[267] Man is the spokesman of
Love, or Life, and being a purely
mental creature he speaks it in the
measure of his understanding of
it.
The idea that would make nothing
of man is one of extreme foolishness.
Man stands at the head of nature, and
is absolute in his position. It is
man who leads the Life Principle
forth into visibility. It is man who
projects the Life Principle into
effort, and who thus builds the world
into a world of uses.
This visible world is not nothing;
nor is it an unimportant something;
it is Love, or Life, in
manifestation. It is the mind side,
or the intelligent side, of Love, or
Life, just as light is the
illumination of heat, or the showing
forth of heat.
From this it becomes at once
apparent that Life, or Love, the
vitalizing principle, is one with its
manifestation, man; and that its
manifestation is as important as the
unseen, vitalizing principle itself.
Man is the visible and audible side
of the Law of Life. The Law of Life
is the unseen side of man, as heat is
the unseen side of light. The Law is
subject to man. Man is the Law in
objectivity. Let the student always
hold this sentence in his memory.
Nothing will ever help him to a
realization of his true relations to
the Law as this one little
sentence.
Do not confuse the Law with the
spirit, or thought-life, of the man.
Though man’s spirit, or
thought-life, is subjective when
spoken of in relation to his visible
appearance, yet when spoken of in
relation to the Law, it too is
objective. The thought-life, or
spirit, is objective to the Law
because it is the externalization of
the Law, the same as man’s body
is, but it is subjective to
man’s body because it is
invisible to our present power of
seeing, and can be made visible, or
objective, only by the intelligent
permission of the body--the external,
or objective mind.
But the Law is forever subjective
to the entire man. It is subjective
to man’s subjective part of
himself, as well as to his objective,
or visible part.
The Law, being subjective, or
unseen in the entire man (body and
thought) is always latent in every
part of him. No matter how sunken or
low the man may appear, be sure of
this, that the Law of Life, or
Attraction, with all its mighty
possibilities, is latent within him,
and can be brought forth by
recognition. And not only by his own
recognition, but by the recognition
of others. As the Law of Life is pure
goodness and infinite greatness,
being the all of Love and justice, so
the man is good and great even though
he does not know it, and though not a
soul on the earth be able to see it.
For the Law is omnipresent; it fills
all space and everything in space;
not a single object can escape its
indwelling power.
The Law in man is justice, and
love, and health, and strength, in
one pure [268] vital flame. “In
it is no variableness nor shadow of
turning.” The Law with all its
infinite possibilities is not only
latent in mankind who are pronounced
altogether bad, but it is latent in
the most diseased of human beings. It
is latent in one person as much as in
another, and there is no case in
which recognition will not bring it
forth and establish its goodness, and
greatness and strength, and beauty in
these human bodies.
To recognize the Law in latency in
a human being is to bring it forth,
or to make it manifest. And when we
have brought it forth by our power to
recognize it, what do we see?
We see the Law itself in
expression in man. Every trace of his
disease, or of what we call his
immortal nature, is gone. For the Law
cannot manifest itself in disease,
because it is Love’s very self,
the true essence of Life.
The Law of Life is latent in man.
Man is the Law of Life, in motion, as
it were. He is the acknowledgment of
its existence. He is the showing
forth of it. He is it organized and
made visible through his individual
prerogative of recognition.
The Law, organized and made
visible in all the objects of nature,
culminating in man, is thus made
available in uses. If there were no
uses to serve, then the Law might
exist as a living principle, filling
all space, and man would be
unnecessary. But because Life is
expressed in organized forms it must
necessarily consist of uses; and man
leads the power of the Law forth, as
it were, into them. He calls the Law
forth into activities. And what would
life be on any plane divorced from
its activities?
“Man is God’s
necessity” quite as much as God
is man’s necessity. In
scientific language; Man is the
Law’s necessity as much as the
Law is man’s necessity; for the
seeming two are one. It requires the
seeming two to constitute the one
infinite Life that we call the
universe--this Life which is subject
to neither disease nor death.
We all know that the Law of Being
is not diseased, and cannot die. It
follows therefore that the Law and
man being one, man cannot be diseased
and cannot die. Never mind the
reports of your senses to the
contrary; they are not to be trusted
in the face of such overwhelming
evidence. The senses have deceived us
always. The senses belong to the
negative pole of man’s
organization and will never be
trustworthy until they have received
the higher education from the
positive pole of his being--namely,
his reorganized and intelligent
brain.
Thought is the creator so far as
visible creation is concerned.
Thought is the product of the brain
and of the external senses. The
senses belong to the negative pole of
the man and had their origin during
the period of his unconscious growth,
and before the last and best product
of the man, his brain, was as nearly
perfected as now. The brain is the
latest product of human evolution,
and is king by divine right. Thought
is the product of the brain and is
inseparable from it. Indeed it acts
in the capacity of messenger for the
brain, or servant to it.
Thought has actually built our
bodies into what they now are, with
all their imperfections. Thought has
planted the seeds of their
imperfections and their diseases in
them, and has watered and cultivated
them there.
In a former lesson I showed that
thought was the body-builder; that
thought, prompted by desire, or
expressed in desire, has built all
the bodies we see in nature, and no
two of them exactly alike, because no
two have had desires exactly alike.
Certain types of thought, or
desire--circumscribed by certain
environments--have produced types of
animals and plants in nature, but no
two members of the same brotherhood
have ever been entirely alike,
because none have thought and desired
entirely alike.
Let us now imagine the time when
man had his individual beginning as
the tiniest spark of intelligence, or
the [269] faintest glimmer of a
consciousness of Love, or Life. This
small perception of the Love or Life
Principle constitutes the personality
of the individual--not the Law of the
individual’s existence, which
is absolutely unimpeachable in its
perfectness, but the
individual’s consciousness, or
his conscious perception of the Law;
his individual estimate of the Law;
which estimate has always fallen far
below the Law’s true capacity.
But it is this individual estimate,
whether adequate to express the true
worth and glory of the power of the
Law, that constitutes the man’s
personality.
The man’s personality is the
man’s own estimate of himself.
Or rather, the race’s
personality is the race’s
estimate of itself, for individual
cases are often exceptional. The
race’s estimate of itself,
which is the estimate of the power of
the Law, forms an atmosphere of
thought--of ignorant thought, so
far--into which all children are
born, and to which all are subject
until such time as individual
intelligence awakens and thinks
itself out of race beliefs into the
freedom of more positive truth.
The student must now begin to see
the difference between a man’s
personality and his true
individuality. His personality is
made up of his inherited beliefs
concerning himself. His individuality
is something quite different from his
personality. It is only now in
process of evolution. While his
personality has been built up in a
great measure by the thought which
sanctions the crucifixion of his
desires, his individuality, when he
shall have achieved it, will be the
externalization in the flesh of his
desires. Therefore, the man’s
present personality is his false
self. His individuality, when it
becomes established, will be the real
and true man.
The Bible says, “As a man
believes, so is he.” This
paragraph refers to man’s
personality alone. In another part of
the Bible Jesus asks: “Said I
not ye are gods?” This last
expression refers to the true
individuality of the man.
Man, as to his personality, then,
is what he believes himself to be.
His personality is that part of him
which he shows forth. It is his
person. It is what we see when we
look at him. Possibly the man we look
at has a shortened limb and goes on
crutches. This disfigurement is no
part of the man’s true
personality, though it is a part of
his personality.
But how can a man’s
personality diverge so far from his
individuality?
His personality is an inherited
thing. It is the inheritance of ages
of belief in man’s weakness and
dependence on a power outside of
himself, and of his consequent
ignorance of his own latent
power.
Man, as a growing creature, has to
pass through the conditions and
beliefs that make up his present
personality. These conditions and
beliefs are the negative pole of the
conditions and beliefs that
constitute his individuality. In
other words, the man’s
personality is the negative pole of
his individuality; and in the process
of his growth it was absolutely
necessary for him to pass through the
negative pole in order to reach the
positive pole of individuality. There
is no way by which any can attain any
positive truth whatever except by
going through its negative pole
first. The negative of a truth, or
the denial of it, proves the
existence of it, and puts us on the
right road to find it. The negation,
or denial of a truth, is the root of
that truth; and the limbs, leaves and
branches, flowers and fruit, which
are its positive pole, are sure to
appear in time.
Man, as to his personality, has
scarcely advanced at all for
thousands of years. The ancient
Greeks, though no further advanced in
individuality than we are, yet had
better personalities. They made the
development of beauty a specialty,
and they therefore presented a better
bodily appearance [270] than we do.
However, this fact shows no purpose
in these lessons, except to show the
relation of thought to the
personality.
No doubt the general tendency of
the race through all these centuries,
when it has seemed almost stationary,
has been toward the development of
intelligence up to the point where
unconscious growth would be merged in
conscious growth, and the race be
enabled to take hold of itself, as it
were, and do its own growing. But
generation after generation have been
born and died, and the great
conception has taken place only
within the last few years--the
conception of the fact that conscious
growth is a possibility to us.
Conscious growth involves the
necessity of knowing how to grow. It
involves the necessity of
understanding the Law of Growth. And
the race could not advance from
personality to individuality until it
had learned that all growth was based
upon the Law of Attraction, and that
this Law was expressed in the
creature as desire. In proportion as
it learns this great fact it will
begin to trust its desire; by the
doing of which it will lay the
foundation for its individualization.
And in proportion as it trusts its
desires it will begin to disbelieve
its old, inherited beliefs. In this
way its personality will gradually
change to individuality.
Now, the purely personal man is no
man at all. He is a bundle of
inherited beliefs. He has no
character. That which appears to be
his character is not actually his. It
does not stand upon its own
foundation of reason. It simply
stands upon hearsay, and it is a very
weak thing. And yet it is one of the
most obstinate and immovable things
imaginable; and it is this simply
because it does not stand on the
basis of its own reasoning powers,
nor of any reasoning powers whatever.
It is what it is, because it is what
it is. It believes the things it does
believe simply because it is the
petrifaction of those beliefs. It can
give you no reason for anything, and
it therefore furnishes you no hold
upon which you can insert an
awakening thought. It is little
better than an automaton. It goes
through life as its father and its
grandfather did; and about the only
purpose it serves is that of an
almost impregnable impediment to
those who have begun to think outside
of the old fossilized beliefs, and
who are thus manufacturing character
for themselves that will in time mark
them as distinctly
individualized.
To develop the truth that will
lift man from the personal to the
individual life will require all the
space I shall occupy in the
forthcoming lesson. There will be a
good deal of repetition as a matter
of course. For these lessons are in
almost diametrical opposition to the
cut and dried beliefs of the whole
race, and the great difficulty will
be for the student to unlearn the new
and saving ones. If my students were
children with minds as unwritten as
fair blank paper, I could readily
plant the seeds of this mighty and
only saving truth in them, but they
are not children; they are already
mature in erroneous beliefs. Their
minds are like gardens overgrown with
many weeds, and the weeds must be
pulled out before the new seeds of
this wonderful and ever-growing truth
can spring up and make much headway
in its new soil.
The teacher of such royal truths
as these of Mental Science is the
veriest iconoclast. He is the
image-breaker of the age. He must of
necessity antagonize old race
prejudices, and for a time produce
confusion in the mind of the student.
Life, in its coming, stirs up
commotion. It is only death that is
quiescent; only stagnation that works
peace. “Keep me out of still
water,” is the prayer of the
truth seeker. Christ, who knew the
effect of truth, said: “I come
not to bring peace but a
sword.”
Almost the whole world is in still
[271] water. Those who are immersed
in this deadly quiet are satisfied to
remain there. They partake of the
deadness of thought that surrounds
them, and are virtually dead
themselves. “Leave us alone to
our slumbers,” is their cry.
But the student of Mental Science
must expect to be shaken as with the
trump of doom; for these great truths
bring life, and life means activity.
It means effort. It means the
awakening and unfoldment of every
faculty, many of which no man as yet
dreams of possessing.
I say the whole world lies
slumbering in the lap of ignorance,
and its slumber is so deep and
profound that its awakening will be
like bringing the dead to life.
Therefore the student who feels in
himself the first thirst for this
great truth must keep his eyes
steadily fixed on its revelations. He
must never look back to the old
sheltered nook where his former
companions are lying at ease. He must
understand once and for all that the
quiet place where they are resting is
in the shadow of the deadly Upas
tree, whose very atmosphere is death.
If these companions will not come
with him, he must come alone. It is
the only way he can save himself; and
eventually he will see that it is the
only way in which he can save them.
In entering, therefore, upon the
study of the Law of Being, which
means nothing less than absolute
conquest of disease, old age and
death, the student must resolve to be
held by no preconceived prejudice, no
result of any early training, but to
follow where truth leads, and to do
it boldly.
Years ago, before I had heard of
this great science, I found out that
truth only gave itself in exchange,
as it were, for him who sought it.
Truth and the one who seeks it will
sustain the relation of lovers to
each other. They will give
reciprocally. The more we give
ourselves to truth, the more truth
gives itself to us. And there is no
freedom except in truth. Since all
our fetters are of ignorance, it is
truth alone that makes us free. For,
remember this great fact, that truth
is actual life, and expresses itself
in flesh and blood; thus renewing our
bodies more and more daily.
I have made these statements in
order to give the student courage as
he pursues the truth. It takes a bold
man or woman to break loose from the
thralls of a world’s ignorant
opinions, in which he or she has been
held so long, and to launch boldly
out in pursuit of something untried,
simply in the hope of finding more
soul-satisfying food than they have
had before. There is a letting go of
the old before the new is reached,
and there is nothing but faith to
bridge the two conditions. For my own
part I had long seen that there was
nothing in the old, and I did not
fear to venture toward the new. I
felt that I had nothing to lose and
everything to gain; and the result
has justified my belief. I know that
I am standing on firm ground now. And
it is a worldwide space, and a sure
foundation--no less a space, no surer
a foundation than a knowledge of the
splendid faculties latent in men, the
investigation of which will make them
manifest, and bring heaven to light
right here on earth.
Heaven is surely within. To
recognize this fact little by little
is to bring it forth into our
everyday uses and thus to make play
of all the work that now so loads us
down and smothers us.
Therefore I say to the student, do
not hang back from a thorough
investigation of this study because
your creed-bound neighbors are afraid
of it. The creeds had their origin in
the race’s infancy, and are as
unsuited for the race today as
jews-harps and marbles are unsuited
for grown up men. Come with me into
each new position as I shall lead you
forward, and use your own judgment
concerning its correctness.
There is no doubt but you will
meet [272] with much criticism from
your friends. They will believe you
to be on unsafe ground, and will
think that you are jeopardizing your
soul. Their influence may even alarm
you and cause you to ask yourself if
you are really sinning in what you
are doing. Then stop and investigate
the question, “Am I a
sinner?” Take the orthodox
ground in answering the question if
you wish. The orthodox say that God
is all in all; that there is no space
where he is not. Now, God is absolute
good; sin is an impossibility to him.
He is in you. If he fills all space,
he must be in you, and he must be in
you as pure goodness. Therefore you
are not a sinner. You cannot be a
sinner. You may believe yourself to
be one, but it is not so.
So you see that taking this thing
from an orthodox standpoint, you have
logically proved that you are not a
sinner. You can commit many errors,
you can make many mistakes, but they
are not sins, no matter how terrible
they are. The spirit of Life within
us--the Law of Being--that I have
called God in the foregoing
paragraph, is capable of yielding us
all truth; but unless we seek the
truth we shall not find it.
Truth is the knowledge of Being;
seek this knowledge and you become
clothed with the power of knowing.
Therefore if ever the question,
“Am I really a sinner?”
arises in your mind, go alone,
holding fast to the statement that
all is good, and wait until the
answer comes. It will come, and when
it comes it will come in these words:
“If all is good (God) you are
not a sinner, and there are no
sinners.”
To accuse yourself of being a
sinner, or to accept the accusation
as it comes from your more ignorant
friends, is the first step in Mental
Science where you will feel the very
foundation of your old beliefs shaken
under you, and you may for the time
be frightened--frightened to think
that you are not the sinner you
believed yourself to be; frightened
to think that you are not standing in
the position of danger you had once
seen yourself in; frightened at the
wide area of freedom that is opening
before you.
And now, one word about freedom.
Although it is the goal of happiness
to which all our aspirations point,
yet secretly the race fears it, and
prefers its bounds rather than trust
itself within its unfettered
dominion. The reason the race fears
freedom, even while longing for it,
is because it has been encouraged to
believe in its own weakness instead
of its strength. And believing in its
weakness, it recoils from the freedom
that requires and indeed compels one
thing of every soul who would enter
her sacred precincts; and that one
thing is self-trust --the kind of
trust that enables a man to stand
alone in the dignity of a
consciousness of his own worth. We
may long for freedom until the earth
covers us, but until we achieve the
erect position of self-conscious
worth we shall never obtain it.
The character of Luther never made
much impression on me until I saw a
portrait of him. Then in the grand,
resolute old face, every line of
which portrayed the courage of true
individuality, I beheld the spirit
that “would go to Rome though
the very tiles on the house tops
turned devils to oppose him.”
And I saw more than the individuality
of Luther in the picture. I saw my
own individuality, and was a stronger
woman from that hour. I felt more
than ever the spirit that would not
conform--the spirit that dared stand
by my own desire and clothe it with
my new beliefs; beliefs born of my
own brain, in repudiation of my
father’s beliefs which had
clothed me, but which would clothe me
no longer.
What a mighty thing a man is when
he catches a glimpse of the true
spirit in him and begins to live from
it; when he sees his desires and
justifies them, and puts his faith in
them until they come forth
individualized, to set [273] aside
the poor, characterless personality
he was born into. When a man stands
by the spirit of himself--his
desires--he is strong; he feels the
magnitude of the moving power within
him; he begins to know himself. It
was not himself that he had known
when dwelling in his inherited
personality, but now he is no longer
held back by his former nothingness.
He recognizes the fire in the engine
of his existence and he prepares to
move forward in the direction of
freedom. He steps forth to take his
place on the apex of eternal life,
and the universe crowns him monarch
of all.
In reading over the above I recall
the bondage we are under to the small
things in life. The majority of
women, for instance, scarcely know
how to make a dress until they find
out how Mrs. Smith, or Miss Jones, or
Mrs. Brown, made her last new gown. I
am not in favor of entirely ignoring
the fashions in dress, nor in making
one’s self conspicuous in small
matters; but to be afraid to exercise
one’s own opinion for fear
somebody will speak of it, measures
an amount of servitude that is
appalling to think. And so perhaps as
good a denial as any other can be
based on this little illustration,
and here it is:
“It makes no difference to
me what other people wear, or what
they think of my wearing apparel, I
shall consult my own preference in
this matter. I love to dress
tastefully and with ease to myself,
and adaptability to my pursuits. At
the same time I do not wish to run
conspicuously against the established
fashion. I have taste in dress
peculiar to my cast of mind, and
probably to my style of appearance,
and I must honor this taste to a
certain extent because it is part of
my individuality; but whatever I do,
I shall do it of myself and for
myself, quite independently of the
opinion of others.”
Here is a first step taken in
self-assertion against the social
opinion that makes slaves of us all.
Next, in the matter of religion,
declare that no man, ordained or
unordained, shall do your thinking
for you. Claim boldly the privilege
of making your own mistakes in the
development of your own intelligence.
This is a bold step and brings a big
reward. It is a great conquest when a
man can face the people with a
resolution like this.
Once, in a creed-bound community,
where I, too, was creed-bound, it
came to my ears that a man in a
neighboring village had stood up in
church and told all the people that
he could no longer join in communion
with them, but must withdraw himself
from them. He said he had changed his
opinion. He had ceased to believe in
a personal devil and a vengeful God.
He could not help this, he
said--belief was not a matter of
choice with him--and he hoped his
dear brothers and sisters, among whom
he had been born and grown to
manhood, would not bear him any hard
feeling, for he was sure of one
thing, that since the terror of hell
fire and the fear of an angry God had
fallen away from his mind, he loved
every one of them a hundred times
more than he had ever done before,
and that the whole world, down to the
flowers and insects, seemed dearer to
him.
This went the round from mouth to
mouth among the ignorant people, many
of whom pronounced him a devil
incarnate. Being a child myself, I
naturally accepted the popular
verdict concerning him, and my
imagination had no difficulty in
fitting him out with cloven feet and
horns. Several years afterward I saw
him. And what a man! With no more
education than those about him, he
had been constructed entirely on
different principles--a mammoth head,
features of indescribable beauty, a
faultless form--his entire appearance
that of a Greek god. A man so nobly
balanced and so just that all people,
far and near, came to him to settle
their disputes, instead of resorting
to law.
[274] What a lesson the sight of
this man was to one of my age then,
coupled with the words I remember
that he spoke!
The affirmations for lesson
fifteen are something like as
follows--the student may vary them to
suit his special needs:
I am stronger in my own selfhood
than I would be by merging my
selfhood with that of a thousand
other people.
One man can be stronger alone
if in the consciousness of true
individuality, than a thousand men
combined who are destitute of such
consciousness. Therefore,
Resolved: That as I cannot
lift men to this consciousness all
at once, I will in the meantime
stand alone, and thus get the
measure of my own strength.
I will stand on my own
beliefs of what is right and
nothing but honest convictions
shall swerve me.
I will not thrust my opinions
upon other people, nor antagonize
them purposely, but I will
carefully hold them to my own
mental statement of Being; namely,
that all men are great and good
even though unknown to themselves;
and thus shall I behold the seed
sown in silence and darkness spring
up to life and light, until they,
too, shall stand in the noble
individualization of the true human
magnet, and be able to wield the
power such a position
commands.
At each moment when the old
habit of ignoble concession tempts
me I will remember that the world
needs men, not things; and I will
stand by my manhood--stand by the
best I know, not in querulousness,
but in the strength that shows
forth in justice and love.
I will at all times hold my
thoughts firmly to the conviction
that I can make myself to be
anything I choose; also that I
choose to be more and to know more
than any human being has ever been
or known.
Having taken my stand as a
believer in my own eternal
progression, I shall proceed to
push ahead past all the beliefs in
sin, disease, and every form of
weakness simply by claiming what I
want, and expecting to receive
it.
I shall go over the arguments
laid down in these lessons until I
know at least something of my own
worth and power, and have begun to
feel the mental strength that comes
from such a knowledge. And as
mental strength is physical
strength, I shall thus establish
this personal me as firmly and
nobly in the external world, as the
individual me is already
established in the inner life. I
shall bring forth the inner me and
make it personal, or externalize
it.
I shall remember constantly
that the more firmly I hold for
myself, knowing that there is
nothing too good for me, the
stronger and healthier, the happier
and more prosperous I shall be,
until I feel myself gradually
becoming an irresistible power for
every form of good.
And so shall I be builded
into a glorious magnet, and come
understandingly into the potency of
the Law.
