LESSON III
OUR BELIEFS
Helen Wilmans
A
Home Course in Mental
Science
Benedict Lust, N.D. M.D.,
Publisher
New York, 1921.
[55]
Because a man is a mental, and not a
physical creature, it follows
necessarily that as a man believes, he
is. Therefore, his beliefs in sickness
and death are real conditions though
mental, and he passes through these
conditions on his way up from brute
ignorance to divine intelligence. They
are incidents peculiar to one phase of
his growth. Do not forget that all of a
man’s growth is purely
intellectual. It is the acquisition of
new knowledge.
And once
more I repeat, that a man being all
mind, it cannot be otherwise than that
all his conditions are mental.
One mental
condition is as real as another, and
every mental condition a man is capable
of, is dependent for its character upon
his knowledge of absolute truth.
It is not
always convenient to put a man’s
belief in sin or power of evil in the
same category with his beliefs in
sickness and death. What he calls his
sins, and for the punishment of which
he has devised various tortures, some
of them eternal, are simply the
mistakes he makes in the heaven-born
right to pursue happiness. But sickness
and death are mental conditions of
negation or ignorance, which are
universally conceded to bring their own
punishment.
The race
has never devised a hell in which to
punish people for being sick, and yet
sickness and death are as culpable as
those acts we call sinful, and have
their origin in the same cause; viz:
negation or ignorance.
It is
entirely proper to treat sickness and
death as beliefs, because a man is a
mental creature, and all his conditions
are beliefs; but beliefs are real
conditions. A belief that is based on
the great foundation theory of this or
past ages, that evil is a self-existent
force, must necessarily be a negative
belief because it rests on a mistake.
It has not the solid basis of absolute
truth on which to rest, and from which
it is fed constantly. It is like the
house built on sand, which, when the
rains descend and the floods come, is
washed away, and the world sees it no
more.
But the
beliefs which rest upon that
incontrovertible and universal
truth--all is good, or Life--are
positive; they cannot be shaken; they
are fed every instant by an influx of
new truth, and they become stronger and
stronger, building him who entertains
them into splendid health and strength
and beauty and courage; carrying him
every moment farther away from the
possibilities of ever again dropping
into the negative condition where
sickness and death can master him.
But since
animals are comparatively healthy, how
does it happen that the human family is
so diseased?
As stated
before, I take an evolutionary view of
this subject. And for the sake of those
too deeply rooted in the old to take
suddenly to the new, I will say that
this view does not conflict with the
Bible. I have been an earnest student
of the Bible, and I am convinced that
if the believers in the evolutionary
theory knew a little more of the Bible,
and the theologians a little more
evolution, the “irrepressible
conflict” [56] between science
and religion would melt into
nothing.
The
printed Bible is a wonderful book.
It shows
forth the effort of the master minds of
past ages to solve the problems that
evolution alone has power to disclose;
and the revelations of those struggling
minds in conflict with their own
ignorance, and the ignorance of the age
that surrounded them, are surely the
most glorious example of heroism ever
beheld.
The men
who wrote the Bible wrote from their
own interior perceptions. They looked
in their hearts and wrote. And this is
why the Bible comes so nearly being a
transcript of evolution. Every man is a
world in condensation; and when he
writes from himself he writes in a
great measure the history of the world
just as it is written on the rocks and
glaciers.
Take, for
instance, what the Bible says of the
Garden of Eden, where man dwelt in
happiness with himself and
“God”--which means good--a
state where the infinite good was not
doubted. All of this refers to the
harmonious, instinctive life of the
race before the dawn of man’s
reasoning faculties, which awakened his
conscious individuality and led him to
ask a thousand questions that he was
not able to answer and which have kept
the race in a constant state of
fermentation ever since.
But though
the Garden of Eden was peaceful and
contented, man can never return to it.
The angel with the flaming sword does
actually guard its gates to this day,
and no one who values his growing
intelligence--which is his hope of
salvation--will ever attempt to
return.
The race
is a transitional period from animal to
divine. In our animalhood and while
guided by instinct, before the
awakening of the reasoning faculties,
we were at rest, at ease--whole in our
condition. We were all mind then as
now, for there is nothing but mind; but
we were crude mind--crude minds,
rather--whose organism did not evolve
sufficient thought to awaken and call
us out of our sphere. We were in a
condition of repose. Even now we see
the animals content, comparatively
healthy and happy, except as they come
under man’s influence, and yield
to the ban of his beliefs.
But man in
his long journey upwards from the lower
planes of development reaches a place
where he begins to ask questions. The
first question shaped in the animal
mind brings disquietude and shuts the
primitive Eden on the questioner. His
ease is broken; the search for more
positive truth has begun, and it will
never end until understanding rewards
him.
The
road--a very dark road indeed--from our
Eden of primitive content to the heaven
of understanding, is through an almost
unbroken jungle of doubts and
perplexities. As each small eminence is
reached from which we can see a short
space ahead and around, we gain a new
belief with regard to our conditions
and situation.
These
beliefs are “legion.” The
world is full of them. All down the
ages, as far back as the memory of the
race can reach, they have been bad,
worse and worst.
Always the
idea of God existed. The idea has had
its form in every shade and grade of
crudity. People have even thought Him a
monster to be propitiated. Almost
universally He was believed to be felt
and acknowledged, and the idea of
becoming reconciled to this power
became the central thought of the
religions of the world.
Disease is
absence of ease. When the reasoning
power first emerged from the
instinctive or animal life sufficiently
to ask a question, then there was
disease--absence of ease. Then a little
more light came, and with it more
questions and still greater absence of
ease.
Presently,
men began applying herbs and such
remedies, thus medicating the effect
instead of the cause; and yet because
cause and effect are different degrees
of the one mind, herbs and minerals
have operated to work cures, and [57]
still operate to do so among those
persons who have not awakened to a
knowledge of their own positiveness and
to the fact that drugs are negative to
themselves. It is only a negative
person who can be affected by drugs. As
soon as a man becomes conscious of his
own position in the world, and sees
himself master of all things, he knows
that drugs are negative to him and can
do him no good. The time was prophesied
when men would drink poisons without
harm. This time would be here when men
knew themselves at one with the
“Father”; when they should
have made the
“atonement”--the
at-one-ment, the at-one-mind--when they
should be one with the Law of their
Being.
All of
which means that when men understand
the Law of Being they can do what they
will and suffer no death. Death is an
intellectual separation from the Law of
Being, or the Life Principle.
This is as
good a place as any to speak of the
character of drugs, etc. I maintain
that life can only be expressed through
individualization; that every shrub and
every created thing has its own
individuality and its own character;
and that the character of different
herbs and minerals affects us when
taken into our organizations until such
time comes as we rise to the positive
pole of our life magnet. Then all drugs
and all minerals will become negative
to us. As this process of becoming
positive is a gradual one, so it will
only come about gradually that drugs
will lose their influence upon us. Fire
will also lose its power to harm us in
time. It, like other negative things,
will become negative to us. All these
things are negative to us now in point
of inherent force, but until we rise to
an understanding of the positive pole
of life, where we come to an
intelligent recognition of the fact,
they might as well not be.
We can
have no truth until we recognize it. We
are all mind, and mind can only have
what it believes it has. The beliefs of
these individualized minds called men
and women are their realities.
I am aware
that Christian Scientists say there is
no power in drugs but that drugs
possess only that power conferred upon
them by the belief of persons--by the
belief of the world. But this is not
so. The peculiar quality of almost all
medicinal herbs was discovered
accidentally. The true character of the
herb created the belief; the belief
never created the character of the
herb. We might as well say that belief
created the quality of cold in ice or
of heat in fire.
But no
matter what the character of any herb
or substance, that character will cease
to affect him who has come consciously
into a knowledge of his true relations
with all the earth. Man is master, and
everything below him is ready to
acknowledge the fact as soon as he
declares his authority.
To return
to the point from which I departed in
order to make the foregoing
explanation, I call the world to
witness, that in spite of improved
sanitary conditions, disease has
increased with the progress of
civilization. This is because
man’s intellect has expanded, and
in this expansion he has asked more
questions which he could not answer,
and so has created in his mind still
greater disease, or absence of ease. He
still imagines himself an outcast from
his God in consequence of some sin
committed by his ancestors, and all the
time he is trying to make his
peace.
And so the
whole world is struggling in the toils
of a thousand absurd beliefs born of
ignorance of its true relations to the
Law of Being. We are in the dark; we
have never been in the light.
Incipient
man, undeveloped man (and remember that
all things are man--the tree is a
rooted man, and the horse is a
four-footed man) is at ease in his
ignorance of a higher life of
understanding. And this condition was
his Eden before he reached forth his
hand and took fruit from the tree of
knowledge. The tree of knowledge has
[58] wrought to the full every curse
that was predicted of it.
Woman
became conscious of her pain in
childbirth, and learned to dread it.
Man became dissatisfied with herbs and
berries, and earned his bread by the
sweat of his brow. And thus the race
has forged its way through bitter
experience since that faraway first
question which destroyed the even
balance of the instinctive nature,
until now.
And what
do we find now? Why this, as Tennyson
expresses it, “knowledge comes,
but wisdom lingers.” The
knowledge of many things is ours. Look
over the world and see what mighty
combinations we have made, what states
we have builded, and what inventions we
have constructed. And yet “wisdom
lingers,” for we are no happier
than the beasts of the field or the
birds of the air; nay, we are not half
so happy. They still enjoy their first
Eden, but we, though long since
departed from that crude state, have
not yet completed the circuit round
that upward spiral, which shall open
the corresponding Eden lying so far
above the other, all bathed in that
light which never “shone on land
or sea”-- the light of
understanding. But we are coming to it.
And at last we see all our disquietude,
which we have named sin, sickness and
death, is only false beliefs--false
opinions based on untenable grounds. We
have believed ourselves separated from
the good, the Life, and, therefore,
aliens to happiness. We now know by
argument based on the eternal
principles of absolute truth that this
is impossible. We know that the Law of
Life, the mainspring of vitality, does
fill all space, and that we are a part
of it, as pure as it is. We know that
we do not have a dual life--one of
spirit and one of matter. We know that
our lives are whole,
“holy.” We have come
consciously into true relations with
the universe through the knowledge of
the truth. We know that we are all
mind, or spirit.
Note the
point. We have always been in true
relation to the Law of Being, but we
have not always known it--we have not
always been conscious of it. All the
long road covered by the period in
which our reasoning powers have been
developing up to this state of
consciousness in the truth, has been
filled by ignorant beliefs and wild
speculations based on such evidences as
we received from our five avenues of
sense. But the five senses were never
to be trusted. They themselves were
creatures that needed education before
we could safely rely upon them. They
brought us reports of evil continually
when there is no evil. Now that we know
what truth is, these senses are
constantly bringing us reports of good,
and it is only as they bring us reports
of good that we can trust them.
To deny
entirely the evidence of the senses, as
some of the leaders in Christian
Science are doing, is the height of
folly. I simply deny their evidence
when it is not in accord with the
fundamental truth--all is good, all is
Life.
Observe
this: We have recast the statement of
our lives. We no longer reckon from the
premises of a dual life, part mind and
part matter. We have to get our
reckoning from a different standpoint.
We are all mind; therefore, each
individual mind must shape its
conclusions from a mental basis.
If I
reason out the fact that all is good
and there is no evil, my senses must
bring evidence from every point in
accordance with the truth which my
brain has evolved, or I will not
believe them. By the truth evolved from
the positive pole of me (my brain), I
have learned that all is good, and my
senses, which belong to the negative
pole of this me, must submit to the
logic of the fact as reported by their
superior in authority and power, and
must bring evidence from every point of
the compass in confirmation of it.
Men
believe themselves and others to be
evil, and thus believing, they proceed
to work out their own beliefs. We,
being all mind, are as sinless as the
Law, of which we are the manifestation
or visible expression; and when our
senses confirm this doubly demonstrated
truth we can trust them.
[59] But
when our senses tell us that we are
sinners, or that our neighbors are
faithless or vile, we know that they
lie to us because we have proved by
logic, based on universal or absolute
truth, that no one can be vile.
When our
senses tell us we are sick, we must
deny the power of sickness over us.
Before we come into the truth that all
is good, we cannot deny it. We have to
submit perforce, and thus take the
consequences of our ignorance. But now,
in the light of absolute truth--the
truth that all is good--those relative
truths of our negative or ignorant
former life called sin, sickness and
death--are to be denied in the most
uncompromising manner. For, do we not
know that we are all mind and that mind
is the Law made visible?
There are
cases where I count it wise to repeat.
It is always well to repeat again and
again in teaching, and, therefore, the
following will be excusable:
Mind is
both negative and positive. If any
substance could be perfectly inert
(which is impossible) it would be
perfectly negative mind. Neither can we
mention anything altogether positive.
The terms negative and positive are
relative. They mean vitality
unexpressed, and vitality more and more
expressed in higher and still higher
degrees for the universe is one mighty
magnet, ranging from lower to higher
degrees in expression of vitality all
the way through.
In
proportion to the amount of vitality
expressed by an order or group of
beings, is the intelligence of that
order or group. In the entire range of
being, from a clod to a plant, from a
plant to the lowest animal life, and
from the lowest animal life to man, the
entire difference in shape and
intelligence is accounted for by the
difference in the amount of vitality
expressed. If a tree expressed as much
vitality as a cow, it would not be
rooted in the ground. It would possess
a different organization and be enabled
to walk abroad. If the cow expressed as
much vitality as a man, her gaze would
not turn downward. Her superior
vitality would have projected a nobler
expression of itself, and her thoughts
would range out horizontally and
upward.
All along
the road of development from low to
high, from negative to positive, we
have been climbing step by step from
animalhood to divinity. Born of the
first faint monition of sex, which is
only another name for the Law of
Attraction, or the Life Principle, was
the resolve to move on. And this
resolve is the organized Life impulse
as expressed in the individual. It is
the Law of Attraction
individualized--incarnated. That is to
say, it is positive good, or the Life
Principle, made visible by recognition
of itself. It is the first little
thrill of desire or aspiration. All
compulsion is in aspiration. Desire is
the beginning of growth. All along the
road, up to where we now are this
original life impulse to move on has
pushed its way through negative forms
of mind. At every advancing step it has
left behind it that negative part which
it could not refine or make to
correspond with its own more vital
desire and this dropping off, or
leaving behind its less intelligent
part is called death. And thus man has
made a stepping stone literally of his
dead self at every point where the
negative part of his mind (he is all
mind) prevented the growth or
expression of his positive part--his
thought life. He burst through a
thousand rings of negative mind before
he reached the place where he knew that
all is mind. But he has reached that
place now.
Through
and through, the consciousness of the
true metaphysician tells him that he is
whole, or “holy”--being all
mind. It is the consciousness of his
wholeness that is called the atonement
in the Bible, and upon which the
salvation of the race is rightly
declared to depend. For it is by reason
of this consciousness that man is
endowed with all power over negative
mind. He can make this negative mind
conform to him to the utmost. So
perfectly, indeed, will be his ability
[60] to control negative mind, that he
need no longer escape from it as in
death, but will have it in his power to
refine and vitalize it to such a degree
that he will not need to lay it down in
death.
The
salvation of the Bible is made to
depend on belief. This also is the
doctrine of evolution. Believe and you
will be saved. Believe what? Believe
“God,” which means good.
Believe in the allness of good; believe
in the perfectness of the one spirit of
Life that permeates all things.
All is
good, and there is no evil. This is the
great truth to which Mental Science has
at last carried the leaders of the
world’s thought. These leaders
have passed the long night of hideous
dreams which the race calls sin,
sickness and death. They know that sin,
sickness and death are but the changing
shapes projected upon the world’s
camera obscura by the
people’s dawning
intelligence--not yet brightened into
that light where its reflections could
be considered anything more than the
fleeting vision of the hour. Our
beliefs in sin, sickness and death are
the result of our negative condition.
We can educate ourselves in positive
truth to such an extent that there need
never again be the breaking of the
magnet man by what the world calls
death.
This
lesson would be imperfect were I to
pass on without acquainting the reader
with the power of the world’s
established beliefs, and giving him an
idea of how they are to be overcome;
for they must be overcome, or death and
disease will always hold the race in
the very same fetters in which it
writhes today.
Race
belief is responsible for the condition
in which we see the people. It is
responsible for all the weakness and
wretchedness and poverty we see about
us. And yet the greatest crime one can
commit is to project a belief beyond
the damning beliefs that are killing
the people, one and all. It is heresy
to think a vital thought, because a
vital thought reflects discredit upon
the old, stritified or fixed thought
called race beliefs.
These old
beliefs are holding the race in a
condition of living death, and nothing
but new vital thought--which is
“heresy”--can save it.
I call the
entire product of the world’s old
thought to judgment this day. I ask it
to show something it has produced
besides disease and death. I state
boldly that it not only has nothing
else to show, but that it has rung down
the curtain and turned off the lights
upon the farther power of the people to
show something better. It says
virtually, “Wisdom dies when I
die.” “I am the ultimate of
intellectual effort,” claims this
most monstrous tyrant of all the ages.
Think of an ultimate to human
intelligence that ends in death instead
of a conquest over death; an ultimate
to the ever progressive mind that
sanctions the existence of disease and
murder and poverty and a condition of
unbroken hell, instead of conquering
all these negatives, or denials, of
mental power, and establishing heaven
on earth! Think of an ultimate to human
endeavor that ends is pulseless sleep,
instead of awakening the vital powers
of an unexplored universe and rifling
its treasures for the enhancement and
the perpetuation of its own vitality
and pleasure!
“We
are getting old, and death is
inevitable.” This is the language
of the day. This is the effect of the
world’s devitalizing and
monstrous beliefs; to which it adds the
threat that he who projects a belief
beyond these beliefs is a heretic, and
must be damned.
Why, the
race is damned already in the deadness
of the beliefs that hold it on the low
and wretched plane of vitality where it
now rests; and who cares for further
damning? The only further damning
possible will be more damning of the
same kind; and this will be better than
the half deadness of our present
condition. In our present condition we
are dead and conscious of our deadness.
In deeper death we will be as we are,
only unconscious [61] of our misery;
and this will be a gain.
Half-way
conditions are never palatable. I know
that there is nothing that can
re-vitalize us but the birth of new
thought in our organisms. By the birth
of new thought I mean the acquisition
of new truth.
And the
acquisition of new truth I am going to
have, though all the hells of the whole
world’s old thought must be met
single-handed and conquered. Why?
Because my salvation and the salvation
of the race depend upon it.
There is
but one thing to be saved from; that is
the creeping deadness which is even now
benumbing the faculties of every soul
who has emerged from childhood, and
which ends in death. This condition is
the negation of life, and is the result
of living too long in one set of
beliefs, without prospecting farther
ahead for still more of truth’s
living waters. For the waters of truth
that sustain us today will not sustain
us tomorrow; we must draw fresh
draughts from this undying spring
daily, or we die ourselves.
It has
been the bane of the race to believe
that one draught from this spring of
life is enough for its salvation. As
this one draught, however, has not
saved it, it then makes another mistake
by supposing that the salvation
promised is to be postponed to a life
after death. In this way, it entirely
ignores the self-evident fact that
present life is all the life there is.
Life is Being, and Being is now, and
can only be now. To live today, we must
be today. When tomorrow comes, it will
then be the present time, in which we
must still be. Life is the one fact in
which there is no postponement. If we
fail to live today, we have lost the
day; we cannot postpone this
day’s living until tomorrow.
We are
expressions each instant of an
everpresent truth; and by the
understanding of this truth, we live.
But it is each day’s new
understanding of it that enables us to
show forth new or fresh life. The
understanding of the truth that we
obtained yesterday will not serve for
today’s needs, although it served
for yesterday’s needs. It is like
the food we ate yesterday. The food
that strengthened us yesterday sufficed
for that day, but we need more for the
present day.
The
beliefs of a past age were sufficient
for that age. They afforded all the
mental sustenance the age demanded. But
the new age of today is demanding more
wisdom--a wisdom that will change our
present beliefs--and because it is not
getting it in such quantity and quality
as it needs, it is more devitalized,
more listless and languid, more
diseased and dying, more debauched and
reckless, than any previous age in the
history of civilization.
Old
institutions are worn out because they
stick to the identical ideas that once
met the needs of the race, but that no
longer meet the increased needs of a
new race. Daily and hourly the people
are becoming more indifferent to the
allurements of a heaven postponed to a
future world. They are demanding heaven
right here and now, and are accepting
in lieu of it such apologies for their
ideal conceptions of it as the world
can offer in shape of its poor, little
limited range of unsatisfactory and
evanescent amusements.
And
what--under these circumstances--are
the teachers of the people giving them?
What are the churches doing for them?
And what is the popular literature
offering them?
The
teachers of the people are giving them
nothing that they need, and have,
therefore, lost their power to teach.
The churches are still presenting the
same old ideas, but the people are no
longer accepting them. What then? Are
the churches searching for new truth on
which to fill the great mental craving,
no matter what it looks like? No, they
are not doing this at all; they are
simply calling upon that brute force
called established authority, to assist
them in ramming their rejected ideas
down the people’s throats, in
spite of the people’s wishes.
This [62] is the attitude the church
occupies today towards the entire body
of thinking people, who are craving, as
men never craved before, the stimulant
of mental food that is to save them
right here and now, soul and body,
whole and in one piece.
Practical
salvation is what the people want;
salvation that can only come by an
increased and an ever increasing
knowledge of new truth.
Practical
salvation is the present demand of the
people; and the whole world--so far as
the schools, the churches and popular
literature go, is as dead under this
demand as our burnt-out satellite,
beneath whose borrowed rays no seed
germ is ever warmed into existence. And
this only half. This dead theology, and
dead educational system, and dead
literature that once held their seats
of honor by the consent of the people,
and even by their veneration, are now
holding these same seats by a force at
once pugnacious, defiant and
intolerant. They have nothing to give
the people any longer. The people are
demanding new truth; vitalizing truth;
truth that will hold out stronger
inducements to all of life’s
present activities, and stimulate to
the unfoldment of nobler activities
right here in the world.
For the
thinkers have found out that true life,
vital, satisfying life, means action
and not ease; means conquest and not
slumber; means the ever unfolding
function of their own endless
progressive intelligences in uses for
the benefit of themselves and for those
for whom it is a delight to work, and
to whom it is a delight to give.
Nothing is
going to satisfy the thinkers of today
but the making of men and women out of
themselves, by that incessant
acquisition of new truth that I have
already spoken of.
And this
acquisition of new truth means death to
the old beliefs. But the old beliefs
are consolidated, petrified by ages of
seasoning, and they are not going to be
broken up and scattered to the four
winds of heaven without an effort on
the part of the thinkers.
Farther on
in these lessons, there will be one or
more chapters on denials and
affirmations, which will give the
student a better idea how to deal with
the old beliefs than can be done in
this chapter. But a hint, at least,
will be given.
The
student is requested to think of the
subject as here considered. He is asked
to take one idea at a time and
scrutinize it closely. Then let him
take the entire subject of the lessons
and regard it attentively as a whole,
and see what conclusion he comes to. If
what I have said seems logical, then
let him take up the other side and
think of it. Let him ask himself what
salvation he can find in the old
beliefs. Let him look at our whole
social fabric, with its competitive and
brutal systems, and see if he considers
the race saved. Let him acknowledge
honestly that such as society is, it is
the result of the world’s present
beliefs; and then ask himself if it is
not time to break away from beliefs
that have been faithfully held to for
thousands of years, only to bear such
fearful fruit, let him plunge into such
reading as the daily paper for a week,
to see the murders, arson, suicides,
false dealings of man with man; the
huge swindling combinations; the wide
disparity between the capitalist and
the man who works for him; the
thousands and thousands of homeless men
who are begging for the simple
privilege to work; the soup houses in
our cities; the churches closed and
empty on week days, while men, women
and children freeze on the streets; the
general unrest; the curse of
uncertainty in every cup--that of the
millionaire no less than the pauper.
Let him look at all this, and know that
it is the result of the world’s
present beliefs, and then turn back
again to the first of these lessons and
read them over with an understanding
wide awake and receptive to new
ideas.
LESSON
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES
* * * * *
A Home Course in Mental
Science
Table
of Contents
