LESSON IV
DENIALS
Helen Wilmans
A
Home Course in Mental
Science
Benedict Lust, N.D. M.D.,
Publisher
New York, 1921.
[71] All religions for every race and
tongue agree in revealing certain
things. They all hint at certain
forms of denial. They all coincide in
the idea that God--meaning mind or
spirit--perpetually creates or makes
manifest. But what are the denials
these various creeds hint at? The old
Puritans preached the most rigid
system of denial, depriving
themselves and their children of
every comfort in order that they
might please their “God.”
But their most strenuous efforts in
this direction failed to develop a
better condition of morals, longer
lives or healthier bodies. Neither
did the rigid heaven, which their
grim imaginations projected, serve to
attract the desires of the race
upward. And gradually, the mental
power, which is the Law in
externalization, and which is always
manifesting in spite of the frozen or
the torrid creeds of ignorance, set
these creeds aside; and the race grew
more and more in the knowledge that
it created itself for a life of ever
present happiness.
Carlyle said that for a man to be
happy he must utterly renounce self.
No man ever said a more foolish
thing. To renounce self is to undo
the work of creation by which we are
here today with the power to pursue
happiness. To stand by self, and to
build these selves up in such
strength that they can appropriate,
or make more of the infinite Life
Principle manifest, not only to
ourselves, but to the whole world, is
the object of creation.
Carlyle was wiser than his words, for
he did not renounce self.
Nevertheless, the conflict between
his puritanic creed and the natural
assertion of his powerful
individuality made his life so
inharmonious to himself and others
that his biography is one of the most
pitiful ever written.
Emerson thought that for man to be
healthy and happy he must come into a
state of non-expectation --ceasing to
look for good fortune-- and that in
this attitude the universal good
would flow to him.
Emerson tried to live this idea, and
what was the result? Why, this: That
great brain of his which was the
pride of the nation and of the world
broke down in every tissue--softened,
ceasing to generate a thought; and so
he died.
And yet every religion hints at
denial. Can it be possible that this
universal fact means nothing? No, it
is not possible, for the race beliefs
are precious things; and it is always
unwise for the thinker to discard
without investigation any widespread
belief like this.
If Life is omnipresent, absolutely
filling every point of space in the
vast universe, then it becomes a
truth subject to mathematical
demonstration that there is no room
for evil--assuming evil to be, as the
world now accepts it, an opposing
force to good, having equal or nearly
equal power with it.
We cannot put two substances into a
given space at one time. For
instance, a quart measure cannot hold
at once a quart of water and a quart
of wine.
[72] If good--by which I everywhere
mean the spirit of Life--Life being
good and only good--is a something
that fills all space, how can evil as
another and a separate something
occupy the same space at the same
time? It can no more do it than a
quart of water and a quart of wine
can occupy the same quart measure at
the same time.
There is no sin or evil in all the
universe. All is good, and good is
omnipresent. All the actions and
conditions the world calls evil,
sinful, wicked, and judges worthy of
punishment are only errors or
mistakes growing out of a lack of
understanding of omnipresent good. In
my denial of evil, I do not deny the
existence of murder, theft, lying,
selfishness, cruelty, revenge and the
like; but I do deny that they are
sins or evils. For these offenses are
only mistakes growing out of
ignorance as to the best method of
pursuing happiness. In this form of
denial I do not and cannot (of
course) change the condition itself,
as many Mental Scientists seem to
believe they are doing, but only the
aspect of it in your mind, revealing
it to you in its true colors as a
mistake; so that you will be able to
cast out all resentment, seeing that
nothing is deserving to be called
guilty, or is deserving of
punishment.
The condition called evil is a
condition with a sense of guilt
attached to it; a humiliating sense
of shame for wrong doing; and this
condition does have a place in the
realm of omnipresent good; but the
condition itself is but a belief in
evil, and it is a mistaken belief
similar to the belief in
disease.
Evil is not the opposing power of
good, as it has been supposed to be.
It is simply error. It is ignorance
of good. And so far as it is
ignorance of good, it is ignorance of
Life, or Being, and in this manner it
is its own retribution or
correction.
All ignorance is its own
punishment--ignorance of health no
less than ignorance of justice--but
the world does not know this, or it
would punish men for being sick with
as good reason as it punishes them
for any other error or belief.
Every form of ignorance shuts a man
out from a knowledge of the Law of
Being, which I have been calling in
these lessons by the simple and
comprehensive term of
“good.”
And every form of ignorance is its
own punishment inasmuch as it locks
up the Life Principle from the
ignorant person just to the extent of
his ignorance.
And yet every form of error is a
certain condition of good, for it is
a manifestation of Life, though on a
negative plane. It is good in an
unripe stage of development. Negative
or unripe good (or Life) always leads
to positive or ripe good ultimately,
just as unripe fruit must finally
become ripe fruit. Error is a
component part or a factor in
universal good, and is indispensable
to the completion of the great whole.
Truth and error are two names applied
to different degrees of development
in good, or Life. The unripe
development of the good we call
error; the riper developments of good
we call truth. But what we call error
as well as what we call truth, is
also truth on a lower or more
negative plane; for truth is
substance, and all substance is
truth, or reality in varying degrees
of negative and positive.
Therefore, the whole seeming
incongruity resolves itself into this
one simple fact--good is omnipresent,
and what we call evil is only
undeveloped good, which is destined
to become developed good, even as the
child is destined to develop into
adulthood.
The peach is bitter and repulsive in
one stage of its existence, but it
gradually ripens into the splendid
fruit we know it to be. The race is a
growth just as the peach is, and time
will ripen it out of every crudity it
now exhibits. Is it an evil thing for
the peach to be unripe? Surely not;
neither is it an evil thing for the
race to be unripe, since it is
ripening under the influence of its
varied experience as fast as
possible. To hasten its ripening, it
only needs the fostering protection
of a better system [73] of education.
It should be educated out of its
ignorance, its errors, its mistakes,
instead of being murdered for them.
We might as well beat the peaches off
the tree because they are unripe as
to murder and torture humanity for
its unripe condition.
Denials are in order, and the first
denial is, “There is no
evil.” The thought waves
flowing out from your mind, having
the mighty power of truth behind
them, travel in the same manner as
sound waves. They actually sweep the
very atmosphere clear from fallacious
beliefs, so that others--without
knowing why--feel the burdens lifted
from their conscience and their lives
brightened. Evil is not a positive
power any more than darkness is, and
is dispelled by the assertion of
truth, as darkness is dispelled by
the introduction of light. Therefore,
when the student declares stoutly,
“There is no evil,”
throwing his words world-wide, as it
were, the truth stands revealed; and
thus revealed it proves that the
belief in evil is incorrect. The
character of evil thus disclosed, a
man would be very foolish to place
his chance of happiness upon it.
Evils, or what we call sins, are the
mistakes we make in our search for
happiness; nothing more and nothing
less. And where is the person that
will risk anything of interest to
himself upon a mistake when he knows
it to be a mistake? He must see that
he would have nothing to gain, but
much to lose by so doing. This thing
of divesting what we call evil of its
sense of guilt, and placing it in the
category of mistakes will do more in
the way of reform than all the
penalty attached to it now. Show men
that it is not to their interest to
make these mistakes called sins, and
they will drop them. Take this line
of thought and educate the people in
it, and as soon as they learn the
true spirit of the thing, they will
no more invest their happiness in
such mistaken beliefs than they will
invest their money in swindling
enterprises.
No man would trust what the world
calls evil, only that he believes he
has something--some happiness--to
gain by it. He thinks the so-called
evil he is doing has power to give
him pleasure; or, at least, to
relieve him of some want he feels to
be mastering him.
Now, let us make a personal
application of this. Let us suppose
that I am unjust, and that I am
constantly chiding myself for it.
Does this chiding, this constant
reproaching from my conscience, cure
me? No, it cannot; for every effort I
make in this direction under the
conviction of sin is an admission of
guilt, which the truth in me refuses
to recognize. It is a lie in the face
of omnipresent good, and cannot
stand. What shall I do? I am
grasping, let us say, and not willing
to give others the privileges I claim
for myself--there is no denying it;
it is a fact. What shall I do about
it?
I investigate my feeling and find
that the sense of injustice which
possesses me is not bringing me
happiness. Am I, therefore,
transgressing the law? Remember, sin
is a transgression of law. But I am
not transgressing the law, for the
law remains inviolate, and must
always do so. The law is omnipresent
good, and no one can transgress it.
But we may endeavor to live by such
mistaken methods as personal
injustice prompts, always to prove
those methods failures. Therefore,
evidently these methods are the
result of the non-comprehension of
the law, and not a violation of it.
If it were possible to violate or
thwart the law, this would be an
evil, indeed; but there is no such
possibility. Therefore, we are
responsible for nothing but our
ignorance of the law, and lose
nothing but the glorious results that
would come if we understood it and
lived by it. Therefore, the
indulgence of my unjust ideas is my
mistaken method of pursuing
happiness, caused by my ignorance of
the law of omnipresent good, and of
the fact that nothing but my
co-operation with the law will
produce the happiness I seek. The
more the unjust person dwells on this
aspect of the case, the more he will
see its truth.
[74] A sin being an assumed violation
of law is something we feel we must
atone for. I deny the sin. I cannot
possibly sin, being a creature of
omnipresent good, there being nothing
else to manifest. Then, in
manifesting injustice, I have
manifested the negative side of
justice, and proved that it is not
what helps me to happiness, and I
naturally look forward to the belief
that a sense of justice will do it.
Thereby my mistake has been my
teacher. It has educated me in a
knowledge of positive good, and
proven itself a negative good in so
doing. And it is just so with all of
those mistakes called evils or sins.
They are the negative poles to
recognized virtues, and the virtues
are actually evolved from them. The
denial of evil, as a something for
which we are guilty and punishable,
finally makes the temptation to
commit it fall away from us, thereby
revealing the splendid knowledge of
our own mastery. If we know that our
mistake is not a culpable violation
of law, but only a blind and ignorant
method of pursuing happiness, as a
matter of course, we are no longer
tempted in that direction.
No man is tempted to make what he
knows to be a mistake.
His mistakes are inadvertent, and, as
he discovers them, he abandons them.
All mistakes arise from ignorance;
and every mistake is a negative good
because it is indirectly leading to
the thing the mind is prospecting
for--which is truth and happiness. If
it appears to lead in the wrong
direction for a time, it is because
it is necessary that we should know
the wrong thing before we can be
absolutely sure of the right thing.
We are all down here in these
negative conditions, having come up
just this far from lower or more
negative conditions still; and all
that we learn is by experience. In
this school we make many mistakes,
and these mistakes are all good,
being our teachers to point us in the
right direction.
Therefore, your first denial is that
of the existence of evil. Declare
again and again. “There is no
evil.” Do not wait for a full
understanding of the grounds of your
denial to come to you, but go on
denying, and, as sure as you live,
understanding will come. This denial
(which is true) will put you in a
state for the reception of truth and
the incarnation of it in your mind.
It is as if you said, “The
everlasting Life is here, though
invisible, and I will hold the fort
until it comes.” Doubts as to
its ever coming may assail the brave
soldier student, but no doubt shall
ever quite dislodge him from his
position. The winds and the rains of
a world’s adverse beliefs may
beat in his upturned face, but he
will down them all. As he stands
thus, the little plant of truth, that
thing of perennial growth within him,
is being fed from unseen fountains,
and its harvest begins to open to his
perceptions, and every day as he
stands there holding for it, truth
the invisible, becomes truth the
visible, breaking in glad
efflorescence about him in a hundred
desirable things of beauty and use;
filling him and surrounding him with
such opulence as no man ever yet
attained, or ever will attain, who
acknowledges evil as a real
power.
It is the effort of Mental Science to
provide us with certain facts,
arranged in systematic form, by which
we may gain understanding as we
proceed along our journey from the
not knowing to the knowing of these
truths. Denial has a cleansing power,
and is the first practical step the
student is called upon to take.
The omnipresence of good has been
asserted and proved most logically.
In making the denials, the student
must remember the reasoning by which
the declaration of omnipresent good
was sustained, and must hold it as
absolute security for all the denials
he is requested to make.
These are the denials:
First--“There is no
evil,” because so-called evils,
or sins, are errors, or mistakes; and
errors, or mistakes, are undeveloped
or unripe good.
[75] Second--“There is no dead
matter,” because what we call
matter is mind in a negative degree
of development.
Third--“Pain, sickness,
poverty, deformity and death cannot
master me,” because I have
developed out of that essential
belief in them that once made them
positive to me.
Fourth--“There is nothing in
all the universe to make me
afraid,” because I am the
highest expression of Being (or
Life), and so have dominion over all
the negative forces of the world; and
then, also, because all is good. Good
exists everywhere, and has always
done so, but we have not always known
it. We have been like children
blindfolded and crying that there was
no light.
These denials that I have given, if
persisted in, will tear the bandages
from our eyes, and show us that the
light, whose existence we doubted, is
the only reality above all realities.
The truth that all is good is a
living truth, and the whole impulse
of life is to make us conscious of
it. We are co-operating with nature
and the law of Life when we take
sides with the truth in declaring
there is no evil. We are declaring
our oneness with universal Law when
we deny the existence of matter as
something separate from mind. In
denying the supremacy of pain,
sickness, error and death we are
lifting ourselves out of the realm of
the negatives where such things are
possible. In denying the power of
fear, we virtually assert our power
over everything.
These denials have great potency. Go
off by yourself and say them several
times a day. When you are confronted
by events that seem to contradict the
denials, and your faith becomes
shaken, turn again to the first three
lessons, and read them carefully
over. The light will break in on your
mind from every new reading, and you
will be better prepared to make
denials afresh. Continue to do this
for weeks; continue to do it until
the light of truth shines all around
you. It may chemicalize you.
Chemicalization is a condition into
which students and patients are often
plunged by the receiving of new light
into the mind. It is a stirring up of
the dregs of long settled conviction,
and it makes some persons sick. It
may occur after any of the lessons,
but it is said to occur most often
after the lesson on denials. You must
not notice it. It will not hurt you
much, and in the end will greatly
benefit you. Refuse to come under the
bondage of fear or the belief of
evil. The state of confusion or
chemicalization will pass, leaving
your mind clearer than ever
before.
It is possible that these denials you
are making silently will antagonize
the persons about you, just as they
antagonize your old convictions, so
that you find unexpected opposition
at every step. You family may
manifest greater irritability than
previously. Your neighbors may seem
almost quarrelsome. Christ, who
seemed to understand this, said,
“I come not to bring peace, but
a sword.” He knew that truth
antagonized error, and was prepared
for its persecution in his own
person. The truth, which is beginning
to be organized in you, is shedding
faint beams abroad, and these beams
produce a disturbing influence.
The old system of belief, grounded in
error, rebels against the light.
There is a commotion among the bats
and night owls in the dim twilight
minds about you, and it is possible
that unexpected discouragements may
beset you. If so, deny their power
over you for even one moment. Say
simply, “Nothing can discourage
me. I am standing for eternal good.
It is here, and has always been here.
By my recognition of it--by my
holding the fort for it--it will
become manifest, not only to myself,
but to others.” And from this
starting point you will grow to be a
tower of strength. Presently, without
a word of explanation, you will
become a center of attraction. The
family will begin to gravitate toward
you more than ever, and so will your
neighbors. The bats and night owls
will have disappeared before the
light they found it impossible to
resist. Your [76] silent influence,
which was at first rejected, is now
found to be uplifting; and there is
no soul, however sunken, that will
not gravitate to an uplifting
influence, especially if it be silent
at first; for it is not well to speak
until your silent influence has
ripened the minds about you to a
certain degree of reception. It is
the blatant reformer that the
untaught mind rebels against. Keep
repeating these magic words,
“There is no evil.” Your
child may disobey you, but do not
punish him; lay your hand on his
head; raise your soul by mighty
effort of faith in absolute good and
say silently, “There is no
evil.” Many unpleasant things
may occur during the ensuing week,
but conquer them all with the words,
“There is no evil.”
Remember that people are acting from
the half lights that their negative
lives are yielding, and learn not to
expect perfect results from an
imperfect understanding of the truth.
Hold this mitigating circumstance in
your mind always when you are denying
for them that there is evil--that
they are not sinners, but only
misguided searchers after
happiness.
I have especially named the leading
denials, but there are others. If the
quick sense of anger rises in your
heart, deny it. Say, “I am not
so negative as to be governed by
anger.” In this way you will
gradually lift yourself into the
realm of the positives merely by
recognition of them. To deny the
supremacy of a negative over you is
to acknowledge and recognize the
supremacy of the positive within you.
Do not palliate your feelings or seek
excuse for them. Simply deny, saying,
“I am not angry,” and
maintain it in the face of all
contrary evidence. In this way you
fight nothing. You simply forsake the
negative and cling to the positive,
arraying your strength with it,
knowing that “God and one make
a majority.” If you see your
neighbor’s unjust conduct,
declare that it is but a negative
condition, and being such, has not
the power to hold him longer than
such time as he shall become
conscious of his positive power to
deny it; and your recognition of this
fact will help to cure him of his
mistakes, just as your silent
recognition of the health element in
the patient will make the health
element apparent in his body.
And so, little by little, we start
out to conquer a world of unbelief.
It is our mission to strengthen
ourselves daily by as much truth as
we can recognize and appropriate.
Dwell upon the idea that the good is
life, truth, love, intelligence,
substance; all-knowledge,
all-powerful, all-present--and that
we, being in it and of it, possess
life everlasting, glorious love and
mighty power; that like can only
create like, and that Life, being
good, can only externalize
good.
We cannot live in these self-same
bodies always. We have not lived in
them always; we have changed them
from day to day since the first
conscious breath that we drew, and we
will keep changing them atom by atom
forever. But it is folly, in view of
the fact that we have been changing
our bodies always to suppose that the
sudden and complete change, as in
death, is a necessity. Not a person
in the world has one atom of the body
today that he had ten years ago.
Indeed, so rapid is the change in the
human bodies that it is now said by
learned physicians that from one to
three months time is sufficient to
change every particle of them.
Then, since we are already replacing
the worn-out atoms of our bodies day
by day, let us see to it that we give
the new atom the stamp of immortality
from our newly revised beliefs on
this point.
In this way, each new supply will be
better and more vital than the former
supply. Thought has the power to do
this, being the governing and
building power of the body, and it
has the power to carry with it the
new externals, or bodily
manifestations. Your educated
thought, which is a substance, can
pour tangible invigoration into the
daily new supply of atoms for your
[77] body, by earnestly dwelling upon
these new truths, and trying to feel
(or, what is better--feeling) as you
do, so that your body is changing
under the influence. This, coupled
with the recognition of the fact that
the thoughts are the building power
of the body, will give you the
ability to mold your body as you
will. For your thoughts give quality
to your blood (healthful and more
immortalizing quality in this
instance) and your blood builds this
quality into your body, where it
shows forth in the measure of its
strength. This is the fountain of
immortal youth which Ponce de Leon
sought among the negative (physical)
things of earth, but which could only
be found among the positives of
life.
Every growing thought has the power
to carry with it its own new
externals, or bodily manifestations.
Do not forget this. This power of
thought will enable us to carry our
internal and external (soul and body)
together in harmonious unison
forever, not necessarily, however,
always existing on this earth. We
should pass into higher and still
higher spheres, which would open to
us as we become fitted by our
enlarged being to become actors in
them. For “our Father’s
house has many mansions.” Not
understanding, at the present time,
how to maintain the harmonious
balance in development between our
thought life and our visible (or
bodily life) we are able to live so
long only as the two grow in
unconscious concord. Just as soon as
this concord is disturbed by the
negative laws which govern the
body--the law of the animal
existence, which is the law of
disintegration, the dropping away of
the body, as it were, before the
power of thought--then the thought
and the body cease to work together
smoothly. The body (or negative part
of the mind) becomes an impediment to
the thought (or positive part, which,
as yet, does not know that it has
power to retain the body) and there
comes that separation we call death.
The thought life bursts away from its
impediment, which it cannot raise,
because it has not made the atonement
through a saving consciousness that
it and the body are one
substance--all of one piece.
Death is simply the result of
ignorance of the power of thought to
save. Our bodies are our external
minds. They are not to be undervalued
as they have heretofore been. They
are the expression of our widely
diversified individualities, and are
important to us as the organized
expression of our present state of
thought. Our bodies are the
limitation of the thought that is
ourselves, just as the skin of the
peach is the limitation of the
substance that is the peach. We can
remain in ignorance of our power over
these bodies, and, in consequence, be
forced to lay them down in death; or
we can refine them by a consciousness
of our power over them, thus
rendering them so pliant that they
will change in conformity with every
new thought that we acquire, in this
way becoming perfect manifestation of
our growing, beautifying, inner
selves. Which shall we do? There is
an atonement to be made, which alone
has the power to arrest that breaking
of the magnet man in death.
The atonement, the at-one-ment of
thought and body, must be made by a
conscious recognition that we are all
mind. It must be made either here or
hereafter. We have power to make it
here now, as well as any future time;
and ought to make it now. The time to
actualize a truth is when we
recognize it. Heretofore as soon as a
man arrived at that age where his
intelligence began to be of benefit
to the race, he died. His career was
repeated in his children; and so
progress has stagnated hundreds of
years. Hundreds of years ago, human
intelligence had achieved almost the
same success we are achieving today.
Ideas were written and works were
done which even now are unsurpassed,
because one man has simply been a
repetition of another. Men must live
longer in order to widen the range of
individual experience, and so
increase the general stock of
knowledge. We must emancipate [78]
ourselves from the old forms of
thought, which have so long been our
prison houses, and project better
ones. We are beginning to see the
immense power of thought, to mold,
not only our own bodies, but the
bodies of others, and I have no
hesitation in saying that as disease
has become negative to him who has
mastered this mind power, or Mental
Science, that old age, which is only
a slow aggregation of disease, can
also be mastered.
LESSON
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES
* * * * *
A Home Course in Mental
Science
Table
of Contents
