[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 expected 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.
