New Thought Healing Made Plain

by Kate Atkinson Boehme

First published in 1918

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New Thought Healing Made Plain

Introduction

IN 1902 I wrote a book entitled ‘‘Mental Healing Made Plain.” Today, sixteen years later, I have written another, “New Thought Healing Made Plain.” The earlier book compared to the later is a tiny mountain rivulet, while the later is like a deep, wide river that had its birth in the rivulet. The stream of my thought has, in the passing of sixteen years of meditation and experience, grown to larger proportions, and yet I find upon rereading the first book that I still hold the same ideas, but see them in broader perspective and in clearer light.

The later book contains very little of the subject-matter of the former. Here and there a phrase or a paragraph, occasionally a helpful illustration or incident, and that is all. On the other hand the latter book contains much that is not even hinted at in the former. I rejoice that I find nothing that I would contradict or unsay in my earlier writing, nothing that a larger experience would prove to be untrue, for this convinces me that I have uttered Truth, since Truth, like God, is not subject to change or shadow of turning.

Faithfully,

The Author.

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Chapter 1. What Is New Thought Healing?

IF you are at all observant of life and its happenings, you will admit the fact that your thought affects your body for good or ill. You have discovered that worry, fear and anxiety lower your heart action, deaden your circulation, give you indigestion, headache, neuralgia and other ailments. It is said that a reiteration of worried thought beating on the same brain cells wears the cellular tissue so thin that finally it breaks, usually resulting in death. Even if the result is not so serious, a long siege of worry usually ends in a spell of sickness, which, by the way, is a preservative effort of Nature, as it turns worry into a new channel, so that it beats on a different set of brain cells, or, better still, stops worry altogether, for when one is very sick, the usual causes of worry do not matter much; in fact, nothing matters but the physical suffering and how to get rid of it.

This is a mere hint at the many ill effects of thought upon the body. We will not dwell upon them, but turn to the good effects of the health-giving thought, and more especially of New Thought.

This brings us to the question — What is New Thought? I can think of no more perfect, full and complete definition of it than we find in those wonderful words of Schopenhauer — “Clear Vision of the World.”

New Thought stands for a tremendous movement of the human mind toward the understanding of things as they really are. From the beginning of human life on this planet, from our earliest savage ancestors, it has been a long, hard voyage of exploration and discovery, without a chart to guide, except that of pain or pleasure. I believe that Man has always instinctively sought the Truth, but has encountered it veiled; hence his false beliefs regarding it. In the evolution of a germ of Truth existing in each false belief lies the advance to ‘‘Clear Vision of the World.”

We cannot imagine what this earth appeared to primal Man, but we know that it seemed under the dominion of grim, cruel forces, always arrayed against him in the struggle for existence.

Now, in his clear vision he sees those forces as beneficent, all working toward his highest evolution, all tending toward ultimate health, joy and general wellbeing. These states of mind and body cannot be laid on Man from the outside; they must be worked out from within, as a spider weaves its web out of its own substance. God does not confer Joy as an unearned gift upon Man. He brings it forth from him by means of the Divine Urge.

As Man’s enlarging intelligence compasses more and more of creation he has discovered Thought to be a mighty though hidden Force. For that matter all Force is hidden, but in some instances the material means are evident, while in the working of Thought the mechanism is invisible and intangible.

How is it that Thought acts upon the nerves and muscles of your body, causing motion . Who ever saw a Thought when it so acted on nerve and muscle. No one has ever explained this mystery, and yet we accept it as a fact, not wholly because physiologists tell us it is so, but because we know it through our own experience.

I see a book on the table. I think I would like to examine it. I am conscious of that thought. Then I think I will take it up. I am conscious of that thought also. Then I do take it up and I am conscious that in some mysterious way my thought has caused my hand to reach out to the table and draw the book toward me. Hundreds of nerves and muscles have been brought into play, and yet I do not know how it was accomplished. I may have it explained to me how muscles respond to nervous stimulus, how they contract and expand in obedience to it, and I may see that the entire network of nerves and muscles throughout the body is controlled by thought; but that is not seeing how it is done.

That, it seems, must remain a mystery. But for that reason do we deny it. Not at all. I know of no one who does not acknowledge that thought controls the body, that is, that his thought controls his own body.

I may, therefore, take it for granted that you acknowledge so much, although I cannot expect you at this juncture to go so far as to acknowledge that the thought of another person can act upon your body or upon your mind. Of course we know that the audible speech or written word of another will affect your mind and, secondarily, your body, but that an unspoken thought should produce such an effect is beyond your credence.

The law of Telepathy or Thought Transmission is now accepted by scientists the world over. Such men as Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir William Crookes and Alfred Russell Wallace have tested this law and proved it to be a fact.

Or, if you seek proof nearer home, you can find it in the following simple experiment. Get together a few of your friends. Blindfold one and place him in the middle of the room, after having shown him a key or some other object which you intend he shall find. Surround this person by the rest of your friends, standing in a closed circle with joined hands, while all of you think steadily of the key in the place where it is deposited. After some hesitation the blindfolded person, with slow and uncertain steps, will move toward the key and will ultimately find it.

I will describe the sensation of the person blindfolded as I experienced it. First my mind felt utterly vacuous. All thought seemed to vanish. Then in a few seconds I felt pushed by unseen hands in a certain direction, although no hands were touching me. So strong was the inclination of my body in that direction that I would have fallen had I not put out one foot to balance myself. Then another push and another step, and so I gradually approached a chair on which the key had been placed. When I reached the chair my whole body relaxed, and I drooped over it with arms listlessly hanging until one hand touched the key. On another occasion the key was hung upon the wall, and when I touched the wall I felt a desire to stretch upward with one arm. I did so and grasped the key where it hung upon a nail.

Now, had the force of those minds been directed to my mind I might have had a definite idea of the position of the key. I would probably have thought — The key is on the chair, or. The key hangs on the wall, but I had no such definite thought, nothing but a vague blind movement for which I could not account. I was impelled to move, I knew not why. It therefore seemed that the thought of the minds concentrating upon me acted directly upon my body without passing through the medium of my mind. To me this was conclusive proof that the thought of one person can act directly upon the body of another person.

There is a large hospital in France called La Salpetriere. It is one of the oldest and largest hospitals in the world, covering an area of seventy-four acres, and consisting of forty-five large blocks. In that hospital the patients are treated almost entirely by the power of Thought, but it is used as hypnotic suggestion. They do some strange things there which you would hardly credit, did not the reputation of the physicians in charge and the standing of the hospital back up the statements.

Let me tell you what is done to those patients while in a state of hypnosis. A drop of cold water is placed on the flesh, and the patient is told that it is boiling oil. It then draws a blister. Now, how do you suppose this effect is produced. Quite a mystery, is it not. But being done and testified to by reputable physicians in a reputable hospital you cannot very well doubt it.

They also take a fly-blister and divide it into three equal parts, 1, 2, and 3. Number 1 they place upon a patient’s right arm, number 2 upon the left arm, and number 3 upon the arm of a person who is not hypnotized. This done, the doctor says of number 1 that it will not draw a blister, and says nothing of numbers 2 and 3, The result is that number 1 does not draw a blister. They call that negative suggestion, which means that the blistering power is taken out of the number 1 piece of fly-blister, while it remains in the other two pieces, numbers 2 and 3. I say the blistering power is removed from number 1, but perhaps it is more correct to say that the skin of the patient is made positive against it. The fly-blister becomes negative, therefore, to the skin of the patient, and produces no effect upon it, although it is a good, strong blister, as may be seen by the effects of numbers 2 and 3, of which it was originally a part, the one fly-blister having been cut into three parts for the experiment.

This, then, is the power of Thought. It can turn a drop of cold water into a violent irritant, or a fly-blister into something as harmless as a bit of paper.

When you realize that cold water when used with suggestion can draw a blister, can you doubt the power of Thought over the secretions of the body? Moreover, the drop of water is not actually necessary in the experiment, for Thought without material aid has caused a blister, in the tests just quoted, and Thought alone has prevented a blister.

New Thought Healing is not Hypnotic Suggestion. I am only quoting the latter to prove the power of Thought.

The late Professor William James of Harvard said that tumefaction can be produced by Thought in any part of the body. On the same principle, applied in the opposite manner, tumefaction can be removed by Thought.

Dr. Elmer Gates of Washington proved to me conclusively that blood can be sent here and there through the body by simply turning the thought upon it and directing its current. This he showed me by actual experiment. Other men of science are giving out quite as remarkable statements, and their word must go for something. You accept a great deal on the evidence of chemists, astronomers and naturalists, and the evidence in favor of the power of Thought is just as convincing. No one who investigates thoroughly can doubt it.

I think perhaps the greatest obstacle to our believing that Thought can pass from one mind to another is that there seems to be no material agent of transmission, no vehicle for travel. But there is. It is a refined matter in the form of ether, and on this ether Thought travels. There are things we may not detect with our senses which nevertheless exist, and this ether is one of them.

Who would have supposed, some years ago, that today we should be telegraphing without wires. A transmitter is set up in New York and a receiver in Boston, or any other two points, and the message goes straight from one to the other.

Why then may not a message travel on the ether from healer to patient. The healer is the transmitter and the patient the receiver, the message going straight and true from one to the other no matter how great the separation between the two. A telepathic message goes from here to England, Finland, Australia, South Africa, or wherever the receiver, in the form of a patient, is located. It takes weeks and months for letters to go to those distant points, but Thought goes in an instant, like an electric flash. We have an electrical Thought Power, and we live in an electrical age. Greater wonders still are to be revealed in the coming years.

It is not the message sent from healer to patient that heals. It is not the thought of the healer that heals. What is it, then? It is the Spirit of God dwelling within the patient himself.

And why does it not heal without the intervention of a healer. Sometimes it does, and again it needs to be called into expression by the faith and realization of another mind, such as the mind of the healer, — one that has superabounding faith in the power of spiritual healing.

While the Spirit of God is all-powerful, it must flow through certain channels in order to do its work, and those channels are mental processes. For that reason we formerly used the term “Mental Healing,” but have discarded it, as it does not suggest the spiritual principle at work. Mental processes are dead and automatic unless infused by the life of the Spirit, as I shall show you in the next chapter.

Spirit is formless, but it takes upon itself form when it creates a tree, a flower, a planet, a man or an insect, yes, or a thought, for thoughts have form, although invisible to the physical eye, as are myriads of other forms in the universe, being of finer matter than the retina of the eye can register.

Thought-Forms are ensouled with life and intelligence and they perform a wonderful work in healing disease and unhappiness. When I said that the thought of the healer does not heal the patient, I should have added that it has an influence for good upon the patient in that it calls forth its correspondence in the mind of the patient, as, for instance, thoughts of courage and hope call into being thoughts of courage and hope in the patient, and these thoughts are conducive to health and happiness. Thoughts of faith going from healer to patient arouse faith in the patient, and that is instrumental in healing, so in that way the healer is an agent in the cure, but what I wish to impress upon your mind is the fact that you are as close to the Divine Healing Power as the healer, and that when you learn to open the channels of your thought to its in- flux, it flows straight from God through you. The true healer is, therefore, a teacher, both consciously and subconsciously, teaching consciously by means of lessons and subconsciously by means of thought transmission, by the sending out of thoughts of Truth and Love.

Suggestion is not hypnotic control of necessity, but is merely thought transmission. The Medical Summary of Philadelphia says editorially: ‘‘Suggestion is the moving power in the treatment of disease. Experienced practitioners habitually employ it to advantage of the patient. Prudent friends and callers at the bedside practise suggestion by taking with them the assurance of better things to come. A word of cheer, the reassuring smile, inspire hope — this, too, is suggestion. Rheumatic rings, magnetic healing and divine healing all have their tap-root in suggestion. If, with ability to diagnose disease, and without the aid from coal-tar sedatives and opiates, the physician can relieve such maladies as headache, lumbago, sciatica or the anguish of rheumatic joint, duty imposes the obligation to do so.”

This shows the trend of the more advanced and liberal in the medical fraternity. They, with us, are coming into a “Clear Vision of the World” which involves the seeing of finer curatives than we find in drugs.

You see the world keeps moving on, and no conservatism can stop it. One system gives place to another. Different schools of medicine have put in their claims, had their day, and vanished to give place to more effective ones.

New Thought Healing is here now and is having its day. If it proves to be what the world is seeking, it will keep its hold. If not, it will give place to something better. That, however, does not concern us, for, while we have a power for relieving the sickness and sorrow of humanity, it is best to use it to the uttermost instead of vaguely seeking what may possibly follow. When it is on the wane will be time enough to look for something better. It is not now waning but steadily rising toward the Zenith. Before passing on to the next chapter think over what I have said about the power of Thought, and the proofs of its transmission from mind to mind. These two points admitted, you will not belong in conceding to Thought the function of either creating or healing disease, and later you will see how it is that New Thought heals disease.

New Thought heals because it, in its clear vision of the world, sees the Universe to be governed by Love and Intelligence, and therefore knows that nothing can go really wrong in these lives of ours. It sees in sickness, unhappiness and adversity angels in the night to be wrestled with until the dawn, when they will depart, leaving a blessing with the wrestler. New Thought shows us that our power is WITHIN, that we are the temples in which the Holy Spirit dwells. It teaches us that God is not apart from us, sitting on high, and an avenging Deity, holding us under a curse and frowning upon our joys. We have said in the past that God is Love, but we have not had a clear vision of that Love, else we could not attribute to it cruelties that a loving human father could not inflict upon his children.

No mind can be at peace and no body can be healthy when dominated by a God of Love who is practically a God of Hate. As well might a growing plant strive to reach the light and air when held down by a huge block of granite. The block must be lifted or blown to fragments before the struggle for life and growth will count for anything with the plant.

New Thought is lifting this crushing weight from the human soul, hence its great beneficence and its healing power. No man can be really healthy who is oppressed by fear, or who thinks himself a weakling in a world of antagonistic Giant Forces. He must know himself to be the Giant, and the Conqueror, because of the God WITHIN. New Thought teaches that since God is omnipresent He must be within Man, in continual touch with his soul, in fact one with it; one in spiritual substance, even as the ray of light is one with the sun, so that it has been truly said, ‘‘Closer is He than breathing, nearer than hands and feet.”

Outside and inside, everywhere God and a God of Love, like the vision of the poet — “Oh! the little birds sang East, and the little birds sang West, And I smiled to think God’s greatness Flowed around our incompleteness— Round our restlessness, His rest!”

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Chapter 2. Thought Is A Force

THE Force or Energy that upholds, sustains and moves the Universe is silent and hidden. We only know of it through its expressions, which are many, and Thought is one of the finest and most powerful of these expressions, but Thought itself, although an expression of World Energy, is not sufficiently expressed (expressed or out-pressed) to become visible to the natural eye. It has form, but that form is invisible. It is unseen and unheard until it has expressed or out-pressed itself in writing, printing or speech.

The fact before us is this — Thought is a Force, even when it has not found expression in written or spoken word, and Thought is an outflow from God or the Infinite and Eternal Energy. Thought is the essence of all things, that is, every living thing is an embodied thought, a Thought-Form clothed in matter. It may be said that Thought-Forms clothe themselves in matter.

Shall we then think lightly of Thought? Shall it be vaporous and unreal to us. Not if we have clear vision of the world, for we shall then see Thought as something more real than those material things we know as houses, clothes, food and drink. We who desire to work in Thought Substance must know something of its nature and possibilities, as the artist must know something about the mixing of colors and laying them upon the canvas.

If you wish to run a locomotive you must acquaint yourself with all its parts and learn their relation to each other. You must practise running your engine until you are expert in its management, before you are prepared to take out a train without accident.

On the contrary we have attempted to run a human engine of which we knew little or nothing, and naturally we have had our mishaps which we called diseases, and our engines have been in the repair shop far too much of the time. If the Master Engineer, the Universal Mind, had not occasionally given us a command or word of advice, there might not have been anything left of our engines to take to the repair shop.

The human engine is more complicated and difficult to understand than its iron brother, but it is possible to learn all about it and to keep it under perfect control. It takes time and study and perseverance, of course, but it is time and study and perseverance well spent. In fact it could not be better spent.

Is there any study that can compare with it? I should say not. Indeed it may well be made the first of all studies, for without health, peace of mind, and the ability to master circumstances, what can we accomplish in any direction. Our unevolved powers are greater than we can imagine, and to evolve those powers the acme of the New Thought ideal.

We are like the man who desires to run an engine and seeks to gain the requisite knowledge for his work. He must experiment, and so must we. He must find the motive power and learn to use it and so must we. He must be able to increase that motive power and so must we.

But here the analogy ends, for while the power of an engine has a limit, the human engine has no limit.

We are veritable giants when our powers are brought to the surface. They lie within us like seed germs awaiting the touch of life, as in the tiny acorn lies concealed the mighty oak. I once saw a slender, delicate little fellow, who had been without food for a week, perform a feat that would have tested a Samson. He had been thrown into a hypnotic sleep in a public hall and kept under the strictest surveillance during the seven days of his fast. At the end of the week he was placed in a chair and held down in it by six strong policemen. Then the man who held him in hypnotic control gave a signal and the little, frail creature sprang up and threw off those powerful men as though they had been insects. Where did his strength come from? It was certainly not resident in his flabby muscles.

I have seen many exhibitions of this kind, but the one just quoted occurred in a small town and reputable citizens, among them several physicians, testified to its genuineness, while the policemen who figured in the test were the regular officers of the town, so there was little or no chance for fraud.

When I was a member of the Society for Psychical Research in Boston I saw two hypnotized subjects impersonate Bill Nye and a political orator.

Dr. Pfeiffer was the hypnotic operator and he simply suggested to the one that he was Bill Nye and to the other that he was on the stump in the interests of his candidate. The speeches began and continued simultaneously, and it was difficult for us to follow each speaker, but we heard enough to know that the pseudo Bill Nye was irresistibly droll and very original, his witty eloquence flowing in a steady stream to the end of his long address. The stump speaker was just as good in his role, and it seemed remarkable to me that each should excel in his own adopted style of oratory. Both men in their natural state of mind were very ordinary, hardly up to the mediocre in their degree of intelligence, and yet when under hypnotic control each excelled in his line, each differing diametrically from the other.

The operator could not have given more than a mere suggestion to each, for to have given to one speaker his discourse word for word, he must have been an unusually fine orator, while to have given the two addresses simultaneously would have been a feat to be undertaken only by an East Indian adept.

What, then, was the inference?. Each speaker must have tapped for himself the source of his inspiration. In some inscrutable manner the suggestion to the one that he was Bill Nye must have brought him in contact with Bill Nye’s current of thought; he must have tapped it, as it were, while the stump speaker must have tapped the current of stump oratory.

These instances and many others that have come under my observation have led me to think that under certain conditions we come in touch with other minds, and also with a great reservoir of Life and Mind containing all that we desire to express of strength, vitality, health, harmony, opulence and beauty, of even more that we cannot now imagine. We have but to open the channel and it will flow through us.

I would not advise the channel opened by Hypnotism, for that calls for an injurious negative state, and brings many evils in its train. I quote Hypnotism for the purpose of illustration, but do not indorse its use.

To return to the simile of the engine. We see it on the track, a motionless, lifeless thing, awaiting the touch of the engineer’s governing hand. He opens the throttle and away she springs, a creature of life and power. Is it a miracle? No, an everyday occurrence, and yet a matter of law, a matter of adjustment, a matter of scientific certainty.

Power and life are let loose in us in very much the same way, as a matter of law, of adjustment, of scientific certainty. Complicated the human machinery surely is, but it is not impossible to understand and control it with a master’s hand.

The engineer uses steam or electricity to run his engine. The human engine is run by Thought, the amount of energy put into it being regulated by the character of the Thought. There is a current of Thought generated in Illusion that is weak and inefficient. There is another, based on Truth, that is strong and all-sufficient. As a man thinketh, so is he. If he thinks himself strong he becomes so, as did the hypnotized subject who threw off the six strong policemen. Although physically weak he had been made to think himself strong; strength was suggested to him by the hypnotizer, and he became as a giant. The suggestion opened the way to the Universal Energy, which flowed through him and made him strong in spite of his feeble body.

And the truth is — Strength is not in muscle and nerve but in the spiritual force that infills them, else how is it that flabby muscle can perform the work of a Hercules. Also, how was it that Jeffries lost the fight with Johnson? His trainer said he was physically fit, but he began to doubt his power several days before the fight and so he lost it, because, although really a giant, he was bound in mental chains of weakness. Again, As a man thinketh, so is he.

You may think it is demeaning to spiritual force to assert that it gives strength to the prize-fighter. But why not? God is no respecter of persons. He gives of His Power to all who know how to get it. He sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. God gives energy but does not stipulate how it shall be used, because Man’s will is free. He can use or abuse Power as he sees fit, but of course he has to bear the penalty if he misuses Power.

That is a part of his education in the mysteries of life and the laws of his being.

But to return to the subject — Thought is a Force, and whatever you think of yourself, that do you become, for Thought is not only a Force, but a Creative Force. If you think persistently that you have a disease you contract it; and on the contrary, if you have contracted the disease and can be made to think strongly enough that you are in perfect health, you rid yourself of the disease. Two subjects in hypnotic sleep, one with a cough and the other without, can be so treated by suggestion that when they awake from the sleep, the one who had the cough is free from it, while the other subject has contracted it. This is a singular fact but full of meaning, showing you how illusory are the diseases of the body and why New Thought can heal them.

You may have some internal trouble and you may think it is a cancer. If you think so persistently it will turn out to be a cancer, no matter what it was originally. Or, on the other hand, you may actually have a cancer, but if you can be made to think strongly enough that you have not one the cancer will disappear, on the same principle that the fly-blister, when subjected to negative suggestion, loses its power to affect the skin.

But how can you be persuaded that you have not a cancer when you know by every indication that you have one? Ah, but have you? That is the point. It depends upon what you regard as you. If you are your physical body, why then you have the cancer. I shall not dispute that evident fact. What I do deny is that you are your physical body, and instead I declare that you are a birthless, deathless, spiritual identity, having the power to put on and throw off your physical envelope. In the course of your evolution you have had many of these physical envelopes, vegetable, animal, and, perhaps, human. One after another you have cast them off, like the chambered nautilus, leaving your outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea. Your present shell is constantly changing, and if it has a cancer now, it need not have one if you gain sufficient control over your body to cast it out.

When I say — If you gain sufficient control over your body — I suggest that you are something above and superior to your body. Else how can you control it? As long as you think of yourself as your body, or your body as yourself, you cannot establish any claim of superiority or command over any of its states or activities.

When you deny that you have a cancer you are speaking of the real self that is you, the self that is in the image of God or the externalization of God; for an image is an externalization of a thing. This real self has no cancer nor any other defect or disease. As you realize this your thought becomes exalted, becomes positive in character, and easily controls the body. Thought, when exalted, increases in force, because it holds more of the Divine Energy. It can then heal your body.

And what is true of healing disease of a physical nature is also true of healing disease of the mind. All worry, fear, apprehension, grief, weariness, mental trouble of any sort, is a disease of the mind, and subject to the control of divinely energized Thought.

I can feel within myself how it is true that the real self is not touched or deeply hurt by sorrow, trouble or adversity. As Emerson says: ‘‘What opium is instilled into all disaster — the only thing grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is.”

While I was thinking how best to explain this great truth to other minds I was led by the Spirit to read an article by M. E. Carter in The Humanitarian, a part of which read as follows:

‘‘Some years ago, while at Greenacre, I saw a picture that impressed me deeply. It was painted by an idealist, a girl only nineteen years of age.

The picture represented a beautiful head, the face being perfect in outline and color; but the large, dark eyes seemed to be looking far way, seeking with a hungry, unsatisfied expression something apparently unattainable. The face was inexpressibly sad with its beauty and earnest- ness. Close beside this head, with a cheek almost pressed against it, was another head — the face perfect in serenity and a study in its calmness and peace. Both were beautiful; but one left on the beholder a sense of hunger and anxiety, while in the other there was nothing to desire. The picture interpreted itself as one looked upon it. There in graphic outline was the oft-repeated story of the human being not yet awake to its Divine Self — hungry, anxious, sad, yearning for it knows not what; and all the time the Divine Self, the Real Self, the True Being, close at hand, waiting for recognition. It is this True Self of each one of us with whom, sooner or later, we must get acquainted, and whose presence we must learn to realize every moment of our lives thereafter.’’

It will help you greatly to see in mind the two selves so well portrayed. One restless, sad, unsatisfied, hungry, anxious and longing for it knows not what; the other perfect in its serenity, and a study in calmness and peace. And remember the other Self, the True Self, is very very close to you, fairly touching you.

Seek this Real Self and you will find it. Then will your troubles melt in air and your diseases fall away from you like the old plumage of a bird in moulting time. You accomplish this with that Force called Thought, which is Spiritual Energy expressing itself in terms of Mind. As Emerson said: ‘‘When the spiritual Energy is directed outward, then is it a thought.

There you have the subject of this chapter on the authority of a poet, philosopher and idealist who stands high in the teachings of the New Thought.

Believe me the Real You is a Great Self, as glorious as an angel, as radiant as the sun. Someone has called it the Shining One, a beautiful and fitting name.

In your hours of exaltation, when you feel yourself moved to great and wonderful achievement, and no height seems too high to scale, it is the Shining One irradiating your being. It is then actually speaking through you, and stirring you to endeavor. But the hour passes and you fall again into your negative, everyday self. Darkness and limitation shut you in while the Shining One withdraws behind the environing clouds.

But, you know, the natural sun is often obscured by clouds, yet it will come forth again, and while obscured it is still shining, though its rays do not reach you. Take courage, for your Shining One is near you, though hidden, and it will surely illumine your life again.

There is a state of consciousness that corresponds to the earth in shadow, and that is your present state, except for your occasional glimpses of the Shining One. In course of time the illumination will become permanent. Then you and the Shining One will have made your at-one-ment.

Your evolution consists in learning and applying the laws of Thought that shall clear your mind of clouds and darkness, due to the false beliefs descending to you from your ancestors and their primitive animal beginnings in the faraway past.

I do not wonder that the Apostle said, “For now we see through a glass darkly, but then. face to face.” He thus prophesied the clear vision of the world that shall see things as they are, or face to face.

Thought is the Force that shall heal you of mental and physical disease and bring you health and peace.

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Chapter 3. The Subconscious Mind

VARIOUS writers use the term ‘‘Subconscious’’ in different ways. With some it describes what I should call instead the Superconscious, or what Emerson called the Over-Soul.

That is not what I mean by the Subconscious, for I use it to denote a product or result of the Conscious. Taken in a large and general sense, the Subconscious might be made to stand for all that is not Conscious, but I consider that it makes the study of Mind and its processes more understandable if we divide it and its functions into Superconscious, Conscious and Subconscious, the Superconscious standing for that vast storehouse from which we draw our thoughts, and of which we know very little, the Conscious standing for what we perceive to be the form of mental activity which we recognize as the human mind, and the Subconscious, standing for automatic mental processes or habits, initiated, in the first instance, by the Conscious Mind.

It is of the Subconscious Mind that I will speak in this chapter. To begin with, let us consider its office in controlling the involuntary action of the body, such as the beating of the heart, the circulation of the blood, digestion, etc., any process in fact not immediately set in motion by the will. The act of walking is largely subconscious, but the direction in which one walks is generally dependent on the will, although it often happens that when one goes in the same direction daily the feet will turn certain corners while the Conscious Mind is occupied with other subjects of thought.

The Subconscious Mind is a bundle of habits, and its habits are of long duration. The Subconscious contracts habits of disease; that is, a part of it gets to running irregularly, and keeps on so moving to the disturbance of the general physical harmony, until something happens to set it right, or all the other parts adjust themselves to the erratic action, compromising, as it were, for the sake of temporary peace.

It is well known that the different parts of the body will change position to make room for an organ that is out of place, and though they could perform their work much better in their own proper places, still, after a little grumbling (pain), they settle down to business in their new quarters, and get on quite amicably, though there is always an element of discontent. They do not break out in open riot, but make the owner of the body in which they are ensconced feel somewhat uncomfortable. He knows that something is wrong with the servants in his house, but does not discover what it is.

We have discerned the fact that the physical economy is regulated by intelligence, but have not learned that this regulating intelligence dwells within the organism itself. That it does is one of the strongest points in our healing philosophy.

Long ago, in the early beginnings of life on this planet, that little protoplasmic form, the amoeba, had a natural desire for food. Impelled by this desire, it floated here and there, until it came in contact with the object of its desire, when it folded itself about that object, absorbed from it what it could assimilate, and released the balance. As time went on its desire grew stronger and its need for more varied food greater, so that instead of letting its prey go quickly it held on to it longer, so as to extract from it more sustenance. This resulted finally in a settled, permanent contraction which converted the flat surface of the amoeba into a tubelike formation, the first nucleus of a stomach.

But this stomach could not digest all that it had captured and held, for now it did not give up its prey, and how to get rid of the unused unavailable matter was the question in the amoebic mind. It did not think out the matter as we would do, but set to work to form ducts or channels that served as primitive bowels and kidneys. Later to supply its growing needs it formed the eyes, heart, lungs and other organs.

Note that these organs owe their origin and growth to conscious action on the part of the creature projecting them. No matter how low the form of life, if it has any knowledge of external objects that knowledge may be termed consciousness, for to be conscious means simply to know, the word “conscious” coming from the Latin ‘‘conscius,” from “con” and “scire,” to know. The amoeba was conscious because it knew of the presence of its prey, and it knew enough to grasp that prey. It also had will, for it willed to grasp its prey.

But, as its desires grew apace, it dropped the conscious control of the first established activities, because it could do so by virtue of mechanical law which converts conscious activity into a habit, that becomes automatic, and practically conducts itself without conscious direction or supervision.

If you set a ball rolling it is carried forward by the momentum given by your hand, which is the agent of your conscious volition, and the ball rolls on until the force transmitted to it is spent. By the same law the mechanical action set up at first in the body by conscious volition continues until the force imparted to it is exhausted.

In this way our bodies are running on the motive power given to them by conscious volition in the long ago. As we pass from childhood to old age we get farther and farther away from the original impelling force and we finally run down, as in death, just as a clock would that needed winding.

But, just so surely as the clock can renew its action when a new impulse is given it, just so surely can the human body do the same, and in so doing conquer old age and death.

In winding the clock that its action may be renewed you are dealing with a merely mechanical object. In renewing the bodily mechanism you are dealing with living tissues, animated by mind and spirit; therefore, in the latter instance, your tools must be of mind substance because you cannot regulate a thing of mind with a steel tool. You cannot adjust mind substance with a screw driver and hammer. The body is really mind substance, you know, solidified into material atoms and molecules.

Schopenhauer reduced this world to two factors — Will and Idea. Will stands for the Eternal Energy and Idea for the form it assumes.

I believe this to be true, and as the individual is the Microcosm, or epitome, or microscopic edition of the Macrocosm or Universe, I consider that the motive power of the individual is made up of Will and Idea. Thought is the form that Will resolves itself into; therefore Thought is a Force, and it is the Force with which we adjust and regulate the living tissues of the body.

If you mentally tell a sick person that he is well, no matter how sick he may apparently be, the affirmation falls into his Subconscious Mind, which takes the suggestion and acts upon it, for the Subconscious Mind is sensitive, vibrating mind substance and when it is touched by a living word it moves in accordance with that word.

Living words are words of health, words of success, words of good cheer, and the Subconscious Mind responds to them by setting up better circulation, steadier heart-beats, better muscular and nerve action, better sight, better hearing and better digestion.

On the other hand, dead words, such as — I am sick, miserable, poor, unfortunate and hopeless — all have a disastrous effect upon the Subconscious Mind, lowering the tone of the whole system and producing the exact opposite of the effect of the live words.

Not once only in the history of the world was the Word made Flesh, but every day, every hour and every moment is it occurring. The Word is continually made Flesh, and happy he who chooses the living Word for his utterance.

If you are told that you are well when you are as sick as you can possibly be and live, it will seem to you like a baseless and false assertion, but it is not, and why.

It is not baseless and false for the reason that your sickness refers to a passing physical state which does not belong to the real you. If I see you in a rage at a certain time, and yet know you to be really a person of equable and sweet temper, shall I pronounce you a savage brute . That is what you seem to be at the moment of observation, but I take into consideration that this passing brain storm does not represent you as I know you to be.

Your bodily sickness is just as much a passing mood of the body, so the New Thought healer takes a firm stand and asserts that you are in reality perfectly well, sound and whole. This is true of the spiritual substance which is really you.

This spiritual you is a Creator. It is an Emanation from the God-Centre of all Being and brings with it Divine Power, Creative Power.

Its words are living words and are externalized in beautiful, healthy, bodily substance.

Try the effect upon the Subconscious Mind of vigorous, positive, living words. When you are weak affirm that you are strong. Remember the hypnotized subject, who, through suggestion, acquired such tremendous power, though his muscles were flabby and his body puny. The only difference between hypnotic suggestion and auto-suggestion is that in the former the conscious mind of the subject is made quiescent, and is thus unable to foist its doubts on the Subconscious Mind, so that the latter, not being handicapped by doubt, can accept the suggestion and act upon it without hindrance. In auto-suggestion you will have doubt to contend with, so it will take longer to get results, but if you persist, you will finally cast out doubt and thus obtain a clear channel for Infinite Power to flow through you from centre to circumference.

Even though you are overwhelmed by poverty, sickness and sorrow, affirm the opposite. Say with all the earnestness you can muster: I am rich, I am well, I am happy. Say it again and again, day after day, though all things conspire to give the lie to your words. If you do this faithfully you will at last enable the Subconscious Mind to make your words come true.

If you throw bicarbonate of soda into an acid, you correct its acidity. By a law certain and unvarying you can sweeten by affirmation the sourest states of body and environment.

I have proved this in my own life, and knowing what auto-suggestion has done for me, I entreat you to see what it will do for you. It calls for persistent effort, but that effort in itself and aside from results is beneficial. You have nothing to lose in the attempt. You risk nothing and you have so much, so very much to gain.

We are too apt to think of the Conscious Mind as the whole of Mind, not understanding that there are mental activities of which we are not aware, but the reasoning, philosophical person accepts on good proof much more in the world than the small part of it that comes under his immediate observation. He believes in suns, stars, planets and worlds that are beyond his cognizance. We have equally good proof of the existence of Mind that is beyond our cognizance. There certainly are mental activities that are carried on without direct volition from the Conscious Mind, and without our knowledge.

When you were a little child, just learning to walk, you had to balance yourself very carefully on one foot while you lifted the other and took a step forward, often losing your balance and falling. After many trials you managed to keep your balance and were then able to walk; but even then you could not run and leap. Those were later efforts. The first attempt to walk led gradually to the later accomplishment. In the meantime the first effort at balance had become a habit, a something automatic that did not call for constant care and attention.

Now you can walk and think about something else all the time. If every day you go to your place of business or to some other destination by the same route, after a while you will not need to think about your course, for you will turn corners unconsciously, and finally arrive at your office or other point, hardly knowing how you reached it. Your walking as mere muscular activity was subconscious, and that which sent your steps in one direction was also subconscious.

Life is made up of these subconscious activities. Without them achievement of a high order would be impossible. At first you learned your letters with difficulty, then words of one syllable, then longer words. Then you learned the various parts of speech — nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, pronouns, etc. For a long time reading was a matter of slowly spelling out words, but today you grasp whole sentences at a glance. You spell words no longer. All that work is done subconsciously, and with lightning rapidity.

The late Professor James of Harvard, in his “‘Psychology,” stated that art would be impossible were it not for subconscious processes. You can see that this is so, for if the mind had always to busy itself with every detail in art which at first it apprehends with care and precision, there would never be free bold strokes of the brush. All would be cramped and labored like the writing of a child. The free sweep comes from the care given to the earlier detail which falls as a habit into the Subconscious Mind, and is thereafter executed by it.

In my early study of the piano I was an impatient pupil. I could not understand why I was kept on scale and arpeggio, when I thought I could learn to execute them just as well by taking them as they occurred in a piece of music. My music master knew better, and he said, “You must make your technique a habit, so that you can execute runs, etc., unconsciously, for later you will have other things to consider and cannot give your thought at the same time to technique in detail.” Sometime afterward I saw this to be true, but could not understand it at the moment.

The same rule applies to the study of bettering our physical and mental states. We must hold certain thoughts in the Conscious Mind day after day, possibly month after month, and in some cases even year after year, until they become an essential part of us, until they fall into the Subconscious Mind and set up there an activity.

If you wish to be healthy and carry about with you the magnetic aura of sweetness, goodness and power — in other words, if you wish to be a radiant success in life, shining with the joy of accomplishment — you must hold in mind the thoughts that make such attainment possible, and you must go on holding them until they bring results. A fleeting thought will have little or no effect in bringing you the ideal states that you are seeking, but a thought held day after day becomes a tremendous Force in your life. If the thought be true and noble the Subconscious Mind moves to the measure of truth and nobility. If the thought be crafty and mean, the Subconscious moves to that measure. As it moves it registers its processes in the glance of your eye, the turn of your head, the tone of your voice, the movement of your hand, and in many another form of your expression. Your inner self, which you fancy is hidden from observation, is thus constantly revealing itself to others and attracting or repelling their confidence and affection as the case may be, and the confidence and affection of the world around you are two strong factors in winning success. If you are not liked and your life is not a success, look to your inner life and see what is wrong with it. The trouble lies doubtless within yourself instead of in the world outside.

The Subconscious Mind is also creating your physical conditions to the measure of your thought. It does this so silently, so secretly, that you have no idea of its work in affecting the conditions of your body.

You will understand better how you can be unconscious of the activity of the Subconscious, when you notice that you can pursue a long train of thought, and be so absorbed in it that you are not conscious of yourself as thinking, and will not be until you ‘‘come to yourself” at the end of your train of thought. Your mind has been working intensely all the while, but you were not conscious of it.

It is certain that the Subconscious Mind pursues a very active course without our cognizance. It is also far-reaching and extends beyond the bounds of our immediate surroundings. It reaches out and works for our good or ill, according to the nature of our thought.

Our best thoughts and purposes come from the Superconscious Mind into the Conscious, and thence proceed into the Subconscious in the form of Habits of Thought. They pass from the immense, illimitable tract of the Superconscious into the comparatively small channel of the Conscious, thence to pass on to that other immense, illimitable tract of the Subconscious, where they become living factors for our weal or woe.

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Chapter 4. The Superconscious Mind

THERE is a vast storehouse from which we draw our thoughts. It is great and wonderful beyond our imagination, and it is open to every one of us. This storehouse was called by Emerson “‘The Over-Soul,” and perhaps no better name could be given it, but for the purpose of distinguishing it from the Conscious and Subconscious, I shall call it the Superconscious Mind.

No one knows exactly what the Superconscious Mind is; for that matter we know very little of the Conscious and Subconscious Mind; but we are learning more through observation and experience, and I believe we are close to a greater knowledge of the Superconscious Mind. We believe it to be the home of the potential or the unexpressed instead of the actual (act-ual), or expressed.

What the Unexpressed is I shall not attempt to define, because I cannot.

If I could define it, it would cease to be the Unexpressed and become the Expressed.

All we need to know is this — Is there a Superconscious Mind? If so, how are we related to it? If it be a storehouse, and we can draw from it, what can we draw and how can we draw it?

A thought comes into my mind. Where does it come from? Some other mind? Yes, possibly. But where did it come from in the very beginning? How did it get into that other mind from whence it comes to mine? A coin may pass from hand to hand in the course of its circulation, but originally it came from the mint. Still farther back it came from a mine, and earlier still it may have been in the form of ether, so in the first place it was not a coin in circulation. It is passed to me by another hand, but that hand did not make it. It simply passed it on. Our thoughts are transmitted from one to another, but that does not account for their origin. Where do they come from in the beginning?

They come from the Superconscious Mind. What they are like before they are born into the Conscious Mind we know not, and it matters not. What does matter is that we get the thoughts and that they are the right thoughts to work out our health and happiness.

We want something that shall move the machinery of mind and body, making it speed on merrily, singing as it does, instead of creaking, groaning and finally stopping entirely. Can we get it? Yes.

We have reached a place in intelligence where we know what we want from the storehouse, but doubt if we can get it. The doubt paralyzes our effort and we do not try to get what we want. Moreover, we would not know how to get it if we had courage to make the attempt.

When we want anything in the material world we reach out the hand for it. This we cannot do in the mental world. There we reach out with the mental hand of our desire. Knock and it shall be opened unto you. Desire is the hand that knocks at the door of the Superconscious, and the door is opened.

Thought comes into the mind, but it seems to come in hit-or-miss fashion. It, however, does nothing of the kind. It is regulated in its coming by law. Every thought that comes to us is drawn as unerringly as one chemical atom is drawn to another. It is drawn by the nature of our desire and by its kinship to the other thoughts present in the mind.

If our thought is concerned with Art, then we draw what relates to Art. If it is concerned with Music, then we draw what relates to Music, and so on. Whatever we elect to do and let our thought dwell upon, to that do we draw fresh stores from the Superconscious, and so do we grow in our endeavor, whatever it may be.

The old thought of the world was that each person had a certain amount of talent or genius conferred upon him, and beyond that limit he could not go. The New Thought teaches that there is no such grudging limit placed upon Man; that he stands at the door of Infinite Supply.

If you desire intensely to do anything in the way of high achievement, know that you can do it, no matter what your drawbacks or your age. I know a modiste who turns out the most exquisite creations in gowns and both hands are de- formed so that she cannot wear a thimble, the first and second fingers on both hands having but one joint. Her deformity has lifted her from an ordinary seamstress to the plane of Art, where she works out beautiful designs which subordinates carry into execution.

I know also a woman who, at the age of fifty, began the study of painting and at the age of sixty became a very fine artist, so you see, obstacles such as deformity and age vanish before the determined effort to realize one’s desires.

If your desire is to heal the sick, it shows that hidden within you is the power to do it. Open your mind to the Superconscious, letting the thought that is related to your desire flow into your mind, and you will develop the power to heal.

We are at all times open to the Superconscious, but we can increase our receptivity by desiring to be receptive. We can also exclude from our minds all that is extraneous or foreign to our purpose, as one would remove the weeds from a flower-bed.

The Healing Thought comes down from the Superconscious, hence the beautiful words of Carpenter: “Lo, the healing power descending from within, calming the enfevered brain and spreading peace among the grieving nerves.”

If you are suffering pain, either of mind or body, repeat these lines, and desire intensely that the healing power shall descend. Then wait and fully expect that it will. When it comes it will feel like a fine, cooling shower falling gently upon your heated brain, while little rivulets of peace course along the suffering nerves and still their grieving.

I know this to be so from actual and repeated experience. You have only to prove it for yourself.

The Superconscious is the realm of the Divine. How then does it happen that thoughts of worry, of hatred, of dishonesty and even of murder come to us from that source, if it indeed is the source of all thought.

They do not. When a bright new coin comes from the mint, it is quite different from the same coin after being long in circulation and becoming worn and tarnished.

But the analogy is imperfect and I will not follow it farther. No material illustration can convey to you what it means to open the mind to the influx of the Superconscious. It means freshness, richness and fulness of thought. It means a rush of new purpose and a great tide of invigoration. It means everything good and delightful, my friends.

You cannot remain sick if you are thus renewed and regenerated. You cannot remain poor if you are open to the flow of Opulence. You cannot remain unhappy if you receive the inrush of Love and Joy.

Concentrate all your power on the one effort to draw from this Source of Supply. Pray if you will. Why not? Prayer is ‘‘the soul’s sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed.”

You desire only good. If you desire anything less it is only a mistake of your growing intelligence which will soon be corrected. You desire only good and that exists for you in the Superconscious, awaiting your call.

How can you think yourself sick and miserable with all life’s richest treasures at your very door.

The New Thought is helping you on because it does not deal in the old hackneyed thought of passed ages, that is like old, long-used coin worn so thin as to be nearly valueless. It is giving out to you fresh coin from the mint, showing you new truth, for although truth is as old as the hills, and older, there is now a new presentation of it. It is telling you of laws hitherto undiscovered, by which you can improve and idealize your life in every particular. It is showing you how to apply those laws, and demonstrate results from their application every day. It is giving you clear vision of the world, and showing you that you have everything to live for. It is proving old age and death to be spectres of false belief, without a shadow of reality. It is removing, one by one, all the bugbears of life that have filled your soul with terror and chilled the blood in your veins. It is proving that you have unlimited power of achievement. It is doing all this, and more.

The New Thought is swinging the door leading into the Superconscious wide open, so that all who will may enter.

Do not then lie down at the portal like a beggar and whine. Get up and put on your purple and fine linen, for all are princes who enter the Kingdom of the Superconscious.

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Chapter 5. How To Heal Yourself And Others

IN my search for the secret of New Thought Healing I studied Faith Cure, Mental Suggestion, Hypnotism, Christian Healing, Divine Science and Christian Science. All seemed good and helpful with the exception of Hypnotism, which I consider injurious, but I failed to find just what I was seeking, and the door to the Superconscious stood merely ajar, not wide open. Then I turned to Theosophy, not because of its therapeutic value but because of its exposition of occult laws. I thus learned much of the mobility of Matter and its obedience to Spirit. During this time of study I felt like an embryotic germ, blind and groping for sustenance, ever seeking something, but blindfolded so that I could not see and grasp what I sought. Afterward, as I looked back on this experience I could see that I had been growing and moving toward the light.

Finally came an illumination in which I saw all spiritual substance as one and indivisible, from which I argued that I must be one with this indivisible spiritual substance or else I must be NOTHING, and since Emerson said, ‘‘When the spiritual energy is directed on something outward then is it a thought,” a statement which I believed, then, since I could think, I must be of spiritual substance, possessing spiritual energy.

Then I turned to Spinoza and read, ‘‘If God be Infinite Substance, there can be no substance outside of God, and Man is therefore no substance, or he is God.” This corroborated my thought as to the oneness of substance.

Substance, according to Spinoza, is not a material apart or distinct from God, which he manipulates in the formation of worlds. He teaches instead, ‘‘Extension is an attribute of God, or God is an extended thing.”

If God or Substance be an extended thing, then no point of extension can be other than intelligent Substance, for unintelligent Substance could not be God-Substance.

If God creates by the extension of Himself, then Man is formed by the pushing forth into externals of God-Substance, hence Man is either no Substance or he is God-Substance. But while Man is formed by the extension of Substance, he is also formed by the limitation of Substance, for were he not limited he would have no form. God is limitless in extension and also limited in extension. This sounds contradictory, but it is as though Infinite and Unlimited Substance should set up within itself limits. Indeed the very conception of infinite extension implies infinite limits; for when the mind attempts to think of extension infinitely extended, it reaches out into space, until it is forced to set up a limit; but just as surely is it forced to look beyond that limit, only to set up another, and so on through infinity. Therefore the limitations of Man do not prove that he is not of God-Substance, but rather that he is, for God-Substance sets up limits within itself, but they are limits like the horizon that vanishes as we advance upon it. So do Man’s limitations vanish before the advance of the intrepid and adventurous soul.

Then I turned to Nature and there I saw all living, growing things unfolding from a centre. I saw Life ever pushing forth from a centre to a circumference, and finally it came to me as a sort of revelation that God is at the Centre of Being, and from that Centre is continually extending His Substance into Creation as the sun extends itself in its ray. I saw that God is the Living Soul of Creation, everywhere present in it and yet focussing in dynamic vibrations at the centre of every seed and at the soul centre of every human being.

Then, for the first time did I have a satisfactory explanation of the manner in which God acts in our activities, and I understood why Fenelon said:

‘‘All that exists, exists only by the communication of God’s Infinite Being; all that has intelligence, has it only by derivation from His Sovereign Reason; and all that acts, acts only from the impulse of His Supreme Activity. It is He who does all in all; it is He who at each instant of our life is the beating of our heart, the movement of our limbs, the light of our eyes, the intelligence of our spirit, the Soul of our soul.”

That is exactly my conception of God. I believe that He is in the very beating of our heart, in the movement of our limbs, in the light of our eyes, and in the intelligence of our spirit, and that He is the Soul of our soul.

This places God within, does it not. Still, because God is immanent He is none the less transcendent. He is the great, living spiritual Presence within each one of us, and yet at the same time He is omnipresent. Electricity may be everywhere existent in the atmosphere, and yet come to a focus in certain places. This may seem an irreverent illustration to apply to God, but no natural fact can be irreverent, for God ensouls all Nature.

In order to heal yourself or others you must hold the right conception of God and of yourself, else you will not induce the flow of the healing current, or, I should say, increase its flow, for there is a natural power in all organisms that works for their betterment. It is called the Vis Medicatrix Naturae and it often heals the sick without aid from drugs or other curatives. In many cases, however, it needs help, and nothing helps so effectually as mental and spiritual reinforcement, for it is an intelligent power, and accepts suggestion. It can be intensified by affirmation or suggestion as to what it shall do for the organism.

As Thought is a Force, or, as Emerson calls it, ‘Spiritual energy turned outward,” therefore the healing Word is mighty with spiritual vibrations.

The power of the Word is great or small according to the state of the mind projecting it. There are comparatively ‘‘dead words” and there are ‘‘live words.” All depends upon the amount of Spirit that is in them.

To speak the Word, then, is of no more avail than a passing breeze unless that Word be alive with spiritual energy, and the way to fill it with spiritual energy is to first produce within yourself the mental state that calls forth the spiritual current from your centre in God.

You can do this because of the very nature of Mind, for it is by nature formative, that is, it forms receptacles that the Spirit fills with life. These receptacles are called Thought-Forms.

To illustrate — Let us suppose that before you is a spring of water from which you would drink. To do so you must have a receptacle to catch the water and convey it to your mouth. You shape a leaf, or curve your hands into the needed receptacle, for one of some kind you must have to make use of the water. Or you bend down and place your mouth to the stream, in which event your mouth becomes the receptacle.

Not in so mechanical a manner does the mind shape its Thought-Forms for the receiving of Spirit, but nevertheless it does shape actual forms, and those forms are thoughts that are images or pictures of Truth, and the deeper, broader and more capacious those Thought-Forms, the more Spirit do they hold.

You need, therefore, to examine your mind to see what your thoughts really are. I mean, you should see what you think concerning God, concerning yourself and concerning the world in general. If your thoughts are shaped according to REALITY, or what REALLY IS, then you have good mental forms for the receiving of Spirit. Otherwise you have not.

When I speak of the receiving of Spirit I do not mean that Spirit is a Something separate and apart from you. Spirit is at the Centre of Being, and as it flows outward into externals it produces YOU, first in your inner self and then in your outer self. This outer self is an outer part of your mind, and it is this which is formative. It is this that shapes thoughts for the receiving of Spirit.

Let me illustrate more fully — Suppose a liquid, plastic substance should solidify at its boundary lines, thus forming cells or receptacles into which the liquid part of the substance continued to flow. This would describe, as well as any material terms could, your actual oneness with, but apparent separateness from. Spirit. At the centre is Spirit, liquid, plastic, flowing, so to speak, although this does not really define it, and as it flows outward to the circumference of your mind and body, it solidifies into form, making thus receptacles for itself to flow into, first becoming Thought-Forms, and later, Body-Cells. In itself Spirit is formless, but it evolves forms out of itself in which to hold itself. It builds forms as the spider weaves its web out of its own substance, and then dwells in the web, made out of itself. Water is one with the ice that is formed on the surface, and thus is your mind, with its Thought-Forms, one with the Spirit. Your body, with its tissue-cells, being an output from your mind, is also one with the Spirit.

You cannot think at all without making some kind of a Thought-Form, and that Thought-Form is either receptive or non-receptive to Spirit. If all your Thought-Forms were receptive you would always think live thoughts and be full of health, joy, and all the good things that come from Spirit. Your evolution consists in consciously creating new and better Thought-Forms. Had you started in life with the right beliefs you would have been an automaton instead of a living, growing creature, so do not deplore your mistaken beliefs, but set yourself gladly to correct, revise and remodel them.

The process of thinking is largely mental picturing. What you think you picture mentally, and what you picture mentally is the form your thought assumes, for, as I have said before — Mind is formative. It is always creating Thought-Forms that the Spirit fills with life, according to the nature and capacity of those Thought-Forms .

If you hold a mental picture of God as a Great Person, or large type of Man, seated on a throne, in some remote region above the clouds, you are not thinking in accord with Truth, in accord with what God really is, and therefore your Thought-Form is a dead form, and not a fit receptacle for the Spirit.

This conception of God is proved to be untrue by “reductio ad absurdum,” for if God be over your head he must be under the feet of the people on the opposite side of the globe.

I assume that you have outgrown this childish conception of God, formed when the human race was in its childhood, and knew so little of science as to suppose this earth to be a flat surface, instead of a sphere. Then, too, the natural tendency of the mind is to look up to that which it reveres, hence the conception of a God above the clouds.

But while you have rid yourself of this conception in a measure, the sense of separateness from God still lingers with you, as a last vestige of a mistaken race belief, somewhat as the vermiform appendix lingers in the body, though now out-grown as to use, and often aggressive and harmful.

To get rid of this vestige of false belief you must picture God as Omnipresent, Formless, Spiritual Substance, and see this Substance as taking on FORM and pushing outward from a hidden centre into the outer world, yourself included. Then think of this flowing spirit as feeding you with LIFE, LOVE, ENERGY, and INTELLIGENCE Continually, your mind and body receiving this living current.

The stream of Life flows through you to a degree without your conscious cooperation, else you could not live one instant, because your life supply would be cut off. By cooperating consciously you increase the flow of Spirit and receive more abundant Life.

It is the lack of a fuller flow of this living current, shut off partially as it is by our false beliefs or dead Thought-Forms, that is the cause of our weakness, disease, old age and death. To have the true idea of God and of ourselves is to open wider the channel through which Spirit flows, and receive a fuller stream of renewing Life to counteract the material tendency of the body toward disintegration and death.

If you did nothing else in treating yourself or others but hold the true conception of Man’s oneness with God, the healing would be accomplished, were it not that the mind wearies of holding one idea for a length of time without change, and as it thus wearies it fails to hold the thought clearly and strongly enough to produce the desired effect. For this reason it is necessary to add to the fundamental idea of oneness other ideas based upon it and in harmony with it.

For example, — having pictured Spirit as flowing from the Centre outward through you, then direct it in thought, or picture it as going, to that part of mind or body that is weak or diseased. If any function or faculty seems to be failing, then picture the spirit as flowing into and vitalizing that function or faculty.

Growths in any part of the body are due to a lack of proper activity or functioning. When any vital function becomes inert or deranged so that it fails to perform its office, effete matter is not thrown out of the system, as it should be, the circulation is impeded here and there, and the points of restriction become stopping places for particles of broken-down tissue in the blood. You know what would happen if a stream of water were arrested in its course. The water would become stagnant, and there would be a precipitation of whatever sediment the stream contained. Then, if the current sought outlet and made a detour in order to get it, the sediment would remain where it was deposited, for the motion of the turning current would be sluggish, slow and without sufficient force to flush away the deposit. Surgeons have many technical terms that they use in describing the origin of tumors and malignant growths, but when given in simple language it amounts to what I have just stated.

In treating a growth or congestion, picture the stream of Spirit as playing upon it and dispersing it. Hold also the thought — it is melting AWAY. Say this many times daily, and as you fall asleep at night. Keep this affirmation in mind day after day, and night after night. The same treatment applies to goitre.

In Diabetes, — picture the Spirit as a living, electrical fire, such as appeared to the Apostles. See this fire as searching the kidneys and bladder and burning up the sugar in the urine. I know of a case in which an elderly man with a long-standing case of Sugar Diabetes was healed by this treatment in one month, so that upon examination of the urine not a trace of sugar was found, and it never returned. I have also proof of a case of kidney trouble of forty years’ duration that was healed in a few months by this treatment. The same method destroys the uric acid that causes rheumatism.

Should there be weakness in sight or hearing, a simple, easy, and most effective treatment is to — picture the Spirit as flowing to the eyes or ears and revitalizing them.

Treatments are like inventions. What we want in them is a lack of superfluous detail, simplicity and adaptation to an end. In these days when we are learning to economize motion we must also learn to economize words. The Spirit does not hear through ‘‘much speaking.” It acts upon the merest suggestion.

I am sometimes asked if the “Word of Healing” is some special word. It is not. It is any statement of health and wellbeing. If you formulate words in your own way they will be quite as effective as the set phrase or formula given you by a teacher. It is well enough to accept and use such formula until you are able to frame one of your own, but no longer. The sooner a stated formula takes a new form in your own mind, the greater its vibratory power, and the more Spirit it calls forth.

I am also asked if the Word must be spoken aloud in order to be the spoken word. Not of necessity, for to formulate a thought in the mind is equivalent to speaking it, and a word spoken ‘‘In the Silence” is surely not the audible word.

There are occultists who contend that the audible word stirs vibrations not possible to the inner or thought word, but I cannot testify to the truth of this, as I have never experimented with the audible word, the silent word having been sufficient for my purpose and wonderfully powerful.

To mentally affirm that Spirit can renew any function of mind or body is to speak the Word that shall be made flesh, or in other words externalized in mind, body and environment.

That which creates any function can re-create or repair the same. The English surgeon. Sir William Gull, goes on record with these words:

‘‘What shall the doctors do. Rest and be still. The workman that made the machine can repair it.”

A material machine sometimes gets beyond repair because it is made of matter that wears out, but the human machine never gets beyond repair, for it is made of living tissue, which, according to Dr. Carrel of the Rockefeller Institute, never wears out if it is properly fed and cleansed, getting stronger instead of weaker as it grows older. Dr. Carrel pronounces the animal cell immortal because of its power to renew ; itself, and we of the New Thought believe that Spirit can vastly increase that power.

God is the Divine Workman who constructed the human machine and He can repair and renew it, for with the Power of the Spirit all things that can be imagined are possible.

Keep therefore before your mind this thought — God who made me can also re-make me.

When you fully believe that God can and will re-make you, you will have a Thought-Form receptive to the renewing, recreating current of Life, and the effect will soon be evident in both mind and body.

Bodily disease is usually attributable to an excess of dead material in the system, through having the mind clogged with dead thoughts, and thus causing their correspondence in the body. Children often inherit this state from the thought of some ancestor who has transmitted to them the diseased mental state causing physical disease. Such an inheritance can be annulled by the action of New Thought upon the diseased one. In such a case one should picture the stream of Spirit as flowing through the diseased body cleansing it of all useless and dead atoms.

In treating mental faculties, memory for instance, as you cannot form a picture of it, you will either have to designate it by name, or you can say— “I now picture Spirit as flowing toward that faculty and vitalizing it so that it may do perfect work.”

In paralysis of mind or body, think spirit strongly into the paralyzed parts, giving life where there is now deadness.

That dread disease tuberculosis, and others, whatever their nature, call for the same treatment that I have outlined in the few instances given. Specific details vary according to the case, of course, but the New Thought Healer must possess enough intelligence to apply the principle in varied forms to varied cases. The method is always about the same, very simple, directly to the point, and couched in as few words as possible.

If you find yourself lacking in ability to reach your ideals along any line of endeavor, it shows that your mind needs a greater flow of Spirit. Form a picture in your mind of what you wish to do, or state it in words, and then hold the thought that Spirit is flowing in the direction of your desire.

Spirit is not only Life, but all that constitutes Life, so that it contains the very essence of Art, Music, Literature, Philosophy, Invention, Mechanics, Manufacture, Commerce, Metaphysics, or any of the myriad forms of human activity. You can take from the stream of Life what you want very much as a tree on the bank of a river can absorb through its roots the chemicals in the water that enable it to grow and branch out. Your ability, in like manner, grows and branches through what you receive from the stream of Life.

Do not get tense or excited in trying to help yourself or others, for that tends to pinch the channel and restrict the flow of Life. The more you realize that God’s inexhaustible Power is yours, because of your oneness with God-Substance, the more you will see that there is nothing for you to fear or be anxious about. You need not even fear holding the wrong mental picture in giving treatments, for since you fervently desire the right one, the Infinite Power, working through you, will help you to form it. The wrong picture of today will change its outlines and become the right picture of tomorrow. You cannot go far amiss if you bear in mind the image of the sun and its ray or the ocean and its bay as symbolizing your oneness with God.

You can use the following statement of oneness and will find it helpful —

“I am open on my inner or spiritual side to the inexhaustible ocean of Divine Power. I flow forth from it and am one with it as a bay is one with the ocean, or as a ray of light is one with the sun.”

In treating others begin as you would in treating yourself, with a realization of your oneness in substance with God, for through this realization will come your power. Then substitute this other person for yourself, calling mentally his or her name, for this secures the attention of the Subconscious Mind to which your suggestion is to be given.

Tell the patient mentally that he is one in substance with God and that the healing current is waiting his call to flow through him to bring him into perfect health. Then picture the healing current as flowing through the patient from his centre in God. Later picture it as going specially to the diseased point and acting upon it, according to the nature of the disease. Should it be a fever, picture it as a cooling flood. Should it be great weakness, with coldness of the parts, picture the current as warming and vivifying.

Be filled with loving sympathy for your patient, for Love is the highest healing vibration.

The patient need not be in your presence, for Thought goes to any distance and there is really no separation in the omnipresent realm of Mind and Spirit. I know of cases of healing where healer and patient were separated from each other by thousands of miles. I know of other cases where a patient wrote to a healer and before the letter reached its destination the patient was healed, in which event the appeal from the patient instantly touched the Subconscious Mind of the healer and brought an immediate response. In such a case as this there is a strong sympathetic vibration and similarity of thought between healer and patient, so that appeal and response do not require the medium of ordinary communication.

The mere process of giving treatment to yourself or others is quite simple. The difficulty lies, not in the treatment itself, but in the previous training of the mind to the needed state of power, by the eliminating of false beliefs and the establishing of true ones.

A skilled and efficient healer can give a treatment in from ten to fifteen minutes. When a longer time is needed it is because the mind has not been able to concentrate upon the healing thought. Sometimes it takes a beginner an hour or longer to get in condition for giving a treatment.

To go into the Silence does not mean to banish all thought from the mind, for that is impossible. To stare at a spot on the wall and attempt utter vacuity of mind either brings on self-hypnotism or reduces to idiocy. To go into the Silence does mean to free the mind from certain thoughts connected with cares, worries, anxieties, and all false beliefs of that nature, but you must not leave their place vacant, or like the unclean spirit recorded in St. Matthew, 12-44, they will return bringing seven more unclean spirits with them, and the last state shall be worse than the first. When you sweep and garnish your mind you must not leave it empty of occupants, but fill it at once with thoughts of truth, lest the unclean spirits return. In the Silence your thought should dwell upon your immortal eternal being (The Shining One), and its oneness with God. This it is to be in the Silence, to still the turmoil of mortal life and be alone with God. The external, mortal life implies activity, noise and bustle; hence the life of the inner self, alone with God, is called ‘*In the Silence.”

In the Silence the mind is uplifted to that higher plane where it sees Man to be as disease-less and deathless as God Himself, for Man, being of God-Substance, has the attributes of that Substance.

From this high viewpoint of spiritual realization only can one heal the sick mind or the sick body, and indeed the sicknesses of the mind are quite as many and as serious as those of the body.

False beliefs have the power conferred upon them by heredity and habit, but they can be cast out by the power of the Spirit. The truth shall make us free.

Do not be disheartened if you do not get immediate results from your treatments. Sometimes results are long delayed, but they come at last if you are faithful and persistent. Think of Jacob who wrestled all through the night with God and in the morning won his blessing. Think of Job and his long-continued sorrows and trials, but by faith and patience he came into peace and prosperity. Bossuet says, “‘God does not always refuse when He delays. He loves perseverance and grants it everything.”

And why? Because perseverance is a God attribute and by manifesting it we come into rapport with God, making the passage of his blessing clear and easy. God’s perseverance is shown in the persistence of the Eternal Energy, which could not be eternal did it not persist.

If you have relapses and setbacks in your progress toward health, do not be disheartened, for there is a rhythmic swing in growth which I will now explain to you.

Professor Bose of the University of Calcutta, in studying the law of growth in plants, invented an ingenious instrument by which he could measure their growth, a growth that was imperceptible to the natural eye. He discovered that plants grow upward for five seconds, then shrink downward for five seconds, then remain stationary for ten seconds, after which they start upward again and repeat the same round. In shrinking downward the motion is slower than in pushing upward, hence the five seconds of shrinkage do not carry the plant completely back to its starting point, so that, on the whole, it gains in stature. But note that the five seconds of shrinkage and the ten seconds of remaining stationary are as three to one to the upward push. This is practically three steps backward to one step forward. (I will enlarge upon this in Chapter Eleven.)

If your progress is something like that do not complain that you are not getting ahead, for you are.

Every time you treat yourself or others you become stronger and your Word is more effective, and in time you will be so ensouled by the healing power that it will emanate even from your very garments. You will then heal unconsciously, and in some instances, where the faith of the patient is very great, you will heal instantaneously.

To have faith in the invisible, intangible healing power is at first like stepping into seeming VOID, but you will find in that void the solid ROCK under your feet.

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Chapter 6. The Helping Hand

DO not think you stand alone in sickness, weakness, poverty and misery, for you are encircled by Love and you lie in the lap of Wisdom. You are a child in your mother’s arms, nourished at her breast, the breast of kind Nature, who though she sometimes punishes, is ever ready with her reward. She only punishes to drive you back into the path leading to your greatest happiness. When entreaty and advice both fail, then she applies the lash to save you from the destroyer.

There is a natural healing power called the Vis Medicatrix Naturse. It is generally known only as a function working for the good and preservation of the physical organism, but the New Thought practitioner views this physical functioning as only one phase of an infinite, universal Power, working to bring the ideal into manifestation. The single phase known as the Vis Medicatrix Naturse is wonderful, while the entire Principle, at work through all creation, is great and marvellous beyond our present comprehension.

We may well study this Principle and learn all that is revealed of it at the present time, for such knowledge will increase, and we shall finally see that the entire universe is moving toward ideal states, and that Man’s dream of Heaven may be realized here on earth.

The universe could not reach perfection until its parts are perfect. A perfect fabric must be made of perfect warp and woof. If threads are uneven and defective the whole fabric will be uneven and defective. The perfection of a whole presupposes the perfection of all its parts; therefore, when the universe reaches the ideal state, its every part must be equally ideal.

This involves perfection for you, for me, and for all humanity. It means a steady growing into better and better states, which are naturally happier and happier states.

Vis Medicatrix Naturse is a Latin term for the Healing Power in Nature. If Love did not govern Nature then no such healing power would be vested in it. This power heals wounds, knits broken bones, throws out poisons, renews vigor, and by devious ways restores the body to health, even when such restoration may seem utterly impossible.

This healing power does not stop with the body, but is operative in healing mental wounds and mental suffering of all kinds.

It also extends itself to circumstances and environment, because circumstances and environment are an extension of the individual, as the odor of a flower is an extension in fine particles of ether of the flower. As an odor corresponds exactly to the nature of the flower, so does the extension of the individual, as represented by circumstances and environment, correspond exactly to the life and thought of the individual.

There are states and conditions of environment that correspond to the ailments of the body. There are wounds, lesions and broken bones of environment, as exemplified by the breaking of settled states by means of separation, bereavement and alienation. There are neuralgias of environment, or the sharp pains caused by violent antipathies and quarrels. There are indigestions, or the mal-assimilation of relatives and friends, resulting in fermentation and discomfort. There are catarrhs, congestions, fevers and other diseases of environment quite as actual as those of the body, and the Healing Powder of Nature is fortunately as effective in its action upon diseases of environment as upon those of the body.

What bearing has this upon your life? Why, it is a Helping Hand outstretched to uplift and relieve you. It is at work every moment to bring the chaos and disease of body, mind and environment into harmonious and beautiful order. It is helping you out of present states into more beautiful ones that shall make glad your soul.

Out of chaos into order is the process of Creation, and it is also the process of RE-creation, which is RE-pair, or in other words, it is the repairing or new pairing or new adjustment of mental and physical atoms.

By a mysterious action of the One Mind upon Matter this planet came into existence, and every form of life upon it had the same origin. Biologists tell us that in watching the forming of a bird in an egg the yolk appears to be pinched in here and there as by an invisible hand, until the form of the bird is vaguely outlined. Day by day this form grows more clearly defined until the living bird escapes from the shell. This illustrates the mode of creating in every instance. It is always the drawing together of indeterminate atoms into definite form.

The One Mind, arranging and rearranging atoms in you, is continually recreating you, from moment to moment, from hour to hour, from day to day, and from year to year.

Whether you wake or whether you sleep, the re-creation is accomplishing itself in you. The healing, idealizing, curative influence is working in and through you to bring you into the Heaven of your heart’s desire. This is the Helping Hand.

You can hinder results or you can advance them according to your failure to recognize or your readiness to cooperate with this Power. The best, simplest and most natural mode of cooperation is to think many times daily of the existence and continuous activity of this Healing Power, for creative action is intensified by conscious thought.

The healing of a scratch is actual evidence bearing witness to the Vis Medicatrix Naturae, but not so apparent is its functioning in the inner, invisible mechanism of the body, and even less apparent is it when acting upon your mind or environment. Where evidence is lacking your wisest course is to accept the Healing Power on faith and await results. When you get those results then will your faith be justified.

I know of no more uplifting and hopeful outlook than to see that my life is being continually shaped into more ideal form, that it may become a perfect expression of Divine Order, Health, Beauty, Opulence and Joy. Thus and thus only can I express the Divine.

Just as surely as the yolk of the egg, so vague and shapeless, is the nucleus of the bird that is to be, so am I now the nucleus of a higher, happier being. So are you. The law is universal and applies to all.

I can endure an unhappy hour if I know it ushers in a happier one, and especially if I know the former holds within itself the germ of the latter, and without the former the latter could not have existence. As the seed generates the future entity, so is the evolution of a human life, each new phase of it evolving from the preceding.

Lacking this knowledge we have in the past hindered the good to come, for in dark hours of sickness, sorrow, bereavement and trouble, we have not consciously recognized the Power that was even at that very moment striving to bring us into better states ; and the law is — If we do not consciously recognize this Power we handicap its endeavor, by reason of the fact that our conscious thought influences for better or worse all that concerns us.

Fortunately for us this Healing Power stands ever at hand awaiting our oft-belated recognition, and it is never too late for us to begin to cooperate with it, for even after death it helps us in the life beyond.

We are apt to think of the Subconscious which is Unconscious or Non-Conscious as being inactive because we are not cognizant of its action. That is the great mistake of our lives. When we understand that the Subconscious never sleeps but acts continuously, for our weal or woe, we shall know that we control our destiny, and do so through moving the Subconscious to the measure of our Conscious Thought.

Do not mistake my meaning and think that Superconscious, Conscious and Subconscious are three separate and distinct Minds. They are all One Mind, but One Mind differentiated in functioning as a tree might be differentiated into root, trunk and branch.

Subconscious Mind is as intelligent as Conscious Mind, if not more so, as its activity indicates a very high order of intelligence. The Vis Medicatrix Naturae is an intelligent activity of the Subconscious, and therefore we are not conscious of its operation, noting only the results, and by virtue of them assuming that it is operative.

Having satisfied ourselves of its operation toward beneficent ends, we cooperate with it or intensify it by dwelling in thought upon it, and by suggesting to it certain channels for its forces to move in. When Conscious and Subconscious have a united purpose the former does not pull against the latter to hinder its action. But if, on the other hand, the Conscious Mind is filled with doubts and misgivings as to the ultimate victory of good, with its attendant joy and health, then the Conscious Mind pulls against instead of with the Subconscious, and hinders its accomplishment.

It devolves upon you, then, no matter what your present state may be, nor how disheartening it may seem, to see it mentally as holding the GERM of FUTURE BETTERMENT.

That great scientist Sir Oliver Lodge has arrived at the following conclusion :

“No existing universe can tend on the whole toward contraction and decay, because that would foster annihilation, and so any incipient attempt would not have survived. Consequently, an actually existing and flowing universe must on the whole cherish development, expansion, growth, and so tend toward infinity rather than toward zero. Given existence of a non-stagnant kind and ultimate development must be its law.”

Note how that term “flowing universe” coincides with the Radiant Centre idea that Life flows outward into expression from a Centre which is God.

The universe is on its way to higher and better states. That which tends toward infinity tends toward perfection. One cannot think of the Infinite as Imperfect, as subject to bondage or unhappy conditions. Development, expansion, growth, all lead to increasing freedom from all that restricts and binds.

Bonds, however, have their use for a time, for Power is not gained without overcoming the limits set by opposition, restraint, resistance, obstacle and hindrance. That is why I say — The unpleasantness of the present hour holds within itself the undeveloped germ of future joy. The fairest lily has its inception in the bondage of downpressing earth and darkness, from which, and by means of which it pushes upward into freedom and light.

Bear constantly in mind that the Vis Medicatrix Naturae is always working for the good of your mind, the good of your body, and the good of your life in its every detail.

If appearances contradict this statement, let me remind you that appearances are like the horizon, only an appearance, and the horizon no longer deceives you, since you have learned that it does not mark the end of the earth. Neither do your apparent limitations mark the end of your endeavor, for the horizon line symbolizes another illusion that has long held the world in bondage to disease and weakness, namely, the MENTAL HORIZON LINE that limits your powers to the finite, when the truth is they extend beyond this illusive line and stretch far and away into the Infinite.

Not the least of your Infinite Powers is the Vis Medicatrix Naturae, the Healing Power, the Helping Hand, that is working unceasingly for your betterment, and for a higher type of well-being than you can now imagine, for, in your present state, at its best, when compared to your coming state, you are as the grub to the butterfly, or the atom to the archangel.

Goaded, driven, coaxed and carried, you go on your way to better things, in spite of your mistakes and shortcomings. You could not stop your progress entirely if you tried, but you could hinder it for a time by not cooperating with the law.

Be at peace with your surroundings for they are an indispensable part of your unfoldment. They are in your life by law, and they will go out of your life by law, as the ripe apple drops from the tree. Some day you will look back and see it so. Then you will know that without certain unpleasant experiences your mind could never have gained its subsequent buoyancy and joy.

Wine in the stage of fermentation is cloudy, but give it time and the dregs will settle, leaving the wine clear and bright. So shall your life separate itself from its dregs and become a sparkling, radiant heaven of hope and joy.

Keep the Vis Medicatrix Naturae, the Helping Hand, before your mental vision and aflBrm over and over again that the Law of Love which is also the Law of Evolution is bringing you out of the confined, dark, seed period to the time of blossoming. Trust the Infinite Love that has you in its keeping and rest in peace.

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Chapter 7. Ensouling Thought-Forms

I WILL now tell you something about the creating or ensouling of Thought-Forms. To do that I must define briefly several terms with which you may not be familiar, or, if you are, a definition will not be out of place, as it will show more clearly what I intend to say.

Dating far back to the beginning of language we find our present word ‘‘Man” had its root in an ancient Sanscrit word ‘‘Manas,” which means “Thinker.” This word has come down through the long ages with but little change, until now, instead of “Manas” it reads “Man” and it still means “Thinker.”

Man in his real essence is a thinking principle, and that Principle, the true Ego, is called by Occultists “Manas,” because the term characterizes the Ego as a Thinker. The Ego is known as “Manas,” and its plane of activity is known as the “Manasic Plane.”

There is also a plane of Feeling, Emotion and Desire on which the Manas or Thinker functions, and that is called the Kamic Plane. (Not Karmic but Kamic, for Karma and Kama are two distinct terms.)

I use these occult terms for the reason that I get my knowledge of the creation of Thought-Forms from Vedantic Philosophy and wish to give credit to the same, also because I know of no better terms with which to define the planes of Thought and Feeling.

Manasic activity and Kamic activity must combine to produce the vibration that builds Form and moulds Matter.

How is this building of Form accomplished?

The process is difficult to put in words; nevertheless, I shall try to describe it. The creation of Form is a subtle and fine process and cannot be detected by the physical senses. We should know nothing of Thought and its transmission did our knowledge depend upon a conscious perception of it as it passes from out the mind to perform its various activities. Telepathy or thought transference is known only by its results. That is to say, — when two people agree to send each other thought messages, and those messages are received, word for word, as clearly as though spoken audibly to the listening ear, or through a mental perception as distinct as though written upon paper, why then there can be no doubt that Thought has been actually transmitted from mind to mind. We neither see, hear nor feel such thoughts in their coming or going, and yet it is demonstrated in hundreds of instances, by scientific experiment, that they do come and go. They often present themselves to our minds something as our own thoughts do, coming from we know not where. Whenever we have a thought for which we cannot account by the law of association, a thought so unrelated to our other thoughts as to be actually startling, we may safely assume that it comes to us either straight from the Universal Mind, or is transmitted to us from some other human mind. Experimental tests have demonstrated the law of thought transmission over and over again, until the fact of Telepathy is no longer questioned among scientific men or intelligent people.

The mode of ensouling Thought-Forms, so far as it can be described, is as follows:

The Manas or Thinking Principle forms a mental image by drawing into definite shape the diffused and highly etherealized matter of the Manasic Plane. The mental image thus formed is an ethereal creation, a thing without form, color or weight, and it is drawn down into the Kamic Plane of Feeling or Emotion where it is ensouled and then becomes a substantial Thought-Form, a living entity, possessing form, color and weight and having the power of moving from place to place in accordance with its desire. It obeys the law of life and moves outward from the centre to the circumference of the individual, even going beyond that circumference into the surrounding world.

A collection of these Thought-Forms round about us create what is called a Thought Aura, and it impresses other people either pleasantly or unpleasantly according to the nature of the Thoughts composing it. The person with a pleasing Aura is liked and attracts success, while the person with the unpleasing Aura is disliked and repels success.

You, in your inner essence are a Thought emanating from the Divine Mind, and your thoughts, in their turn, are secondary entities, emanating from your mind.

As you have independent action and can go here and there at will, so your thoughts, being microcosmic editions of yourself, acquire independent action and move out into space, doing many things of which you are not aware. Your thought is capable of going of its own accord to places and people utterly unknown to you, and to this you owe much that seems unaccountable. Congenial friends are drawn together in this way from remote parts of the world, and so are people who can benefit each other.

It is thus that Desire and Aspiration find their fulfilment, and it is thus that Success is gained by thinking.

Some thoughts are weak and short lived. Others are strong and able bodied. You feed and nourish a thought into strength and vitality by THINKING IT day after day and year after year. If you think a thought of health in this persistent way you finally make the thought so strong that it dominates the diseased conditions and drives them out of your body.

Your physical organism may be described as a collection or assemblage of Thought-Forms. The thoughts you think, going out from your centre embody themselves in your nerves, muscles, flesh, bone, blood and secretions. These are actually made and re-made by your Thought-Forms, the “stay-at-home” ones that do not get out of your body into your environment, and since every part of you is composed of embodied Thought, every atom of your body must have its soul or intelligent principle that responds to every thought you think and every emotion you feel, for the intelligent central principle or soul of the atoms is highly sensitive to all influences. Were this not true there could be no possible relation between the healing thought and the diseased atoms it would affect and control.

Sometimes the intelligent principle in the atom is lethargic and slow to respond, and in such cases healing is slow. This lethargic state of the atom is not always due to the patient’s mind but dates back to ancestors who held certain mental states and transmitted them by heredity to their descendants. Time and effort will disintegrate the inherited thought, even as the rocks of the earth are ground to powder by the continued action of the elements.

Your body of today is the sum of your past thoughts and the thoughts of your ancestors. This would seem a difficult or even impossible proposition were it not that the Law of Life is working with you to produce that which you are destined to be, a perfect individual. This is the end and aim of Evolution, and therefore I say — The Law of Life is with you in your seeking for perfect health of mind and body.

Do not think of your atoms as fixed, for they are not. There is a temporary fixity, without which the preservation of Form would be impossible, but this temporary fixity is always subject to the action of Spirit, to that stream of spiritual life that is continually flowing forth from the Centre of Being and becoming you.

You always generate more Thought than you can utilize in your body, and this surplus of Thought constitutes the current that travels outward into your Aura and beyond it. You produce your Thought Aura, and it may be as sweet and delightful as the perfume of a flower, or as noxious and repellent as the stench of putrefaction. Your Aura is an emanation of your Thought and corresponds to its quality in every particular.

No one can harm you if your thoughts are continually good, for each good thought is a positive force, forming part of your Aura, and helping to build around you a protective environment. As you go on making good Thought-Forms they become a veritable army of protectors, and this is the occult meaning of the text — ‘‘He shall give His angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.”

When Stradella sang holy songs before the altar his protective Aura was so strong that the assassins, stealing upon him, were powerless. They could not strike his death blow.

We can readily believe such things possible when we reflect that Thought-Forms are ensouled with intelligence and energy, and that they can therefore mass themselves together as a protective army around the person projecting them.

To be convinced of this is to become absolutely fearless in all conditions and circumstances.

Fear thoughts produce unwholesome, diseased, weak atoms, so it is necessary to eliminate fear from your mind, and you can do this if you realize that you are one with God-Substance and have nothing to fear.

Anxious, worried and sad thoughts come under the head of fear thoughts, and they can be dispelled by the knowledge that you are of indestructible spiritual Substance that cannot be harmed.

God’s Infinite Power is our power, therefore we have nothing to fear, nothing to be anxious about, nothing to worry over, and no real cause to be sad. When we perceive all this then our troubles fall away from us and a vast peace pervades the mind, registering itself also in the body.

But why is it that fear thoughts gain such control over us before we know the truth of our being? I will tell you why. We trace our inheritance of mind clear back to the savage, the fetich worshipper, who feared an unknown and undiscovered world, in which he fancied an enemy ambushed behind every tree. Psychologists, like Dr. Stanley Hall, have shown us how we have inherited our fears from the early savage, but fail to show us how to get rid of them. It remains for the New Thought to show us that.

Remember that your future body is to be made up of your present Thought-Forms, or ensouled atoms. Even the materialist Haeckel in his work on Evolution is obliged to accord souls to atoms to account for their intelligence and activity. You can address Thought-Forms as you would human beings, telling them what you wish them to do. Thus, from day to day you will grow into better conditions by creating new and vibrant Thought-Forms that shall bring you Health, Prosperity and Happiness.

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Chapter 8. The Quickening

IN the forming of an organism there is a moment when the Quickening comes, and from that moment the organism becomes a creature of new life and action. Before the Quickening it has life in a certain sense; that is, it grows and has some functional activities, but after the Quickening it has a new power, that of independent or volitional movement, of acting upon impulses of its own. From being a negative being that is acted upon, it becomes an acting entity, an individual with a will of its own.

Take the embryo of a bird in the egg, for instance. The yolk of the egg gradually assumes the form of the bird. Little by little it develops a spinal column, heart, lungs, etc., and all the while it is being nourished in its growth by the albumen in the surrounding white of the egg. When the form of the bird is nearly complete and it is ready to break forth from the shell, the Quickening comes, and with it the instinct to work its way out of the shell. The bird was alive before the Quickening, but negative and acted upon rather than acting. With the Quickening comes a higher, more positive life, and the power to move and achieve for itself.

So is it with the human embryo on a larger scale and to a higher degree. From the instant of Quickening the foetus becomes something dynamic, and finally assists in its own delivery at the time of its birth.

There is an all-pervasive analogy between things physical and things metaphysical, and so I infer that there is a Quickening in the mind of Man for which preparation is made. For a long time the mind is vague and negative in its action, but all the while it is growing, developing, forming for the Quickening. In other words, we are not fully individualized, and we must prepare to take a step upward into a higher individualization. We must make ready for the mental Quickening.

All our vague and desultory thinking is really working to an end in which it shall take on orderly arrangement around a central thought and become organic, for what is true of the embryo is equally true of the embryotic individual, the human being.

And after the Quickening comes the birth into a higher life. All along the line of Evolution things are being born again upon the next higher plane. The one-celled organism is born again as the two-celled, the three-celled, the many-celled organism, and so Life sweeps on in its upward trend.

The sadness, the questioning, the dull monotony, the drawbacks, the heart sickness, are all phenomena of the embryotic life and must be lived through patiently and hopefully if we would reach the Quickening which is close at hand. Grief, pain and trouble are the pangs of gestation and pass away when the embryo attains its growth.

In the forming of the embryo the yolk of the egg in which it dwells is fed by the albumen in the surrounding white of the egg. The germ of the future life lies in the yolk and the yolk is in the centre, surrounded by the white. So does Man lie in the centre of his environment, and that which the environment contains in the way of event and circumstance is necessary to the forming of his mind while it is preparing for the Quickening.

You are now organizing your mind, making of yourself an organic being mentally. You are already organized physically, but the present organization is imperfect and is being unsettled preparatory to a reorganization of a more perfect character. Old habits of body are being disturbed for the purpose of forming new habits. It is the same with the mind, only the mind has never been organized like the body, and not having been organized, it is the more easily made to conform to a new order of thought. There are, of course, many old habits of thought to break up, and new habits to form, but the old habits are not crystallized in organic formation, so they are plastic and yield readily to formative influences.

If your mind feels peculiarly chaotic and unsettled, it merely shows that a new order is about to form, for chaos always precedes a new order. It did in the Creation, according to the account of it in Genesis, and we have the same process now in creating. In chaos, atoms are lying about in disorder, and the creative act consists in drawing those atoms that are related to each other together into an organic form of life. In the creation of these organic forms there always comes the Quickening.

I am reiterating the term “Quickening” so that you may have it written indelibly in your mind. I want it to fill your consciousness full for a time, until you are permeated with the conviction that a Quickening is to come to you. I want you also to know that you are now working to make it come, working with Creative Law, working with God.

Work that has no happy, pleasurable end in view is a treadmill, and as such it is a torture to a sensitive mind, so I point out to you the end toward which you are moving, as the Apostles of old moved toward the Pentecostal Fire, the Quickening of the Spirit.

As they moved toward the Great Event, so did it move toward them, until there came the Exaltation.

Spirit dwells in us continually. Without it we could not draw the breath of life. It does not descend upon us from the outside, but from the inside. Spirit expresses itself through us, but it has lower and higher phases of expression. We have passed through many of the lower forms of this expression and are now being prepared for a higher. When our new mental form is finished the Spirit will flow into it, and lo, the Quickening and later the new birth.

When you feel inclined to lament your apparent failure to make your life what you wish it to be, take comfort in the blessed truth that you are preparing for your Quickening, that no matter how dull and wretched the outlook, how sharp the pain of conflict, how deep the grief, how heavy the trouble, all are factors in producing the great result. All are formative influences, shaping you into the perfect form that shall be a fit dwelling for the Spirit. All things have to be shaped for their Apotheosis and Man is not exempt from the universal law.

If the embryo of a bird had mind or consciousness it would feel joy as it grows more definite in shape, more like the bird that is to be, but the probability is that the intelligence of the embryo is not equal to this cognizance. However, the larger mind of the biologist, watching through his glass the gradual formation of the bird, sees what it heralds, knows the ultimate of the unfoldment, is sure of the result.

There is in Man a larger mind, a higher consciousness, that sees and waits for the Quickening, the finished product, the perfect individual, but this larger mind is not always in evidence, and when it is not, the smaller, everyday mind is appalled by difficulties, troubled by fear, disturbed by doubt, worn by monotony, and anguished by pain, but under the Creative Hand the difficulties, the fear, the doubt, the monotony and the pain are all worked in as building material for the growing form that is to be quickened when it is complete.

I know a number of honest, reliable people who have related to me their experience of the Quickening, and while differing somewhat in details all the experiences were very much alike. One in particular appealed to me so strongly that I will give it to you for your encouragement. The individual saw and touched a three-tongued spiritual flame, such as came to the Apostles at Pentecost. It was not a hallucination or a vision, but the experience of a perfectly wide-awake normal person, one not given to trances or psychic states. When this flame touched her on the temple she heard a voice saying — “This is the Healing Power.’’ She mentally recognized it as such before she was told so by the Spirit, for when the flame touched her, electric waves quivered through her body, and she was filled with vitality as never before. For days afterward she walked as on air, so great was her sense of exhilaration and lightness of body. She seemed to herself to be all Spirit, and believed that she could have walked on water or floated in the air. In course of time this exhilaration became less intense but she never fell back to the old level of heaviness and stolidity, neither did her mind ever go back to its old plane which was haunted by doubts, anxieties, worries and fears. By nature she had a sad, morbid temperament, apprehensive of the future and given to brooding over sorrows of the past. The Quickening made of her a new creature, completely metamorphosing her former self into a new and powerful being who had lost all her fear of what Life held for her, and who seemed to have power to mould circumstances to her will.

She told me that her quickening was long in coming, that for years she had struggled on, faithful to the Truth as it had been revealed to her and trying to express it in every detail of her life, but often dismayed and disheartened at her failures and her inability to bring health to her body. After the Quickening her diseases seemed to drop from her, and all things became new. She began to live in a higher consciousness so that she understood what is meant by being “born again.”

Others have had the same experience, so I feel justified in asserting that a Quickening and a new birth is in store for all who live the Truth.

Will you not then yield your hearty cooperation to this work of growing toward the Quickening, and dare to feel courage and hope.

You can trust the universal law and the Quickening beckons you on.

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Chapter 9. The One Will

THERE is but One Will in the Universe and that Will is good, therefore your will being an output of the One Will cannot be bad. In itself it is good, but according to the direction it takes it seems bad. An automobile spinning along on the boulevard seems good, but wrecked in the ditch it seems to be bad, or at least a derelict. The human derelict is styled a sinner, the mechanical one, an irresponsible wreck. But in either case the poor derelict has missed the road and fallen into the ditch.

Your will is an output of the One Will, bearing the same relation to it that the wave of the ocean bears to the entire ocean, or the branch of the tree bears to the entire tree. The wave is essentially one with the whole ocean, the branch is essentially one with the whole tree, and your will is essentially one with the whole Will. You can easily understand this to be true of the ocean or the tree, but it is not so apparent with the Will.

This is because the individual is a sort of storage battery, appropriating a certain amount of force, storing and using that amount until it is exhausted, and then appropriating, storing and using more, so that while busied with its limited store it is not conscious of the whole, of which its store is but a fraction.

With the physical eye we see the entire tree and its connection with the branch, and we see enough of the ocean to imagine its entirety and connect it with the wave, but with the inner eye we do not at first perceive the whole of that hidden force, the Will, and therefore we do not realize its connection with the individual will.

But when it is brought to our attention that such a Wholeness or Unity of Will exists, then, while looking at a portion of the One Will, which we recognize as our individual portion, the mind sees dimly, symbolically, the Whole Will, something as the physical eye, when gazing directly at some object, sees dimly and indirectly the surrounding objects that impinge upon the fringe of vision.

There is an abnormal state of the physical eye in which the sight narrows and can see only the point where it centres its vision, all else being excluded, and this same abnormal state of the inner eye prevails when that portion of the Will which you call your will is only present to your perception. The more abnormal your inner sight, the smaller your will seems.

At such times your inner eye is sick, weak and imperfect, so that it cannot see what really is, that which is present with you, and there for you to see, but shut away from your vision because you are afflicted with mental astigmatism. There is one very curious thing about this nner seeing and that is it is transmissible. There is a transference of sight from mind to mind. For instance, if I see something clearly I can transmit my seeing to your mind so that you can see what I see with my inner eye. If I see the Whole Will, and see my will or your will as one with it, and invested with its power, I can impress that picture upon your mind and you will see what I see. If I give my impression to you in writing, you will at once look through and beyond the writing to my thought-picture, which will then stand out vividly in your consciousness. I can convey to you the vision that is mine. It is not mine to secrete but to pass on to other minds as a part of the sacred Flame of Truth. This is the secret of New Thought Healing, the transference of spiritual vision. The healer transmits to the patient’s mind a mental picture of spiritual Truth, and that mental picture is a receptacle into which the healing current flows straight from its God-Fountain. As I have said before it is not the healer who really heals the patient — he but opens the way — and yet his mediation is essential where the patient is unable to open the way for himself.

If you would increase the power of your will you must see it as one with the Whole Will, and as continually flowing from it, through you, as an outlet of universal force. You may imprison it for a time within yourself, but if you do not ultimately send it out, it ceases to be power, and like a drop of the ocean, left alone on the beach, it passes into the ether and is no more. If you hoard it as you would a small store of something that you feared to lose, it will ooze away from you and leave you weak in purpose and action.

If you get the idea that your will is bad and its exercise a sin, that the personal will is something to be crushed, then your inner sight is diseased and defective, and your inference illogical, for to crush the will involves an exercise of will to do the crushing, and the spectacle of will crushing itself out of existence, and remaining a victor in the field after it has crushed itself, is an unthinkable proposition. It is equivalent to saying that you have destroyed yourself and yet still exist.

The very impossibility of the conception proves that Will is an Essential to Life and Being, and being an Essential, its destruction is inconceivable. Herbert Spencer’s argument for the indestructibility of Matter is that you cannot think it out of existence. You can think of it as passing into other forms, but you cannot think of it as utterly destroyed. The same argument would hold good concerning the Will.

Schopenhauer held that the entire Universe is projected into space by Will and Idea, which I suppose is equivalent to saying it is projected by Energy and Thought, Will standing for the Energy that projects and Idea for the shape or Thought-Form assumed by the projective Energy. Every object in Creation is put forth into existence by effort of this One AVill and the will of the individual is never separated from the One Will.

There are apparently separate wills because objects are externally separated from each other, but the Will is not subject to the laws that measure material substance and divide it into parts. On the vast ocean of Will you rise as a wave on one part of its surface while I rise as another wave on another part of its surface. You may be in London and I in Washington, but the omnipresent Will joins us as one. Your wave may move to the North and mine to the South, or yours to the East and mine to the West, but we both are one with the ocean of Will.

The whole force of the Universe is conserved in the One Will. Its energy as a whole is never increased, never diminished, always the same in its entirety, though its individual demonstrations differ, now manifesting great power, now little, as the case may be.

The Will is constructive except at times when it destroys for the purpose of building a better structure. Nature’s effort in Evolution is to bring all beings to the highest expression possible, and the energy that backs and sustains this effort is the Universal Will; hence it is good and we can trust it to work out our highest ideals and aspirations.

Weakness and disease mark a falling away from the Ideal, but in this falling away we are led to a knowledge of the laws of health, and learn the possibility of repair and reconstruction.

The wisdom, the breadth of experience and the depth of sympathy that should come with the passing of the years are wonderful and beautiful marks of age. Not so are the broken-down tissues, the sickness and decrepitude. It is possible, so the New Thought teaches, to acquire the beautiful marks and to obliterate the unlovely ones by a proper direction of the Will.

I may know what is ideal, and yet not will to express it in my life. In that case my knowledge does not tend to beauty of expression in my mind and body. I may know that certain thoughts are corrosive and generate poison in my body, and yet I may will to hold such thoughts as the years roll over me, in which event my will is my destroyer. With all the knowledge of Truth that it is possible to gain, one cannot renew or re-create himself to the ideal without using his will. It is either his Savior or his Destroyer.

You can use the will to good effect with very little knowledge, because there is within you an intuitive perception of what is good for you and what is not. You know by the effect of certain thoughts and feelings that they are injurious to you. You know it is not well for you to indulge in spells of depression, of resentment, of envy, anger, anxiety, fear, etc., and you may prefer not to have such thoughts, yet it seems you cannot arouse will enough to expel them. You try once, twice or three times to put out the noxious intruders, and perhaps you succeed for the instant, but back they come trooping, and more “devils” with them, like the unclean spirit of old. Then you are quite discouraged and struggle no more.

You would not thus succumb if you knew what a mighty power is at your back, even the whole Will of the Universe, every bit of it. It is the old mistaken idea of the separate will that paralyzes your effort and makes you think you have used up all your force when you have not.

Think about your oneness with the Universal Will, the Moving Power of the Universe, the next time you get discouraged, and see how quickly your own will springs up refreshed and reinforced. It will amaze you with what it can do.

Have you reached the place where you reach out for something that will renew your mind, your health and your life in general. If so that reaching out is a movement of the will. It is at work for you. Keep it moving. Keep your automobile on the highway. Charge it with more power. When one charge is used up put in another and push ahead. Use your intelligence to keep it out of the ditch and you will happily proceed to the place where you would go.

The exercise of will is a pleasure in itself, even when it moves to difficult accomplishment. The finest and best endeavor of the will lies not in the subjugation of others, but in the control of self and of circumstances. The will unifies, adjusts, and regulates many conflicting elements into one harmonious, beautiful whole, obedient to a high, dominant idea.

No man can serve two masters and no organism can be harmonious and perfect until all its parts serve one dominant idea.

In perfecting the human organism, both in mind and body, this law is regnant. There must be a ruling Ideal, and the office of the Will is to bring all thoughts, desires and purposes under this dominant Ideal. Until this is accomplished the house is divided against itself, there is contention and discord in the organism, lack of peace in the mind, and in consequence, pain and disease in the flesh.

While the Will cannot crush itself out of existence, it can use one part of itself against another part, one part desiring to follow one course and the other part desiring to follow the opposite course. One of these two courses is in accord with the Ideal, and the other is not. The better course does not look attractive at the start, and it requires a decided effort of the Will to follow it. This is good for the individual, for with the exercise of the Will force is called forth, intensifying the life.

To have more life is to move upward and away from weakness and disease. Therefore to understand the use of the will and to see its oneness with the Universal Will, to set it in operation in obedience to the highest and best that we know, is to find renewal of Life, Health, Youth and general Happiness.

In nervous prostration one loses interest in all things, desiring nothing, caring for nothing, doing nothing, and all this indicates a lessening in the activity of the will. But underneath this non-caring, non-desiring, nondoing state, there is really a desire to be lifted out of a condition that may well be defined as a living death. This desire is a faint stirring of the will, and should be encouraged in every way possible. If the sufferer can be induced to use the will a little every day in the effort to banish from the mind depressing thoughts and also to overcome the tendency to rehearse his troubles to every sympathetic ear, he will take the first step from darkness into light.

All troubles, whether mental or physical, grow and increase as you dwell upon them in thought, for you thus create a mental atmosphere in which diseased conditions thrive like noxious weeds. The only safe course is to uproot and cast out diseased thoughts, so as to give healthy thoughts a chance in the mental soil.

Have you not many times found your fears groundless and your apprehensions worse than the thing apprehended, when it came to pass. And then, did it not seem foolish to have lain awake nights worrying about the future, and tearing down tissue cells with your gloomy fears and forebodings.

And are you going to keep up this useless and harmful habit until your bodily health is undermined, your thought Aura unwholesome and repellent, and your face deeply lined with ugly furrows of anxiety. Are you going to do this? Or are you going to stop it now, and begin to use your will as a saving factor.

Why not say to yourself — ‘‘My will is one with the Universal Will, the Energy that upholds the world. By this Will all things are created; therefore I can use it to get rid of the conditions I deplore, and replace them with Health, Beauty, Intelligence, Genius, Prosperity and unlimited Achievement. I will use my will to these ends, and to the educated and active Will all things beautiful and glorious are possible. I will never forget that my will is backed by the Universal Will, that reservoir of Inexhaustible Energy.

“I will waste no more time in vain complaints and regrets, but instead use the Creative Will to give me what I desire.”

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Chapter 10. Tapping Higher Levels Of Energy

SOME years ago I was greatly impressed by an article written by Professor William James of Harvard University in which he made some astonishing statements regarding the possible renewal of Energy. In the article he used the term ‘‘Second Wind” to denote a phenomenon in Psychology, indicating a psychic law.

You may know that it often happens in athletic sports that a contestant will be prostrated by fatigue, even to the point of acute distress. The breath will come in short, painful gasps and the physical state be one of utter exhaustion, but let a sudden excitement occur, such for instance as the cheering given to another contestant, and a strange thing sometimes happens. The exhausted man will get his second wind, and this second wind will be better than the first, for it is a great spurt of energy and usually means victory.

After due observation of this phenomenon Professor James came to the conclusion that not only is a second wind possible, but a third, a fourth, or even more.

Now to me this is very inspiring, for it confirms what I have long believed, that Man is the possessor of unlimited power. Beyond the fatigue limit, where one seems completely spent, there are higher levels of energy waiting to be tapped, and what is needed to tap them is the sharply pressing edge of a persistent purpose, the mental act of PUSHING ON.

Right here let me enter a word of caution. I would not advise you to push beyond the fatigue point physically until you are prepared for it mentally, for if you do there is danger of utter collapse or even death. You must first become fully convinced that you can tap higher levels of Energy. There must first be the mental ACT of PUSHING ON, and it must be made a habit before you can safely try the physical PUSH beyond the fatigue point. You must establish within yourself a steady, unconquerable purpose to push on.

Professor James enumerates the various excitements that produce the second wind, and I notice they are in the ultimate either thoughts or emotions. He also explains that there need be no external excitement, that the determination to push on is often quite sufficient. I will quote his exact words in this connection:

“On usual occasions we make a practice of stopping an occupation as soon as we meet the first effective layer, so to call it, of fatigue. We have then walked, played or worked enough, so we desist. That amount of fatigue is an efficacious obstruction on this side of which our usual life is cast. But if an unusual necessity forces us to press onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain, critical point, when gradually or suddenly it passes away and we are fresher than before. We have evidently tapped a level of new energy, masked until then by the fatigue obstacle usually obeyed. There may be layer after layer of this experience. A third or fourth wind may supervene. Mental activity shows this phenomenon as well as physical, and in exceptional cases we may find beyond the very extremity of fatigue distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own, sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push through the obstruction, never pass those early critical points.”

The fact is, we use up one layer of energy and think that is all we have at command. We believe ourselves exhausted because we do not know of the other layers to be tapped by us at will.

Whatever goal we have in view, whether it be health, or some other ultimate of human endeavor, we are too apt to let the fatigue obstacle “knock us out,” though level upon level of higher energy be waiting to be tapped when we push mentally beyond the fatigue point. Note that I say mentally, not PHYSICALLY until you are prepared MENTALLY.

To be prepared mentally is to be absolutely sure of your one-ness with Universal Energy, or God-Substance. To be equally sure that you are flowing forth as a stream of life from that Substance into the outer world continually. To be also sure that you can tap, or release within yourself more energy when one store of it is exhausted.

You may be so exhausted physically that to move a muscle seems impossible, or you may be exhausted mentally and in the bitter pangs of despair, but the persistent will to push on will tap the higher level of energy, yielding the glorious ‘‘Second Wind” and turning life into a song of triumph.

If you are sick the energy to combat disease has run low and you need to tap a higher spiritual level. Then the disease will be routed and the machinery of your body will run smoothly, with- out clog or hindrance. If your trouble be a matter of adversity, of disappointment, of what we call hard luck, the same rule holds good. You have merely reached your fatigue obstacle, and the more distress you feel, the nearer you are to your ‘‘Second Wind.” Now is the time of all times for you to achieve success by tapping a higher level of energy. Now is your great opportunity. Do not give up on the eve of victory, push on.

The physiologist will tell you that the body is bound by certain laws, that its strength cannot exceed the quality of its muscle and the nerve stimulus. Why is it then that a small puny hypnotic subject can perform Herculean feats of strength when under the power of hypnotic suggestion. The same physiologist will tell you that while a second, third or fourth wind may be possible, still there is a final fatigue limit beyond which bodily effort cannot pass. I deny this on general principles for it is not borne out by facts and living experience, and because I see with the eye of the Psychologist, which sees powers unknown to the Physiologist. Psychology is sweeping away the old limits of Physiology, and this is shown by experiments in Hypnotism. I do not indorse Hypnotism as a curative agent, but I credit it with adding greatly to our knowledge of many hitherto undiscovered powers, and with showing the horizon of the Impossible as ever receding when we advance upon it. Let your limit line of belief, separating the possible from the impossible, be to you like the horizon line, which is really no line at all. It is merely where your sight stops, and depends upon the point where you stand. Advance and your horizon moves with you, showing a beyond not before visible.

Someone else may tell you that your ideals are impossible to realize. This I also deny, for I know beyond all doubt that nothing is impossible that your mind can fashion or your heart long for. The impossible is only that which you fail to reach by stopping at the fatigue point because your mind is weary of waiting and hoping and stops short of the ‘‘Second Wind.”

Simply to know that higher levels of energy exist and can be tapped will stimulate you to go on and tap them. That has been my experience, and from what I know of universal human characteristics I judge it will be your experience also. Physical pain is sometimes the means whereby we are pushed on to tap higher energy levels. Evolution, though always kind, is often apparently cruel, driving us out of certain conditions with the lash, as horses are driven from a burning stable, administering the lesser pain that the greater pain may be escaped.

A physician in Washington told me of a patient of his who was confined to her bed and seemingly unable to leave it, though for no organic disability that he could discover. Every organ was normal and functioning properly, but still the patient was bedridden. After exhausting all remedial measures at his command the doctor determined on a psychological treatment, and a severe one at that the setting fire to her bed. The woman did not stir until a leaping tongue of flame scorched her hand, when, with a shriek of terror, she sprang from her bed and fled from the room. The cure was not only for the moment, but was permanent.

We all, more or less, fall into lethargic states where ideals fail to rouse us to action, and it is then that pain, with stinging lash, drives us from our lethargy, the lethargy that leads to death. We flee our burning beds in the anguish of fear, but in that fleeing we find renewal of life, of energy, of hope and of joy.

We of the New Thought can tap higher levels of energy by putting into practice the principles in which we believe. We know we are actually one with the Eternal Energy, even as the ray is one with the sun. Therefore the Eternal Energy is ours to manifest. It could not be otherwise. The ray is of sun substance and manifests the sun.

Naturally we cannot use the whole of the Eternal Energy at once, for that would be out of proportion to our needs. We do not want an avalanche of power, but just enough for our purpose at the moment.

To use a homely illustration — We are like pipes or channels that convey Energy from its Divine Centre to its Human Circumference. Pipes limit or narrow Energy to their own capacity, but in so narrowing they focus it to definite use. Electricity floating freely in space cannot light our houses, run our cars, or turn the wheels of the world’s activity. To do this it must be narrowed, focussed or confined to the limits of a tiny wire.

In our inner, spiritual selves we are this very Energy itself, and like the electricity floating freely in space, while our outer, functioning selves may be compared to pipes or wires or conductors of Energy.

Remember this distinction, for it is very important. It is as though the ray said to the sun — ‘‘I am with you at the Centre of Substance, but I go forth from that Substance into the activities of light and heat.”

At first we tap Energy at a low level, then at higher and higher levels, as we rise to higher planes of thinking and living. It is, therefore, true that at present we cannot form an adequate conception of the great and wonderful achievement we shall make as we ascend the scale of Being. It is an endless progression to better states.

A Second Wind may come to you in various ways, but never without the push or endeavor of your own mind, backed by the Spirit. That push is never so effective as when you press against an obstruction, against ill health, adversity and unhappy environment. Right there you meet your fatigue obstacle which is really the source of the Second Wind, for it is only by means of overcoming great obstacles that you get the Second Wind.

As I have just said, a Second Wind may come to you in various ways. It may, for instance, come in a sudden, inexplicable betterment in your affairs, or in your health, or in your peace of mind, or in your energy of accomplishment. Your world may have been upside down and in chaos, when suddenly everything will be righted, and just as you have desired it to be. This is an exact result of your mental push, instead of the streak of good luck you are inclined to call it. That mental push has tapped an energy level and in consequence a Second Wind has blown over your world, turning it right side up. I mention this because otherwise you might not recognize the event as attributable to a Second Wind. You will understand better how this can be when you realize that a Second Wind is a spiritual power or influence, acting intelligently for Humanity, when Humanity obeys its law.

So I find that you are really a Giant in chains. A Giant in your Godhood, but bound by chains of mistaken belief. You are self-hypnotized into ideas of limitation. You are self -hypnotized into a belief in your separateness from God. Your state may be compared to a dream in which you try to move and cannot; a waking dream, similar to those you have in sleep.

The giant Gulliver, when bound by the fragile cords of the Lilliputians, could easily have broken his bonds, but imagining himself held by them he made no effort to free himself. That is exactly your state.

Do you realize what it means to be a Ray flowing forth from the Divine Energy. No, of course you do not, for if you did you would know you could break your chains, and would no longer be held by them.

You will never be entirely healed of your disease and weakness until you learn your power. When I say you are self-hypnotized into ideas of limitation, I will explain what I mean by calling your attention to the state of one who is hypnotized by another mind to think he cannot open his eyes when they are closed, or move hand or foot. He is practically paralyzed by the effect of the other mind acting upon him, so that he really cannot open his eyes or move hand or foot. Until the impression is removed from his mind he remains paralyzed although his nerves and muscles are capable of perfect action.

In something such a manner do the false beliefs of the world impress the individual mind, and New Thought Healing is the removing of the false impression or belief, thus setting free the Giant who is enchained.

It will be a helpful thought for you to picture yourself as a Giant in chains, for that is what you are in reality, and your apparently heavy chains are but cobwebs compared with your strength to break them when the Giant within you comes into a knowledge of itself and its God-Power. You may clothe the thought, if you will, in the following simple words:

I am a Giant in chains, hut my chains are only cobwebs. All power is mine because of my God-hood. I flow forth from God continually as the ray flows forth from the sun, and as the ray carries with it the Sun-Energy, so do I carry with me the God-Energy.

Your tired muscles are tired because of your false belief concerning yourself, a belief that just so much energy and no more is given you, whereas, in very truth there is a continual flow of energy through your muscles, did you but realize the truth about yourself. You cannot realize this truth at once, and until you do so, sleep and rest are essentials in your life, as periods for gathering and storing new energy. The reason you find sleep reinvigorating is because then the Conscious Mind releases its grip on the Subconscious and allows it to follow its natural bent, which is to open itself to the God-Energy and let it flow in without clog or hindrance.

As we grow more and more into the Truth of Being we do not tire as formerly and we require less sleep. We do not step into new and better conditions on the instant, but grow toward them imperceptibly, until, all at once, comes the Quickening, as is the case with all embryonic growth, and the Quickening is followed by the New Birth into a higher, stronger life on this earth and in this body.

Sometimes a release of power comes suddenly, as in the case of a man who was so crippled by rheumatism that he was practically helpless. He had to be dressed and undressed, and even fed, for he could not use his hands. One Sunday evening the entire family went to church, after undressing and putting to bed this apparently helpless man. The house caught fire during their absence, and no one responded to his cries for help. Higher and higher crept the flames, and more intense became the terror of the poor man, until, with a sudden influx of power, he leaped from the bed, dragged everything out of the bureau drawers, and filling a sheet with his belongings, he shouldered the great bundle and ran downstairs into the street.

His muscles had been held in the belief of rheumatism, but when his mind was filled to overflowing with fear of the fire, the belief in rheumatism was crowded out and found not a nook or a corner to lurk in. The chains of belief were broken and the Giant set free. The chains were essentially mental, as you see, and they were broken by thought. The man thought he would be burned to death unless he managed to get out of the burning house, and the thought of escape flooded his muscles with the energy to act.

I gave a similar incident earlier in this chapter, but the two cases differed in that the first was a mental paralysis, while the second was a physical affection, but both yielded to the power of thought.

Evolution is working with you to unchain the Giant within. The chains are weakening in places, and will finally give way.

Is it harder to believe that you have a Giant within you than to believe that in a tiny acorn lies hidden the mighty oak, giant of the forest? Given the right conditions and the oak breaks through its bonds, the Giant breaks its chains.

The real, spiritual Man that is made in the Image of God is the Giant within. It is Man before his fall into Matter and the illusions attendant upon Matter. The processes of Involution and Evolution demand that this Giant Man shall become entangled in the illusions of Matter, even as the oak is imprisoned in the acorn. The Giant must be bound hand and foot by its chains up to a certain time, and shall then set to work to free itself. This is for some reason a necessary experience. The why and wherefore is still largely unknown to us. We only know such to be the process. We do not know why a seed has to germinate under the burden of the dark earth, instead of in the light and air, but our lack of knowledge in this respect does not hinder or alter the fact.

What we do know is that such is the law, and we act in conformity with it, placing our seeds in the ground with faith that it is the right thing to do, and getting our results.

All manifestations of unusual strength or of hitherto unknown powers such as healing the sick, great genius in literature, art or invention, come from the Giant within, who has for the moment slipped his bonds and is extending his fore-arm into the world as a prophecy of fuller manifestation in the future.

Trials and difficulties in your path are not lions seeking to devour you, but kindly angels coming to wrestle with you in order to leave you a blessing. They bear a friendly challenge to the Giant within to come forth and try his strength.

The Second Wind is the breath of the Giant within, the breath of the Spirit.

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Chapter 11. First Aids To Healing

YOU cannot learn to heal by the use of set rule or formula, for the healing power only comes to those who lift the thought to a higher state of consciousness. One of the first aids is a realization of

The Mobility of Matter

You must convince yourself that Matter is mobile and plastic to the motion of Spirit. Occultists have always believed in the mobility of Matter, and now Physical Science is confirming that belief. It has shown us that Matter when reduced to its ultimate is an aggregation or assemblage of “electrons” or ‘‘ions” that are particles so small, so electric as to be infinitely plastic. These “electrons” or “ions” combine to form atoms or molecules, and are always in a whirl of vorticular motion.

A mass of stone, though apparently fixed and solid, is really in constant agitation within itself, this agitation being caused by the vorticular whirl of its constituent particles. Not perceiving this motion we think of the stone as a solid mass of inanimate Matter.

There never was a greater misconception. Dr. Paul Gibier, of the Pasteur Institute, very truly says: ‘‘We are unceasingly deceived by general appearances. And thus, knowing as we do the imperfection and unreliability of our senses, we may advance as a manner of axiom that the strongest illusion is what we call reality.”

Dr. Gibier, of course, does not mean Reality itself, but what is called reality and which depends upon the testimony of the senses. If, instead of the sensory illusion, we could see the actual state of the stone, the constant agitation, the vorticular whirl, we should know that its electrons in their activity are closely related to the vibrations of Mind in their fineness and subtlety of motion, and we should not feel it impossible to affect even a stone by the action upon it of Mind. Then, seeing this truth concerning Matter and Mind, we should know for a certainty that Mind can change the electrons of the body, even to its bone structure, for bone has greater plasticity than a stone.

God manifests His Spirit on this earth through Matter, and is only knowable to us in terms of TIME and SPACE. Thoughts have form and are therefore Matter, for Spirit itself has no form, though it ensouls forms. Spirit organizes Matter in forms both high and low. Thoughts are high forms of Matter and dominate the lower forms.

As we call more Spirit into manifestation in our thoughts the greater becomes our control over material things. It was thus that Jesus walked upon the water, healed the sick, raised the dead, turned water into wine and stilled the tempest. It was thus he performed all his miracles.

Man has learned how to cause Matter to act upon Matter by mechanical means, but he is now learning a higher law by which Spirit acts through Mind directly upon Matter without mechanical intervention, changing its shape, annulling its destructiveness, increasing its constructiveness, and making it altogether obedient to spiritual mandate.

Many strange things are happening to revolutionize our false beliefs regarding Matter. Some time ago a young machinist in Massachusetts attracted the notice of scientific men, among them the late Professor James of Harvard University, by some remarkable feats such as bathing his face, hands and arms in blazing alcohol, without raising a blister or suffering the least discomfort.

He also dematerialized his body and became invisible to those in the room with him for about forty seconds. Those who watched him said he seemed to dissolve in air until entirely invisible, afterward returning to his natural form. These tests were made under the strictest conditions so as to guard against mistake or fraud. The young man seemed to be in a passive state and said he thought of nothing in particular. This would indicate that he used no conscious control over Matter, and the probability is that a Subconscious Power came to the surface and asserted itself, independently of conscious volition, for the purpose of challenging the attention of the world and stirring it to learn the law regulating the phenomenon, which, if true, and it is well vouched for, opens to us a wide range of perspective.

Matter, thus viewed, does not present the impregnable front that too often dismays the New Thought healer, for, like the walls of Jericho it is ready to crumble at the trumpet call of the New Thought Prophet — Always is Matter plastic and Spirit compelling.

Another aid to healing is —

The Magical Power of Sleep

Magic is not an uncanny or unnatural thing. It is but an activity based on a law not generally understood. The magical power of sleep is due to a law of the Subconscious Mind, by which it works out the suggestions given to it by the Conscious Mind, and does this most effectually during sleep, for reasons which I will explain later.

A great engine can be set moving by a finger touch on a controlling lever. The Subconscious is like the engine and the Conscious is like the finger touch on the lever, giving impulse to action. This impulse in itself seems slight and insignificant, but it is most important, and even actually necessary to start the desired motion, whether in the engine or in the Subconscious, and it is the direct cause of the motion and its results.

This is a fairly good illustration of what occurs in sleep, due to the impulse given by the Conscious to the Subconscious. It is a fact known to Psychology that suggestions can be so given to the Subconscious as to be executed by it in minutest detail. Suggestions for health, suggestions for success and prosperity, and suggestions for happiness, can all be made to the Subconscious, and by it be actualized in the life of the person for whom they are made. You can, in this way, help yourself and others to actualize what you desire for yourself or for them.

In giving these suggestions to yourself, a process which is called autosuggestion, you should make them just before sleep, and even if you fall asleep before finishing your suggestion, so much the better, for the Subconscious can pick up half a suggestion and act upon it, so great is its intelligence.

The reason that the Subconscious acts more powerfully while you sleep is because it is not then hampered and hindered by the doubts of the Conscious Mind, for doubt is the arch ENEMY TO SUCCESS in REALIZATION.

A very good suggestion to make to the Subconscious is the following:

I desire to be convinced of my oneness with God-Substance, and to know that I continually proceed from it in a stream of life, and knowing this, I desire to be free from fear, free from worry, free from anxiety, free from depression, that my days may be serene and happy, I desire an ever increasing realization of strength and mastery, so that whatever trials come to me, I may look down upon them from spiritual heights, knowing that I have power to control or alter them.

Any other desires you may have, put them in your own simple words and give them to the Subconscious to work out for you, as you would place a seed in the ground and leave it to Nature to germinate. You can only place it in the ground. You cannot cause the seed to open and push upward. That is beyond your personal effort. So is it with the suggestion seeds which you plant in the Subconscious.

Another first aid to healing lies in the understanding of

Imperceptible Motion

Students and patients are often discouraged because they do not for a time perceive any good effects from study or treatment. They should then be encouraged by learning a few facts connected with imperceptible motion. They should be reminded of the constant motion in our bodies of which we are unaware. What, for instance, do we know of the swift coursing of the blood through veins and arteries. What do we know of the constant activity in building bodily tissues. Cells are being torn down and new ones built, but this is imperceptible to us. What do we know of the digestive process? except for the unpleasant sensation of slow digestion, and that is not so much an activity as its cessation. Many of the bodily motions might be completely revolutionized without our knowledge, until later when we noted an improvement in health.

Patients sometimes stop treatment while all this wonderful recuperative activity is going on within imperceptibly, and when the treatment is thus stopped the outer result is never made manifest, and the patient mistakenly thinks the treatment has had no effect, whereas it has had an effect, but only interiorly.

The action of thought is imperceptible; hence it is hard for us to realize it to be a force. In the immense tract of the Subconscious there is always motion that is imperceptible. We do not see and feel thought when it goes forth to bring to us our own, or perform its mission of healing, and there are great powers working within us of which the Conscious Mind is unaware.

We stand upon an apparently quiet and stationary earth, and yet we are flying through space with incredible speed, turning somersaults the while, but this motion is to us imperceptible. Do you then find it difficult to believe that other motion may be equally imperceptible, and that the appearance of inaction may be as illusive as that of the earth appearing stationary.

When you are inclined to feel discouraged, remember that your conscious thought controls the imperceptible motion in your body. Depression and discouragement have a bad effect upon this motion, while hope and courage have a good effect and stimulate recuperation.

I will repeat here for your encouragement something that I alluded to in a previous chapter.

Professor Bose of the University of Calcutta, in experimenting in plant life, constructed an ingenious instrument by which he could measure their growth, though the process, as you know, is imperceptible to the eye. We notice that a plant has grown, but we do not see it in the act of growing because the extension is so infinitesimal at the instant as to be beyond our perception. But, as I said. Professor Bose succeeded in getting a measurement by means of the instrument he made for the purpose, and this is what he discovered.

A plant grows upward for five seconds and then shrinks downward for five seconds. Then it remains motionless for ten seconds, after which it starts upward again and repeats the process just described.

In shrinking downward its motion is slower than in pushing upward, and therefore in the five seconds of shrinkage it does not go clear down to the point it started from. If it did, of course, there would be no increase in height. At each upward push it gains something over the amount of shrinkage, and this gain constitutes the exact measure of its growth at the end of twenty seconds given to pushing upward, shrinking downward and remaining motionless. All of this motion is imperceptible to us, and yet, after a time we say, ‘‘How that plant has grown!”

We have always supposed that plants grew right on upward, never dreaming that they shrank downward and even stopped growing entirely, for a while, and yet we might have known the truth about their manner of growth had we reasoned on the line of general principles, for we know the Law of Rhythm regulates all motion, therefore the motion of growth cannot escape it.

I discovered long ago the operation of this law in mental and spiritual growth, and mentioned it in my writings, saying that the healing thought drew the atoms of a patient’s body into a new adjustment, and then the inertia of atoms drew them back into their former unhealthy adjustment. Then, if the treatment were continued, the healing thought pulled the atoms back again into the position of health, and again the inertia drew them into the state of degeneration and disease. But, finally, if the treatment went on, the swing toward health became so compelling and strong that it conquered the tendency to pull back into negative conditions. I knew this to be true, and now I find confirmation in the research of physical science.

Please observe that the effortless period with the plant lasts as long as its upward push and downward pull taken together. Also notice that the plant spends three times the number of seconds in shrinking downward and remaining stationary that it gives to upward pushing. In all twenty seconds are given to one round and only five seconds of that time are given to the upward push. If your time of slipping back and of inaction should seem long to you, the plant has the same, and yet, in spite of this it grows upward and so will you.

When I say, — “You will grow upward,” — I mean you will push your way mentally up into planes of Being that are high and positive to weakness and disease, and in that way you will outgrow them; that is, you will grow above them.

The plant does not know enough to reason and doubt and worry about its manner of growing. It simply obeys the law unconsciously, and in so doing it gains and grows in the face of set-backs and stoppages.

Man is now in the era of conscious growth and can promote or hinder his advance by the nature and manner of his thought. He is fast learning the law of growth, and beginning to use it to accelerate his progress.

As he learns more of this law he will see that shrinking downward from accomplishment does not mean that he will not reach his aim ultimately. Neither does a long spell of “doing nothing” or ‘‘getting nowhere” invalidate the final beneficent outcome. If, instead of converting such times into spells of depression and discouragement, he will regard them as times of “storing energy,” he will know them for what they really are, and increase his receptivity to the influx of energy, and be able to do all the more because of the motionless period.

Another first aid to healing is:

The Mighty Logos

This stands for the Spoken Word. The Creative Vibration which the New Thought teaches you is a wonderful Power, making for your advancement in health, happiness and wellbeing. By means of the Word, God creates. Long before the human race came into existence God spoke through the Elohim who were high spiritual beings, saying, “Let there be Light!” and light sprang into existence. The Elohim acted as the Logos, speaking the Word directly to primeval Matter and the Word was creative. It acted on Matter and produced light. So, today, is your Word creative. Matter is now as it was of old, obedient to the Word, even as plastic wax to its vibrations.

Be assured of this when speaking the Word of Health to atoms that are out of adjustment in the body, and know that because of their law-enforced obedience to the Logos, they must assume new polarization at your command.

Do you think this a mystery? Let us then compare it to another mystery, that of the voice in singing. How do you produce a tone. Suppose you wish to sing middle C. This tone is made by disturbing the air at the rate of 128 vibrations to a second of time. Or will you have middle D. This calls for 144 vibrations to a second of time. Middle E calls for 160 vibrations to the second, and so on up the scale. But when you sing these tones you have nothing to do with the number of vibrations you set in motion, and you need not know of them, any more than a bird does in its song.

What is necessary then in order to produce these and other tones? You need simply to think and will to produce a tone and this impulse speeds to the vocal organs and sets them vibrating, disturbing the air in the exact ratio demanded for the tone.

These intricate changes in the vocal organs in the production of various tones take place in response to a command of your thought and WILL.

You utter the command and the Universal Mind sees that it is executed.

You have the same power over the molecular motion in your body. You have only to speak the Word and it will be fulfilled as it is in the production of tone.

Remember how a musical tone is made, and then, on the same principle think and will that the molecules of the body shall whirl to the pattern of health, and they will obey your Word which is God’s Word.

Speak the Logos and the molecules will obey.

Also speak the Word to circumstances and they too will obey. God sings through you. He will also SPEAK through you.

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Chapter 12. New Thought Leads To The Blessed Life

IN their effort to get away from too vivid a consciousness of material things, some New Thought writers are inclined to depreciate or totally ignore the office of the external world in the evolution of spiritual life.

They forget that were it not for external stimulus, intelligent expression would be impossible. Shut a child away from all that acts on his senses and his life on this plane becomes extinct. Shut him away partially, and in proportion to his seclusion does he lack expression. We need this touching or impact from the outside to call forth that which is within us.

As Emerson says: “We stand before the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance and Unity into Variety.”

That is the place where the secret unfolds itself to us, the place where Being is passing into Appearance, and Unity is passing into Variety.

To stand where we see Being and Unity only, or Appearance and Variety only, is to stand afar, and not be present at the revealing of the secret.

We who know the secret see all Being as One, but we also see that One as the Continent or Container of the Many, the Source of the Many, the Projector of the Many.

This is really the primal or basic truth upon which all other truths rest as upon a sure foundation. When the mind holds this truth it is prepared to build upon it. It can see a Perfect Whole, a Perfect Good, no matter how imperfect, incomplete and apparently evil the Appearance.

You are asked as a student of New Thought to acknowledge that All is Good, but you say: ‘‘How can I, when I plainly see that a part of the All is Evil?”

Now you are looking at the Appearance and not at Being itself. Can you not imagine a state of pure, white light in which there is no shadow. That is Being, the ‘‘light that never shone on land or sea.” When it does shine on land or sea, it becomes Appearance, and is then divided into light and darkness, and the darkness is Evil, or the appearance of it. Often the light seems almost swallowed up in inky blackness, but the light shineth ever more and more unto the perfect day. From darkness to light is the evolution of the individual; from the darkness of ignorance to the light of intelligence, from the darkness of hate to the light of love, from the darkness of despair to the light of hope, from the darkness of sorrow to the light of joy.

This evolution of light from darkness follows the plan of creation when God said, “Let there be light.” Those words come ringing down the ages and the command still is, “Let there be light.” In the True Life there is no poverty, disease or unhappiness. They are only shadows of the ‘‘apparent life,” and when the True Life appears these shadows flee away.

The Vedanta has a beautiful teaching that the Central Consciousness or Being is Pure Bliss, and I believe that to be absolutely true.

The Swami Abhedananda says: ‘‘True Life, or Being or Blessedness is beyond time and space and is not bound by conditions of any kind.” He also says: “Unblessedness consists in the idea of the separateness of the part from the whole, and in the bondages of other imperfections, arising from this mistaken notion of individual isolation. To be united to the Whole, to be free from the bondages of these imperfections, and to be perfect, is Blessedness.”

The New Thought is proving to Man that he is not separated from the Whole of Being, but that he is one with it and inherits its power and perfection.

Hold up your hand with the fingers extended and the palm toward you, and you will see what is meant by being one with the Whole. Let the palm stand for Being and the fingers stand for external expressions of that Being. From out the palm extend the fingers and their life proceeds from the palm. Sever the connection and the fingers die because cut oft’ from the source of their life. You are a finger on the Palm of Being and you are one with it. The Living Whole is the sum of its living parts so you are one with the Whole.

The day is coming, if not now, when you will see yourself as continually proceeding from the Father, and being born again from moment to moment, as new life flows through you. It is in this sense that you are a child of God, and not in the sense of a child separated from the parent body. The ocean is father to the outlet that flows forth from it, and the sun is father to the ray of light. The ocean gives of itself to its outlet and the sun gives of itself to its ray. It is thus that God, the Father, gives of Himself by continual influx to His children. The only cutting off or shutting off of this influx that can be is in the non-recognition of this truth. We are only partially awake concerning ourselves, but a fuller awakening is at hand, with which shall come a greater influx of life.

God gives Himself to His children without loss to His own Substance because that is infinite and inexhaustible, and, moreover, since God and Man are of one Substance, that Substance merely passes from Centre (God) to Circumference (Man), and is not lost in the passing.

God gives Himself in Opulence to His Children.

Since God is the Container of all that is expressed in the Universe He must be Opulence itself, and may truly say: ‘‘Mine are the cattle upon a thousand hills,” for ‘‘The world is mine and the fulness thereof.” The Creative Power which has made and is making you continually also placed vast stores of gold in the mines for the use of his children, and gave each of them an Aladdin’s lamp, which is really the power of DEMAND. The rubbing of this lamp, which brings one’s desires to pass, is the action of the mind in affirming the demand. Then, too, each child has the ability to cooperate with the lamp by using hand and brain to give to the world a fair equivalent for its share of gold from the mine. This would be a poor world indeed, a world of beggars, if things we desire could be had for the asking, for as Channing wisely said: “If Man could live on acorns alone he would gather his store, lie down under a tree until his store was exhausted, when he would gather more acorns and lie down again.” The Universal Intelligence knows that Man requires a stimulus to effort, and it fills him with multitudinous desires, making him work to actualize them.

But often the very best work does not bring its equivalent in gold, and that is where the New Thought Aladdin’s lamp helps to bring to us our just reward. To know that we are one with God and therefore the world is ours and the fulness thereof, is to rub the lamp so that our

OWN MAY COME TO US, IF WE WORK FOR IT.

God gives Himself in Health to His Children.

You cannot think of God as diseased or weak, can you? The Infinite cannot be bound by weakness or disease, else would it not be infinite. In ‘‘The Wisdom of Solomon” it is written:

“For God made not death, neither hath He pleasure in the destruction of the living.

“For He created all things that they might have their being; and the generations of the world were healthful; and there is no poison of destruction in them, nor the kingdom of death upon the earth.

“For righteousness is immortal; but ungodly men, with their works and words, called death to them.”

Thus spoke that wise man Solomon. He knew that God did not make death, and that He had no pleasure in the destruction of the living.

All things that God made are living realities, and the things He did not make have no real existence, though they may seem to have it. They are myths, chimeras, figments of the brain, illusions of a sick mind. Therefore the sane man must brush them aside in order to see the clear vision of the world.

Why did God make men. Not that they might glorify Him, for He needed no added glory, being Perfection and having glory in its fulness. No, He made men and all things, simply that they might have their being. To this end He made them healthful, or in His image; and He placed in them no poison of destruction that would produce sickness, nor did He institute death in the order of creation. As Solomon said — men have called death to them, or brought it upon themselves. God gave of His own Substance to make man, and that Substance being righteousness is immortal.

God made you and me that we might have being that is without the poison of destruction. Then away with the miasmic unbelief that declares for disease and death as a part of God’s great plan.

God is Living, Spiritual Substance, the only Substance in the world, the Substance that substands, or stands under sun, earth, moon, stars, men and all living things, and that is their Source of Life.

God, or Living Substance is eternal, immortal, and because you and I are of that Substance we, too, are eternal, immortal, and therefore have no poison of destruction in us, no disease or cause of death.

God gives Himself in Happiness to His Children.

Since God gives His Substance to Man, He must give Happiness, for we cannot conceive of God as being unhappy; if so He could not be Perfect and Infinite. God is Pure Bliss, and in so far as we fall short of this state we fail to receive the constant flow of God-Substance.

New Thought, in its clear vision of the world, shows us that God is Wisdom, Power, Love, Perfection, Wholeness, Harmony, Opulence, Beauty, Joy, and even more than our present ideals can compass. We sight but dimly the glory that is to be revealed in our lives, but the full vision may come sooner than we think. The World-Illusion is holding our eyes that we cannot see, holding our feet that we cannot walk, holding our hands that we cannot do. We are self-hypnotized by this Illusion, but the Truth stands waiting to set us free.

Let us then bend all our powers to the realization of the one great truth that God flows from His Centre of Being to the Circumference, and therefore All is God.

Man, if you will, is the Circumference of God, but Man’s true being reaches back to the Centre.

Poverty, disease and unhappiness are not in God’s Being; therefore they are unreal, evanescent, fleeting clouds hanging over the life of Man for a purpose not yet revealed, and going when their work is done. Then shall we know THE BLESSED LIFE.

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Chapter 13. Affirmations For Achievement

IN walking the path to achievement you must be equipped, and the equipment must be mental. You will not undertake the journey unless you are spurred on by courage and hope, and that courage and hope can only come to you through a knowledge of your one-ness with the Unconquerable World Energy, which in other phrase is God.

If you lack courage and hope, I would advise you to go in training by use of the following formulae:

Part One

I am open on my inner or spiritual side to the inexhaustible ocean of Divine Power. I flow from it and am one with it as a bay is one with the ocean or a ray of light is one with the sun. All achievement is mine through the working of this Power. I shall succeed in all my undertakings.

Part Two

They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.

Part Three

Power is within. I am a generating center of Power, therefore my Power is within myself and not outside of me. I need not wait for circumstances to improve through some outside influence, for I can change them myself by the Power that is within me. Power is within.

Part Four

Having learned that I am one with God, the Infinite and Eternal Energy, and having also learned to look for a radiating center of that Energy within my own spiritual being, I now declare that I will radiate Power, even to the ends of the earth, if need be, TO BRING TO ME MY OWN, by which I mean that which is related to me, that which will help me to express my higher self, to do the most good in the world and ensure my greatest happiness. With concentration of all my being:

I NOW CALL TO ME MY OWN AND IT SHALL COME TO ME.

Part Five

Faith steps out on seeming void and finds the solid rock.

Part Six

The World is my Keyboard and I can play upon it now.

Part Seven

I drink at the Fountain of Eternal Joy.

Commit the above to memory, part by part, and meditate upon it at night, just before you sleep. It is during sleep that the Subconscious Mind is most receptive to suggestions from the Conscious, and is ready to act upon them in order to bring to you your own in various forms.

The foregoing formula for achievement is an outcome of my own life and experience and leads to success in any line of endeavor. If you understand and use it aright it will help you to heal yourself and others and succeed in anything you undertake. It gives the principles by which health is attained, happiness established, and financial abundance secured.

SELAH

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Bibliography

My current of thought has been fed and enlarged by the intake of ideas from such minds as the following: Schopenhauer, Spinoza, Fenelon, Herbert Spencer, The Swami Abhedananda, Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir William Crookes, Alfred Russell Wallace, Madame Annie Besant, Professor Bose of the Institute of Calcutta, Professors William James and Josiah Royce of Harvard, Dr. Gibier of the Pasteur Institute, Dr. Carrel of the Rockefeller Institute and Sir William Gull, a noted surgeon of England, who said, “What shall the doctors do? Rest and be still. He who made the machine (the body) can repair it.”

THE END

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Table of Contents

New Thought Healing Made Plain