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Lesson IX
PRAYER AND SELF CULTURE
(Part 1)Helen Wilmans
A Home Course in Mental Science
Benedict Lust, N.D. M.D., Publisher
New York, 1921.[159] Prayer is asking for more light. The upward struggle of the immortal mind is always from darkness to light; from ignorance to intelligence; from negative to positive. The animals have prayed for this light unconsciously, and their prayers have been answered, and gradually they have climbed to light, reaching it and holding it in the erect posture of manhood. Every advancing step upwards has increased the beauty and the utility of their organizations. Through prayer, they have recognized every greater intelligence.
And here we are--we who have prayed, or aspired, ourselves into men--here we are, all ready to pray, or aspire, ourselves into gods--by which I mean men who know their own power. But we are now where we will have to pray consciously. Having discovered the tree of knowledge of good and error in the midst of the garden (in manhood, midway between animalhood and godhood, or midway between positive and negative), it is demanded of us, from this time on, that we know what we are doing.
Emerson says that it is the “oversoul” that kills.
We are manifested or made visible by limitation.
What does this mean? It means that as the expressed thought of a limitless intelligence we every moment come in contact with some obstacle we must overcome if we would keep on growing and developing. Certain of these obstacles which we do not overcome form our limitations, circumscribe or prescribe our shape, and render us visible externally. The cow and the horse and the tree could overcome no further, and each preserves its own type. This type represents its energy. It shows the power of each object to overcome, so far as the object has developed it.
As the world grows older, and time ripens conditions, it is easier to overcome environments, because environments become less dense and we become more intense as individuals; and little by little the limitation yields and the more perfect creature shows himself.
And here he is in the form of man, but still limited. Limited by what?
We are limited by that which we do not know. As we are mental creatures, it therefore follows that the utmost verge of our intelligence is our limitation. Or, as Emerson implies, it is the higher life not yet understood by us that proves our barrier, that gives us our shape and renders us visible to each other. All things are rendered visible by limitation, and all things limit themselves by the extent of their intelligence.
We, as individuals, are individual expressions of the infinite whole. No two persons, or creatures, ever express precisely the same thing. Each of us expresses what he recognizes as good, and he expresses it in the measure of his power to recognize. The limit of his recognition makes the outer boundary of his personality and gives us the [160] man in appearance, or as he appears to our sight.
If we should cease to recognize any good whatever, we would cease to express anything. We would lose these organized forms and drift back or become dissolved, as it were, in the great universal fountain of Life. So the Life Principle is both individualized, and unindividualized at once; unindividualized and unlimited in its possibilities, and individualized and limited in its organizations.
Who can fail to see the object of creation? All nature is the power of the Law made visible by recognition. That the Law is recognized in weakness is no indication that the Law is weak, but that it is faintly or feebly recognized. Error, sickness and death are weak manifestations of the Law, but they point to the fact that more powerful recognitions of it are to be attained. And there never was a prayer sent forth in the world that was for any other purpose than to obtain a stronger manifestation of the power of the Law. But what is prayer? First let us find out what is not prayer. Let me quote from A. P. Barton:
“Man has been called a praying animal. Feeling his inability to save himself, and his helplessness in the hands of destiny, or fate, or providence--terms he has used to designate the powers without himself to which he deemed himself subject--he has been prone, in time of danger, or serious apprehension of the future, to cry out to an unseen power for guidance, deliverance and salvation. Sometimes he has made an image and set it up before him to illustrate his idea of a personal deity; and sometimes he has only imagined a form sitting far away upon a bright, mystic throne. But he has always supposed that the real power is an invisible presence sentient to the human cry and responsive to the human needs. But the formulated need, or desire, often uttered in vocal speech, and sometimes vociferated in screams, has been intended for an ear to hear, a mind to comprehend, and a heart that sympathizes, and has exprected an intelligent response.
“This attitude of man is founded upon the assumption that he is in himself without power and subject to the caprices of conflicting, uncertain forces exterior to himself. He has been taught that the source of life and energy is located in a deity far away, and very much inclined to being hard to his petitions. It is consoling and relaxing to the self-abnegated weakling to imagine that an anthropomorphous father hears and is hostile to his welfare, unless placated by servile humility and fulsome praise on his part.
“So he has thought that prayer consisted in crying and begging, like a cringing slave under the lash, and imploring this deity, whom he addressed with many flattering adjectives, to send him from afar a pittance of good as a matter of grace, or favor.
“The effect of this attitude--which is a direct nullification of life’s kingdom in the human soul and a denial of spiritual heredity--is to externalize, or manifest in the personality, the fruits of weakness and the symbol of death. In thus imagining and declaring separateness between himself and the fountain of light and power, the human child has failed to manifest them in his person and has so driven back the body until it habitually drops away and returns unto the elements from which he took it.
“So long as man craves to be heard by intelligence without him and to be aided by a power separate from himself, he continues to endow that which he addresses with ears and eyes and arms and human attributes and caprices. He shrinks from the idea that there is no personality in the heavens to turn a listening ear and extend help, though he be invisible and silent and uncertain in his responses. He feeds his fancy on bread from an imaginary master’s table and dreams that his strength is revived by the powers that be--somewhere, somewhere.
“Some have said, ‘To think of God as principle seems too cold and cheerless. [161] I love to imagine arms that embrace me and protect me, a bosom upon which I may rest, and a heart that throbs in sympathy with my longings and tears’ But we know that even this view of God must be taken in a metaphysical sense, for we must agree that a God with actual form and outline and human propensities would of necessity be confined in space and capricious in his conduct; and that he could not, therefore, hear and heed all at once and alike, nor take all the crying children into his arms and bosom at one time. When he would attend the prayer of one, he must turn his back upon millions of other supplicants.
“Then the metaphor really means that the arms are spiritual, or inspiration, beams of power upon which the soul may lay hold; the bosom is the great presence of hope and rest in which we bask when we are trusting and pure in heart; the heart is the warm, loving, throbbing soul of the universe in which we have our being; and the ear that hears is the spiritual sentence and sympathy of the father-essence arising out of our kinship with it, and which responds to our longing desires as the air rushes in to fill the vacuum.
“Which are warmer or more comforting, the ideal image of a separate, uncertain, personal God, to whom we must feebly cry for help, or the knowledge that the very essence of our being emanates from and lives in love as the omnipresent, glowing, healing, life-giving power and presence, supplying every need, and always active in redeeming and saving? Which is the more comforting, the idea of a hand that may or may not be extended at our call, or that of omnipresent omnipotence being the God whose individual image and likeness we are, and the recognition of which manifests applied potency and execution of design and purpose according to human-directed thought? Which view gives us most freedom and security, and which renders intelligent prayer most effectual?”
What is called prayer is, nine times out of ten, the puling cry of weakness, the ignorant demand of an insatiable selfishness, or the frantic exhibition of indefinable fear based on ignorance of the Law and of man’s relation to it.
True prayer is that desire for a knowledge of our relations with the Law so intense as to lift us by slow, or perhaps rapid, degrees into a realization of such knowledge. In proportion as knowledge comes on this subject our limitations widen about us. We become greater and more powerful creatures, and are able to express or make visible more of the possibilities of the Law.
It is no use to go down on our knees and try to magnify the Law. No one can magnify it. It is already all there is. But we can magnify the manifestations of the Law by magnifying ourselves. To do this is the result of more intelligence. Therefore, intelligence is the one thing needed. It is life--more life added to us, more vitality, greater power to conquer obstacles, and infinitely greater freedom and happiness. The moment prayer, or aspiration, ceases to be unconscious, as in the animal, and becomes conscious, as it is now beginning to be in man, the man’s destiny is in his own hands. I say that it is in our hands to shape ourselves and our surroundings by prayer, and yet it is not the kind of prayer that commonly goes under this name. It is not supplication at all. It does not say, “Thy will be done, while I lose myself in nothingness.” It says “Let me seek to understand the Law, and then let me work in co-operation with that Law, which will be the expression of my own will no less than that of the universal Life; for I am one with the universal Life; identical with it; inseparable from it. It is the power, the Life, and the way; and I am the expression as well as the organ for further expression of the power, the Life and the way. The more I identify with the Law the more unerring I become and the more harmonious and strong my Life will be.”
[162] “When ye pray believe that ye receive and ye have.” He who spoke these words knew what they meant. He knew the feeble wail of weakness and the frantic supplication of ignorance were not prayer. The words, “When ye pray believe that ye receive and ye have,” bespeak the knowledge of the thorough metaphysician. Their very nature shows them to be the ripe ejaculation of mighty strength. When a man can fill this injunction concerning prayer, he prays no longer; he appropriates by recognition and affirmation. Heaven is open to him and the world is beneath his feet.
When he reaches this position he sees that prayer means work. He sees that it means a ceaseless effort of self-culture.
Self-culture is the acquisition of that which adds to our happiness by enlarging our environments. It is the acquisition of that knowledge which leads in the direction of freedom--freedom from everything that hinders and binds, and above all, freedom from disease, old age and death.
We love to learn. Even the garnering of the world’s past knowledge has seemed a beautiful thing to us. We took delight in it, feeling that it added to our mental stature. But the self-culture of which I am writing is infinitely above this. It not only adds to our cherished mental acquisitions, but it becomes flesh and blood to us, and is manifested in our personalities in unfading beauty and undying death.
This self-culture is the real and only prayer. It goes forth in effort and is expressed in results. It is not to be gained by the study of books, for they do not contain it. Nor by listening to sermons, for they teach the opposite of it; thus darkening still more the minds of those who go to them for saving knowledge.
We gain it by putting firm faith in our desires and aspirations; by turning away from the fears we have always trusted, and placing our trust in that which seems good to us. It requires an effort to do this. Indeed, the doing of this is a matter of constant and unwearying effort; but this effort is a part of self-culture and leads to its highest form. It is the establishment of self in the thought, and the justification of self, which is the first step in self-culture. It leads by imperceptible degrees to a knowledge of the power of self. When this time comes, good-bye to disease, poverty and every form of weakness.
Self-culture is the acquisition of that form of knowledge which shows the man how great he is; shows him his own unlimited possibilities, and suggests to him his proper mode of development.
No man knows what he may become. Therefore the first thing in self-culture is to learn that there is no limit to what he is capable of learning. This one item of knowledge pulls down every bar to his progress and turns him loose--a free citizen of an unlimited universe. It places him upon his own mental, making him dependent upon his own effort, and independent of the opinions of others regarding himself and his intellectual capacity.
This, too, is a great thing, for the majority of men and women are sadly hampered at the very outset of their attempts in self-culture by the opinions of their friends concerning their intellectual ability. But when one knows that all acquisition depends upon personal effort, and not on superlative genius, he will take courage and begin to treasure the fact that whatever he is he can become more; that he has one hope that nothing can shake, and that hope founded in the tremendous fact that he is the seed germ of all possible growth.
Thus he becomes established in himself. He has found the foundation soil of himself, and out of the soil he may produce just what he wishes.
And so the man begins to make himself from his own conscious intelligence. He begins to answer his own prayer as all prayer is answered--by [163] personal investigation in the pursuit of truth. A man may build himself as he builds a house when he knows how to trust his desire; when he knows that perfect trust brings the perfect answer.
Acquired knowledge is not self-culture. I am not going to disparage it, but it is an accumulation, and though it may beautify and embellish, it bears no vital fruit. It may aid in the advancement of man’s life-work on the present plane of the world’s thought, but it is not the unfoldment of the man himself; it is not the growth of the Life Principle within the seed. It is true that inasmuch as it draws from the man his own native thought, it may become an aid in his self-culture, for everything that is thought-compelling is an aid to natural growth, and natural growth is the direct aim of all self-culture, though not necessarily the aid of what is termed education--which is the acquisition of ideas.
Self-culture, then, is not dependent upon the study of books of any character whatever. And it is a fact that up to the present time the study of books has rather retarded than assisted race efforts at self-culture. And this because an almost universal respect for authority has overshadowed the individual’s respect for his own spontaneous thought. And so the thoughts of others have taken the place of original thought by being accepted as unquestionable, and they have thus become as dead lumber in the mind, whose effect has been to deaden native thought and to deaden the individual with it.
The deadest people I am acquainted with are those whose native intelligences are overlaid by the learning of others; persons who meet the fresh, original, vigorous and life-giving thought of the present day with their heavy, dusty tomes of an accumulated and now obsolete wisdom. It is literally impossible to make these people understand or feel the vital power of the thought you give them, because their power to respond is quite gone. The very fountain-head of their own original thought is filled up by the rubbish of the dead ideas and has gone dry.
These men are dead and do not know it. And being dead they are obstructions in the way of the living; all the more so because the greater part of the race, being unawakened to a knowledge of its own power of thought, still regards them as authority. And thus is death perpetuated, and the vitalizing, life-giving power of true self-culture retarded. And therefore it is, as I said before, that the very beginning of self-culture is grounded in the fact that a man must know himself to be a germinating seed of all possible development. This is the first step; and it is a necessity on which his whole future depends. To start out in pursuit of self-culture is an idiotic performance, for self-culture is not a pursuit at all. It is not following after the ideas of other people, no matter how brilliant those ideas may be. It is a staying at home and delving deep down among the original thoughts that well up from native intuition. It is an analysis of these native thoughts after they make their appearance, and a submission of them to the most crucial test of experiment, by which a selection is made, retaining those which are practical and rejecting the others.
And the doing this day by day, totally uninfluenced by the beliefs of other people, is self-culture.
Of course it takes a courageous man to bring out his native ideas, and to stand by them in the face of misrepresentation, abuse and ridicule, but the courage is supposed in advance, for no person but a courageous one has emancipated himself from the crushing weight of that old-time authority that makes original thought impossible.
Are the thoughts of others, then, of no use to us at all? Yes, they are of great use, if taken as they should be. And this is not by a blind acceptance of them, but as a stimulant to self-thought. Here comes the Law of action [164] and interaction--the true law of eternal growth. You balk this Law when you yield yourself, or your belief (for it is the same thing), blindly to the belief of another. But when you maintain your own belief in the spirit of an honest searcher for truth, and the other does so too, then out of the very firmness of the position of each, overruled and controlled in both of you by the greatest desire of all desires--that of knowing truth for truth’s sake--there comes a candid and beautiful interchange of ideas out of which both are deeply benefited.
In this way the ideas of one stimulate and create ideas in the other, perhaps totally at variance with the ideas that created them.
The hermits that go alone to think do not accomplish much for themselves or others. It is better to do one’s thinking in communities where thought is challenged, and the generator of it is compelled to give a reason for it. In giving the reason for it, the thought becomes fixed in belief if it is correct, or is annihilated if false. And so growth proceeds.
There is nothing better for the growing man than the disclosure of his thought. There is no such thing as casting pearls before swine in the mental realm now. Every pearl cast forth is picked up by some hungry soul, though the swine may have declined it.
CONTINUE
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