[283] In looking back over the
previous lessons I find that I have
not made the subject of desire as
prominent as I wish to, and I have
concluded to say more about it. It is
a subject of vast importance. And
further advancement in growth depends
upon a thorough understanding of it.
Therefore I mean to make it plain,
even though I am accused of needless
repetition. This lesson will be in a
measure a recapitulation of the whole
subject.
How does it happen that man is so
in the dark concerning himself? It is
because he was not created a perfect
creature. It is because his
individual existence is of
comparatively short duration. It is
because he is a growing creature, and
has not yet attained the full stature
of the intelligent man.
Man has created himself little by
little all through a thousand ages.
Though latent in the one Life
forever, yet there was a time when
two or three tiny points of
recognition came together through the
Law of Attraction, and formed the
beginning of his personality. These
points of intelligence being fused
into one, thus became a magnet of
greater power than the simple magnets
around them, and as a center of
attraction had more power to draw
others to themselves; and thus
personal growth commenced.
And the tiny creature thus begun
kept on growing all the time, both
internally and externally. The more
it recognized the quality of the
power of the Law, the more power it
put forth. The basis of all growth is
desire. Desire is the unacknowledged
factor in the evolution of man.
Desire is the “cornerstone
which the builders rejected”;
and it is desire that shall prove the
chief prop in the foundation of the
temple “not built with
hands”-- the temple of
universal man.
The Law of Life has only one mode
of expression, only one voice, and
that is the voice of desire. The very
first faint monition of life was
recognition of desire. It was the
feeling of some want. This was the
beginning of individual growth. It
was, as it were, the projection of a
little voice that cried, “more,
more.”
And now I weaken in view of the
impossibility of showing the student
the mighty power of this tiny voice.
Oh, this voice! What a builder it has
proved! Mightier than a
magician’s wand, even in its
first faint, almost inaudible cry! A
mere speck, invisible through the
most powerful microscope, an almost
infinitesimal drop of (so-called)
protoplasm, yet so much incarnate
desire, and crying for food-- crying
for a more enlarged life, a wider
comprehension of Life, or Love. And,
only think of it, the little voice
reaching upward and expanding
outward, and the very universe
leaning to listen and bending to fill
the tiny mouth; stopping in her
beneficent motherhood to gratify this
baby demand.
[284] The very first little life
that sent out its cry for
“more, more,” became a
standing demand upon the universal
motherhood of nature, and the supply
has always proved equal to the
demand. And all through the period of
our unconscious growth the babies
have never once lost faith in the
mother. The spirits within them never
once thought of curtailing their
demands or of crucifying their
desires. To crush their desires was
to crush the Law of their lives. They
only recognized their desires, and
this was recognizing the Law; and to
recognize the Law is to make it
manifest. Now, the more of the Law
these creatures recognized, the
greater and stronger they grew.
I take it for granted that desire
is individualized Law. In other
words, the Law manifests in
individual desires. These desires
being clothed upon by individual
thought, or recognition, become our
individualities.
So the desire in a man is the
fountain-head of Life in the man.
Life has no other way of speaking
through individual recognition but by
desires.
Now, all through the period of our
unconscious growth we never dreamed
of questioning our desires. We obeyed
them. We yielded them a blind and
unquestioning obedience. And what was
the result? Why this-- the desire was
drawn forth to organization until the
tiny drop of protoplasm had built
itself a digestive system and a most
complex and beautiful form, adapted
to every possible emergency. Speaking
from a mechanical point of view,
desire, which corresponds to steam,
has built itself a beautiful engine,
and even an engineer (in the brain)
that was to direct the engine. But
the engineer at first did not know
his duty, and for thousands of years
he has been trying to learn it. It
has taken him all this time to get
acquainted with his engine and the
power that propels it.
As it is man’s highest
privilege to make mistakes, since it
is the only way he has of learning,
his first mistake was to imagine that
his propelling power, the steam in
his boiler, was a dangerous foe, and
to begin to repress it.
“I must crucify my
desire!” was the first
exclamation he ever made upon
becoming conscious of its presence.
“Desire is the devil!”
shouted the clergy for a thousand
years; and numberless monasteries
were built in whose seclusion it was
easy to crucify desire; easy to dam
up the energizing spirit of Life in
the man and prevent it from flowing
forth. It is a matter of history that
even kings and princes submitted
voluntarily to whipping on the bare
back as a penalty for having
entertained desire. Desire was the
great foe of the race. I have no
doubt but the devil in Eden who
tempted Eve was desire. Now, put it
this way, and let us see how that
fable stands. In one of my first
lessons I think I made it plain that
the garden of Eden was man’s
condition of unconscious growth. It
was that early condition in which he
conformed to the Law of his Being
(his desire) unquestioningly. There
was never a conscientious scruple to
trouble him in the gratification of
his wants. His life, though on the
animal or unreasoning plane, was
whole in itself. No side feeling ever
pulled him from the straight path of
his leading inclination. He devoured
other animals without compunction. He
never had anything to regret.
Consequently he was in a condition of
ease, or repose. This was the animal
Eden. In this Eden man did not work
for his living, but subsisted on what
came to his hand. But Eve--who is the
intuitional part of man--partook of
the tree of knowledge in the midst of
the garden, and her eyes were opened
so that she knew truth from
error.
Man represents the intellect and
woman the intuition of the race. With
the awakening of intuition came a
dawning knowledge of justice. For
intuition is the love-fountain in the
human being, and it is rightly called
female.
The very first faint intimation of
justice in the race broke up its
animalized [285] conditions, called a
halt in the progress of that old
first law in which might makes right,
and began a sort of unorganized,
primitive defense for the entire body
of the people. The moral aspect was
born, and its birth destroyed the
first Eden. Men began to labor for
their bread.
Their growing brains projected
ever new questions for solution, and
these questions were answered by the
feeble light of such intelligence as
they had; and false, or negative,
beliefs were the result.
In the old Eden only the brute
instinct was recognized, and this
brute instinct was devoid of
conscience. But the mother love for
the child, and farther on, the
mother-sympathy for other mothers,
interposed a check. Eve has always
molded Adam. Her tender nature has
always stood at the portals of his
more robust intelligence, and when he
opened to her, lo! she had the apple
in her hand. She had eaten first of
the tree of knowledge, of truth and
error, and she bade him eat of it,
too. He did so, and the primitive
Eden of animal content shut on both
of them forever. They had started out
on a life-long voyage in pursuit of
truth.
Desire is the unacknowledged
factor in personal growth. But is not
desire a selfish thing? And is this
not a good reason for crucifying
it?
I answer, desire certainly appears
to be a selfish thing. As man is a
growing creature his first desire is
expressed in an instinct for more
life. He cries for more life all the
time, and as his intelligence has not
ripened up to a point where a
perception of justice is possible to
him, he destroys ruthlessly the other
lives that come in his way so that he
may live. His ignorant but powerful
recognition of the Law of Life within
him is expressed in uncompromising
selfishness. Now, selfishness, even
in its most marked form, is nothing
but individualism expressed on an
animal, or undeveloped plane. The
animal, or animal man, who expresses
selfishness is still expressing the
Law by the best light he has; for
every manifestation of life is an
expression of the Law, no matter how
selfishly it is expressed.
The reason that more creatures do
not manifest more of the Law in their
personalities is because they are not
able to recognize more. It is the
personal intelligence that is at
fault and not the pure, bright,
unblemished spirit of the Law within
each creature.
Now, individualism--and note this
statement carefully--is the one
potent fact standing head and
shoulders above every other fact,
except that great and all-inclusive
truth that the Law is. For the
Law might as well not exist as not to
be able to express itself; and it is
expressed through individualism. The
spoken word of the Law puts its own
interpretation upon itself, and this
interpretation, no matter how
incorrect it may be, is the personal
creature, the external creature. At
present the spoken word is not so
much a true conception of the Law as
a misconception of it, just as if a
powerful thought had been uttered and
you had caught the words, but were
quite unable to comprehend the
meaning of them. So every living
creature, no matter how mean and
ignoble it may appear, is the spoken
word of the Law; and each of these
spoken words is hastening on to a
better recognition of its own
meaning. By slow degrees the spoken
words are discovering that the Law
infusing them is Love, and only Love.
And as this knowledge of themselves
grows within their own intelligences
their selfish methods of indulgence
change, and conform more and more to
the Law, which is pure justice, and
from which comes the knowledge of
universal brotherhood.
And yet it is true that the Law as
expressed within them is
desire--every bit desire. And this
desire always clamors for itself, for
its own interests. Were this not so,
individuality would be an impossible
thing, and the word of Life might as
well have remained unspoken.
[286] What is it that the spirit
of man clamors for? It is in
answering this question that we will
discover how desire may be the breath
of the divine spirit of all good in
man, and not the wicked thing we have
always believed it to be. Desire as
manifesting in individuality is
simply an ever-increasing demand for
more and more happiness. Happiness is
the right of every person. It is our
one aim and object, and our only
pursuit; and there is not a solitary
exception to the rule in the world,
or in the universe. The frailest and
faintest speck of life has started in
the never-ending pursuit of
happiness. It is infused by a desire
that is of the Law; or rather, it is
a part of the Law struggling toward a
comprehension of itself.
The Law is Love. It is the living
principle of attraction in all things
that seeks continually to draw atoms
into closer relation to each other.
Love, when it becomes a conscious
thing to the understanding of the
individual, shapes itself in desire,
or desires. With every step in
evolution, from lower to higher,
these desires become more numerous,
more complex and varied; and they
also become stronger. They are felt
to be the moving spirit of every
action, as indeed they ought to be,
for they are nothing less than the
voice of the one eternal Life
Principle that men call
“God.”
There is only one attracting
power, and it is the Law of all
substance. It is the same in essence
in the horseshoe magnet and in the
mother’s yearning for her
child. It is the same thing that
brings lovers together in marriage,
and partners in business. It is the
hidden motor to every movement that
was ever made--unintelligent
movements no less than intelligent
ones. It is this that draws the
moisture out of the earth on which
the tree feeds, and the substance out
of the sun’s rays with which it
colors itself in beauty.
The Law of Attraction, which is
the Love Principle, or Law of Life,
accounts for all things, and is
responsible for all things. It is
perfect, and therefore unchangeable.
It is the same in man, and in the
flowers and beasts, and it has but
one voice--the voice of desire. And
this voice speaks for just one thing;
it speaks for happiness. The methods
by which men pursue happiness may be
just or unjust. The desire, which is
the Law in man, has nothing to do
with his methods. The desire exists,
and this is all. The desire is the
man’s moving impulse. It is his
true, pure, unsinning self. The
methods by which he attempts to
actualize his desire have in the main
proven to be mistakes.
But the greatest mistake man has
ever made is to attribute his
mistakes to the desire within him,
when nothing was wrong but his
limited intelligence.
And it is because he has made this
vital mistake that he has spent ages
in crucifying his desires instead of
cultivating his intelligence
concerning their gratification. What
he now needs to do is to learn the
immense importance of his desires,
and to seek just and humane methods
of gratifying them.
In proportion as he sees the
strength and importance of his own
desires, he will see the strength and
importance of his neighbor’s
desires; and as desire is pure love
from the influx of the Law, he will
hold his neighbor’s desires as
sacredly as he holds his own, and so
justice will be born.
Now, justice--that factor that
harmonizes all influences, and in the
end produces heaven on earth--can
never be born of anything but
man’s recognition of the nature
of desire. For when he recognizes
desire he recognizes Love; and Love
is the Law of Attraction. So when man
recognizes desire within himself, and
understands its origin and meaning,
he will have found his own moving
impulse, and he will see that it is
as much of the Law as he can gain an
intelligent conception of. And he
will also see that every step of his
growth, from his first inception, has
been the greater and still greater
recognition of it; and that [287] his
further growth through eternity will
depend on the still increasing power
of his intelligence to recognize yet
more and more of the Law within him
as expressed in desire.
If this statement has made its
proper impression on the student he
will now perceive how it is that man,
as to his personality, is simply
intelligence, or mind, and how the
whole visible universe is mind in
different degrees of unfoldment. And
he will also see from this fact how
it is that his destiny is entirely in
his own hands, and always has been,
though he did not know it, and how he
may now begin to do his own
knowing.
Since a man, as to his
personality, and this is the visible
part of himself, is altogether
intelligence, it therefore follows
that the more truth he learns the
more he shows forth--the truth being
that the Law within him as expressed
in desire is the one diseaseless and
deathless thing; and that is the true
self within him; his untrue, or false
self, being the mistaken estimate he
has placed upon his real and true
self.
As a man’s intelligence is
expressed in thought which shapes
itself into beliefs, his body, or his
personality, is made up of his
beliefs. A man shows forth his
beliefs in his person. The Bible,
speaking of this, says: “As a
man believes, so is he.” When
he believes in error, he shows forth
error, or incarnates error in his
personality. As error cannot endure,
it therefore follows that unless the
man corrects his erroneous beliefs
his personality falls away from
him.
It is a fact that diseases are
multiplying all the time, and that
lives seem to perish more
easily--with less apparent
cause--than ever before. This is
because the new light is dawning more
and more clearly, and the old
consolidated beliefs of a hundred
ages are losing their hold on the
people, so that they weaken and
disintegrate more easily than
formerly.
Because of this fact, the most
intelligent of the world’s
physicians have lost faith in
medicines and stand aghast at their
own helplessness. Many of them have
retired from the practice of medicine
from pure conscientiousness on this
point. Mental Science will bring them
forward as the world’s
benefactors again. I say again,
because the noblest and most truly
unselfish men and women I have known
have been medical practitioners,
persons who have honestly tried to
relieve the world’s suffering
thousands. For remember this, that
though the world’s diseases are
only false beliefs, yet they are real
to it while they last because the man
is all mind, and his beliefs are his
conditions.
To repeat my ideas on desire--for
I can never make this point too
strong: the basis of all growth is
desire. The Law of Attraction
itself--that one and only Law, on
which all Life depends--is desire,
which is Love in expression, or Love
seeking and attracting that which is
related to it.
All growth of the individual,
therefore, is effected through
desire. Desire is the motor of every
effort; and external life means
effort and has no other object but
effort. The secret of the steel
magnet is desire; and no doubt the
entire universe of planets is
regulated and sustained in equipoise
through this great factor alone. The
words “desire” and
“love” are almost
synonymous; both are love; but while
love seems a quiescent principle,
desire appears to be the reaching
forth, or the yearning of love, or
love in motion going forth in search
of an object.
Man in his growth has nothing to
do with the Love Principle, or the
one vitality. That is to say, it
exists independently of him, and he
has no power to add to it or take
from it. It simply is. His
prerogative is confined exclusively
to the recognition of it; to the
getting a large enough perception of
its greatness, or a big enough
estimate of it. It is so mighty a
power that the human intelligence as
yet has gotten scarcely the faintest
fraction of an idea concerning it.
And yet this majestic power is the
individual Life Principle [288]
existing in indescribable greatness
in each man. It is the force within
him that actuates every movement he
makes. To connect the belief of sin,
disease, and death with this
ever-flowing, external potency is an
absurdity. And yet our
intelligences--quite ignorant of this
truth--have done this absurd thing,
and in this way have given to the
external world our weak, wretched
personalities that are standing
libels on our real selves--the great
and unconquerable individuals lying
latent within us.
This capacity of Love, or Life,
which manifests itself in numberless
desires in the man is the real man.
It is the true individual. It is the
almighty and one Life focused to
expression; an upspringing jet from
the unquenchable and divine passion
men call “God.” The
desire in man is a power--all his
own--drawn to coherence, or personal
comprehension, out of the one
indescribable force that sends the
worlds spinning through space in
obedience to its command. And it is
great and unconquerable as its
source.
This great creature then is the
real man--is the true individual--and
he is the Law individualized. Jesus
saw this whole truth, and when they
asked him, “Art thou
God?” hoping he would condemn
himself by his answer, he could not
deny it even though he knew they were
ignorant of his meaning and would
probably murder him for the truth he
spoke.
For my part, I am rapidly growing
to that point in intelligence where I
can understand such a man, for
instance, as Mohammed; a man who
lived comparatively alone with his
own understanding, and who studied
himself interiorly until he gained a
perception of his greatness; gained a
constantly growing perception of it,
until, looking at it in some supreme
moment, he could not restrain his
convictions of truth, but cried out
in glad exultation, “Surely,
surely, I am God.” Why, there
are days when it is as easy for me to
believe this myself and of every
living soul as it is to believe
ourselves only men and women.
Mohammed’s mistake was in
believing this stupendous fact of
himself only, whereas he should have
seen that all are gods in the same
sense that he was.
The difference of seeing for
ourselves alone, and of seeing for
ourselves and all others equally, is
the difference between injustice and
justice, or between hell and heaven.
To see within others the same
glorious spirit that we see within
ourselves is to abrogate those lines
of inequality we have considered as
race fixtures and to liberate every
living soul to the freedom of an
infinite possibility of growth. This
wipes out hell in every one of its
varied forms, and establishes the
harmony of an acknowledged and deeply
understood fraternal equality. Your
desire for happiness is as sacred as
my desire, and my desire is as sacred
as yours. When we shall learn the
binding claim of desire through
knowing that it is the voice of the
Law within us, it will become the
lovingest pleasure of our lives to
help each other actualize it.
To make this lesson practical--to
make it productive of present
results--I will now give the student
some affirmations and denials to be
used in studying it:
Desire is not the
“God-cursed” and sinful
thing we have been in the habit of
considering it. On the contrary, it
is the vitalizing Principle of
Life, to be recognized by the
intelligence, and to be led forth
into visible actions under such
direction from the intelligence as
will render it most effective for
good to ourselves and others.
Desire is the man in process
of growth. Desire is never diseased
nor sinful. It points only to
happiness; and as a human
intelligence I recognize this fact
and stand by my desire from this
time on.
My intelligence tells me that
the desires that apparently point
toward injustice to others do not
really point there, because
injustice to others does [289] not
bring happiness but misery, and
desire points to happiness
alone.
Make these affirmations and
denials slowly and thoughtfully. It
is no good to repeat them
parrot-like. Bend your intellect to a
full comprehension of their meaning
as you repeat them, these perceptions
to show forth in their bodies, and
they will take root in your brain and
drive the old beliefs out.
Not on any hypothesis can we base
the assumption that man is diseased
or sinful, or in any way subject to
death. Therefore let your denials be
to this effect. Call up the whole
argument, and then declare with great
positiveness, “There is no sin,
no disease, no anything that is not
desirable.”
You will say, “There is
poverty, and what are we going to do
about poverty?”
I answer, that in these lessons I
am not trying to establish a
student’s relations with the
outside world. I am simply trying to
establish him in a knowledge of
himself. If I succeed in doing this,
I shall have made a powerful magnet
of him, and shall have placed him in
the direct line of the Law of
Attraction, where all things that are
on the external plane that are
related to his peculiar faculty will
come to him through his personal
efforts, or his reaching out for
them. For though we are now in the
mental world, and have in a sense
forgotten the cast-iron limitations
that a belief in matter imposed upon
us, yet the time will never come when
effort will be unnecessary to us. To
be alive is to make effort; to be
more alive is to make still more
effort; and the time is near at hand
when we shall be a hundred times more
alive than we ever have been, and
when all this wonderful vitality will
be expended in effort that will
change the whole face of the earth,
giving us new climates, new
productions, and producing wonders
that we can have no present
conception of.
To establish the student in a
knowledge of himself is to put him in
a position where his ever-growing
demand for more knowledge of the
possibilities of the Law is met by a
never failing supply. Knowledge is
all that any man lacks. Knowledge of
himself means nothing less than an
ever-growing mastery of the
conditions that surround him.
These lessons have nothing
directly to do with man’s
external conditions. I am well aware
that the student feels the hampering
influence of his environments almost
as much, and sometimes more, than
what he calls his physical
disabilities. But these (so-called)
physical disabilities are really
mental disabilities. Each one of them
is a record of some particular mode
of thinking that is erroneous and
hampering. All of them together make
up the sum total of his ignorance,
which is the only foe to his freedom;
and this ignorance, or this negation
of intelligence, constitutes the
personality that he calls his
physical body, the body of his
present limitations. Now, if I can
get his “physical body,”
which is his intelligence, right, I
shall have placed him where he will
be in true relation to the Law of
Attraction; and when he is in true
relation to the Law he will find that
those things in the external world to
which he is related by desire will
come to him because they belong to
him. His effort to obtain them will
meet with a sure reward.
