realization.
As soon as we lift our personal life to the level of the universal life in
positive recognition of our own, it will come to us and abide.
Union with the cosmic life is a possible thing here and now; the human
life is but the remote picture of our place in the universal; our life's
relations may become the flowers on our tree of life, and our manifold
experiences the fruits of our own growing and all life be one perfect
round of liberty born from conscious righteous choice.
Cosmic Therapeutics
"_And He stood between the living and the dead, and the plague was
stayed_."
The greatest secret of the age is the connection with and manipulation of
the cosmic energy.
In every age and every race men have stumbled on to relationship with
their atmospheric environment and have each demonstrated it in their own
way, but it remained for the twentieth century investigators to give us
the real key to our continuous connection and the methods by which this
connection could be demonstrated to the thinking world.
The minds of the past taught us the existence of an atmospheric
environment and to a degree manifested our connection with it, but
accomplished it through the medium of objective lines of connection and
transference; today we are finding the new truth that man is able to
create his own environment even to the most minute thing and create it
from atmospheric energy lifting his creations aloft in his life in finite
form through the medium of a power that, in its first expression, far
transcends sight and touch.
Today we know that the great Cosmic currents in which the whole world
lives, and moves, is nothing but a vast undifferentiated sea of energy.
This energy is acting always in the formless as electrical currents; these
currents are always waiting to be set in motion with any other current
which corresponds with them in electrical reaction either positive or
negative.
Man's whole atmospheric environment is formed of these currents and he is
a localized attracting center, registering in himself and his environment
just those electrical reactions with which he relates under the great
Cosmic law of correspondence.
We have found in the past that these atmospheric currents can be sent as
vibrations through the medium of any object that is brought into relation
with them and the degree of registration depends upon the instrument used.
In some rates of vibration these waves may be made to become heat; in
others, cold; in others, light; in others, sound; in others, just motion,
without sound being separated. Physical science has given us examples too
numerous to mention of the positive expression of enforced vibration in
relation to objective things, but it was left for Marconi to show
conclusively that these vibrations may be produced and transmitted through
the medium of the atmospheric waves themselves, and psychology has shown
that any instrument, either mechanical or human, may register vibrations
in the very moment they are attuned to them.
Atmospheric environment has passed deeply into the development stage
scientifically, and even in this it does not yet really appear what it may
be, but it is easy to see how all atmospheric energy becomes really a
substance from which every skilled mechanic may create his own expression.
Metaphysically, it is plain to see that man is only one part of this great
cosmic energy, and that standing as he does, a localized point in the
ocean of formless vibrating ether, he becomes a specialized, attracting
center and the lines which connect him with this ocean of energy are his
own thoughts.
In the physical plane men use wires and machines and objective
localization, but on the higher planes of consciousness we only need to
use the vibrations of that plane, and the higher connecting thought wires
become as tangible to those who use them as do the objective connections
on the physical planes.
On the human plane our thoughts become the metaphysical avenues of
connection; with thoughts we reach out into this formless ocean of cosmic
energy and create through recognition the things which we desire, and our
environment under this law becomes the world-picture of just what we have
had the power to create for ourselves.
This cosmic substance is neither great, nor small, finite nor infinite, it
simply is substance from the highest to the lowest expression of life.
There is no escaping this universal product of energy. We ourselves are
It!
The physical universe, and everything that we call matter, is simply
_universal energy_ manifested in form; everything expressed on the
physical plane is cosmic energy materialized; and every human being is
only this cosmic energy localized and expressed in human flesh and form.
Form is only the physical side of Divine mind.
In this ocean of universal energy or atmospheric environment which we call
formless, there is always some form of some kind, but the formless is a
form too high for our human mind to comprehend, we have not yet reached
the plane of unfoldment where we have cosmic recognition.
As we investigate this atmospheric environment, we find it has two
distinct forces at work within it, and these forces are the positive and
negative reaction of its atoms. This positive and negative reaction of the
atoms is continually going on, and they each have their corresponding
embodiment in the eternal world of matter; they act independently or
together, and when one has learned how to blend these two reactions in his
consciousness, as do the skilled magi, he has come to the center of his
own and universal being.
In the manifested world of substance, mankind takes its place in one or
both of these energies; it is drawn into their expression by the universal
law of attraction. Each life is in its first expression, positive or
negative in its cosmic polarity. In the universal interpretation, we learn
to look upon the positive life as the creative, and the negative life as
the receptive.
Every individual is just what he is by the natural law of his own cosmic
relationship, and he will remain just what he is at any point of progress,
and express himself in his own way until he grows into a deeper state of
comprehension, and knows the method of changing his cosmic positions.
When we get the truth of the universal energy in our minds and realize
that this energy is really positive and negative, and that both these
reactions have their corresponding material manifestation in ourselves,
then we are ready to go farther into the study of the registration of this
energy, and from this into the higher psychology of function.
There is nothing in this atmospheric environment of ours that is not
endowed with intelligence. Everyone who postulates a _first cause_
begins with the universal _intelligence_. This _intelligence_ is
given to us as a beginning, it remains with us to the end.
The acceptation of the truth of the unity of intelligence is the first
step toward investigation. All finite life is an embodiment of universal
substance and intelligence in some form--this is truth.
Physical scientists everywhere are showing us the infinitesimal lives
working continually and in ways that are wonderful.
Psychologists are opening daily the hidden chambers of this physical and
metaphysical world, and giving us high lights on what we once thought
impossible of investigation; they are showing us astounding examples of
conscious ideation in every order of life, and are aiding us to draw
interesting conclusions.
There is a great universal intelligence and a remote finite expression of
this intelligence; the lesser is always dependent upon the greater and our
human life becomes the microcosmic pattern of the macrocosmic world.
With this premise firmly under our feet let us go on to the question of
the intelligence of the physical tissues of the human body, and our
relation to disease, health, poverty and opulence.
Every cell of our physical body is intelligent and capable of being
instructed into finer grades of expression; this is the process by which
we refine matter into spirit and by which we pass from a lower to a higher
expression of wholeness and build our cells into a grade of consciousness
so high that we produce objective expressions of such perfect response
that we become the higher revelation of the cosmic consciousness.
The higher we go in intellectualizing ourselves, the closer we draw to the
cosmic consciousness, and the more familiar we become with its laws. The
highest life is the one that includes the most.
It is a natural law that we have at all times unconscious thought relation
to the universal abundance and our thoughts are the conscious agents of
construction and destruction, and we work through them as soon as we are
old enough to think and reason.
Disease and poverty would never manifest for us if we did not some time
recognize it in our atmospheric environment with our thoughts, and work it
out on the objective plane through the law of atomic attraction.
Whenever doubt, worry, anger and negative thoughts take possession of our
field of consciousness (the everyday mind), we are creating these things
for ourselves in the cosmic currents and they cannot refuse to register in
form either in our body or in our environment.
It can be seen that if, year after year, we separate ourselves from the
positive creative cosmic intelligence, and put up our images of personal
limitation, the creative intelligence is joined to the weaker energy and
cannot refuse to work out the conditions with which they are related.
The human mind is the agent which must be taught to stand as sentinel and
force our minds to people our currents with thoughts which make only for
the perfect health, perpetual opulence and divine realizations.
The minor intelligence of our cells would just as readily work out the
universal law of perfection if we only knew enough to intelligently direct
them and not overpower them by our negative personal directions.
When we have once established in our minds the truth of this universal
cosmic intelligence, in which there is no sickness, poverty or death,
unless we recognize it, it does not take us long to work out better
conditions for ourselves in the physical body and environment.
No matter what our lack may be, we can know that it is because we have set
our human thought to work under a personal negative law instead of a
positive creative universal one. We have only to stop, face about, and
begin to direct our thoughts intelligently, and in union with the higher
plan, and solicit co-operation with all the finite forces around us.
If we find ourselves diseased, with pain, and physical mal-positions we
can speak to our physical cells as we would to a friend and connect them
with the higher creative currents and help them to get into a higher form
of building; they are ready at any moment to answer, "The sheep know their
shepherd's voice and obey it." They must begin to build in the new
likeness and in the very moment that we consciously direct them; this is
the law, there is no appeal from it.
Everything comes to us from the Infinite atomic ethers through the law of
Divine attraction, and when we have built and rebuilt our cells into an
intelligent relationship with absolute wholeness, we become a magnet, so
highly sensitized and so magnetic and carefully polarized, that we are an
attracting center for everything in our atmospheric environment, and our
physical body and our environment become the expression of our thought
world.
When we know enough to send our thoughts into the universal energy with
only the recognitions of positive creations, such as health, wealth, love,
divine realization and actualization, then our material world must be made
the immediate reproduction of these things.
The sick world passes along with all its thoughts poised in the
destructive recognition; we meet them upon this pathway, and knowing the
law of the higher constructive power of building we must meet their
questioning with some answer that will restore them to the state of
consciousness they have lost.
The very first truth that every sick life must know is that thoughts are
_things_, and make themselves felt in form, and that in the great
atmospheric energy, like attracts like. Our consciousness becomes for us
the wireless stations which attract and register the universal messages,
and each station attracts its own from whatever plane or state of
consciousness it vibrates.
The invisible world is _something_ and its substance is
_something_, and that we do not understand it and have improper
correspondence, is no proof that the power of correct correspondence does
not exist.
There are great occult laws of relationship always awaiting our deepening
comprehension:
"_Till one appears who bears,
All nature silent is,
Silent for evermore,
Beating its waves of force
On an unanswering shore
Till one appears who bears_."
The cosmic atmospheric energy in which we live, move and have our being is
always ready to become manifested in form, and may become manifested by
anyone who knows how to create a form for himself.
It has been manifested in many varied forms by the children of men, but it
has not yet entered into the hearts of men to conceive of the glories that
are yet awaiting them when one appears who really does hear, and knows the
full truths of cosmic power.
This is the secret of Cosmic Therapeutics, and those who know this secret
really do become the twentieth century mystics and are rulers over the
manifestations of finite and infinite energy. When we come to this point
of demonstration we are the world's greatest physicians. With this
knowledge we may conquer not only disease and poverty and despair, but we
may overcome the last enemy--Death, and live and have being in a world of
universal power.
There are grades and grades of intelligence both in the human and the
Absolute mind: All grades of cosmic currents are ever ready waiting to
respond to those who touch them; there is nothing mysterious or
unattainable about them; they are the natural results of natural laws, and
we come into union with them through growth and recognition.
We first come to a consciousness of our universal, atmospheric
relationship with all that is, then we learn to understand the response
that comes to us from every person and everything; then we reach out in
perfect faith with our deep of need, calling to the deep of supply, and
the doors of a thousand hidden chambers of nature open bringing divine
revelation into our souls.
Absent Treatments
The sick world has always had its scientific and religious investigation,
and in addition to this new-found power of atmospheric creation there is
another great truth which the sick world must know in order to make its
own union, and this is the truth of the power to manipulate these Cosmic
currents not only of our own creation, but for anyone who touches our
life; we cannot only think and realize and actualize for ourselves, but we
can reach out into the formless energy and create, direct and control
these great universal currents so that they will have the power to rebuild
another's life.
We have a great psychological Cosmic truth known as "absent treatments"
but which is really COSMIC THERAPEUTICS in our new understanding; we use
cosmic currents to heal ourselves and we manipulate them for another
thereby eliminating time and distance; we get behind the things created
and understand and deal with the Energy which creates.
The sick world has tried all the things of the physical world through the
medium of objective lines of transference--drugs, electricity, diet, baths
and what not, each one a part of the cosmic consciousness, but it finds
that the laws still exist, and as long as they remain related with the
laws of disease in flesh it will manifest for them in flesh.
Absent treatments is the power to connect with and direct the Cosmic
atmospheric currents which make for positive expression of health, and
when we have laid hold of this power, we can change at will any vibration
of negativeness with which we find ourself or others expressing, and we do
it through the power of thought, feeling and revelation.
These higher laws of relationship are only mysterious and strange to those
who do not understand; the Hottentot stands in wonder and amazement at the
X-ray machine, but the skilled operator turns on its power in spite of
this ignorance and disbelief, and it works whether he believes it or not.
Just so the skillful operator in Cosmic Therapeutics can generate, control
and direct the power of the Cosmic consciousness which he understands, and
it brings its results whether the skeptical mind of man accepts or denies.
This power to manipulate nature's finer forces is only hidden from those
who do not seek to find; in the moment a soul knows that it is possible to
connect through thought and to manipulate through consciousness, it is
born into union with the Energy that creates and can say, "Let there be
light" over its own world.
We can stand in the great Cosmic Energy and with tools a thousand times
finer than the finest X-ray or vibratory machine known to science and
project our thought power into regions of an ether so fine, so vibrant, so
vital that the very touch of them upon our being fills us with the great
pulsing energy of the universe. In just the instant we connect with these
currents our old vibratory rates of living are changed and we have passed
from death into life; we are healed to stay healed through conscious union
with the ALL-HEALTH currents of the Universe.
There are many clumsy operators in any field of science, and there are
plenty of them in this new world of Cosmic Therapeutics, but investigation
and application give unfoldment and skill, and we will soon pass into such
a complete understanding of these higher laws of being that it will be a
novelty to find a life unacquainted with them, and everyone will be using
Cosmic Therapeutics in some degree.
The fundamental law of absent treatments is the truth of the Oneness of
life and intelligence, and the ready response of the Absolute intelligence
to the finite mind.
Each life has its own direct line of thought connection with this
Universal Energy, and no matter where it stands in its comprehension, it
can be taught to understand this simple truth of thought relationship.
We can think ourselves to the outermost rim of things and there connect
with the diverse differentiated energy which can only make for disease and
lack, or we can think ourselves to the very center of the Cosmic heart and
find there the "peace that passeth understanding." We find this center and
attract its energy through human thoughts of power, love, hope, faith,
joy, purity, patience and consciousness of infinite union, and our every
action carries with it into the external world a power that manifests for
us as health in our body and wealth in our environment.
When we know that all life is universal atmospheric intelligence and that
it responds to us from any point we touch it, we need then only to throw
ourselves into conscious thought union with everything which we desire;
forgetting all the weak negative things we do not desire, and this
conscious connection leads us into relation with the energy that must
eventually manifest in form.
If we want to heal ourselves we stand with our whole life open to the
positive creative Cosmic currents and let them beat through us and around
us; we WILL then and there to pass our whole being into union with every
creative universal force, and to feel the power of its energy sweeping
through us; we hold our life to this higher understanding until the great
flood tide of the universe comes sweeping along our veins and through our
being, washing away in its resistless force all the lesser moorings which
hold us to the thoughts of disease or decay; we have then the life more
abundantly than is promised and we feel that we have entered into that
place that is prepared for the people of GOD; we are healed to stay healed
for the very life blood of the universe is in our veins.
If we then want to give an absent treatment, and send to another this
Energy that creates we just take the thoughts of our Cosmic atmospheric
relationship in our mind, and reaching out first in perfect thinking we
build for them a perfect thought body, and place it in the Cosmic Energy;
holding fast to this image we pass with it into the deeper states of being
where thinking ceases, and KNOWING is the law, and we bid them stand forth
with us in conscious union whole, complete, the God-child, one with the
ALL-HEALTH of the Universe.
When we can do this, our work is finished, and we can let them go, secure
in the consciousness that they are one with us in strength and power. When
we have really understood this higher law of recognition we look with
all-seeing eyes into the face of Cosmic Intelligence, and we see the
infinite supply answering our finite lack, we abide in a position of
knowing which passes us externally into health of body and environment.
How to Give Absent Treatment
Concentrate your mind on the one whom you wish to heal, then build a
mental vision of him; see him in consciousness just as whole and perfect
as if he was really radiant with health. Make believe that he is standing
before you a perfect picture of physical perfection, work on your vision
until you can produce and hold the most beautiful idealized picture of
human beauty of flesh, form and character. Never forget to illumine your
perfect thought-patient with a divine light of spiritual radiance. This
perfected "make-believe-self" must be the risen God within them and it
must come forth resplendent in a new glory. When you can hold a perfect
vision of him and make yourself blind to anything but this image of
beauty, health and power--then place him in the Divine Life and leave him.
God, the great universal intelligence, will make the balance good. He will
finish what you have begun. There is concerted action between the atomic
mind of infinite substance and the mind of man, "and as the Father raiseth
up the dead and quickeneth them, so has he given the son the power to
quicken whom He will."
This vision held daily and intensified by belief and conscious command
will be accepted by the spiritual consciousness of the patient and whether
his surface mind accept it or not, his deeper consciousness gives the
stimulation to his body and this registers it in form and he is healed to
stay healed through the silent laws of mind. "And he stood between the
living and the dead and the plague was stayed" because by his own
transcendent consciousness he set in operation the higher laws of
intelligence in substance.
It is written that in the Psychological Institute in France, Professor
Prisbram, in one of his psychological experiments, asked a patient to
think powerfully and concentratedly upon a make-believe vision of a
bottle--he did, with his hand on a sensitive plate in a developing fluid,
and slowly the picture of the bottle registered upon the plate.
Just as this make-believe bottle registered upon the plate, just so does
the make-believe perfect flesh-body register in the cells of the old, and
under the law of renewal of tissue, it is developed into form. This vision
is the true self that is latent in every life. "The first man, Adam, was
of the earth, earthy, the last man, Adam, was a living soul." "There is a
body terrestrial and there is a body celestial, and the glory of the
terrestrial is one and the glory of the celestial is another." And with
the vision of the celestial body, in which the consciousness vibrates as a
living soul, our treatment is accomplished and we have made our mind a
conscious part of the mighty plan and we can ask whatsoever we will and it
will be granted.
How often shall we treat an absent patient?
Three times daily and between these times forget them utterly, give them
to the Cosmic forces, the Absolute. Holding on to a patient in thought
often delays his recovery. When you have done your spiritual visualizing
powerfully and perfectly, stop! The Universal Law will do the rest; never
give an anxious thought to them, nor recognize death; vibrate life and
more and more life to them and just as the current runs along the wire
just so this silent Cosmic intelligence will flow from you to them, and
health will come, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, back along their
veins.
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