[215] Blessed indeed is he who
feels and knows that a single thought
of a single soul can swing wide the
portals that open from the animal to
the divine.
Thrice blessed is he who in such
thought can stand alone until the
prejudices of an ignorant race,
seeking to overwhelm him, have grown
so tired that, like the wayward brood
of the mother bird, they come to
claim--under the hovering wings of an
all-sustaining faith--that protection
they fail to find elsewhere.
After all, it is he who can stand
by his highest hope that the world is
always waiting for, and waiting for
the purpose of crowning him king,
though it knows it not.
Every soul is seeking strength.
There is only one way to acquire it,
and that is by dropping forever the
race’s accepted belief in its
own limitations and trusting those
castles in the air projected by the
ideal. If my dreams are the best my
nature yields, then to live in them
is the most sensible thing I can do,
even though they never should become
real.
But to live in our dreams is to
make them real. And this is true
because Being is not limited. And
every aspiration of the soul,
stretching outward in the direction
of good, of more life, if believed
in, becomes bone of our bone and
flesh of our flesh. Belief in the
ideal will turn all its hopes into
muscle and tissue and blood and
brain. The voice that speaks through
the ideal is the voice of a higher, a
more perfect life, and he who listens
to it and believes in it will be led
out of the inharmonies of our present
hell, into a boundless place where
our constantly unfolding faculties
will express themselves in those
never-failing activities which alone
can make heaven for us.
We must find heaven in
unrestrained growth; in the constant
unfoldment of our faculties in the
true line of our attractions.
But the race has scarcely unfolded
any new faculty for hundreds of
generations. A trifling advancement
here and a slight step forward there
has been all. The people have held
the heresy that God made them just as
they are, and that they are as
perfect as they ever will be until
death purifies them. They do not know
that they are growing creatures, and
have been from the first. If they did
but know this, they would also know
that there is no limit to farther
continuance of their growth except
the limit put upon it by their
ignorance; an ignorance that
constantly rejects the hopes held out
by their ideality, and insists on
clothing the manly future in the
child’s garments of the
past.
There are leaders among men
because, though all men do not trust
their own brightest hopes, yet they
gladly follow the man who does. The
true leader is the man who believes
that something is possible for him
that his followers do not believe
possible for themselves.
He who is a great leader, and at
the same time adds to his power as a
leader the power of teaching the
people [216] and healing their
wounds, not only believes the
(so-called) impossible is possible to
him, but he believes that it is
possible for every living soul also.
And thus in elevating himself by his
belief he elevates all others
equally. It is in this way that the
mind healers are doing their mighty
work. They have ascended--through a
serene and steadfast trust in the
ideal hopes they find implanted in
the race--from the world’s old
belittling and hampering beliefs
concerning race limitations, to a
loftier place and a clearer mental
atmosphere than was ever reached
before. They see that the
people’s implanted hopes were
meant to be actualized in real life.
And they see farther, that their
actualization will remove every one
of our liabilities and make us free
citizens of the universe, with
perfect control over disease, old
age, poverty and death.
In the multiplicity of my duties
there is sometimes an hour when I
lose sight of my power to overcome
disease, old age, poverty and death.
At such times a sense of being alone
and lost imperceptibly steals over
me, and I question myself as to what
is the matter. In a moment the whole
line of thought in which I live--the
thought that is slowly making me
over--like McGregor--I find myself on
my native heath once more, and at
home in the broad fields and green
pastures of my splendid
possessions--the home unfolded to me
through the ideal hopes--that because
of my faith have become real.
And oh, what possessions! So
clearly do I see the perfect mastery
of man over all his hated
environments, through the power of
supreme trust in himself, in the
unfoldment of the seeds of all great
achievements now lying dormant in his
brain and waiting for nothing but his
own recognition of them and his
beliefs in them to lift him bodily
out of his present charnel house
beliefs, and rescue him at once and
forever from all his enemies.
For my part I hesitate no longer
to proclaim in the boldest manner
that the time has come that St. Paul
spoke of. It is quite plain from his
writings that he anticipated
man’s final conquest over all
things; a time in which he would say,
“Oh, death! where is thy sting?
Oh, grave, where is thy
victory?”
The factor by which death and the
grave are overcome is now being
evolved through the faculty of
ideality; that faculty whose
wonderful creative power has been
ignored so long; but which has
steadily unfolded in spite of the
contempt heaped upon it, until at
last we begin to see it as a shining
light; the light in each man’s
brain that is to guide him to perfect
freedom in all things.
In lesson ten I made it plain to
the student that a mighty storehouse
of the world’s wisdom lay
behind his present perception. I said
that the recognition of this wisdom,
and an attempt to unearth it, as it
were, would not be without its
beneficial effect.
In lesson eleven I told of the
power above the throne, and tried to
account for its presence there, and
also to hint at its uses. These two
phrases--the power behind or beneath
the throne, and the power above the
throne--point most distinctly to the
throne itself and to him who sits
upon it as the executive of this
power. The ability to use either of
these two powers did not seem to
depend upon themselves, but upon
someone who had the right to govern
them both.
The central point of all
individualization is the
“I.” What the
“I” is no one can tell,
any more than to say it is
self-consciousness. It is certainly
the very heart of the magnet man, and
the full power of the attracting
force is located in it. It ranges at
will through the entire organism. It
can drop for the moment its objective
consciousness--this outside mind--and
become submerged in the subjective
mind--that wonderful storehouse of
memories--lying back of our present
earth experiences. It can ascend into
the purely ideal mind and lose sight
of all that lies [217] below it. It
is in this condition that miracles,
so-called, have been worked. In the
great majority of the race the
“I” is located centrally
in what I have called the everyday
mind, from which we have projected
all the uses that now appear in the
world.
Now, try to follow me. It is the
privilege of the man to live in
either of these chambers of the
brain, and create from the material
yielded him within these
chambers.
I pause a moment, awed, before the
secret but tremendous meaning of this
last sentence. I told the student in
the last lesson that man was
creative. I told him that man had
created himself all along the journey
of life up to the present moment,
though nearly all of his creation has
been done unconsciously to
himself.
But now I tell him a greater
thing. I tell him that a man has the
power to undo the present status of
his personality and slip back, and
down the thread of his life
experiences, and express his life on
a lower plane than he can now
conceive of. That no man ever did
this, or ever will do it, does not
militate against the fact that he has
the power to do it. Man is an
individualized will, and there is
nothing on earth to prevent him from
doing what he wishes to do, provided
he wills to do it, and understands
the law of the doing. It is easy
enough to understand the law by which
this is done, but no soul can ever be
found who desires to do it. All
desire points to the future, because
freedom is in the future, and the
escape from the past has been an
escape from many and indescribable
bonds.
The temptation, then, is not to
slip backwards down the stream of
time, but to look ahead and strain to
get on. Therefore it is the ideal
that tempts us now. It tempted the
Christian Scientist to the utter
renunciation of the world of senses
as represented by our objective
minds. It filled him with visions not
impossible of realization by proper
methods, but purely phantasmal on his
part, because cut off from the source
of their actualization in flesh and
blood--namely, the lower chambers of
the brain that relate him to the
earth from which the roots of his
being draw their substance. The
position of the Christian Scientist
was like that of the lily enshrined
in the bulb, and which believed it
could spring to full bloom
independently of leaf or stem; which
believed indeed that it was in bloom
even before it had emerged from the
bulb. It took the spirit of the
prophecy of its coming for its
actual, tangible appearance. In this
particular it quite ignored the Law
of Attraction, which is the law of
growth.
Christian Science is a sort of air
plant. It is not rooted in the earth
life by its many and varied past
experiences. It is like a floating
head whose body is dead. It is a
species of insanity; an unbalanced
condition that cannot last long. But
it is a man’s privilege to live
in this upper brain if he wishes to,
and to create from it. That which he
creates is phantasmal, like the
condition from which it sprung, but
the phantoms are real to him and to
others in his position. A great deal
of healing is done in this way. The
scientist has lifted himself to a
place in the ideal where he does not
perceive the obstruction to his
creative word; and so the word
creates health, strength, or whatever
it is spoken for. This form of
healing is not invariable in its
results by any means. The main
benefit derived from it is in the
fact that it points the way which
underlies the power, the discovery of
which enables us to create health
with absolute certainty in all
patients.
It points to man’s unfailing
creative power. It says more forcibly
than any words, “You can create
any condition you please for yourself
and for another who places his case
in your hands. And you can make your
creations endure
permanently--recorded in flesh and
blood--when you know how.”
Psychological healing endures as
[218] long as the conditions in which
it had its birth endure. A vast
amount of this psychological healing
is more imbued with the substantial
force of the lower brain than it
knows of. And in proportion as this
is the case the healing is more
lasting, and so is the creativeness
of the healer. When I came out of the
Christian Science school I was one of
the most powerful of all
psychological healers. I had no use
of any part of my anatomy but the
upper brain. I walked on air. My feet
did not seem to touch within several
inches of the ground. I went about
pounding people over the head with
the cabalistic sentence, “You
are well.” Many of them
acknowledged the impeachment, and
miracles, so-called, resulted. A few
were so ungracious that they refused
to be convinced. This latter class,
at first in the minority, came out
largely in the majority later, as I
began to investigate my condition.
Life became a burden to me from the
endless questions suggested by my
untiring and unsparing mind. It was a
worse nuisance than
“Helen’s Babies.” I
was fast developing into a mammoth
interrogation point, and I would
rather have been an ampersand, or
anything else in the shape of a
contraction of my condition. At last
I saw there was no rest for me until
I set myself to the task of finding
the answers to my own questions. In
doing this I found where the
“I” is located, and
gradually became acquainted with its
marvelous power when acting strictly
in the line of the Law.
The “I” is located in
the objective mind, though it has the
power at any time to visit either the
subjective or the ideal mind. In
fact, the “I” is king in
the domination of man, but his throne
is located neither at the highest
point in his kingdom nor at the
lowest. It is central, and its
position is such that it commands
both extremes of its dominions.
The business of the
“I” is to lead all of its
powers out into the objective world
where they become operative in
projecting uses upon the external and
visible plane of life. There is no
use for the memories and experiences
lying behind the “I”
except as they can be brought to bear
upon our efforts of conquest in this
present life here upon the earth.
There is no use of the magnificent
ideal faculties except as their grand
conceptions can be built into
substantial structure right here
where we are living today.
Man’s interests at this stage
of his evolution are centered in the
world we live in. And this will be
the case for thousands of years yet.
When he gets away from this world he
will get away from it in a manner
similar to the way he gets from
America to Europe. He will have
discovered the potencies and
character of the ether lying between
us and the other planets, and will
have constructed airships to navigate
it.
For as sure as nature exists,
there is no ascension except by
growth. There is no growth except by
the acquisition of knowledge. There
is no conquest over the obstacles
that stand in the way of the
realization of our desires except by
individual effort. And this effort
has got to be expended on that plane
which calls into use the whole man;
every faculty of his being and every
atom of his person; and this plane is
the plane of the earth life on which
we now dwell.
To ascend into the ideal and live
there means the cutting off of the
“I” from this earth
plane. It means death. Not
annihilation--for such a thing is not
possible--but it means death to the
body and the cessation for the
present time of effort upon the
earth. If there was anything to be
gained by the ascension of the
“I” into the ideal, and
the death of the body, it would be a
pleasant thing to do and the right
thing to do. But the death of the
body--the objective or external
intelligence--is not the right
thing.
The right thing is the expression
upon the external plane of the entire
man. Externalization is the right
thing. Externalization is expression
of [219] the Law of Being. The Law
might as well not exist as to exist
and not be expressed or made
manifest. The universe might as well
be blotted out as that the Law should
not be made manifest by that
recognition of its existence which is
expressed in all the myriad forms of
nature, with man at their head.
We have had too much nonsense
about the beauty and perfection of
life on the invisible plane. It has
almost ruined the race by causing it
to postpone its efforts and its
desires to another sphere of
existence--an ethereal sphere, where
there is no resistance to our wishes,
and where everything comes without
the expenditure of energy. We had as
well learn the truth about ourselves
now as at some future time; and I am
going to put it plain and strong. The
preachers are all wrong in trying to
save souls apart from their bodies.
They simply cannot do it. Souls are
saved only inside their bodies,
because souls and bodies are one.
They are different apartments of the
one mind that constitutes the whole
man. And man can only be truly saved
when he understands the fact that he
is whole. This is what the Bible
means when it says that in order to
be saved a man must be whole, or
“holy.”
Now, the body is simply one phase
of the man’s mind. It is the
objective part of his mind--the part
that takes cognizance of external
things. Cut this part off from the
other divisions of his mind (as in
death) and the man has sustained an
almost irreparable loss. His throne
is gone; his base of operations in
the realm of useful effort is
destroyed. He has become an air
plant; a floating, rarefied spirit.
And I believe that he must take on
earth conditions again.
Of course, I do not know this, but
I do know a good many positive facts
that point to this thing as a
necessity. In the first place, I know
that a rarefied, ethereal condition
is not the condition that yields
strength. These bodies of ours, these
eternal minds, are even now much too
ethereal, too rarefied, too sappy, to
yield us the strength we demand. Our
sight is too imperfect, and so is our
hearing and all our other senses. In
fact, these bodies (ethereal minds)
are only embryonic as yet. They are
watery, diluted and weak. They have
got to come out into the external
with infinitely greater strength and
power than they have ever done yet.
The time is coming (it will be here
when we get rid of our ideas of the
desirability of spirit life) that our
flesh will be so firm and yet so
elastic that no substance on earth
can compare with it in strength, and
power, and beauty, and lightness. Our
eyes will be composed of such
substantial material that they will
supersede the telescope and
microscope. Our hearing, our touch
and our taste will also be much
improved as our sense of sight.
The only thing that ails us now is
that we are not far enough out in the
external world. Our external, or
visible, development is too faint and
weak. So much so that it yields to
every breath of adverse or ignorant
belief and suffers itself to be blown
back out of sight again. Why, the
wind blows through our bodies and
chills us. Our bodies, our external
perceptions, are so shivering frail,
from a lack of recognition of what
they might be, that they are at the
mercy of things and conditions which
are utterly negative to them, if they
only knew it. When we drop these
external perceptions (our bodies),
will we be any stronger?
Strength is fixedness of
perception. Perception belongs to the
world of sense. Fixedness of
perception is not the loss of
perception, as by death, but its
reverse. It is the constantly
accrediting power to perceive more,
and still more. Do not forget that
perception is of the senses. It is
the externalizing power. The stronger
and better our senses are the more
fixed and firm and irresistible will
our bodies become, until they will be
indestructible by any accident
whatever.
[220] Mental Science teaches the
road to life on the external plane.
It teaches how to improve and
strengthen these bodies. As the body
is every particle mental this can
only be done by an increase of
knowledge. “Knowledge is
power,” says the wise man. It
would not be power if it did not add
to man’s strength on the
external plane. A man has no place to
make use of his knowledge except on
the external plane. Knowledge must be
applied to uses or there is no need
for it. Everything under the sun
teaches us this fact. I accept
nature’s teachings, and shall
continue to do so until I am
convinced that there are better and
more reliable teachings somewhere
else. It is safer to rest upon
nature, and to learn from an
observation of her methods, than to
listen to the vaporings of men who
have got so far away from her and are
so ignorant of her laws that they are
really insane.
All men want to know is the truth.
They are not persistently mad in any
desire to follow error. They want
life. This is the leading desire of
every organized creature, from a drop
of protoplasm up to a man. They want
life, and they will follow any trial,
no matter how obscure, that leads in
the direction of life. While they
believe that life could not be
perpetuated on the external plane
they sought to perpetuate it on an
invisible plane. So great was their
desire that it should be perpetuated
that they thought no sacrifice of
present, external life was too great
to make for it. Hence the mighty
power of the various churches, and of
the whole church as an
institution.
Why, the church has ruled the
world for many centuries. It has
almost ruthlessly subverted the will
of the people to its own will because
the people believed there was life in
it. “All that a man hath will
he give for his life.” But
slowly, slowly, and almost
unconsciously to the people
themselves, the truth on the subject
has been growing. That this truth has
not sooner manifested itself in
thought and word is because it was a
matter of growth. It is only with
conception of the fact that a man is
a mental creature, and that he is all
of a piece, whole, or holy, that the
gradually dawning idea has been able
to be formulated into a spoken or
written statement.
And who doubts men’s
acceptance of this matter as soon as
they perceive the truth? Even without
perceiving the truth, but with only
the faint, unconscious light of its
first dim beams penetrating them from
afar, they have ceased to cling to
the church as their only hope. Their
interests have been gradually drawing
off from the unseen goal of their
former hopes, and have become more
deeply centered in the affairs of
this external life.
It is the constant cry of the
half-deserted churches that men and
women are too worldly. And the
preachers themselves are, in most
instances, quite as worldly as their
audiences. They chide themselves for
this worldliness and promise
themselves reformation, but they do
not reform and cannot. Life is
calling more loudly from the external
side, and they have to hear. It is
impossible for them to close their
ears to the charm of the vital and
vibrant sound. They are becoming more
alive, instead of more dead; by which
I mean that from the very nature of
their progressive intellects they are
coming forward more and more into the
external world of uses. The external
seems more inviting to them, and
their visionary, subjective heaven
less inviting and less real because
they themselves are more wide awake
by reason of the universal growth of
knowledge. They cannot escape this
universal growth of knowledge. And
knowledge is tangible stuff; it is
something that builds itself into
blood and brain and muscle and bone
on the visible side of
life--something that prepares our
bodies for doing more work and more
play; that prepares our constructive
faculties for building new uses.
Something, [221] in short, that
widens the entire range of life on
the objective plane and makes it more
inviting still.
And this is going to be the case
right along from this time on, and to
a much greater degree than ever
before. The whole tendency of the age
is toward an externalization of our
latent energy instead of suppressing
it or drawing it into the invisible
world out of sight. This is the work
of evolution. Every step in growth
has been toward the time when man
would express himself completely and
wholly on the external or objective
plane. Think of the majesty of grace
and power that will be expressed when
a man expresses himself--expresses
all he is capable of expressing! Of
course, this means the conquest of
death, and nothing less.
How to conquer death is precisely
what Mental Science teaches. It
teaches the student, in the first
place, that such a thing is possible.
Having taught him this much, it has
done a wonderful thing for him,
because, let it be remembered, that a
man is a mental creature; that, in
point of fact, he is a mental
statement that he himself has made.
Previous to his knowing that death
could be conquered, his mental
statement (his body) held the belief
of death as an unavoidable thing. The
simple knowing that it is not an
unavoidable thing is a change in his
mental statement (his body) by which
the seeds of death are cast out.
This knowledge, or this change in
his statement of life, brings him at
once to the realization of the
“I,” and to a clear
perception of where it must
necessarily establish its throne.
This establishment of a man’s
throne is a new thing. The
“I” has been so weak from
non-recognition of its own power that
it did not know it was a king. It did
not know that it had any power. It
did not know that its word was
creative. It did not know that it was
obliged to accept the race beliefs
that have held all human beings in
the bonds of disease and death. It
did not know that it was a free
thing; that it could deny its
inherited life-statement and make a
life statement for itself of a very
different character. For these things
were not to be known until the
“I” had found out that it
was a whole. It had imagined that it
was at least three things, and
perhaps more, and had not the
faintest idea to which of its three
parts it belonged.
But now it knows that it is whole;
that its three chambers of mentality
are all one, and it has established
its throne in the center, and this
central mind is the objective mind.
And it is to this objective mind that
the king on his throne intends to
draw the mighty power so long
concealed in both rooms of the
subjective. He intends to draw all
this wonderful volume of reserved
force right out into the world of
effects, and make it available for
the working of miracles in curing
disease; in developing the unknown
external resources lying latent in
nature; in constructing such
appliances in locomotion as the brain
of man has never yet imagined; in
establishing systems of government in
which all men shall have justice and
opportunity of expression, or,
rather, in making manifest such
knowledge in individuals as will
render the word
“government” obsolete,
and substitute
“co-operation” in its
place.
The king on his throne intends to
make his own body represent his ideal
of beauty and strength. As the
sculptor works out his splendid
design in marble so will the
“I” work out his design,
in flesh and bone; only the chisel
with which he effects his work will
be a tool a thousand times stronger
than iron. It will be thought.
