Part 9

The moment a life desires anything it instantly becomes related with that thing, but it does not become a possession until all the conditions are fulfilled. Some minds think so lightly of everything that nothing ever becomes steadfast and certain. They drift aimlessly between loss and gain, health and disease, crying out, "Where are the promises," never realizing that promises are only fulfilled when the whole selfhood becomes grappled to the rock of understanding.

Human life is only a growing time, and each life will remain just where it is and express the laws of its level of consciousness until it develops out from them into others.

Sickness, poverty, wretchedness, disappointed hopes are common in the journey of Life; despairing human lives are common too, and lives full of rebellion can be found on every hand, but all these are the products of thoughts that produced them and show just where the consciousness has lingered.

Freedom from all these negative human experiences comes as the reward of inner growth; it can only come through unfoldment and transmutation into higher understanding. Human pain and loss, despair and disease, and the heart-breaks of life, are all the fruits of the Tree of Life whose root is Truth.

When sickness, sorrow and unhappiness have taken the place of health and joy in our life, we have no one to blame but ourselves; we can know that through a long line of perverted thinking, both inherited and acquired, we have become related with the laws in consciousness, and these laws are thoughts of self, hate, jealousy, strife, condemnation, resistance, etc. We have thought it unconsciously in the past, but until we stop and get up new thought relationships, these old things must go on. When we know the higher truth of New Thought Relationship, and the power of constructive thinking, we can begin then and there to change things and we instantly can clean out all the distorted thought energy, and pass the simple act of thinking into a creative form, quitting forever our response to the negative things around us.

We see the truth of "Whatsoever a man soweth, that also shall he reap," and we see, too, that this harvest field where we reap is the human life, and the seeds are thoughts, and we then and there fill our field of consciousness with thought-seeds of Health, Strength, Peace, Love, Joy and all the ten thousand beautiful constructive things, and we soon are living in a perfected thought world, surrounded by the dream pictures of our soul consciousness. We become like mystical seers, we can prophesy then about everything in our life without fear of contradiction, for knowing the Law that on the path "Like produces Like," and knowing the thought-seeds we sow, we can be certain of the future harvest.

Under the Law Eternal we cease to consider ourselves related to anything that we do not want. These things we do not want have ceased to exist for us, in the moment we have forgotten them in consciousness. We must refuse even to connect with them in memory. Sometimes this is a hard lesson: The Law of Memory is a peculiar force, it is the expression of fixed thinking--that which we cannot forget has made deep inroads into consciousness. Memory often keeps us related in strange ways, and hinders our unfoldment. Memory is the connecting link between the yesterday and today; it makes the past always the present and it remains the master of many lives and pours what it will into the field of consciousness until it is conquered.

We cannot go on to peace, power and divine unfoldment while we are wrapped around with olden memories, olden idols, fears and bondage.

It is an unwritten law that we pass on as we become fit, and any life can at any moment come away from the thought law of sin, sickness and death, into the law of peace, power, happiness and joy.

The great God-life wants us to have whatever we want, and will help us to get it and keep it. We have been told for ages to "ask and receive, seek and find, knock and it shall be opened." The Universal waits upon our recognition of its presence and before we ask it is given. The moment we know what we want and ask for it under the higher law of recognition, it is ours, then we only have to wait until we can manifest it. Over the same thought line which we pass out our desires, there passes back to us the answer to our prayers and our human pathway blossoms with the fruits and flowers of our deeper understanding.

The law of bondage will never become the law of liberty, but each one of us may come away into this perfect law of creative thinking as soon as we teach ourselves the simple act of picking out thoughts that relate us with the higher things of life. The kinds of positions, friends, conditions and environment we attract to ourselves under the positive conscious relationship are entirely different from the ones we will attract under the negative destructive thought laws. Good friends, happy environment, peace and love, are not made from the material of mind that recognizes only lack, loss, envy, despair, fear, condemnation and resistance.

When we want health, we must think health thoughts and become one with the laws that make for health and live at health's heights; when we want wealth we must create a wealth thought vibration and link our lives with the levels of wealth. All the grand, good things of earth can only come and gather around us when we have lifted our consciousness to the level at which they can be touched.

In the light of this higher understanding we can see that in just the proportion that our human nature rises towards the Universal Wisdom, our human perception becomes widened, until, at last, we include all the laws of higher living, thinking and being, and we bring from the hidden center within ourselves a profound knowledge. As our life grows more and more in the power of perception, we retire farther and farther from the personal, the pessimistic, the limited belief of selfishness, condemnation, resistance, and we begin a new thought life filled with moral, intellectual and spiritual glory, and even though "since the fathers fell asleep all things continue as they were from the creation," we see the true laws of creation, and making pur minds one with these laws we pass with them and through them on to perfected human wisdom, we turn to the daily life then with a higher, holier and more glorified purpose and out from all the gloom of the past we find the promises have all been answered and that God has provided some better things for us, which without us could not be made perfect.

The final word, then, to the sick, discouraged and diseased world is this:

"The righteous are in the hands of their God (the LAW) and their life is full of immortality," and knowing this anyone may recognize their conscious union with whatever they desire; create it in their human thought world and project it into form in the Cosmic Consciousness; then with wide open soul eyes walk calmly on, expecting it and never laying down their demand until it manifests for them.

The Outside and Inside of Life

"Jesus said unto him, go and wash in the pool of Siloam. He went his way therefore and washed and came seeing." ST. JOHN IX, 7.

When we read the history of the ages behind us we cannot help but see that through every phase of human evolution there has run that subtle something which men call "the power of the unseen."

Matty of our forefathers lived in self scrutiny and subjective investigation, and many lived in lawless expression of their objective selves with no idea of life in its subjective action and form. As humanity advanced in its reverence it came to where lack of attention to regeneration and self-comprehension was followed by an inner sense of guilt, and those who know the power of the two states of consciousness, the outer and the inner, have grown to where they look upon it as abnormal to higher progress, to only enter these finer courts of being just to rest and renew the physical body.

Men instinctively know that life is too serious and mighty to pass along on the objective side of living without now and then going into the center of being and holding an earnest deep contact with the silent consciousness.

In the old thought world it was not strange for master men in every walk of life to pray. The powerful warrior turned his eyes from the field of battle to the strength of Heaven; the trusting mourner turned his eyes from the loss of earth to the gain of dying; even Milton gave himself to the discords of politics in action, and the symphonies of the seraphims. In the silence great lives everywhere have mingled the meditations of the Absolute with the thoughts of the discordant, differentiated and apparent now.

There is not a family anywhere that does not possess at least one person who in himself holds the proof of how real and earnest a thing are the exercises and consciousness of the solitary vigil.

There is something of reverence yet in many lives as they recall the blessing given at meals and the evening hour of prayer. To the wayward and those living in the control of the outside things of life, it was an hour of bondage, but to those who were at all awakened to the call of the inside life, it was an even-tide of peace and power and rest.

It cannot be denied that the years have brought great changes in the methods of human worship. The contempt with which some of the later educators treat worship and religion betray an ignorance on their part both of the true office of revelation and reverence, and this blinds them to the real, innate, fundamental longing of human life.

There are many who come away from the old thought and who believe in the promulgation of a new truth, but they attempt to build up the new through the destruction of the old, and pass along as Iconoclasts seeking what they can destroy. These lives are the lawful product of the undeveloped human comprehension, and the only safety for the race is in the fact that only a few ever take them seriously, and these soon see that they are not inclusive enough to help more than the few, and that after a while, in order to meet the demands of their own increasing individuality, they must themselves pass into wider union, into worship and get away from their own limitations.

Humanity must forever pass between the outside and the inside of life, and only as each soul becomes awake in both conditions can it understand and unite with the laws of perfect being.

New Thought is conscious of the open door between the inside and the outside of life, the earth and Heaven, and it knows that each soul may live from choice in either state of consciousness and pass in and out at will.

Man instinctively knows the difference between the inside and the outside of living; he can easily detect the laws of action, and the laws of silence. The tendency of our New Thought development is to teach lives to pass more and more into the inside power or, in other words, to come into the unseen laws of being and work consciously with the energy that creates and which is unmanifested, while at the same time they manipulate the manifested, external things, and through the understanding of the finite are able to bring into expression the absolute power.