LESSON II
THOUGHT, THE BODY BUILDER
Helen Wilmans
A
Home Course in Mental
Science
Benedict Lust, N.D. M.D.,
Publisher
New York, 1921.
[35] To
understand the Law of Being is to
become master of those conditions
called sickness and death. This
understanding is the knowledge that
works what would now be called
miracles; because to understand the Law
is to be one with the Law, and the Law
is diseaseless and deathless.
Good and Evil
In all the
universe there is nothing but good.
There is no evil. Evil, like disease,
is a misconception of the law.
Evil--the same as disease--has the
foundation for its belief in our
ignorance of the fact that all is life,
and therefore altogether good.
We are not
evil. We are ignorant, and it is our
ignorance that is counted to us as
evil, or sin. But ignorance is
undevelopment, and undevelopment is not
sin. The child is more undeveloped than
the man, but he is not therefore more
evil. He makes more mistakes than the
man, but it is because he has more to
learn. His mistakes are helps to him,
because he learns from them, and they
are, therefore, good. The race believes
itself divorced from God (or good)
which is an absurd idea, since
good--the Life Principle--fills the
universe, and divorce in the universe
is impossible. It remains for the race
to learn that “all its
evils” are the result of its
unripe intelligence, and that error,
sickness and death are not positive
forces. What the race calls its sins
are simply the mistakes of its negative
or unripe condition; they are pitfalls
into which we stumble in our blind
groping after light.
Man is
feeling his slow way from animalhood to
divinity. What is his guide? I answer,
the hope of happiness. From low to high
there is one incessant search for
happiness. The tiger eats a man to
appease his hunger, this being his
highest realization of happiness. The
murderer kills a man for the revenge he
feels to be his due, or for money to
purchase some gratification. In either
case, it is the allurement of happiness
that prompts the act; and in both cases
the act is the same in character, both
acts emanating from the same
instinct--the irrepressible desire for
happiness. The man who kills or wrongs
another in the pursuit of happiness
commits a great mistake. What does he
need? He needs intelligence; he needs
to be raised from the negative pole of
life--the animalized and irrational
condition--to the positive pole of
existence, by education. Suppose that
it is not safe to society to turn him
at large while he is being educated?
Then shut him up. Society must protect
itself, but it need not turn murderer
to do so. A large majority of men on
earth today are seeking happiness by
methods that, though less disastrous
than those pursued by the tiger and the
murderer, are still prompted by the
same mistaken idea. What is the cause
of it? Ignorance.
What will
remedy it? Intelligence. Good exists
and is omnipresent; but the race is too
ignorant or too negative to grasp this
splendid truth. The truth is
attainable; has always been [36]
attainable; but only a few have grown
tall enough to see it.
In our
darkened position we can only grasp
limited or relative truths. It is these
limited or relative truths that we call
evils. In every act of our lives we are
seeking happiness, and we are here for
no other purpose. Being ignorant,
having barely emerged from the negative
under lives we have lived from our
individual beginnings, we do not know
how to seek it. We seek it by mistaken
methods, and by our mistakes we learn
the true methods. So every mistake
becomes a stepping-stone that lifts us
to higher planes of thought and life.
Without these mistakes we would never
have risen to where we now are. This
has been our only possible way of
climbing from the negative conditions
we are approaching. And thus every one
of our so-called sins has only been a
mistake which has benefitted more of
the race than it has harmed. In our
darkened situations, we have nothing
but our mistakes to learn by.
As there
is a positive and a negative pole to
everything, so there is a positive and
negative pole to truth. Error is the
negative pole of truth; hatred is the
negative of which love is the positive;
death and disease are the negatives of
which life and health are the
positives. The physical and spiritual
parts of a man are the negative and
positive poles to the one mind that is
he. Always in our search for truth we
grasp the negative first; then we learn
our mistakes by experience with it. And
this mistake becomes the finger-post
pointing us to the positive pole, or
truth positive. Having tested both
sides, we then know ourselves on solid
ground. Our lesson is well learned and
we are ready for another. And in this
way the race has been advancing through
the negations of truth, up to truth,
till at last it begins to behold the
positive truth and to formulate it in
the statement that all is good.
Negative
corresponds to ignorance--it is the not
knowing. Positive corresponds to
intelligence--it is the knowing. In our
ascent from lower or undeveloped
conditions, it cannot be otherwise than
that we pass through a period of
ignorance concerning universal truth
before we reach that point in
intelligence where it becomes plain to
us.
Life and
health are the two great realities.
They have existed forever and will
continue to do so. All life is truth on
its own plane of development. In every
person or creature or plant, the
conditions or environments are
consistent with the developments of the
person or creature or plant. If a man
is sick, he is in the toils of the
negative conditions, which he can only
overcome by a knowledge of greater
truth.
Sickness
seems and is a real condition to a sick
man; but it is not an absolute power;
it is not a positive thing, as health
is, and is nothing to the man who has
learned his power to overcome. Sickness
is the negative of health, or the
denial of the presence of health, or
lack of practical understanding of the
fact that health exists and is a
positive thing to be attained by
positive intelligence. As a man is all
mind, mental ignorance of the existence
and the ubiquity of the health element
is sickness.
“But,” says the student,
“in this case everybody in the
world would be sick all the time,
because all are ignorant of the fact
that the health element alone
exists.”
This point
is well taken and must be explained. In
the first place that condition of
health which the race enjoys called
“normal” is a very low
condition indeed, and in comparison
with the high and splendid condition of
vitality to which it may attain, it is
little better than sickness. It is a
condition of negation of this wonderful
vitality that is in store for us, and
is so decided a negation of it that it
is open every moment to the inroads of
a thousand beliefs in disease, and is
constantly [37] tumbling into these
beliefs. In this shaky, uncertain
condition I have spoken of, man’s
entire condition is diseased. And truly
the whole world is so overspread with
convictions of the potency of disease,
that but for the fact that the health
element is ubiquitous and asserts
itself in spite of race convictions, as
every absolute truth always does, the
whole race would die of its numerous
beliefs in disease in less than a
year.
Sickness,
then, is ignorance of health; and
ignorance that cannot help being made
manifest on the man’s exterior,
because he is all mind. The man is a
unit, and what he does not know is made
apparent on his bodily appearance the
same as what he does know. That is, the
ignorance or negation of intelligence,
either with regard to happiness or
health or life, makes itself manifest
on the man’s surface mind (which
is his body) the same as his
intelligence does.
And is not
this an evil? No, it is good, both to
the sick man and to others. It is a
condition of ignorance to be overcome
by a knowledge of this great, absolute
truth to which we are all evolving--the
truth that all is good. It must be
borne in mind that we are growing
creatures, and that we have no way to
grow except by the recognition and the
appropriation of truth, and that if we
did not take the penalty of our
ignorance we would never learn. It is
because we are all mind that we cannot
escape the penalty of our ignorance,
for every ignorant thought transcribes
itself on our external or crude mind
(our bodies).
I put my
hand into the fire and am burned. It is
not because the world believes the fire
will burn me that I am burned. It is
because my hand is negative to the
fire. And yet I am more intelligent
than the fire. How, then, can it burn
my hand? I answer that my thought is
more positive than the fire; but my
thought is the positive pole of my
life; and the positive pole of me (my
thought) has always denied all
relationship to the negative pole of me
(my body), and the negative pole, thus
denied, is less positive than the fire,
and is burned by it. The fire cannot
burn by thought. It cannot, therefore,
destroy the finer or more intelligent
part of me. It can only destroy that
part of me which I have not so infused
with intelligent thought as to render
it indestructible. The positive pole of
my life has evolved past the hurtful
influence of the fire, but the negative
pole has not. Therefore, the negative
is dependent upon the positive pole for
its power to resist the influence of
the fire. This fact is due to the Law
of Growth, which leads us on from
incipient developments to greater and
greater inheritance of power, and not
(as is supposed by some teachers of
Mental Science) to our beliefs alone.
For it must be borne in mind that in
the process of evolution we encounter
in our growth from negatives to
positives, the negative condition
first, because the unripe always
projects from itself the ripe and
precedes it.
The riper
thought is the product of the body. It
is true that the body is all thought.
But the body is thought that heredity
has fixed in certain forms of belief,
and from these fixed forms of belief, a
freer quality of thought is generated.
Now it is this freer quality of unfixed
thought that, being dissatisfied with
the fixed habit of thought to which it
belongs, and which generated it
(namely, the body) is always ready to
prospect for new conditions and new
truths. This latter quality of thought
is invisible to mortal sense, and has
been supposed to be a powerless thing
except as it prompted to external
deeds.
But it is
anything but powerless; it is the
product of the body, the body is also
its product.
Do not
forget that it is one with the body,
and that its relation to the body is as
the positive pole of the magnet to the
negative pole.
Though
evolved from the body, thought has been
the body-builder from the first. But as
this process took place on the
unconscious plane of [38] growth, very
little was known of its power.
But now,
after the deepest study and much
experiment, it is known that conscious
thought, educated thought, thought that
begins to know its own power, can break
up the fixed habit of thought, from
which it was evolved (the body) and
make the body over again in the form it
most admires and desires. Educated
thought can change the body’s
fixed habit of belief in disease, old
age and death.
And
because this is so, the old
dispensation of suffering and weakness
and wretchedness is about to close, and
the era of man’s complete mastery
over his body and his surroundings is
about to begin.
Man
created himself on the unconscious
plane through the medium of his blind
desires. As an animal he followed where
his desire led, unmindful of
consequences; and in doing this he
gradually developed from the atom to
what he is now.
But his
development has been slow recently; and
this is because he could go no farther
until he had discovered the law of
growth, and had found out that thought
was the chief factor under the law.
Now, in
his animal, or unconscious growth, the
desire that constantly led him into
better conditions was simply unanalyzed
thought. Thought is the great factor in
race growth, and in individual growth,
whether it defines itself of the
thinker or not.
Up to the
present point in growth, thought has
not been intelligently defined, nor its
power understood. It has been supposed
in general to be a sort of
supernumerary in the mental economy,
except so far as it was pinned down to
hard work in the solution of problems
and the manufacture of useful things;
as to the great bulk of it, that went
gadding about building air castles in
Spain, and roaming the universe in
aimless abandon, it was called
imagination, and was supposed to be a
delusion and a snare, by those who were
“foolish” enough to attach
any importance to it.
But it is
the imagination that is the
body-builder. It is this quality of
untrammelled thought that is now
recognized as the wings of the body;
the lifting power of the body.
And note
this; it is not an unintelligent
lifting power like steam. It is
thought; it is the body’s most
intelligent, ethereal essence, and its
most emancipated mentality. It is that
part of the body’s self which has
not succumbed to the fixed habits of
the race; it is that part of the body
which is free; which feels that it does
not have to accept the beliefs or
conditions it was born into.
Being
educated in a sense of its own power,
it refuses to accept any beliefs or
conditions that are not pleasing to
it.
But it has
not known its power until recently. It
accepted the race opinion, of itself,
and considered itself a sort of
ornamental appurtenance in the human
economy. Thought has only begun to know
that it is a power. It does not, even
yet, know what a perfectly wonderful
power it is; but it is gradually
learning this. It does not yet know
that it has power to renew and fashion
the body, out of which it had its
birth. It does not know its own power
to prevent fire from consuming the
body. But it has this power, and in
many instances in the world’s
history it has done this very
thing.
A
man’s body is the product of
evolution. The thought generated by the
body may be considered a later product
of evolution; or, rather, that quality
of thought that recognizes its own
power (for in strict truth the body and
the thought are coeval--being one). But
it is scientific to affirm that the
riper thought of the present day is the
latest product of evolution.
The
relations of body and thought have
always been interactive. At one time
the body is the cause, and thought the
effect. Then, thought will be the cause
and the body the effect. This has gone
on in a gradually ripening process,
unnoticed by the individual, [39] until
at last thought has developed to a
point where it begins to recognize its
power as a factor in growth; moreover,
as a free power, unfettered by the
fixed beliefs which compose the
body.
What a
tremendous position this is!
Who doubts
that we stand on the threshold of the
mightiest revelations our world has yet
seen?
Man,
self-created and self-creative; and
with the knowledge of how to create
self.
When man
makes a mistake, it is a mistake all
through and through him, because he is
all mind; and this is the reason we are
said to take the consequences of our
mistakes. We are our own mistakes, and
we are gradually ceasing to be mistakes
as we learn more and more of this
absolute truth, all is good. We are of
a piece with our beliefs. When we
believe we are sick, we are sick; first
because we are yet only crude
developments, and therefore, liable to
come under the dominion of negative
influence; and second, because after
coming under such influence our
uneducated thought holds us there, in
part, by virtue of its being the
master. We need not believe ourselves
subject to sickness. We must educate
ourselves in a knowledge of good and
its omnipresence and omnipotence, and
we must learn to unfold the power we
have within us for the overcoming of
all obstacles. It is there in plentiful
supply for all emergencies, and we may
have it for the taking and using.
Sickness,
though a true condition, is but a
relative condition; one that relates to
and is dependent upon this particular
stage of our growth from negative to
positive life. As a relative truth it
is helping to open our eyes to a better
understanding of absolute truth, and
is, therefore, a good thing. It is the
disagreeable consequence of a mistaken
way of thinking, and of being negative.
If we were not sick we would not
perceive the negative condition which
the sickness indicates, and would not
seek for the knowledge by which to
overcome it.
Error,
sickness and death are negations of
Life. The history of the race is a
story of its efforts to overcome these
results of its negative condition. In
other words, it is an effort to grow
larger, and stronger and greater by the
recognition of more truth, or life, out
of the universe of all-truth or
all-good. We express just as much of
this all-truth or all-good as we
recognize, and no more. But the more we
recognize the more positive we become,
and the more we outgrow those
conditions or beliefs, called error,
sickness and death.
Good,
Life, is omnipresent, omniscient,
omnipotent. As we come consciously into
an understanding of the omnipresence of
good, we will become happy, and we will
know the true methods by which
happiness is secured. We will then make
no more of those mistakes the world
calls sins and punishes as sins.
As we come
consciously into an understanding of
the omnipotence of good, we will have
power to overcome our environments and
to overcome all obstructions, thus
widening and deepening our lives and
work, not only for our own benefit, but
for the benefit of all.
As we come
consciously into an understanding of
the omniscience of good, we will feel
the presence of life; we will know that
it is around us and in us and above us
and below us, and we will not be afraid
lest we “dash our foot against a
stone” and fall headlong, as we
continue our journey through the
universe. All of this knowledge will
the body imbibe from thought, the
body-builder.
The time
was when these lives, latent in the one
Life, were made manifest, or became
organized in individual lives; they
were expressed or they became
externalized. And very small lives we
were in comparison with what we now
are. All happiness is in growth, and we
became growing creatures. A man only
has that which he lives; he only has
that which he can accumulate by the
process of growth.
[40] If
ever the time should come when we
reached that utmost point of growth
called perfection--that point beyond
which we cease to grow--life would hold
nothing more for us. Growth is life;
stagnation is death, whether it occurs
in a worm or the highest arch-angel.
When growth ceases, life ceases. We are
all right, even here in our negative
condition, because we can grow out of
it. We can only grow in good because
there is no evil to appropriate in our
growing. We can only grow in
intelligence and strength because in
our upward climb out of the negatives
and into the positives, we leave
weakness, which is ignorance, behind
us, where it belongs, and advance
steadily to the realm of positive
intelligence and strength. Matter as a
substance distinct from mind does not
exist. What we call matter is only the
more negative parts of mind less
infused with intelligence. At death,
the man lays down the negative part of
himself because his thought--the
positive part of him--is not
sufficiently educated in a knowledge of
its own power to save the body from the
Law of the negative conditions--to
quicken it, and thus render it positive
and consciously alive all through and
through, as thought itself is. The
first step toward quickening these
bodies so that they shall become
positive to those negative conditions,
or beliefs, called sickness and death,
is to show that matter is not a
substance distinct from mind. Matter is
negative mind, and these bodies of ours
are laboratories for the refining of it
into positive mind: thought.
Thought,
then, which is evolved from the great
body of crude or undigested mind that
the world calls matter, is the most
active substance that we know anything
of, and is by far the most vital and
intelligent. Electricity is rapid in
its movements, but it does not
annihilate time and space as thought
does. It is thought alone that can
compass the bounds of a world in a
second; and thought is generated by
these human brains. Electricity is an
unorganized power; thought is its
master, and can organize it. The
thought which our brains generate is
powerful only as it counterparts
universal thought, which is Life, or
Being. Therefore, thought is the
positive pole of the magnet man; it is
the captain of the craft, and has the
directing power over him.
Thought
can make sick and it can make well.
Thought grounded in error, or from a
negative basis, and educated in the
knowledge that all is good or life, can
make well quite as easily. Thought,
though unseen, is still a substance; a
substance as much more powerful than
the crude substance called matter, as
steam is more powerful than water.
Thought,
the captain, has never recognized its
power over its own craft, nor over the
thoughts of other people. And yet,
being a substance, it goes out of these
human brains and meets the thought
emanating from other brains, and an
influence is wrought which the
individual as a whole (positive and
negative poles together) knows almost
nothing of.
The
thoughts that go out and meet and
influence other thoughts bring back no
report of the fact, simply because they
do not know that they can do so, and,
therefore, do not listen for them. That
sense by which we can hear these
thoughts is rudimentary in us, and will
only develop by use. The time is no
doubt near at hand when our thoughts
will go forth to distant points and
bring back to us a perfectly correct
report of what has been transpiring in
the place where they have been
visiting. We are only beginning to be
conscious of the power of thought, and
we do not even imagine how much it
partakes of the omniscience of the Law
of Being.
Thought
demonstrates its omniscience in
proportion as we recognize its quality
and power.
It is by
thought that we heal. If my thought is
grounded in the belief that all is
good, or that all is Life, it is
positive to your thought, which is
grounded in the belief that evil exists
and has [41] the power to harm. The
truth is always positive to error, and
can make a convert of error, provided
it is conscious of its power and able
to direct its forces aright.
A
conscious knowledge of the power of
thought is essential to the use of that
power. A comparatively weak man who is
conscious of the power of thought, and
who believes in and trusts his own
thought, may gain control over the
thoughts of a more intellectual man
than himself, provided this man is
unconscious of the power of
thought.
“But
this is mesmerism, and it is an evil
thing,” you say.
“Yes,” I answer, “it
is mesmerism, but it is not an evil
thing.” “And why,”
you ask, “is it not an evil thing
for a mind to gain control over another
mind in every way superior to itself,
and use it perhaps to serve its own
selfish purposes?”
I ask in
answer, why is it not evil for the
electric storms to devastate the West
and the South as they do every Spring
and Fall? There is a great power made
manifest in these electric storms that
man must discover and appropriate for
the use of the world. We would never
know that the power existed but for its
fearful manifestation. It is just so
with the power of thought--we have
discovered its power through the
seeming evil of mesmerism. In both
cases the good lies in the power
manifested. When this power shall be
divested of its sting by the practical
knowledge that shall direct it to the
world’s immediate benefit, we
will begin to reap the harvest. It will
be the application of a greater power
than the race has yet known, operating
under the law of good to all; and we
will reap the benefits in the increased
health and strength of the race--even
to so great a degree as to banish all
its poverty, disease, old age, and,
lastly, death.
The race
is in the preparatory department of its
education yet. The books and all the
implements for learning the higher
branches are here now, but we cannot
read yet--we have not finished the
alphabet.
Thought is
the healer. Thought educated in the
knowledge of that universal truth--all
is good, or all is Life--becomes a
power not to be resisted by the
negative thought of the negative
individual. And the thought of every
soul whose belief is grounded in the
appearance of evil is negative to even
the weakest, frailest thought of him
whose belief is grounded in that great
truth--all is good, because all is
Life.
“Eschew evil and believe in God
if you would be saved.” This
means that we are to cease to believe
in evil and to learn to believe in
good; or to cease to believe in death
and learn to believe in life if we are
to be saved.
Saved from
what? Why, saved from so-called sin,
and from sickness and death; saved from
the undeveloped condition which these
words imply, by being lifted into the
power which the knowledge of truth
confers; and above all, which the
knowledge of that best of all truths
confers--all is good, because all is
Life.
A belief
in good, or the all-prevalent Principle
of Life, is the foundation rock of a
world’s salvation from error,
sickness and death.
A man is
all mind. As such he is a bundle of
beliefs. What he believes, that he is.
Therefore, his beliefs are his
realities, even though they may be
based on the untenable premise of the
existence of evil; yet they are his
realities as long as he lives them and
believes them. In order to be strong,
healthful, intelligent, vital,
beautiful, a man must believe in good
and only good; or Life and only Life.
As I have often said, the whole Bible
hinges on two words--
“believe” and
“overcome.” I am now
dealing with the first of these words--
“believe.” Believe in
good--which means life and health--and
be saved; “believe a lie and be
damned.” To believe evil is to
believe an error, and believing an
error is being damned, because no man
(being all mind) can escape the penalty
[42] of his beliefs. And he who
believes in evil (a lie) takes the
consequences of his belief in so-called
sin, sickness and death, and is thus
damned. To cease believing in error is
to cease being damned (whether in this
world or any other.)
If a man
believes himself sick, I treat him for
his belief. His belief is his real
condition. He is sick. Being all mind
he is, therefore, a series of beliefs,
and “as he thinketh so is
he.” The man is sick and his
sickness is unmistakable evidence of
his negative condition, and this must
be overcome, else growth would stagnate
in him, and he might as well have never
been born. How would a man know he was
negative unless he had some unpleasant
evidence of it? If there were never a
ripple to break our negative condition
and suggest an improvement, our
condition would not rise above that of
the brute. Indeed, it would never have
risen so high.
Then what
is the duty of a teacher? It is to
infuse the student with positive
thought. All positive thought is based
on the belief in absolute Life. The
more strongly the teacher is ingrained
in the knowledge of absolute Life, the
more powerful he is as a teacher. The
duty of the teacher, then, is to
present all the logic he possibly can
in favor of the fact that all is Life.
This logic must make its indelible
impression on the student’s
intelligence. The student must be
convinced that this logic is correct.
This is the teacher’s duty. No
teacher can do any more than to impress
the fact upon the student’s
intellectual perceptions.
And here,
where the teacher’s work stops,
the student’s work begins; for
this truth needs more than a mere
intellectual perception of it. It needs
to enter into every part of the
student’s organization and to
remodel him after its own pattern.
When this
truth shall have permeated every atom
of our bodies, there is no guessing how
vigorous, how perennially young and
beautiful we will be. This is the
advent of that age prophesied from the
beginning--the age in which man would
learn his mastership over all things
below him. I say “learn,”
for he is already master and does not
know it. To make man conscious of his
mastery over sickness and death is the
meaning of the present great mind
movement to which the thinkers of the
world are now directing their
attention.
EXPLANATORY
In lesson
two, I have said that the body
generates thought. I have also said
that thought builds the body. Both of
these statements are true. Thought and
the body are both of one piece, and in
respect to time are coeval. In point of
fact, the body is all thought. It is
condensed thought, or thought fixed in
certain forms of belief; and from it is
constantly being liberated (through the
mechanism of the brain) a lighter and
more free form of itself that is called
“thought” in distinction
from “body.” But the two
are only different forms of one
substance, and their relation is
interactive. They are cause and effect.
Their interchange represents the
“to and fro” current that
is inseparable from growth; that is, in
fact, the main point in evolution, and
which--in the nature of the Law of
Being, or the Law of Attraction--cannot
be otherwise.
The body
generates the thought, and has done so
on the unconscious plane of
intelligence always; and the thought
has permeated the deadness of the body
and enlivened and vitalized it, and
lifted it to higher planes of being,
also on the unconscious plane of
growth. And so growth has proceeded
until thought has ripened into a
consciousness of the situation, and
into a knowledge of its own power. And
it is now beginning to direct
consciously its own power down into the
body with a view to make such changes
and improvements in the body as are
prompted by desire.
Here we
see an instance of the action and
reaction involved in evolution, or the
Law of Growth. The body has now [43]
ripened the thought up to a certain
perception of its own capacity. And the
thought, thus ripened, now turns and
pours the ripened consciousness of its
own capacity into the body; thus
bringing up the structure of the body
to a higher plane of being than it ever
was before, and making it capable of
engendering higher and better and
greater thought, which will again pour
its influence into the body for its
further strengthening and uplifting.
This is the to and fro current involved
in all growth, and in all movement, no
matter what the nature of the movement.
It is action and reaction. It has its
rise in the Law of Attraction; and,
without it, the universe would be as
dead as a door-nail, and a good deal
deader.
LESSON
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES
* * * * *
A Home Course in Mental
Science
Table
of Contents
