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Lesson IX
PRAYER AND SELF CULTURE
(Part 2)Helen Wilmans
A Home Course in Mental Science
Benedict Lust, N.D. M.D., Publisher
New York, 1921.[continued...]
What is more, these pearls of thought are veritable seed. They will enter some mind where they will take root--being uttered--and they spring up in wonderful things, and bring forth fruit heretofore unknown in the world.The mere speaking one’s highest thought is beneficial in more ways than one. Thought smothered in the brain dies inoperative. The power to create is vested in the spoken word, and not in the one that perished before it was born. Thought is the beginning of effort. If effort dies before its beginning no one is benefited. The speaking it forth is a step toward its actualization in practical form.
But the speaking of our highest thought is, above all things, beneficial to ourselves. In speaking the new, strong thought we speak ourselves into new strength. We take a step forward that establishes us in our own opinion, ahead of where we were, and calls upon us for a fresh accession of courage in maintaining the advanced position. It leaves no chance for shirking the consequences of our new ideas. They are spoken, and being spoken we know that their effort is inevitable, and we grow bolder in standing for their defense.
Our ideas may be wrong. Very well. When they are spoken we shall soon see whether they are wrong or right. They can only be truly judged when seen, and why should our foolish, personal pride stand between the knowledge of the truth and us? He who is not willing to become a fool for truth’s sake has not yet entered the sacred precinct where true self-culture begins.
If truth were already understood and demonstrated, all we would have to do would be to learn it as children learn their school lessons. But it is an unknown thing in its higher character, and there is no way to get it but by listening to its suggestions as they arise within ourselves, projecting themselves in strange thoughts and ideas, not unmixed with our former beliefs, and therefore not altogether reliable. But such as they are we must be true to them. We must stand by them unflinchingly. We must give them utterance. We must allow them to speak themselves into observation, even though to do so is to bring upon ourselves the misconception of those who will not learn, the jealousy of others who have opinions of their own for sale, and the scorn of the fossilized rulers of public opinion who hold the unthinking majority in their deadly clutches.
There is a law involved in this. It is part of the Law of Growth. To him who is faithful to the best he knows, whether that best is of great value or [165] not, the law guarantees a fuller and better and a constantly increasing revelation of truth.
And so it pays to be a fool for truth’s sake. He who is a fool for truth’s sake manifests a fidelity that shows him related through desire to all the good there is in the whole universe. His very foolishness is a draft on an unfailing bank of indescribable riches, which, as he goes on, will crown him in the eyes of the whole world a god in stature and power.
To be true to your own native thought, and to speak it freely, and to weigh it well, and to hold it in calm, dispassionate comparison with your previous thought, and with the thoughts of others, this is self-culture. It is self-development; it is growth.
It is natural growth. It is growing out of yourself as the tree and the bulb grow. It is the only saving growth. Would the bulb grow by supinely observing the growth of the tree? No; it must pull out of itself the Life Principle latent in it. The Life Principle latent in the tree is for the tree. The tree cannot grow for the bulb, nor the bulb for the tree. Individualization is the intent of the Law. Each thing stands for itself, and grows out of itself. To know how to grow out of one’s self is self-culture. And this is what the new thought called Mental Science teaches.
To grow out of ourselves gives us new strength daily. It banishes disease; it strengthens every mental faculty; it makes the memory over new; it doubles many times one’s power of concentration.
And the power of concentration is actual life. It is the opposite of diffusiveness. Diffusiveness is death.
Is it any wonder, then, that the self-culture I have described should heal the sick and strengthen the individual in all the relations of life?
“Seek first the kingdom of heaven and all other things shall be added unto you.” But where is the kingdom of heaven? The same voice has told us that it is within.
It is within. And there is a door in every human organism that opens up to its outflow.
It is in original thought--at present so broken and perplexed and unsatisfactory in our perception of it. But it is the precious stuff out of which--in its further development--we will build the heaven we long for.
Heaven, like every other thing, is a growth. Native thought is today feeding and shaping it even here on earth, and will go on feeding and shaping it all through the ages. Genuine self-culture is the main factor in the evolution of every ideal.
“He who continues to be passively molded prolongs his infancy to the tomb.” He who molds himself can avoid the tomb.
Self-culture is the making of men.
And the first step in the direction of self-culture is to resolve to follow truth no matter where it leads.
Channing says: “Self-culture begins in the deliberate and solemn resolution to make the best of our own powers.” He also says: “The first grand condition of success is a willingness to receive the truth, no matter how hard it bears on one’s self.”
To sever our connections most absolutely and positively with every form of the world’s present belief is the only hope of the race today.
This will be the beginning of that form of self-culture that means nothing less than the utmost salvation of the man, soul and body.
I strive for the highest in sight. I will be satisfied with nothing short of the very best my mind suggests.
Partial salvation is no salvation. Give me the knowledge that saves utterly. I want it even though its acquisition shatters every idol I ever cherished.
And, indeed, this is precisely what it will do, for it is our old beliefs that are our idols. It is they that hold us bound to the dead past. It is they that rivet our eyes in the back of our heads. It is they that must be abandoned forever.
[166] These beliefs were born in the infancy of the race; and that they should hold us now, when it is time, and more than time, that we should outgrow them, is a disgrace to our intelligence, and to the barbarism we call our civilization.
Therefore, I say, let them all go. Cease to hold them in your mind with that brute force, that muscular tension, born of fear.
For the tenacity with which you hold these old beliefs comes from the fear that in all the universe there is nothing better, or nobler, or higher than they. You do not know that, in a broad sense, there is no evil; that the universe is a universe, or a whole or unbroken and absolute good; that when you have outgrown one good, another and better awaits your acceptance.
You cling to the old until it becomes dead lumber in your hands, and you are dead lumber with it.
And all because you are afraid. Afraid of what? Afraid of the mighty opulence of good that is omnipresent; that simply awaits your renunciation of the old beliefs--founded on fear--to fill you with health, strength, power and beauty.
“Knowledge is power,” said the old writers. Knowledge is the recognition of truth; the seeing of truth; and to see truth is to be truth. To be truth is to be saved to the utmost, body and soul, for truth is imperishable. It never dies.
Have we truth now? Are we harmonious and happy now? I say no! Much less are we so now than even one hundred years ago. One hundred years ago the race was in a measure one with its beliefs. At least its beliefs were less antagonistic with its surroundings then than now, and its conditions were more harmonious. Therefore it was less diseased and less sinful.
By “less sinful” I mean that it violated the set beliefs of the race less. So that in looking back it is a common cry that that time was better than this.
But this is not so. The present time is best. The present time is more intellectual; but the more intellectual we become the more out of harmony are we with the old beliefs that refuse to change on account of a certain set order of things, held in place by a set order of professions for which there is no earthly and no heavenly use, and which will all disappear as soon as the people have learned to trust the unknown, instead of fearing and dreading it as they now do.
For the unknown--so dreaded now--is our savior.
Are the theories--the beliefs--of the present day saving us?
Disease and death are our only foes. Are present beliefs saving us from them?
Evidently Jesus taught the salvation of the body. And when the Jews met him in argument with an attempt to refute the glorious ideality that marked every utterance that he made, and cited the fathers of the old dispensation as their authority, his answer, so short, so simple, so masterly and effective, was only: “Your fathers are dead.”
And these words I repeat to the advocates of the old beliefs. There is no salvation in them. The very promulgators of them are dead. And those who now contend for them--not because their ancestors believed in them--are dying rapidly and horribly. Diseases are multiplying instead of diminishing.
A man’s knowledge is not a distinct possession. It is the man himself. And because this is so, it was said in the old time that a man is what his beliefs make him.
But really there are no beliefs now. We do not truly believe the old beliefs now. We are in a transitional place between the reign of the old beliefs and the formulation of better beliefs; more humane beliefs; beliefs that trust the good more, and fear the evil less; beliefs, in fact, that will surely discard all evil as a governing power, and put faith only in the soul’s most cherished [167] ideal that already proclaims the omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence of good.
Self-culture today is founded in the deliberate intention of the individual to move forward in the direction pointed out by his noblest desires; dropping, in the meantime, every one of the old, established beliefs--long enough, at least, to prove their fitness or unfitness to serve him on the steady road to progression he proposes to tread.
To acquire the new truths, the old ones, which have served their purpose in race growth and now have become errors, must be unloaded from the mind. The pilgrim in search of truth must start out unhampered and free.
The beginning of self-culture is to get rid of the old. We must not hesitate to cast every particle of the long accumulation of dead lumber overboard, and take for our compass the soul’s noble and supreme desire that points always in the direction of the highest happiness.
We do not know, and cannot even imagine, the incidents leading to it. We may go through dark experiences to find it, but faith in it will always guide us aright, and it will be ours.
To believe in your desire--which forever points onward and upward; from grosser to finer; from ignoble to noble; from poverty to opulence; from disease to health; from the repulsive to the beautiful; from death to life--this will lead you aright; this is the prayer of faith. The simple belief in your own desire--firm, unquestioned, undoubted--this will lead your steps up out of the wretched conditions that surround you into those ideal conditions of which you are constantly dreaming.
What have you been believing in heretofore? Stop a moment and reflect.
Do you not see that you have been believing in your fears--the fears that quite obscured and made light of your desires? I am sure you have been doing this the larger part of your life. I want to tell you that there is a well-defined line between the positive and negative poles of your being, and it is found right in the place where you cease to believe in your fears and begin to believe in your desires and hopes.
A belief in your fears keeps you on the death side of this line, where every form of sickness and poverty and helplessness will be your lot.
A belief in your desires or aspirations, will place you on the other side of this line--the upward side of it--where you will realize that there is nothing but good, and where there is no disease, no poverty, no pain and no death.
This is a tremendous thing that I am writing, but there is no truer truth than it.
The difference between trusting our fears and trusting our desires, or putting faith in our prayers, is the difference between poverty and opulence; between sickness and health; between old age and immortal and ever progressing youth; between life and death.
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