Chapter 15
FAITH-THINKING
Charles Fillmore
Keep a
True Lent
MAN CAN NEVER discern
more than a part of the circle in which
he moves, although his powers and
capacities are susceptible of infinite
expansion. He discovers a faculty in
himself, and cultivates it until it
opens out into a universe of correlated
faculties. The farther he goes into
mind, the wider its horizon, until he
is forced to acknowledge that he is not
the personal, limited thing he appears,
but the focus of an infinite
idea.
That idea contains
within itself inexhaustible
possibilities. These possibilities are
projected into man's consciousness as
an image is reflected in a mirror, and,
through the powers vested in him, he
brings them into
manifestation.
Thus man is the most
important factor in creation--he is the
will of God individualized.
There is but one God,
hence there can be but one ideal man.
Each individual is the focus of the
life, intelligence, love, and substance
of this one universal man,
Christ.
We draw all our
substance, of whatever nature, mental
or physical, from Him: "In him we live,
and move, and have our
being."
Our identity as
individuals is formed by the infinitely
various combinations of His attributes.
We are the will of this Grand Man,
Christ, and all of us draw on Him,
through our sentient volition, for
whatever we need.
All that any individual
has ever expressed, or may ever
express, is open to each one of us,
because there is but one fount and we
all stand as equals in His
presence.
There is one principle
of music; but there are millions of
combinations, in symphony and song, of
the few simple tones on which that
principle is based. These tones are
expressed in form as notes. They may be
on the staff, in variations beyond
computation, and similar variations may
also be repeated above and below the
staff.
So each one of us
focuses the attributes of man in his
consciousness in infinite combinations
on the staff--the intellect; above the
staff, the spiritual; below the staff,
the animal.
Certain arrangements of
dominant tones are recognized by
musical composers as producing harmony.
So in man; certain combinations of the
attributes of the Christ in the
individual, Jesus, produced the
harmonious man, Christ
Jesus.
We refer to the Christ
as man, because our language has no
word which expresses the two-in-one of
Being. The Hebrew Yeve is a term that
includes both male and female
attributes.
Paul inspirationally
said: "Have this mind in you, which was
also in Christ Jesus: who, existing in
the form of God, counted not the being
on an equality with God a thing to be
grasped."
This is the problem set
before each one of us. We all want to
know how to let the mind be in us which
was in Christ Jesus. We feel the
stirring of powers and capacities which
we have never been able to use because
of a weakness in some co-ordinating
faculty.
One person may have a
talent suppressed because of
diffidence; another may have a talent
rendered obnoxious by excessive
egotism. This all shows that our powers
are making servants of us. We must know
who and what we are; we must take our
place in the Godhead and marshal our
forces.
There are various
methods for doing this. Most of them
are limited; they never get above the
intellect; they do not venture into the
spiritual. Most of the methods are
theoretical; they are written down by
those who have perceived the truth but
have not carried it out in
detail.
One man let his life be
a demonstration of the bringing forth
of the powers of the Christ; this was
Jesus of Nazareth.
From within He gave
forth the doctrine of the Christ;
externally He stood for perfected
humanity, Jesus. His apostles
represented the powers of all men
acting their respective parts under
varying moods, but eventually blended
into the one harmony--perfect
man.
In order to command our
powers, and to bring them into unity of
action, we must know what they are, and
their respective places on the staff of
Being.
The Grand Man, Christ,
has twelve powers, represented in the
history of Jesus by the twelve
apostles. So each one of us has twelve
powers to make manifest, to bring out
and use in the attainment of his
ideals.
The most important power
of man is the original faith-thinking
faculty. Note particularly the term,
"original faith-thinking faculty"; a
great deal is involved in this
definition. We all have the thinking
faculty located in the head, from which
we send forth thoughts, good, bad, and
indifferent. If we are educated and
molded after the ordinary pattern of
the human family, we may live an
average lifetime and never have an
original thought. The thinking faculty
in the head is supplied with the
secondhand ideas of our ancestors, the
dominant beliefs of the race, or the
threadbare stock of the ordinary social
whirl. This is not faith-thinking.
Faith-thinking is done only by one who
has caught sight of the inner truths of
Being, and who feeds his thinking
faculty on images generated in the
heart, or love center.
Faith-thinking is not
merely an intellectual process, based
on reasoning. The faith-thinker does
not compare, analyze, or draw
conclusions from known premises. He
does not take appearances into
consideration; he is not biased by
precedent. His thinking gives form,
without cavil or question, to ideas
that come straight from the eternal
fount of wisdom. His perception
impinges on the spiritual, and he
knows.
To the question, "Who do
men say that the Son of man is?" those
who reflected the indefinite, guessing
thought currents of the day, answered:
"Some say John the Baptist; some,
Elijah; and others, Jeremiah, or one of
the prophets."
But Jesus is not asking
for secondhand opinions; He appeals
direct to the faculty in man that
always knows. He says, "But who say ye
that I am?" and that faculty
represented as Peter, answers, "Thou
art the Christ, the Son of the living
God."
Then the Christ blesses
him, and says: "Flesh and blood hath
not revealed it unto thee, but my
Father who is in heaven. And I also say
unto thee, that thou art Peter, and
upon this rock I will build my church;
and the gates of Hades shall not
prevail against it."
The thinking faculty in
man makes him a free agent, because it
is his creative center; in and through
this one power, he establishes his
consciousness--he builds his world.
Through the volition of this faculty,
he can refuse to receive ideas from
Christ; he can cut himself away from
the realm of original Truth or from the
illusionary universe in which he is
forever unraveling tangled ends and
chasing shadows. Thus we see clearly
that this faculty is the rock, the
foundation on which our consciousness
must be built.
For generation after
generation, humanity had exercised the
thinking faculty, and fed it on the
illusions of sense, and "every
imagination of the thoughts of his
heart was only evil continually." The
root of the Hebrew word here translated
evil is aven, which means "nothing."
Thus man was feeding his thinking
faculty on nothing, instead of true
thoughts from God.
As the result of this
lack of conscious connection of the
thinking faculty with the Fountainhead
of existence, humanity had reached a
very low state. Then came Jesus of
Nazareth, whose mission it was to
connect the thinker with the true
source of thought. Thinking at random
had brought man into a deplorable
condition, and his salvation depended
on his again joining his consciousness
to the Christ. Only through that
connection could he be brought back
into his Edenic state, the church of
God.
Then it was, in the
darkness of intellect's night, that the
thinking faculty caught sight of its
higher self and joyfully exclaimed,
"Thou art the Christ, the Son of the
living God," and the response to that
gleam of spiritual perception was the
acknowledgment of faith as the
foundation on which the church of
Christ is built.
What an incalculable
amount of time, energy, and effort has
been wasted trying to build conditions
of harmony, by both individuals and
society, without making the connection
between the thinker and the true source
of thought.
If you have not
recognized the spiritual center within
yourself, and have not acknowledged
allegiance to it, you are drifting in
the darkness of sense.
You are allowing your
thinking faculty to draw its thoughts
(which are its food) from the chaos of
ignorance, and you suffer the
consequences in the discordant world it
creates for you. Do not forget that
everything that appears in your life
and affairs, physically, mentally, or
otherwise, has sometime been sent forth
from your thinking faculty. It is only
through the power vested in it that you
can come into consciousness of
anything. Consciousness makes your
heaven and it makes your
hell.
Some persons have let
the thinking faculty run away with
them, and they cannot control their
thoughts. So some drivers let their
automobiles run away, but the law
always holds them responsible for
damage done, and they find it cheaper
in the end to give stricter attention
to driving.
Get clearly into your
understanding that you are not the
faith-thinker, Peter. You are Jesus;
Peter is one of your twelve
powers.
Before this dawns on
you, you are a carpenter; you are a
builder in the realm of matter. Peter
is a fisherman, one who draws his ideas
from the changeable, unstable sea of
sense.
When you realize that
you are Mind, and that all things are
originally generated in the laboratory
of Mind, you leave your carpenter's
bench and go forth proclaiming this
Truth that has been revealed to you.
You find that your tools in this new
field of labor are your untrained
faculties. The first of these faculties
to be brought under your dominion is
Peter, the thinking power. This
thinking faculty is closely associated
with another power, your strength
(Andrew; Andrew and Peter are
brothers), and you say to them, "Come
ye after me, and I will make you
fishers of men."
"Going on from
thence"--that is, when you have trained
these faculties until they are in a
measure obedient, you discover two
other powers: John (love) and James
(justice). These are also brothers, and
you call to them both at the same
time.
You now have four powers
under your dominion; these are the
first apostles of Jesus. With these you
begin to do the works of
Spirit.
You now have the power
to heal the many that are "sick with
divers diseases, and cast out many
demons," and to preach "throughout all
Galilee."
That Peter stands today
at the gate of heaven is no mere figure
of speech; he always stands there, when
you have acknowledged the Christ; and
he has the "keys of the kingdom of
heaven." The keys are the thoughts he
forms, the words he speaks. He then
stands "porter at the door of thought,"
and freely exercises the power that the
Christ declares: "Whatsoever thou shalt
bind on earth shall be bound in heaven;
and whatsoever thou shalt loose on
earth shall be loosed in
heaven."
You can readily see why
this faith-thinker, Peter, is the
foundation; why faith is the one
faculty to be guarded, directed, and
trained. His words are operative on
many planes of consciousness, and he
will bind you to conditions of
servitude if you do not guard his acts
closely.
The people who let their
thinking faculty attach itself to the
things of earth, are limiting or
"binding" their free ideas, or
"heaven," and they thereby become
slaves to hard, material conditions,
gradually shutting out any desire for
higher things.
Those who look right
through the apparent hardships of
earthly environments, and persistently
declare them not material, but
spiritual, are "loosing" them in the
ideal, or "heaven." Those circumstances
must, through the creative power vested
in the thinker, eventually arrange
themselves according to his
word.
This is also especially
true of bodily conditions. If you allow
Peter to speak of erroneous states of
consciousness as true conditions, you
will be bound to them, and you will
suffer, but if you see to it that he
pronounces them free from errors of
sense, they will be
"loosed."
Until faith is
thoroughly identified with the Christ,
you will find that the Peter faculty in
you is a regular weathercock. He will,
in all sincerity, affirm his allegiance
to Spirit, and then in the hour of
adversity deny that he ever knew
Him.
This, however, is in his
probationary period. When you have
trained him to look to Christ for all
things, under all circumstances, he
becomes the stanchest defender of the
faith.
How necessary it is for
you to know the important place in your
consciousness that this faculty, Peter,
occupies. You are the free will, the
directive Ego, Jesus. You have the
problem of life before you--the
bringing forth of the Grand Man with
His twelve powers.
This is your "church."
You are the high priest without
beginning of years or end of days, the
alpha and the omega, but without
disciplining your powers you cannot do
what the Father has set before you.
Your thinking faculty is the first to
be considered. It is the inlet and the
outlet of all your ideas. It is always
active, zealous, impulsive, but not
always wise. Its nature is to think,
and think it will. If you are ignorant
of your office--a prince in the house
of David--and stand meekly letting it
think unsifted thoughts, your thinking
faculty will prove an unruly servant
and produce all sorts of
discord.
Its food is
ideas--symbolized in the gospels as
fish--and it is forever casting its net
on the right, on the left, for a
draught.
You alone can direct
where its net shall be cast. You are he
who says, "Cast the net on the right
side." The "right side" is always on
the side of Truth, the side of power.
Whenever you, the master, are in
command, the nets are filled with
ideas, because you are in touch with
the infinite storehouse of
wisdom.
You must stay very close
to Peter--you must always be certain of
his allegiance and love. Test him
often. Say to him, "Lovest thou me more
than these?" You want his undivided
attention. He is inclined to wander. We
say our "mind wanders." This is an
error. The mind never wanders. The
faith-thinker, Peter, wanders; he looks
in many directions. He stands at the
door of heaven, the harmony within you;
the same door has the world of sense on
its outer side.
Peter looks within--he
also looks without. This is his office,
and it is right that he should look
both ways. But he must be equalized,
balanced. He must look within for his
sustenance; he must recognize the
Christ before he can draw his net full
of fish.
Keep your eye on Peter.
Make him toe the mark every moment.
Teach him to affirm over and over
again. Say unto him "the third time,
Simon, son of John, lovest thou me?" He
may say, "Lord, thou knowest all
things; thou knowest that I love
thee."
This is a very common
protest. We hear in this day of modern
metaphysics that concentration is not
necessary; that it is only necessary to
perceive spiritual Truth; that the
demonstration will follow. Jesus gave
us many lessons on this very point. He
knew Peter like a book. He knew that
this faculty was versatile but apt to
change its base frequently. When in the
exuberance of his allegiance Peter
protested that he would lay down his
life for Jesus, the Master said,
"Verily, verily, I say unto thee, The
cock shall not crow, till thou hast
denied me thrice."
You must teach Peter to
concentrate. Teach him to center
himself on true words. It is through
him that you feed your sheep (your
other faculties). Keep him at his task.
He is inquisitive, impulsive, and
dictatorial when not firmly directed.
When he questions your dominion and
tries to dictate the movements of your
other powers, put him into line, with,
"What is that to thee? follow thou
me."
Descartes said, "I
think, therefore I am." This is
precisely as if Jesus had said, "I am
Peter, therefore I am." This is the I
AM losing itself in its own creation.
Exactly the converse of this statement
is true: "I am, therefore I
think."
Thinking is a faculty of
the Ego, the omnipotent I AM of each
one of us. It is a process in mind, the
formulating process of mind, and under
our dominion.
The I AM does not think
unless it wills to do so. You can stop
all sense thought action when you have
learned to separate your I AM from the
thinking faculty. Know this, and live
in Christ.
Be no longer a slave to
the thinking faculty. Command it to be
still and know. Stand at the center of
your being and say, "I and the Father
are one." "I am meek and lowly in
heart." "All authority hath been given
unto me in heaven and on earth." "I am,
and there is none beside
me."
