LESSON VI
THE SOUL OF THINGS
Helen Wilmans
A
Home Course in Mental
Science
Benedict Lust, N.D. M.D.,
Publisher
New York, 1921.
[103] To be nobler; to be better; to
be greater intrinsically and all
over; to be more and do more; to
project a grander doing from a
grander being; to extract a deeper
vitality from a deeper knowing--this
is the enticement to live.
Why, men are actually asking for some
incentive to live! They are so tired
of the old beliefs, and yet
unable--with the limited range of
their mental vision--to see anything
better, that they are begging to be
shown something worth living for.
They feel their stagnation so much,
submerged as they are in the
world’s dead thought, that each
day is a weariness to them, and will
be until they are aroused by the
newer and more invigorating ideas
founded upon a wider conception of
man’s own latent
possibilities.
Only their own original thought can
save them.
And the fountain-head of this
original thought within the man has
been dammed up so long by the
dead-beliefs of a dead age, that not
one in a hundred knows that he can
think. Fewer still have the slightest
conception of the power of thought,
or dream of how this alone will
change the whole current of existence
for them when it begins to flow; nor
of how it will--not only make them
alive all over, but will give life to
everything they see; thus
transforming the dead world into a
living world of enchanted
beauty.
Self-generated thought is the vital
fluid itself. It courses through a
man’s veins, and stimulates him
to undreamed activities. But he needs
to draw it fresh from the
fountain-head of his own organism
each day. Therefore, he must at once
turn his back on the beliefs of the
present age--on all of them--for they
are not his. Even those among them
which are truest are not properly
related to him by the divine
parentage of his own creative
functions; and so he must let them
go, and step clear from them all in
absolute nakedness. He must then
search his own organism for the
well-spring of original thought, and
bring it forth in which to clothe
himself. For man is a mental being,
and truth, in a thousand forms, is
the Life Principle lying latent and
made visible by his own recognition
of it. This is the true method of
mental growth--which is also
“physical” growth--for as
sure as the world turns on its axis,
Walt Whitman was right when he said:
“The soul is the body and the
body is the soul.” For a man is
whole. His so-called physical being
is his mental being, and the ever
progressive unfoldment of the mental
will be the ever progressive
unfoldment of the physical.
At present the mental is standing
still, chained to the old dead
beliefs; and the physical is standing
still, chained to the old dead
beliefs, because the mental and
physical are one. The physical is the
mental and the mental is the
physical. It is one; and is one with
the dead beliefs, and dead with them.
Yes, dead, all but that faint
consciousness of life that renders
death perceptible.
[104] Truth is a substantial element
springing from the human organism in
obedience to the demand for it. Ask
yourself a question in relation to
your own vital unfoldment, and the
answer is revealed to you out of
yourself, just as the fruit on the
tree makes its demands upon the roots
of the tree for more nourishment, and
gets it. What you ask for will come
to you in the shape of thought; and
what is more, it will be pure, vital
life essence, and will fill you with
fresh power.
Without knowing anything about
anatomy, or caring anything about it,
I yet seem to perceive that the human
organism--in itself one whole and
perfect laboratory for the evolvement
of life--is composed of three
distinct departments; of which the
stomach with its dependencies comes
first in the process of growth, and
is the lowest--being nearest the
earth, as it were, its business being
the transmutation of the
earth’s products into something
finer than itself, out of which
arises the second laboratory,
represented by the sex system, or the
vital and reproductive system. Then
from these two lower
laboratories--the digestive and the
reproductive--comes the third and the
highest, which is the brain.
The earth and all of its products are
tributary to the lower of these
laboratories, the digestive system.
The digestive and the sex system,
with the whole earth and all its, as
yet, unknown elements, are tributary
to the brain. There is nothing in the
world that the brain may not command
and obtain, provided the order is
sent by the proper route--namely,
through its tributary digestive
systems that unite it with the earth.
For it is a fact that a man is a
growth, just as a tree is a growth.
He is rooted in the earth and draws
sustenance from the earth by the
stomach, just as the tree is rooted
and draws sustenance from the earth
through its roots.
Nor does the proof of his kinship
with the tree stop here, for the tree
corresponds to the man in other ways.
Its body corresponds to the
man’s vital system, and its
leaves and flowers to his brain. The
whole effort of nature is to develop
this threefold digestive machine for
itself the meaning of its
organization and the power vested in
it.
Always evolution is from lower to
higher; from the earth upward or
outward; always away from the more
leaden or the deader influences of
the earth toward the freedom of the
more etherealized substances that
exist in greater abundance outside of
the earth, and that keep refining and
strengthening in proportion as they
go outward.
Therefore, the time comes when the
trees are emancipated in a measure
from the earth. Their roots are no
longer embedded in the soil, but have
assumed the form of feet and roam
over the ground in the lives of
various animals. In their development
they have been recognizing
(unconsciously to themselves) more
and more of the infinite Vital
Principle that permeates all
intelligence, and this enlarged
recognition has projected more
enlarged and more free lives. All
evolution leads in the direction of
freedom.
The subject of evolution will never
be understood until the great change
in human thought, now going on, is in
a measure completed. That change
means the complete transposition of
thought from the basis of dead matter
and a material universe, to the basis
of vital intelligence and a universe
of living mental substance. The old
scientists have elaborated the idea
on the materialistic plane; they have
done immense good in just this; but
when their entire system shall have
become transmuted from material to
intellectual, or spiritual, it will
then stand forth its true colors, and
the whole world will understand the
mystery of (so-called)
creation.
Man is a spokesman of the one eternal
Life. He is the interpreter of it. It
“materializes,” or
becomes visible externally through
his comprehension of it--through his
intelligence.
[105] Man is an unfailing fountain of
truth whose constant outflow, if
encouraged, would fill life with new
activities, and the world with new
and mighty uses. But is it
encouraged? On the contrary, every
outlet for the flow of new and fresh
and vital truth is closed up by the
tyranny of the old thought that rules
the age.
The old is enemy to the new, and yet
the new alone has saving power. Must
this state of affairs continue? Must
the synods continue to crush their
foremost men because they cannot help
but think? Must the newspapers, in
their sedulous effort to keep with
the majority, treat with contempt,
and often with abuse, each new idea
that appears in print for the simple
reason that it is new?
Look at the mighty work there is for
the new thought to do!
The masses are in the hands of the
enemies of the new thought; and under
their blighting influence they lie
half dead and almost impervious to
the lifting power of the new. Look at
the entrenchments of the old thought.
It has been built into systems, and
is sustained by mighty salaries drawn
from the very heart’s blood of
its victims. It is organized at every
point. It is well equipped for a long
siege; but its equipment is not proof
against the decomposing influence of
the new and high thought now coming
into the world.
By way of illustrating what I have
been saying, let us glance at the
positions of labor. Each succeeding
year there is a growing excess of
laborers over the demand for them.
With every improvement in machinery
thousands of men and women are thrown
out of work. Every discovery of a new
motor, or every new application of an
existing one, is paid for in human
lives reduced to beggary; in children
defrauded of everything that makes
life worth living. What then, shall
we quit making discoveries? Shall we
stand still, or, what would be better
yet, if this is the proper idea,
shall we not destroy what machinery
we have and return to the primitive
condition wherein each family spun
and wove its own wool and cotton,
raised its own hog and hominy, and
felt itself independent of the need
of exchange?
But exchange is life--exchange of
every description--and the absence of
it leads to stagnation and ends in
death. Therefore we cannot return to
these old conditions, nor can we
stand still where we are. We must
press forward in making still more
discoveries, that will throw still
more people out of work.
But the people have got to have work,
and in order to have it, we must
create new uses. In order to do this
we must cease to repress desire in
ourselves. On the contrary, we must
foster and cherish our desires and
let them become our stimulant to
greater creativeness. Desire is the
spirit of every effort. To suppress
desire is to kill effort before it is
born.
Now the race is not to keep going
forever round and round in the
execution of the same old uses, like
a blind horse in a tread-mill. If
this is to be the case it might as
well cease to exist. And the fact is,
the race is now manifesting the
result of its past and present
tread-mill existence, and is even at
this time beginning to cease to
exist. Look at the fact that we have
three million laborers unemployed in
the United States alone. This means
that there are three million persons
over and above the number actually
needed. That which is not needed
disappears; and the hard conditions
of these people, their lack of enough
food and warmth, will tell on them in
time, and they and their offspring
will become weaker and weaker and
finally cease to be factors of
society. Not being needed they must
either make themselves needed or
disappear. In the course of evolution
there is no room at the bottom. The
lopping off goes on at the bottom;
never at the top. In the race growth,
all the room there is, is at the top.
The creative principle works from
below [106] upward; and its one
propelling force is desire. Those who
are content with little, get little,
and finally get nothing. They crush
the voice of desire within
themselves, and desire, which is the
propeller of all activities, ceases,
and when it ceases the person who
generates it, or who ought to
generate it, ceases.
Now people must desire. Those who
have ceased to desire must begin to
cultivate the faculty again. But this
is only the beginning. After desiring
they must trust their desires; they
must put every particle of faith they
can summon in their desires. This
condition is creative; it is a
condition that furnishes new ideas,
and that stimulates to the effort
that embodies them.
This is what I mean when I say that
the race must create new uses or die.
Nature is always true to herself. She
produces with a lavish hand in each
special line of her vast
creativeness, and one would suppose
that it would never cease. But, lo! a
nobler creation appears, and that
which was produced in such abundance
disappears. It was only a preparation
for a higher birth. As with
vegetation, so with races. Only the
exercise of the creative principle
with a race is ever the guarantee of
its immortality. If it grows, it is
all right; it will be continued in
life. To create new uses is to grow.
The only way to create new uses is to
trust our desires by carrying them
into effect in the external
world.
Imagination lies at the base of
desire, and is its mother. It is
endlessly prolific; so much so, so
stupendously suggestive of wonderful
possibilities, that we are afraid to
trust it. “It is too good to be
true,” we say, and, with the
faint-heartedness of a fatal
ignorance, we shut our eyes upon the
glorious prospect it opens to us. And
yet, to trust the desires born of
imagination is the beginning of the
creation of the new uses that alone
will entitle the race to a permanent
habitation upon the earth. In the
creation of new uses will be found
our own salvation. This alone is race
growth.
The imagination is eternally
forecasting a condition of more than
heavenly splendor; but the dull,
everyday, treadmill faculties are
constantly discrediting the glorious
vision. Now, so long as this
condition endures, so long as this
barrier to farther progress continues
to exist, will the race--as it
continues to multiply--keep pressing
with more and greater weight against
the barrier; and in this pressure the
weaker will be crushed; and, indeed,
there will be no comfort for any, on
account of the eternal scramble for
better places, and the fear of losing
such places as we now occupy--which,
in spite of the small comfort we get
out of them, are better than
none.
This is the condition of race
stagnation today. There is only one
way out of it, and that is by
bursting the barrier that prevents
the foremost from going farther. This
would enable the slower in
development to trail after the
foremost, and thus keep all creatures
in motion on the progressive
route.
What is the barrier? It is doubt.
Doubt of all things but the already
demonstrated facts of everyday life.
This doubt strangles imagination, the
mother of desire, and prevents the
expression in effort of a
thousand--yea, a million--creative
resources lying latent in man, as the
tree lies latent in the acorn.
If the acorn were developed to that
point intellectually, where doubt is
born, it would never be anything but
the acorn. It would discredit the
splendid imagination that forecasts
the oak--and the desire that cries
for expression--and the oak would die
within it. It is due to the fact that
doubt is not yet evolved on the
lower, or unconscious, plane of
growth, that growth has the power to
proceed at all. Doubt is born of
thought when thought begins to ask
questions. And, in the plant and
animal world, individuals have not
become introspective, and do not ask
questions. The power to do this
belongs to man.
[107] Thought, being the
body-builder, has the privilege
either to discredit desire or to
believe in it, and thereby clothe and
make it manifest.
Desire, in the order of evolution,
seems to precede thought. It does not
really do this, since the two are
coeval; but one thing is certain, it
does precede self-conscious or
self-analytical thought. Thought
exists long before it becomes
conscious of its existence; hence my
meaning when I speak of conscious
thought and unconscious
thought.
Now in the growth of the lower orders
of life, desire--which is the basic
principle of all development--is not
discredited by the doubts that are
born of thought; and so the process
of growth--as we observe it--is
simply marvelous, if we are to judge
it consistently with the present
status of our doubting minds.
Suppose, for instance, we knew
nothing of the past miracles of
growth, and someone should tell us
that a mighty tree lay folded in an
acorn, or that the glorious Japan
lily--that most wonderful of
flowers--was enwrapped in the folds
of the little rusty-looking bulb. How
easily we could disprove it from the
materialistic standpoint by
dissecting both acorn and bulb, and
finding no trace of their mysterious
intelligences. The desire that exists
in these seed germs, the mighty power
of unfoldment never to be discerned
by material analysis, the potency of
indestructible individuality, the
characteristic, self-respecting,
impregnable and invulnerable
“I” is there, and holds
true to itself, waiting and waiting
its chance for expression under
circumstances that favor it. But of
all this mighty power, not a trace is
visible to the natural eye. And yet
experience has proven that it exists,
and we know it, and have ceased to
wonder.
Now, man is a seed germ of infinitely
greater power of unfoldment. But,
because we have never seen his
unfoldment we doubt his power. We
have grown to a point in intellectual
growth where we have reached the
negative pole of our own mighty
intelligences, and where, instead of
believing in them, and in the buds of
promise starting up from them, we
doubt, and these doubts chill and
wither the buds; and so the race
stands still as we see it, and in
almost the same tracks it has been in
for hundreds of years.
Desire is the soul of individual
growth. Although I cannot state what
follows as a demonstrated fact, yet
it does seem as if desire were a part
of the Law of Attraction drawn to
organization by individual
recognition. An analysis of desire
shows us that is possesses the same
quality that the Law does--it draws;
it possesses the drawing power. This
drawing power at certain stages of
its evolvement becomes love, the very
soul of all life, the heating or
living principle (that principle in
nature which, when perceived in its
effects, has been called God.)
Now, whether desire is of the Law of
Attraction or not, it surely seems to
be, and it is the very voice of
nature within us that constantly
reaches out in pursuit of greater
expression. Therefore if I were to
speak from the old theological
standpoint on this matter, I should
say that desire is the voice of God
within us, and that all growth
depends upon our listening to this
voice, and obeying it. Theologians,
however, have divided their God and
made a devil of one half of him, and
they say that the voice of desire in
man is from the devil.
They do not know that desire points
always in the direction of freedom,
which is happiness, and that the many
fearful actions charged to its
account come from the mistaken
efforts of the intellect to gratify
it.
Desire is certainly the voice of
nature speaking through the
man’s intelligence. It may be
crushed out by thought, the
body-builder, or it may be clothed by
recognition and made manifest in
flesh and blood. Doubt of its worth
and its noble aim and [108] end will
crush it. Intelligent recognition of
its true character, its noble purpose
and its power, will establish it in
visible manifestation in such forms
of manly and womanly strength and
beauty and grace and lovingness as
the imagination cannot now conceive
of.
Every manifestation of life, whether
mineral, vegetable, animal or human,
is an incarnation of the Law; the
power that draws to a common center;
the Love Principle, or Life
Principle, of the universe. The Law
is expressed in love. Every life
loves something and wants that
something, and grows to a larger life
by the acquisition of it.
Every life therefore is a bundle of
desires, and the more complex the
life, the more manifold the desires.
The tree climbs to a nobler growth
through the gratification of its
appetites, which are its highest
desires. So does the worm; so does
the greater animal.
But it has been the unflagging effort
of all civilizations to crush out the
natural desires of men and women, and
substitute a cut-and-dried system for
the training of the race; pruning
people down and pressing them into
certain molds--mostly of a
theological pattern. And so it
happens that men do not express the
spirit within them, the living,
breathing desires that they are, but
something else that means nothing, or
almost nothing.
“Conceived in sin and born in
iniquity,” says the Bible;
which means that man was conceived in
a false belief and born to reap its
consequences. That false belief is,
that his natural desires (which
constitute the man proper) are vile
and sinful, and must be crushed out.
Desire is not only the means of
man’s unfoldment, but it is the
unfolding man himself; it is the Law
of Attraction unfolding through the
man--a recognition of which, by the
man’s intelligence, conjoins
the man with this Law, to his
realization of the words Jesus spoke
when he said, “I and the Father
are one.”
When you crush or moderate or tame
the desire, you crush or moderate or
tame the man. Man as incarnate Love,
or desire, is an aggregating center.
All that he desires from out of the
inorganic mass of things drifts to
him by the Law of Attraction, if he
will not chill his desire by a doubt.
And no one is defrauded by this,
because in deep truth the supply is
always equal to the demand. It is
only when desire for those things
called property begins that men have
to regulate the gratification of
their desires by a sense of justice.
Even this apparent suppression of
desire is not suppression, but the
yielding of an inferior desire for
the gratification of a greater
one.
“But,” says the student,
“the sense of justice is surely
the boundary line of desire.”
To which I answer, “No; desire
can never find a boundary line; but
it can fill the measure of growth on
the horizontal plane--the plane on
which we now live, and in which
property rights have their
origin--but this apparent limitation
will have the glorious effect of
pushing desire upward into a higher
plane, where a higher, a more
unfettered and a nobler class of
thoughts will clothe it in a new form
of splendor and power.”
The babe is born into the world--a
pure love--to unfold itself
constantly to ever increasing
desires. But the crushing process
begins immediately; and presently it
is pressed into the mold of the
world’s ignorant or negative
beliefs, and ceases to grow. It
ceases to grow as it ceases to
desire. Having reached man’s
estate he congratulates himself that
the keen edge of his ambition is
dulled; that he is learning content.
Oh! death, thou art in league with
content for the annihiliation of the
race! By slow degrees, the natural
desires, instead of being trained and
made stronger and guided upward, and
changed into aspirations for the
absolutely true in all things, are
pushed back and chilled, and finally
killed; and this is the end of
man’s vitality, and
consequently the end of his life. For
desire is the pure [109] fountain
flowing from that central fire of
love which is the motive power of
vitality. And aspiration is desire
endowed with wings that lift man
upward and above the horizontal plane
of the world’s present status
of thought. “Oh, that I could
fly away on the wings of my
desires!” But the wings of our
desires are constantly clipped until
our desires become the tamest of
domestic fowls, and the pure and holy
ambitions they would have developed
into lie dormant, leaving us in the
“sere and yeallow leaf,”
abandoned to the deadness of a
mildewed content that we call the
“will of God.”
It is man alone who is creative, or
who has the power of making things
manifest or visible. I want, I want,
is the constant cry of organized or
visible forms. More, more, is the
ever ringing demand of the
individual; I want more. It is not
God who wants more, but I, myself.
For this is what individualization
means; and the objective world is the
world of individuals.
Sin, sickness, poverty and death are
the result of negative
vitality--negation of life. We lack
vitality because we crush out desire,
which is the only stimulant to
vitality, the only generator of it.
In this condition of powerlessness
anything may happen to us, because we
do not resist and do not believe we
ought to resist. “God sends us
these afflictions,” we say,
when in fact it is our
non-recognition of the desire within
us (the Life Principle of the
Universe) that permits them or
renders their presence
possible.
These conditions or beliefs are
nothing more than that general
establishment of negative development
which all through the ages have
simply repeated themselves in a
series of never ending rounds while
waiting the advent of their
master--man. And man has been here
for thousands of years, and, in his
mistaken sense of humility, based
upon a belief in his abject
dependence on a personal God, he has
regarded these weaknesses, or
denials, of his power as his masters.
The negative forces--which are the
unintelligent forces--are on top,
simply because man--the intelligent
force--does not take his place above
them. And all this time he has
believed that his false position with
regard to these negative forces was
God-ordained; and this belief has
paralyzed his desire, by teaching him
content. In paralyzing the desire,
instead of training it into
legitimate and noble aspiration, the
man has been paralyzed. And this is
the situation today; an awfully
mistaken situation that man must be
educated out of.
Man must be taught his supremacy over
the negatives. He must understand
that the Principle of Being which
speaks through the tree and the worm
in desire, speaks through him in
still nobler desire; in other words,
that his desires are the voices of
nature calling for greater and
stronger and more wonderful
manifestation upon the eternal plane
of life.
The “more, more” that
cries through me, from the simplest
little want to the loftiest hope, is
but a reverberation from the
undiscovered vaults of a glorious and
endless progression, that I may yet
traverse in this gradually refining
mental body, if I will not blight my
desire with the chilling touch of
deadly doubt.
Look at desire and see what it is. It
is something within us whose
outreaching relates us to something
desirable yet to be attained. Is life
a lie that a desire may exist and
that which gratifies it may not
exist? How superlatively foolish such
an idea is! And say what we will of
desires that appear evil, there is no
evil in them, for happiness is the
soul’s supreme desire, and
includes and sanctifies all
desires--even those which, for the
time being, prospect for it in
mistaken directions; thus obtaining
the curse of society and the
restriction of the law and adding
strength to the popular belief that
it is God’s will that human
desires should be crushed. The
mistakes we have made in following
our desires to [110] the realization
of our highest ideals (dreadful
ideals, many of them, but leading to
higher ones) are the events that have
cemented public opinion in the belief
that desire is of the devil, and that
it must of necessity be crushed out
or subordinated to a mistaken idea of
“God’s will.”
Desire is the aggregating principle
of life in man. It is the cohesive
quality. It is the “I” in
him about which all belongings
congregate. Desire--our own
desires--all of them, from the
simplest cry of the babe for food to
the most complex wants of the most
highly spiritualized being, are
monitions of the Law or Principle of
Attraction speaking in us for that
thought material--that recognition
with which we may become clothed in
greater power and splendor and beauty
and opulence.
That manifestation in whom desire is
supremest is master by inherent
right. Desire, being greater in man
than in any other creature, proclaims
at once his mastership and his
unequivocal title to this position.
He cuts down the tree because his
desire for fuel or lumber overmasters
the tree’s desire to live. He
kills the animal because his desire
for food overmasters the
animal’s desire for life. And
thus the survival of the fittest,
through the mastery of the strongest
desire, has worked the world’s
conditions up to where they now
stand.
And here is man, the conqueror, who
has mastered all things and put them
beneath his feet through desire, now
that he is on the very threshold of
the kingdom he has conquered, held
back from entering into possession by
the false assumption of ignorance
that the desire in him, and which is
he, is an evil thing and must be
subordinated to “God’s
will”--as if this very desire
were not the one eternal
self-existent will expressed as only
it ever expresses itself--through
living organizations of which man is
the most complete.
LESSON
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES
* * * * *
A Home Course in Mental
Science
Table
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