THE purpose of the scholar today is to know how to use his own faculties. To such we can do no better than commend “Paths to Power,” by a most practical student in advanced thought, Hon. Floyd B. Wilson.
CONTENTS
Introduction
I. One’s Atmosphere
II. Growth
III. A Psychic Law in Student Work
IV. Unfoldment
V. Power: How to Attain It
VI Harmony
VII. The Assertion of the I
VIII. The Tree of Knowledge – of Good and Evil
IX. Conditions
X. Faith
XI. Back of Vibrations
XII. Wasted Energy
XIII. Something About Genius
XIV. Shakespeare: How he Told his Secret in the “Dream” and the “Tempest”
INTRODUCTION.
Few words are necessary, it seems to me, in presenting this little volume. The first seven papers may be considered as a series, each one following the other in a natural order of progression. The seventh the Assertion of the I completes the series. The other papers contain, to a certain extent, the application of the 7 principles of the philosophy presented.
Each student will need to make personal experiments, as I recognize that each one must modify, to some extent, the course I have followed, on account of his own temperament, environment and position in the cosmos. Many have been working and writing on similar lines; but they differ as to the discipline required to accomplish purpose. Herein I present a method that I have tested and proven to be practical.
A few of these articles have appeared in some of our monthly publications, and two or three have been read before the School of Philosophy and other societies in New York city during the past two years. All of these, however, have been recast, and the fourteen papers presented, although each is complete in itself, are parts of a whole.
New York City, September, 1901.
I – ONE’S ATMOSPHERE.
It is almost universally conceded that each one carries a certain atmosphere that may be felt by all who come in contact with him; but how that atmosphere is formed and held by each individual is an open question.
It is his nature (whatever that word may mean to the speaker), says one. Another, versed in astrology, knows that the stars, at the hour of birth, settled it all. Another has read the arguments in the books on heredity, and believes one may inherit spiritual qualities from father or mother or ancestors. A fourth reads history, and knows environment to be the sole cause. Yet a fifth, claiming to be wiser and broader-minded, believes in the stars, and fleshly ties, and environment, and education, as combining to create the atmosphere surrounding each one.
Accepting fully any of these theories, we must conclude that the individual is largely irresponsible. From him emanates what has been, by some of these forces, implanted within him. In short, a tide of circumstances first met him; and through his actions thereby forced was created the atmosphere that marks his individuality. If this were the truth the whole truth the subject would possess little of interest, and might be at once dismissed.
With our ideas of education, which we have been following and elaborating for centuries, the end has been to discipline the memory and to train the mind to generalizations and classifications that give the student information, poise, and judgment in lines dignified as intellectual.
With the experience gained by training students in language, mathematics, history, etc., progress has been made; so that, as the years go by, more and more (measuring by the bulk standard) is being added to the curriculum of the college. Classes being graduated today show greater proficiency in Latin, Greek, modern languages, mathematics, history, and so on, than classes on whose members degrees were conferred by the same college twenty-five years ago. Professors congratulate themselves on this, and promise in the near future even better things.
It is not the purpose of this paper to belittle or criticize this advance. In its way, it is well enough. A knowledge of Latin can be gained only by the study of Latin, and it is fortunate that the student can now make more rapid progress than formerly. Granting that the college method, in the subjects taught, leads the student as rapidly as he can safely progress in each one of them, still his real power in the world is given tangible expression by his atmosphere and what has college training had to do with that? College has its environment; the student remains within it for four or more years; its impress is not likely to be completely eradicated. Yet, if the student leave college holding any of the commonly cited theories to account for one’s atmosphere, he is simply adrift in the world of thought. Is there safe anchorage to be found? Let us see.
This subject of one’s atmosphere stands forth as a great is. It is a mighty reality. Though its creation may be surrounded with mystery, its existence is as real as the noon-day sun. We feel it everywhere in mingling with people; in some it attracts, and in others repels. Recognizing unfavorable atmosphere surrounding a friend or associate, attempts have been made to change it. As a rule, the result of such attempts has been a failure. What is worse, the great majority of the human family, while lamenting that their atmosphere is so-and-so, declare at the same time that they are powerless to change it.
This subject, therefore, has a charm more than sacred to every being; a charm reaching his innermost holy of holies. Let one declare repeatedly and openly as he may his inability to control his own atmosphere, his whole existence is full of proofs of his efforts to do that very thing. Taking a broad view, in the light of the new metaphysics, mingling the truths of the Eastern philosophy with the more vigorous mentality of the West, must there not be a demonstrable reason for these attempts to control? Why should the desire to change one’s atmosphere enter the mind, suggesting even discipline to that end, if there be no hope of its attainment? Does not the desire, coupled with the attempt to satisfy it, mean something?
Again, some have succeeded in their work. Do we not all of us know people whose atmosphere has been wholly changed? Have we not met them with surprise, feeling they were not our former friends, but reincarnations of them? How they succeeded has been vaguely told at best. The investigator listened to their story, but it did not bring conviction; so these experiences have brought little truth to the thinking world.
Where is the trouble? Is all real knowledge intuitional? Will the logic of intellect ever refuse light from that source? If so, we must recognize a higher guide than intellect to help us on these lines.
That the proposition may be clearly understood, it will be best to state it boldly. It is this: Man controls absolutely his own atmosphere. To prove this, we leave the logic of the schools. We must look within. We enter the throbbing silence of the intuitional. One cannot refuse to do so; because, in the statement of our proposition, it is self-evident that “man” cannot refer to the man as seen in the flesh. It is the great impersonality of one’s being; it is his ego; it is the unseeable; it is the eternal. “Man controls” means, then, that the true ego controls; and, primarily, if the true ego control, the true ego must have knowledge of such power.
Knowledge of power must precede the ability to use the power intelligently. If these simple, self-evident statements be true, how little does our conscious self know of the real self within! That, however, we may not stop to consider. The purpose of this paper is to lead the student to know his power, not to marvel why he has not known it before. It is true that many have learned of a seeming other self-hood to which they could appeal. They did not know the open way to the reservoir of wisdom within; they guessed, and, happily, guessed well. In this day of advanced thought, however, the student demands demonstration. Please note, in passing, that one might even have knowledge of his power and not exercise it. Knowledge of it gives courage, and yet all the work is to be done.
You may know you can learn Japanese, because of your acquaintance and discipline in other languages than the one first acquired at your mother’s knee; but such knowledge alone does not give you a mastery of even the simplest phrase in Japanese. Reasoning from past experiences in the study of language, you know what the result must be, with faithful work on your part, under the direction of a master in that tongue. All this reasoning is simple as to the learning of a language; now, how far does it help us in the demonstration attempted? If we can control nothing without knowledge of the power to control, this knowledge must precede the power.
From whom shall such knowledge be gained? We turn to Eastern philosophy, and read of, the marvels done, and being done, by the masters; and yet the story of their unfolding is unrevealed. We look about us here, and find some illustrious examples some noble victories won over conscious self by men who could only see and read the shining lights and signboards appearing to the eye of Hope above the limitless pathway of “I can.” But these men again are confusing and indefinite when attempting to tell the way. They may have some theories; but too often it seems they were led almost blindly. Nevertheless, that they won is something we must not overlook that.
It is evident from what I have herein presented that our proofs, if found at all, are to be found in the realm of the intuitional. How can one know that statements from the intuitional are truths? The conscious mind demands demonstration. May it not all be found somewhere in the history of progress? Let us note some conditions, states of mind, brought about by causes clearly understood. This may help us.
If ever you were in a railway accident where you suffered a severe shock, have you not noticed that for weeks and months thereafter, upon taking up a newspaper, your eye would quickly fall upon any item in it referring to a railway disaster of any nature whatever? It seemed to you that such occurrences were increasing, because you were always reading of them. Today, however, we know that your eye was directed to the paragraph by the action of the subconscious mind, from a motive in the nature of warning. The shock you had previously received made you for a moment absolutely still. At that instant, the subconscious mind became charged with the one thought of enlightening you, whenever it might, on that subject; hence, the seemingly unconscious action.
Here, then, we find a condition, a state of mind, an atmosphere, has been created. To overcome this atmosphere, one has only to charge the subconscious mind with thoughts of security and peace. This may be accomplished in divers ways; one of the simplest may be to sit alone fifteen minutes each day and hold the thought: “I AM under complete protection, and always safe”. Soon the sitter will find the stories of accidents in the newspaper will no longer press themselves upon his attention. In the above case, the action which produced the condition was involuntary the action to change is voluntary and scientific.
Look over your list of friends for a moment, and select one whom you have known for years who never gives a complete, frank endorsement of another. Though he may speak of marked traits with praise, he invariably insists on adding qualifying phrases by way of criticism. Gradually you have observed that you could not come in his atmosphere without being treated to a budget of criticisms on others. These others might be your friends, or they might be public characters more or less well known. Your friend has learned to pride himself on his wonderful ability to discern faults quickly in those whom he may meet. Soon all his friends know what to expect when they come within his atmosphere. They also find that, within it, they are likely to supplement him on the same lines. They, too, become faultfinders. The effect of this on the principal, who created this atmosphere about himself, is to intensify his bitterness, till even they who once listened willingly, now withdraw from an atmosphere that has become too oppressive for them to breathe. No one would think it fair to lay this condition to “the stars,” or to “environment.”
There is hardly a reader who will not be able to recall the early life of at least one young man, whose childhood was spent in poverty, and who, in boyhood, expressed a firm desire to take a college course. If, a little later, that desire became a declared resolve, soon all the avenues opened to the end. That desire and resolve created an atmosphere which attracted the forces necessary to the attainment of the purpose. Many of these young men will tell us that, as long as they were hoping and striving and longing, mountains of difficulty rose before them; but that when they fashioned their hopes into fixed purposes, aid came unsought to help them on the way.
With a little reflection, illustrations will present themselves by the score to the reader as to some of the causes that may tend to produce this or that atmosphere. Our argument now forces the conclusion that the atmosphere about us is a product of thought. Thought makes it what it is, and thought alone can change it when it will. Though it be true that conditions are started as we have seen, sometimes without purpose of will, and sometimes by purpose half-conscious only, and sometimes by firm resolve, still, the bringing about of an atmosphere is always due to the active working of persistent thought. The atmosphere that marks strong individuality is universally conceded to be the product of the invisible emanation of thought centered on an idea.
Our proposition as to control, therefore, now reduces itself to this: If we know ourselves masters of our mental apparatus, we know we can control our thoughts and thus dictate our atmosphere.
It is, however, pertinent here to ask how it is our thoughts often seem to mark out their own course, regardless of our intentions. This assumption is only partly true; still, it is partly true. If one allows others to do his thinking, and is continually molding over his own thoughts so that they will run smoothly in the grooves that carry the thoughts of his friends, he brings confusion to his mental atmosphere; and he must not be surprised at the result. The mental work, being haphazard, may then produce an atmosphere neither contemplated nor desired. We can direct our thoughts if we will but we cannot direct them if we stop to question whether they are right. That we must know. Doubting disturbs the atmosphere about us to such an extent as to deprive it of all its attractive force to bring to us the thing we would. Fear or doubt is the mountain in our way; and there is no reason to harbor either in our thoughts for a single moment.
If, in silence, daily, we hold ourselves passive receptive for the particular good we most desire we open the way for the creation of the atmosphere that is sought. One must come to these sittings as nearly passive as possible; but, above all, free from doubt.
Let each one know this is the way, just as he knows the course he must pursue to learn a language. This is the way to catch glimpses of your true ego your great, impersonal and divine selfhood. Your mortal ego your everyday self is a product of thought. Allow it to be tossed about in the hurry and rush of business, receiving through the ethers the half expressed thoughts of others, and you have the average business man of the world. Control can never be gained without discipline. Your atmosphere, being a product of thought, must receive all its power and force through the creative energy that gives it existence.
If one knows, then, that thought creates atmosphere, and that each individual has the right and power to control his own thoughts, our proposition is proved. Work, in the silence, may be new to some. It seems hardly fair to call passiveness work; and yet work is our only word to signify the path to attainment. To many it will be found serious work to learn to hold themselves passive; so, in the silence, work. The moments spent in this way will do more to advance you to the end than any other thing you can do.
If you have never held yourself thoughtless silent know that others have done so. Knowing this, know also that what man has done, man can do again. Believing this, one may commence his task, and alone, in the silence, wait wait wait, until he knows.
Then, as knowledge comes, he finds himself attracting through vibrations new forces to his aid. These silent, mysterious, but potent, forces from the Infinite could not reach him before. Now, he has created an atmosphere which permits their entrance within it. They will never desert him if only he keeps his atmosphere true. No great willpower is required to produce the atmosphere one desires, or to keep it thereafter. Willingness that it may come, with the faith and trust that always precede works, is the simple guide. The illumination that follows will be proportioned to the broadness of the work attempted. As one learns more and more of the power of his true ego, he will come to know more and more of the unity of life. Then he will not have conquered self. He will have simply become acquainted with his own divine selfhood.
II – GROWTH.
Growth is a word of vast meaning and significance. Broadly, we speak of mental and physical growths. Each may pertain, as a whole, to the mind or to the body, in general, or to special lines on which development of mind or body is sought. When we speak of the growth of thought, we are considering the mental up-reaching to a comprehension of truth. There are other mental growths. One may, by force of will, discipline the thought-center to grasp the niceties in the construction of language, to acquire a fine appreciation of the exactness of mathematical laws, and so on. This student work is good mental-gymnastics if conducted rightly, and may prepare one for higher perceptions, for true spiritual growth. At the same time, this discipline may be carried on in such a way as to becloud intellect, and so fetter unfoldment.
To understand the laws of real mental growth, one must remember that the mind is the spiritual nature whose primary function is intuitive perception. Though the term mind is often used vaguely I shall, in this paper, use it only in its essential sense as the higher element of the soul.
True growth of the mind herein referred to is not brought about by storing in it historical facts. The growth which we seek is beyond the usual teachings. It is rather a freeing of the mind from material fetters so it may act for itself. It is the uncovering and bringing to light of knowledge already possessed. For ages this has been the problem of the Yogi. If one has a true conception of man and of creative force, and the unity that binds and holds them one, his next step is to bring himself into the harmonious vibrations that bind all, as the vibrations between the atoms of wood and stone bind their particles together; then, the universe of power is his.
Assuming the student has fairly grasped the meaning of the oneness in life, he next, before putting himself into harmony with all vibrative force, must recognize that vibrations pass through ethers, and in the ethers individual atmospheres are formed and held. His first discipline is to make his atmosphere right; then, and then only, are harmonious vibrations possible from him to the infinite source of power, and from the infinite source of power to him.
Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle, knelt in prayer, as the dramatist tells us; but, from his kneeling posture he arose with:
“My words fly up, ray thoughts remain below;
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”
His atmosphere of guilt cut him off from, and prevented his connection with, the harmonious vibrations of infinite force.
In the battle of Chancellorsville, the great Confederate general Stonewall Jackson’s atmosphere became disturbed. His connection with the infinite was broken, I claim, and he, the idol of the Southern army, whose power over his soldiers had been magical, and whose fearlessness in battle had carried him safely through tempests of bullets, fell, never to rise again in the material body as a leader of earth’s forces on the fields of war.
Jesus stood before Pontius Pilate, as I read the history, a failure. How the atmosphere of him, the most powerful of psychics of ancient or modern times, became disturbed, one may not know. It may have been caused by the repetition of the words, “Unless I go away, the Comforter will not come to you.” I do not know the cause; but I do claim to know that a disturbing force did affect the ethers about him, the Master. He recognized this, and knew the vibrations of harmony between him and Infinity had been broken, as the atoms of wood recognize the foreign force that cleaves them in twain; and afterward following this, broke forth his first and only lamentation, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
With these familiar illustrations before us, it seems to me that the logic of the philosophy I present will be understood; and, if accepted, we are ready to enter upon its consideration, to learn how we may apply it to assist our own spiritual growth or unfoldment.
The power to be gained by sitting in the silence, by absolute passiveness, by concentration, has been told a thousand times. Hours for concentration and helps to concentration have been themes for the teachers’ discourse over and over again. Every earnest seeker for truth finds, in his own unfoldment, something to reveal. Knowing, as I do, that only “in the silence “ is real growth possible, I am about to present herein some ways to reach the elementary or primary condition when one may go “in the silence” understandingly, and bring from it the knowledge he would.
I will here assume that the seeker has broken from the theological dogma of ignorance, superstition and fear; that he has forever blotted out from belief the possibility of there being a personal God, sitting in a material heaven on a material throne, welcoming good immaterial souls to this material heaven and, with equal justice, sending other immaterial souls to a material hell. What could a material heaven or a material hell hold of joy or fear to the immaterial soul?
Growth is impossible with such conceptions of Being with such ideas of possible material future dwelling-places for disembodied souls. Intelligence is fast burying this rubbish of out worn theological beliefs in unmarked graves beyond the possibility of resurrection.
Assuming, then, that you have awakened, or have never been enthralled in that nightmare of ignorance, and that God, or Being, means to you, above all, Intelligence; that within this Intelligence is substance the creative force of the universe; that you are one with that creative force; that you are an atom, if you please, in its composition then, can you not understand why it is your right and privilege to come into harmonious vibrations with all the other atoms, with the absolute creative force of the universe? This being your birthright, you want what is yours. God gave man dominion over all the earth. You are on the earth; you are man.
Do you not now understand? You are seeking only what Creative Intelligence gave you ages and ages ago. You are not seeking what does not belong to you, nor what it is impossible for you to gain except by payment of wearisome labor. No; you are only asking to know how to take the Almighty’s free gift to you. Fully recognizing this, let me lead you, if I may, to the treasures all your own. Not yours only, but mine. The way is “a strait and narrow one,” but it is open to all. If, then, you know your birthright your oneness with God your way to possession is, as I tersely put it in my very introduction, through vibrations, and these become magical with power when one’s atmosphere is made attractive and the channel of faith laid open.
Having attained a true concept of Being, and our relations to the great Impersonal It of the Universe, we are ready to enter upon the study of atmosphere. The atmosphere surrounding us was not placed there by our parents. We must drop all belief in the possibility of inheriting spiritual qualities. We may give the stars their fair share of credit without making them our prison-keepers as to atmosphere. We, being one with God, and having dominion over all things, must not bow to heredity or to the influence of the stars. “We cannot recognize any master, for, in doing so, we would, in our first statement, be repeating idle words and not appropriating the mighty truth they express. Our atmosphere then, marking our own individuality, may have become very unwholesome through our non-recognition of the truth. Though that may be so, it is in our power to make it what we would.
Now, the ways: From our true selfhood springs the desire of the hour, the desire of the month or year, the desire of our life. Let it be, for illustration, the recognition of a desire to master the thought and purpose of the poet, Browning. To do this you must bring yourself into harmony with the vibrations from the Infinite that thrilled the intelligence of Browning as he wrote. How will you accomplish this?
First, if my argument is correct, you must fix your atmosphere you must Browningize it. Select an hour for the daily reading of Browning’s poems, first giving attention to the study of his life, by his best biographers. In the study of his life, pay special attention to the order in which he wrote his poems as far as you can, group them into periods that mark his literary growth. You will soon find that this particular hour in the day or night will have a sacredness. It will be a dedication of that time to the thought of Browning. Head no commentaries on Browning study no criticism on his works. You are seeking guidance from a higher source. You may, and will, carry more or less in your daily work, whatever it may be, your Browning atmosphere. However, try to overcome that during the other hours of the day you may and should (as far as possible) lay aside all mental debates that arise during these hour sittings. Leave them to be taken up on the following day. Within a few weeks you will have finished the drudgery of your work; and, at that hour each day, you will find new beauties in these poems. Sitting in the same chair, in the same room, and at the same hour each day, with mind resting on his thought, you will have found a new atmosphere, and that new atmosphere will be congenial to poetic inspiration on the lines that Browning found.
Your greatest work is now completed. You have created an atmosphere the vibrations of which will attract from the infinite forces of the universe just what you need to bring you the fulfillment of your desire. Now you may lay aside your books, repeating, however, often in the silence some of the poems, particularly those that once seemed meaningless or mystical to you. Your atmosphere having been made right to accomplish your purpose, the vibratory forces now merge you into the infinite oneness, where all is revealed. Stilly you must learn to be, or you will disturb these vibrations. New meanings to these poems will come to you their beauty and their philosophy will be yours. Possibly, in the stillness, at times, you will almost feel the presence of Browning, and the clairvoyant, if present, might see him bending over you. Better than all, from within you will be told that you have fathomed the mysticism of Browning, and intuitionally you will know that you have come into the same harmonious thought-vibrations that made Browning a genius, and made you to appreciate and understand his greatness.
For another example, and one most practical, let me take that of desire for money at a particular time, to help one out of a particularly embarrassing position. This is really the problem of the age of the day of the hour. The failure that many make to draw from the infinite what they need is due to the fact that their anxiety brings them a repelling rather than an attracting atmosphere. Overcome that one must, or the supply from the infinite can never reach the seeker. Here you will note that the atmosphere created by severe tension of the mental forces breaks off harmonious vibrations from the fountain of supply. To again connect your selfhood (entity) with the source of all wealth, look first to your atmosphere. If you accept and believe the truths of the philosophy as I have herein presented them, you know the way. Follow it. Turn not to money-lenders or to friends indiscriminately the so- called “hustler” does that; and if he hustles hard enough, he may find (stumble on) the harmonious chord, though having first broken a thousand other chords of harmony’s harp, which may not be easily mended.
The true way, the only way, is to wait in the silence till you again make your atmosphere true. If your needs are pressing, intensify, not your anxiety, but your stillness. Let your intensity express itself in hope and faith and trust. Your philosophy, if you have learned your lesson right, long ago would have told you there were no devils. If no devils, then no fear if no fear, then no possible cause for anxiety.
Do you tell me that the plane of absolute faith and trust, beautiful and grand though it be, is a slippery one for mortal feet to rest upon? If so, you have made it so by wrong thinking, and by asserting untruths. If you are one with all creative force, all power is yours. Hold this truth assert it, and forever banish every devil (evil) from your consciousness.
Yet you may be prompted to ask, What if we stumble or fail? Do not even ask that question do not speak those words as having power over you. Remember, once Jesus failed the harmonious vibrations between himself and all infinite force were stopped; yet, even then and thereby, the whole waiting world learned a new truth that he, who had overcome sickness and sorrow and suffering and poverty, had also overcome man’s historically named “greatest enemy” Death.
Sometimes we ought to fail later experience with their lessons prove it. We did not fully understand, it may be, the real purpose of the desire; but our faith, if we have merged ourselves in this philosophy as we should, ought to be great enough to teach us to know that all is well, and to enable us to thank the infinite force of creation even for seeming failure. On the earth-plane we may not always be able to distinguish between the real and the seeming. Let us in faith always hold in mind that even failure can be to us only the alphabet to success.
To attain the purpose which forms what we call the ambition of our lives, we must first, in the silence, learn if it be simply an idle wish or a spiritual desire of the soul. It will be told us as we wait; and, if a real desire, it will prove itself such from within. Recognizing that, we know it is God’s message of promise; then our work begins. We turn first to books relating to the subject in question and read them, that their influence may help us to throw out attracting forces on the ethers surrounding us. Our prayers are not rhetorical climaxes, nor the half-expressed longings of a declared unworthy to be recipient.
We know we are worthy God told us that when He touched the chord whose vibrations thrilled and filled our being with the glorious truth that real desire held in itself the bright promise of attainment. Our silent hours, regularly and sacredly kept for the purpose, first, of making our atmosphere true, are our seasons for communications with the Infinite God with Him with whom we are one. This mighty Impersonality we cannot define; but yet, this infinite force we can appropriate. Hardly have we completed our elementary task as to perfecting our atmosphere, before the true vibrations begin. We do not force them we cannot. With our atmosphere true, they begin their outreaching and their intermingling the great harmony sought for has come. Oh, how true the words, when we understand them, “For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light!”
Seekers for truth wherever you may be tell the world now waiting of the pearls you have found. Herein I present you with an easier way than the Yogis of India have practiced. I have proven its worth, but find another, if it seem best in your particular case. Know, above all things, that vibrative harmony must be gained to bring you into oneness with Being. Find the path to this. Growth, then, begins with the finding of one’s divine selfhood, and is sustained by linking that selfhood, through soul-vibrations, to the Immanent God.
“He has found himself who knoweth.
That the power he may crave Reveals itself, and showeth That it came but when he gave – Gave of himself to other souls Who struggle hard and long To choose the path from varied ones That join; but in the throng Are jostled, wearied, spent, and worn,
And find no peace or rest.
“Tis not of other’s knowledge born.
But deep within each breast.”
III – A PSYCHIC LAW IN STUDENT WORK.
The progress made during the past fifty years in the work of the schools is something marvelous. The actual work done in our preparatory schools and our colleges, embracing a period of eight years of study, is stupendous compared with what was done during the same period of time fifty years ago. Then, students carried their pallor on their faces; now, their faces are ruddy with the glow of health. There is much to be said in favor of a method that has brought about such results.
Divers causes may be assigned for this improvement. In part, it may be attributed to better teaching, but one may ask what brought about that better teaching. In part, it may be attributed to the ascending scale of more generally diffused intelligence to the more systematic courses of instruction from the primary schools on to the advanced age and to its demands. Giving to each and all of these factors their full measure of compliment, to my mind, the true cause the real factor is behind them all. It is to be found in a psychic law which has to some extent asserted itself by bringing the consciousness of teacher and student within its direction. If this be true, a full recognition of this law may make all student tasks light and eliminate drudgery absolutely from his life. Though the general health of students in this day is excellent, we still have too many cases of what physicians call broken constitutions, under pressure of the work demanded to attain high ranking in the classes. If a knowledge of this law will relieve this pressure, who would not welcome it?
Let us see if we can discover it. At the commencement of the year’s work in the autumn, the good student will observe that it usually takes him some weeks before he can prepare any lesson to his complete satisfaction. In fact, they (the tasks) seem anything but a part of himself they are so foreign to his whole composition there is not the least blending between him and them. Even though he may make a good record in class, he knows he has been repeating information he has gathered not presenting knowledge which he has made his own. A few weeks and the blending begins lessons are more easily mastered, and he has entered into friendly relations with his foreign acquaintances. This is the natural result of careful study does one say, and that is all. If a natural result, there must be a cause a law. Within that law there may be volumes that ought to be lodged in our consciousness.
Just here another fact is to be noted, and that is that all good students have fixed hours each day in which to prepare each-lesson. If I were to ask this or that one why he selected one hour for Latin, another for geometry, another for Greek, and kept those hours almost sacredly for each, he would probably say he did not know. He began the term that way and kept it up. Another equally good student in the same class has made a different selection as to the hours when he prepares his lessons. Each feels conscious that the plan selected by himself is best for himself, and each is right.
We talk too much about unconscious mental action. Even some of our metaphysical writers do not seem to recognize that sub-conscious mental action is anything but unconscious action. It brings to us often the highest intuitive knowledge. To distinguish between conscious and sub-conscious thought is to take a long step toward the attainment of the wisdom of the Yogi. The student usually, in selecting the hour for the preparation of this or that lesson, is directed by subconscious thought action he always is when he finds that hour especially congenial for the particular work assigned it. The psychic law I am trying to tell you of, therefore, embraces within itself both time and method.
In some cases the selection of the hour or time for work on each particular study may not be of serious importance. If the student come to his work with a heaviness as though he were half wearied before he commences, he best sit quietly passive and ask the question as to the hour he select for the task. Often he will find the answer spring forth in such manner that he will ask “Who said that?” Sometimes he may hear the single word, “Now.” We are all more or less aware of these spontaneous answers or suggestions have we been conscious as to their origin? This is the way, the intuitional speaks to consciousness. Let the student learn to trust it. The hour selected rightly, let him remember that the attainment of knowledge is not a cramming process. He is not about to try to put something inside, he is trying to learn how to use what is already there.
If the student has yet given no time to metaphysical studies, I would ask that he practice the plan suggested herein without inquiring as to the philosophy on which it stands. To try to elaborate that would require far greater space than I here set for my limits, and the practical purpose of this paper might be lost. Mental development seems to me always a misnomer, for development suggests a working over by the introduction of something new. Instead of there being development, there is simply an unfolding. One is not adding new powers to the mind; he is simply calling forth the latent ones. Each study rightly pursued will aid in doing this; and the unfolding or the uncovering can be made a series of delightful incidents which always uplift and never break down.
First, the student, by his work, cultivates an atmosphere of attractiveness and force. The etymology and syntax of his Latin grammar fill his thought with the exactness and the perfection of that tongue. He images the men who mastered that language as men of force men to conquer. Virgil expands imagination, linking mortals to immortals; Cicero’s periods bewilder him with their masterly brilliancy. He finds himself mentally watching for something beyond the petty seeking for the meaning of the words, and their grammatical relationship to each other. This puts the mind in condition to receive the vibrations from the ethers in harmony with the atmosphere created. This means the unfolding the awakening to knowledge; not the crowding of something into the storehouse of the soul. That storehouse possesses wealths of experience the student is seeking its treasures, and, possibly, adding some new ones thereto.
However, let us leave the philosophy. To point the way to delight in study is what I promised. The student has selected the hour to begin the work in each, and understands that no change is to be made as to those allotments. Next, he is to drop all thoughts of learning difficult tasks or of self-sacrifice for knowledge. There is no self-sacrifice about it he is giving these hours to the unfoldment of powers within. This wrongly-called work is now his season of communication with his real selfhood. Its vibrative force he does not know, but he soon becomes conscious of its far-reachingness to infinite force. Instead of his learning the lesson, all nature seems to have come to his aid, and he has absorbed it, not memorized it. This task is not a foreign substance to be introduced into a receptacle called mind. Now, it has become an integral part of his selfhood.
He cannot lose it; and, though memory has been a function to aid in grasping, the possibility of forgetting is not tenable for an instant. Such an absorption of a lesson occasionally comes to any student. If the psychic law of atmosphere and vibrations (and fixed hours held solely for the special work each day are primary requisites) is kept religiously; such absorption or assimilation will delight the student, and bring to him the joyousness of intelligent unfoldment, during those seasons which formerly were to him hours of toil. I advise, of course, that he start each day in as happy a frame of mind as he can. This cheerfulness may require a little effort at first, because he may have been in the habit of thinking these study-hours wearisome. However happy the mastery of the lesson may have made him, its accomplishment meant work. Even after the work was done, and excellently done, he may have turned to the next task with some fears that memory might prove treacherous the following day. With a true recognition of mental unfoldment which this method will soon bring, there can be no possible lodgment for such fears, or any fears.
Just here comes a suggestion one must not overlook. As the studies are usually arranged, the student never has more than five recitations in any one study per week, sometimes not more than three. He has been accustomed to devote, therefore, but three or five seasons of study to the particular subject each week, and yet there are seven days in the week. This has been the error his subconscious thought started him right, but the requirements of the curriculum upset much of the psychic power he had begun to accumulate. There must be no break. The hours must be kept daily Sundays and Saturdays, and all holidays alike. One may shorten the time somewhat, if the lessons cannot be made to fill it; but start always at precisely the same hour each day. The prevailing idea that the mind needs rest is all very well in one way, but to overthrow this plan, even one day in every week, is to disturb atmosphere and vibrations, and to fetter unfoldment.
When the vacation season comes, and the lessons of the year are passed, then some new unfolding begins possibly without any appeal to books. The only serious embarrassment in this daily work may be found, perhaps, from the fact that a portion of it, at least, will be done in the afternoon, and Saturday afternoon is a delightful time for bicycling and matinees. As to one day out of the week, from either of these amusements the student need not be barred. If riding, and the hour comes, let him rest his thoughts on that hours allotted task, and image to himself what it brought. He can also do the same thing at the matinee and yet not lose any essential part of the performance. Students who fairly test this method will never turn from it. If its philosophy interest them, and it will, they may later enter into its consideration. It will bring them to the oneness of life, of which so many speak without grasping the awful meaning held in the word, Unity.
IV – UNFOLDMENT*
*Read before the School of Philosophy, New York, October 2, 1899.
The story of biography that entrances the reader is that of the development of the individual, the noting of the successive mental stages reached, which mark the unfolding of the latent powers of the hero. One may fix his gaze on the brilliancy of the achievement with rapt admiration, but the path to it is what interests most the path standing out clear, with the monuments on the way, speaking the symbolic language of Growth.
Around the men whose names are renowned in history as warriors or statesmen, discoverers or inventors, scientists or reformers, orators or poets, there has been woven the veil of mystery; we have, by common consent, placed them on pedestals, and worshiped the ideals we created from the reals we did not understand. We thought it both human and noble to do this, and from the standpoint of sentiment we were right. Today the mental waves of the thought current of the closing years of another century arrest our attention and tell of the real (or divine) lesson taught by these histories.
The law of unfoldment is a discovery. Long ago we had read and accepted Emerson’s statement of truth that “God enters by a private door into every individual,” but we had most vague ideas as to what “God” meant, and we did not know the way of the “private door,” so this acceptance brought us nothing. Then through the darkness there came upon us revealings from the unknown. They were not the accepted conclusions from a developed philosophy. No, truths seemed to be forced upon the intellect a stream of knowledge swept around us whose course and source were undiscovered and unexplored. Mystified, we called it occultism, and included under that head a world of phenomena and thought speculation which modern philosophy had not yet classified. Thinking men and women began to enter its dark portals some in search of one demonstration, some another. Within those dim corridors the story of unfoldment is learned; and now, as it breaks on us in brightness, we are declaring occultism shall be occultism no more, and that light shall scatter all darkness.
Now we know how blindly men have worked how they have been led without ever discovering their leadership. We know now how they might have freed their paths from hundreds of the barriers on their way had they only recognized the law. We know now why the most successful ones have been the most diffident upon hearing their own praises sung; and, in the language of Emerson, declared, “Not unto us, not unto us.”
Though we have grasped some of the great truths revealing the true selfhood, and feel we have merged ourselves within them, are we yet really acquainted with the law of unfoldment? Were we absolute masters of it we would be the greatest of Yogis. The Hindoos call such mastery Pranayama, for all the forces have been by them generalized into Prana, and he who has grasped Prana has grasped all the forces of the universe, mental and physical.
The Hindoos, it seems to me, more than all other philosophers recognize the unity of all life the divine individual selfhood, responding through vibrations with creative energy, and the oneness of spirit that illuminates all souls. I do not care to go into nomenclature as a rule, but let me try to make myself clear as to my use of the word soul; for, from my standpoint, it is our acquaintance with it and with ways of reaching it, that we are considering in the lesson of unfoldment. Man’s individuality is determined by the endowments of his soul. The endowments of every soul are powers, faculties and capacities. Again, we may speak of these as to know to feel and to choose and designate them as the intellect the sensibility and the will In these endowments, and their development and exercise, must always be found the traits we call character, in the individual.
The soul, ever enduring, ever enlarging, is the immortal but changing plane of the entity, man. It vibrates with creative force. Through it, is the path to all knowledge. Within itself memory sits, the emotions repose, the imagination rises, and will and purpose find their enthronement. The soul, therefore, is rich in its possessions, yet the soul is dormant to conscious mind unless illuminated by Spirit. Spirit is the light of the soul. Spirit is God. Spirit is universal. By it is man bound to the entire cosmos; through it must he recognize his divinity, his oneness with God, the creative impersonal essence, energy and force of the universe.
To develop or unfold, then, is that one should acquaint himself with and learn how to use his own soul force. I do not like the word develop, because it is not a correct word here. There is no such thing as the conscious self’s developing the true selfhood. Conscious self has a work to do that the powers of the soul may unfold and express themselves; it may suggest, recognizing that the soul waits for suggestion, and then it must learn how to be absolutely still. The gunner carefully moves the gun on its pivot, this way and that, till the mark is covered; then, fixing it firmly still, a touch sends the ball forward on its errand. Your thought, your suggestion, is the ball. Once sent forth, let conscious mind know it has performed its part, and, in faith and silence, await the response of the soul.
Within the soul, with its far-reaching endowments, then, we find the storehouse of wisdom; to unfold is to learn the conscious entrance into that storehouse. How did that storehouse become filled with all this knowledge, do you ask? The superficial answer to this question is, through the action, conscious and subconscious, of the mind, in filling this reservoir to be called on in times of need. We who know the truths of the philosophy of repeated incarnations, and of the soul’s vibrative energy reaching to the Source agree with Emerson that the “soul of the child is as mature as the soul of the sage.” We recognize, therefore, that the soul has been gathering value to itself for countless ages; and that, if we discover how to consciously enter that sacred enclosure, its treasures will be our conscious possession. To each, in the economy of the divine law, is given the right and power to enter into this temple of infinite supply, and help himself to all his fondest desire reaches for, if he will.
It is but fair to myself and my subject that I say just here, that this discipline for the unfolding of one’s powers, in its entirety, constitutes and embraces the purpose of being, the divine object of existence. He who grasps this truth and faithfully devotes himself to the calling forth of the powers of the soul will never ask the question, “Is life worth living?” He will know that, infinitesimal cell or atom of the mighty universe though he may be, even he is needful to the creative force of the Immanent God.
It may be well to pause here before taking the first step, and honestly inquire how much of truth’s light has penetrated and entrenched itself within our consciousness. Have we made acquaintance with our own souls? Have we lifted the curtain of the earth-plane, conscious logic, high enough to catch the view of the great background of our being? Is our real selfhood an unknown volume to us? Do we guess or hope, or do we know there are latent powers in the soul to be uncovered to be unfolded? Let us look for the proofs. In school days, have you never worked late over a problem and retired weary and half-discouraged, then joyously awakened a few hours later, realizing that the solution had come? Sometimes you felt you must rise and write it down, and sometimes you knew you could safely wait till morning. Unconsciously, you then have said, the problem was solved. Now, however, you must be taught to speak more scientifically. There is no such thing as unconscious mental action; all mental action is either conscious, or subconscious. The course of subconscious mental action is often not clear to conscious mind. At times it baffles even the wisdom of the Yogi. Subconscious mental action may be the acceptance on the part of the soul of a suggestion from conscious mind, and logically carrying it forward till an end or purpose is attained. Again, it may be the bringing of the will into vigorous action by a suggestion, so that dormant or newly-created brain cells send forward such electric force that a hitherto concealed compartment of the soul is broken into and its treasures disclosed, and then passed to conscious possession.
In the illustration just given, desire was so strong that it hurled thought forward till it found lodgment in subconscious mind, after the conscious was lost in slumber. Then, illuminating Spirit, that always shines, bathed the image firmly held before it by subconscious thought, and the brilliancy of the picture dazzled the senses and awakened consciousness from slumber to light and truth. You did not dream the solution of the problem, you simply found the way to the storehouse -of wisdom in the exhaustless bank of the soul, a mental bank whose deposits ever increase as repeated drafts are made. Some of the spiritualists would explain this quite differently. They would say your guardian spirits came and brought you the knowledge you craved. In this, I do not seriously disagree with them, though the potent force always lies back of the effect. Your desire, your crystallized thought, coupled with faith, created an attractive atmosphere. That was the cause. Spirit force could not reach you till you opened the way. That done, the clairvoyant could doubtless have seen spirits around you and trying to aid you; and, if gifted with clairaudience as well, she might have heard the voices. They are of the infinite force of spirit, and so aided in the illuminating; and yet, all these apparently divers forces are one, for Spirit is all, and one of its purposes is to awaken conscious mind to the limitless powers of the soul.
Messages (some fraught with wonderful meaning) may be brought you by others who are either in earth or in spirit life; but knowledge cannot be brought you by any one, it comes from the working out of a mental process within. If you have worked it out in a previous incarnation, in this, you have only to uncover. Unless you feel completely convinced that my argument as to the real source of knowledge is correct, you cannot enter upon the course I am about to suggest and find it. Glance at the records of history for a moment. Who taught Joan of Arc warfare? Where did Galileo and Kepler learn the music of the spheres? Who taught Homer to compose and sing heroic poems two hundred years and more before the Greeks had an alphabet? Where did Swedenborg learn the language of the angels? Who taught Lincoln statesmanship? And whence Napoleon’s inspiration when he declared, “Impossible is the adjective of fools”? There is, in my philosophy, but one reply to all these questions: They each and all found their way to the mighty reservoir of knowledge — they made acquaintance with their own souls and appropriated its treasures “Within, within’s the light.”
“Truth speaks in the senseless, the Spirit;
But here in this palpable part
We sound the low notes, but are silent
To music sublimed in the heart.
“Too few and too gross our dull senses,
And clogged with the mire of the road,
Till we loathe their coarse bondage; as sea birds,
Engaged on a cliff, look abroad
“On the ocean and limitless heaven.
Alight with the beautiful stars.
And hear what they say, not the creakings
That rise from our sensual bars.”
If, then, we are agreed where knowledge is, we need not scatter force by looking for it where it is not. We know the secret place, and each must enter for himself. He then appropriates what is his own. Desire told of the treasures in the storehouse, and let this teach each one the sacredness of desire. Desire to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge is, therefore, God’s message telling us what is ours if, we will.
“Seek not with an anxious look,
Quiet your worried mind,
Know these words are true indeed,
Seek and you must find.
“Think not that to gain your wish You must so and so believe,
Forget not the truth of this,
Ask and then you must receive.”
Now, we are seeking an entrance within the temple not made with hands; eternal, in the heavens. The way is a “straight and narrow way, and few there be that find it,” said the greatest of Yogis, whose communion with his soul was so absolute that it dominated his conscious self. In giving instructions he always spoke from the center, the seat of the subconscious selfhood. At the gateway of the entrance we lay aside our load of false beliefs, our load of errors and prejudices, our load of doubts and fears. Waiting there, we ask guidance of the soul “the perceiver and revealer of truth.”
“Be still and know” is not a command; it is a simple statement of truth. Knowledge from within cannot come to us unless we are still; nor can it come if we doubt or fear. To open the way that it may come, with stillness we must combine trust; following that, as a heritage, will come patient, receptive listening.
That you may put yourself in such an attitude, it is proper that I here go somewhat into detail. The ambitious student who recognizes truth when spoken by another is inclined to try and force demonstrations. He loses power by this, and his progress is slower. So many have told of sitting alone and holding firmly in thought a purpose as a way to the end, that thousands upon thousands have been trying by so doing to obtain demonstration, without even knowing what keeping still meant, to say nothing of their wrong ideas of building and holding mental images.
First, then, learn to sit and be still physically. Select an hour in the day or evening a full hour, and just an hour, when you can be free from interruptions, and take that same hour each day, and no other. Sit with both feet resting on the floor; let the chair be of a height to permit this. With both feet resting on the floor, a right angle should be formed at the knee. Next, be careful that the spinal column be kept erect there is a fluid passing through it to the base of the brain, with which your thought has everything to do. In a lying down posture this fluid presses against the base of the brain; and, if concentration is attempted in that position, it will be found exceedingly difficult to sustain it. More than that, that position bars unfoldment. Knowing now the position to take, and the absolute requirement (in the initial work of cultivating acquaintanceship with your soul) of coming to these sittings the same hour each day, you are ready to commence your work. For the first few weeks, and probably for a full month, I advise you to pay no attention whatever to your thoughts during these hour sittings; let them run on, let them run whither they will.
Your first discipline is physical this too many have ignored. Within a month, by such discipline, you can stop in your walk even, and find a delightful stillness surrounding you, and the mind absolutely free. This physical rest and stillness is most essential to true progress. Having gained this stillness you commence to command thought. Send it on the simplest of errands at first. Keep it within your physical selfhood. Center it on some portion of the body say the hand and then try to trace every sensation you feel in the hand. Follow this by directing to other parts of the body. An increased supply of blood is sent to these members by this exercise, and atrophied organs and muscles have thereby been restored to their normal condition. Following the study of sensation leads us, naturally and logically, to that of the study of images. The lowest forms of life feel, even the amoebas, and so sensations are known to them.
To image requires intellect; in its exercise it calls on both memory and imagination. Let your first imaging be of the real, not of the ideal. Say a city you visited long ago. Call up in memory all it readily gives forth; and, passively waiting, enjoy, as you can, looking at these mental pictures. The next day you will find the pictures more distinct. Some details you had not even noticed when you saw the church, or town-house, or school-house, or monument, now appear. A street you scarcely recognize comes to your vision more or less distinctly. A week or two of these sittings pass; and your soul, through the subconscious mind, will have revealed all it has to reveal on that subject. Possibly you have not gained any valuable knowledge; but if you have been patient and followed this course carefully, you have opened communication with your soul. You can want nothing to which your thought, rightly directed, may not help you. Follow for some weeks the calling up of images which will put memory to its test. Say the school and playmates of childhood, their youthful faces, their names, their characteristics. The soul has forgotten nothing; let it prove this to your consciousness. Within three months of faithful work, following these simple lines, you will find yourself fast approaching mastery of your own thinking self. That mastery opens the portal to the soul, the treasure-house.
The next step in unfoldment goes beyond the individual or conscious self. You want to reach out mentally to others. Your discipline has now prepared you for this. In your first attempts, select some purpose most unselfish in itself and directly affecting the good of another. If you can know when he is asleep, select that hour to treat or help him. This, of course, as to time, refers to your beginnings. Sit still; image him where he is, and you near him; speak your wisdom to his soul. You will be surprised how quickly the work will be done. In your practice, always preserve the attitude of listening, as intuition speaks more frequently through the medium of the mental ear than through that of mental sight. I suggest that you begin your sittings with your eyes open, but close them as soon as there comes a sense of strain upon them.
The Hindoos make measured breathing preliminary at almost every sitting. There is a world of discipline in their breathing exercises, I cannot commend them too heartily. Inhale, counting, say, four; hold the same; count, exhale, and rest the same. Modify this exercise from time to time. All well-directed breathing exercises harmonize the system and fit you mentally for the more serious work. One of their exercises, you will find, at first, quite difficult, but I feel I ought not to pass without mentioning it here. Inhale deeply through the left nostril, centering thought on the nerve current or spinal column, as if you were sending your breath through it so that it may strike (mentally) on the last plexus, which they call the seat of the Kundalina. Then hold for a short time, and exhale slowly through the right nostril. This practice is conducive to repose or rest. If you have tired nerves, it will calm them down so that such peacefulness will come, that you will feel you have never before known what rest meant. After you have followed the method suggested a few months, there should be seasons of rest, seasons when you cease to strive for anything.
During these it might be well to give, say fifteen minutes of the early day, or the same time just before retiring, to a sitting; this simply for preserving harmony of the forces, and keeping the way to the source open and clear. When, from time to time, you are about to undertake some serious task to which you feel called, read books that bear upon the subject, and talk with people who understand something of it. Do not strain to reach what does not appear through these avenues, but let the main features rest quietly in your mind Note the facts that you have, and skip the speculation advanced; you are seeking the truth. All the speculation, all the theories of others cannot help you.
You are reaching for a point beyond. If you desire this knowledge, that desire proves your soul has it in her storehouse, and you now know the way to find it. Having brought about you consciously an atmosphere that can receive and hold the vibrations that you are calling to yourself, you again enter the silence and receive from the soul the revealings which it is ready to give to your consciousness. Later on, you will come to the more serious purposes that dominate your life. Having learned, tested, and proved, that the “straight and narrow way” leads to knowledge, you will enter it with absolute faith and trust. You will not trouble about time and dates, for living will have begun to you to be an eternal now. In the brilliant radiance of the present, and the knowing that it always is, you can have no longing for a future.
Herein I have presented you with an outline of work on the details of which I might elaborate for the next hundred pages were I attempting to take you over the course suggested step by step. I trust, however incomplete this brief paper may be, some, at least, may grasp a method that will help them to find the way that leads to purpose fulfilled. All spiritual advancement is a growth. The unfolding can come no faster than you are ready for it; without discipline it may never come at all. The limitless powers of the soul are the limitless powers of man. Possess your conscious self of the wisdom of your soul, and the book of knowledge will be open before you. Then you will need no more to go to books, for infinite knowledge will be yours. Even though no mortal may ever reach the pinnacle of this sublime height, every approach toward it is upliftment to worthier deeds and nobler lives. We have only the glimmerings of our own possibilities. History shines with names here and there that tell us what man has done. In learning of the powers of the soul, you have learned of the absolute unity of all life and force, and the secret spoken by our wisest philosopher that all have “an identical nature.”
“God is the ocean limitless
That doth all springs supply,
God is the “I AM that I AM”
The self of every I.”
Then
“In the silence, in the silence,
In his love, so kind and true,
In the living, throbbing silence,
Find the work you have to do. ”
After you have over and over again proved the truth of this philosophy by receiving revealings from the soul of wisdom never gathered by others, then hesitate not to assert your oneness with creative force and power, and sing with Emerson:
“I AM the owner of the spheres,
Of the seven stars and the solar years,
Of Caesar’s hand and Plato’s brain,
Of Lord Christ’s heart, and Shakespeare’s strain.”
V – POWER: HOW TO ATTAIN IT.
Were the question asked the student, the professional man, the mass of struggling humanity generally, what would ye, the reply of each and every could be crystallized into the single word, Power. The way to the end desired, be the end what it may, is through some path whose goal or end is what is comprised within the scope of that magic word. To gain power, the seeker consults what is called the teachings of history, and reads the conclusions drawn from experience. The story of a life, a great and noble life, is presented by one who has made himself familiar with the events of that life, and there we find the story of purpose and accomplishment. After all, what have we? A compilation of facts that may tell of daring deeds, of wonderful victories, of glorious triumphs all done and won by the hero. These are marvelous things, we may say, and he has won his title to renown. We may become, with other readers, a worshiper at that shrine.
We may speak his name with veneration, and thank God for such examples of God-like men. Then the reader pauses and reflectively wonders if he may find, in his time, some similar hero. The story is simply to such a reader one of interest. The lesson to be learned by the life is lost. The real lesson is not understood by either the biographer or the reader, and may not have even entered into the consciousness of the hero himself.
When one finds himself in doubt as to what is for his best interest in a new venture, when intellect presents no solution, when past experiences fail to give any light, he seeks counsel, hoping thereby to bring about a focusing of intellects to penetrate the mystery and reveal the secret. From these counsels he usually comes as wise, but no wiser, than when he entered them. To act blindly he feels is not good judgment, so he returns to the battle now more than before filled with confusion and doubt What he needs is foresight, he says, meaning by that knowledge of the undetermined, while the conclusions of judgment are drawn only from experience. In our ignorance, we have defied intellect, through which the reasoning faculties were developed. This has been made to represent the dividing line between the brute creation and man. It characterized the highest animal plane. It represented a force capable of limitless culture and expansion. It was the human element to be trained and disciplined by the schools. By the machine drill, it was to be made useful to direct in all the affairs and businesses of life. Blindly we are still going on in the same way, mingling doubts and fears, and hopes and longings. Force is scattered. Possibly the seeker turns to prayer; but even then the church dogma advises his way may not be God’s way, and that he must learn to be content with what may come.
The ecclesiastic advises that there may be a wise purpose in the withholding, for this is the logic of the theologian. He does not enter into the warm high hopes of the seeker who is working toward, it may be, his noblest ideal. That ideal came to him he believed from God, that God make it radiant and holy, and now that God, after such an awakening in his soul, prevents, the ecclesiastic may tell him, the realization. He, the seeker, can have no further use for such a God. His intellect again speaks, and apparently more wisely; he turns back to it, declaring he has no longer time for dreams. A point has been reached, a point passed; only error has been won. Effort finds a new path which reason approves, and work again begins; but doubt and questionings fill the path with obstacles. The orator, the poet, the clergyman have shouted, “Life is a battle,” till the ethers absorbed the thought, and man breathes an atmosphere miasmic with doubt, uncertainty and strife. This atmosphere has a peculiar density and holds thought enslaved. Thought is largely a product of environment a reflection of the mental atmosphere around us. Thought is free, and all have absolute freedom in its realm. Why not use that freedom? Why not use that freedom wisely? Who shall fetter your thought or mine? Alone and still, it breaks forth at times with words of prophecy. Whence came the message? Beyond the reach, we know, of the logic of intellect. Then whence its source? Cold logic could not give it birth, and experience remembers no parallel.
In physical science, advance has only been made by a series of experiments. Many of these experiments have been called accidental ones, for on them, at first, no theories were based. Truths were revealed by them and the law of cause and effect were later followed out by analysis. Mysteries were unraveled that no known law of synthesis could have uncovered. In the study of the mind we are dealing with something more subtle than matter. Far within, there is an unfathomed depth no logician dare claim to have reached. From that depth spring to conscious self the undiscovered truths. To know the intuitional is to know truth. This is a strong statement; can it be verified to the logic of intellect?
To clearly illustrate the position taken, the soul is the spiritual ego, rich in past experiences and full of desire to communicate with the commonplace ego which has steeped itself in the intellectual dogma called knowledge, and thereby lost sight of its divine fatherhood. Through the spiritual ego vibrate the harmonies of the divine, unfailing directors of the real selfhood. It speaks in dreams and noble desires. Each sublime desire from it is simply a telepathic communication from God, advising one what may be his. Through it is the only method of communication with the Infinite. To recognize and follow its mandate is to listen to the voice and to obey the command of God.
Franklin heard the summons and sent the kite with its metal tip to meet the powerful, unerring messenger that passes from cloud to cloud on its pathway of dazzling light. Till then, the thunder was only recognized by the ecclesiastics as God’s voice from the heavens, and the lighting as his uncontrollable bolts of destruction. To investigate more would be to offend God, said these theologians. They had the church dogma in their hands to prove the wisdom of their logic. Franklin only claimed that he had an idea, and that his experiment was to test if that idea were true. Where did the idea come from? He could not have gleaned it from books, for the wise men of the day then, as now, spoke from the record. For authority they, like the scribes of old, quoted from the accepted philosophy of the age in which they lived. In a moment of stillness was that idea fixed on his consciousness so that he could not drop it even if he would. From the infinite source of light was revealed to him a truth, and he made the instrument to demonstrate it to the world.
From the unknown came the message to Joan of Arc; and, with it, the irresistible force to compel action. History furnished no parallel to such a leadership; but inspired truth, finding complete acceptance in a single soul, will always carry conviction to the multitude. The purpose accomplished, the bigotry and superstition of the age turned its erring, cold logic on the lesson, and all its wonderful meaning was lost.
Since man has kept a record of events, the pages of history and biography have been crowded with the marvelous. Sometimes we have called it coincidence, sometimes luck, sometimes providence, sometimes fate. Today the philosophy of the opening years of the twentieth century says there are no accidents; law is universal. Telepathic communication from mind to mind of the living is accepted generally. Drifts of thought thro ugh the atmosphere, changing purpose, carrying conviction, bringing harmony, creating doubt, and so on, is fast growing into general acceptance. Many go further, and claim to receive spirit messages from those who have passed out of this plane of existence, and their proofs are so startling that the skeptics of the London Society of Psychical Research declare, in substance, that they find no other explanation of the phenomena. Others, still more advanced, accept substantially all this as true and claim that the soul can speak directly with the Infinite. They claim to know of the receipt of such communications, and to live upon the light and help they bring. There were prophets in the past, why not in the present?
Why should God have been willing to communicate with Moses, with Abraham, with Solomon, with Paul, with Socrates, with Shakespeare, with Franklin, and not with you and me? May it not be our fault? What wonderful telepathic communications are recorded? How can mind speak to mind unless there be a complete unity of all life through spirit which is itself the light of the soul? Spirit pervades all space, illuminates all souls, animates all life, is eternal and changeless. Souls may and do grow in knowledge by unfoldment, which knowledge can only be possessed through the illumination of Spirit. How may one invoke and possess himself of this aid? Evidently he must first make acquaintance with his own soul. If he can communicate with it, he may hope to communicate with other souls distant from him; and he has then taken the first step upward in the line of spiritual progress leading to truth. The first step is to break from the dogma of fear. Philosophers and poets alike have had too much to say of fear, and too much to say of man’s weakness and God’s greatness. Our line of thought will, if rightly followed, lead us to know the unity of man and God.
Recognizing that, we will know the truth of “Seek and ye shall find.” “Ask and it shall be given unto you.” Step by step let us try ourselves. First, our way starts with a recognition of the demonstrated facts of telepathic communication. Next to telepathic communication comes up for consideration drift thoughts meeting ours and thereby affecting us in divers ways. These are easily recognized by a sensitive, a Yogi, or even by a student who has made but little progress in the metaphysical teachings of the day. Often you have been engaged in earnest conversation with a friend, when, without any apparent cause, you have become abstracted and then turned to him asking the theme which a moment before you had been discussing. The cause of that abstraction was a drift-thought from the ethers sometimes it may come with such force as to break off the conversation from the subject under discussion and bear you away with it on a new one you apologizing to your friend for the break with “It has just occurred to me” or some such phrase. These drift- thoughts scatter force if allowed to seize hold of one. They prevent concentration and are the enemies or devils to be overcome by the student calling for power. They must never be mistaken for the intuitional messages of truth.
As to messages from those who have joined the great majority to those here, the London Society of Psychical Research, to which I have referred, says the message and even the form comes. If not from souls once known here, then whence the message beaming with their self-same intelligences? If one has never investigated this subject, it may be best not to assume knowledge which he does not possess. Prejudice is one thing, ignorance is another. Remember that one of our most famous German philosophers has said: “The man who any longer denies clairvoyance does not show that he is prejudiced; he only shows that he is ignorant.” Read Rev. Dr. Minot J, Savage’s “Psychics, Facts and Theories,” and “Miracles and Modern Spiritualism” by Alfred Russell Wallace, D. C. L., LL.D., then start in yourself and investigate. In the science of “Raja Yoga” of the Hindoos, which means “the conquering the internal nature,” it is claimed that the sum total of all the force in the universe, mental or physical, when resolved back to its original state, is called Prana. The knowledge and control of this Prana is the one aim of the Yogis, and is called Pranayama. Spiritualism, they say, is but a manifestation of Pranayama, and add “It is quite probable that there may be hundreds and millions living here that we can neither see, feel nor touch. We may be continually passing and re-passing through their bodies, and it is probable that they do not see or feel us. It is a circle within a circle, universe within universe. Those only that are on the same plane see each other.”
As we move forward in our psychic studies, we are simply grasping the meaning of the word soul. Within us it is, outward it reaches till lost in the Infinite. We best be slow about accepting messages that seemingly come as from the infinite impersonal force of the universe; yet they, even they, may come. When one readily calls these vibrations, he has learned the whole secret, Emerson puts it: “We know that all spiritual being is in man. A wise old proverb says, ‘God comes to us without bell’ that is, there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens.”In the “Over-soul,” Emerson again speaks inspired truth in “Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The simplest person who, in his integrity, worships God, becomes God.” To reach the state here indicated by Emerson would be to pass beyond the intellectual and the reasoning plane. This higher plane is called the super-conscious; Yogis of India have been known to reach it. May there not yet be Yogis found here amid the rush and hurry and danger of western civilization?
The purpose of this paper, however, is not the attainment of the ultimate; it is the developing of power in this or that direction. Along my line of reasoning, we have seen that thought can travel without the aid of wires of iron, or steely or copper. It can travel through the ethers on lines that can never be drawn. It seemingly comes from souls no longer held in earthly environment. Sometimes it comes to us through conscious action, often through subconscious. Nothing happens; there are no accidents. Then, there must be a law governing all these wonderful phenomena. Only by accepting the unity of life can the law be discerned. If God is spirit and spirit is all, we, our divine selves, must be one with this great light and force which illuminates and controls all. Being one with It, we can speak with It and act with It. Though we may never fully comprehend the central essence from which all harmonies flow, still from It we may appropriate all we would to fill our lives with joy and peace and plenty and love.
Relieve God of the personality with which the theologian has clothed Him, and then the vague, meaningless statements of the same theologian become radiant and we catch glimpses of the great impersonal Energy as we say, God is spirit, God is love, God is light, God is truth, God is force, God is law, God is justice. Laotsze, the accredited founder of Taoism, twenty-five hundred years ago wrote of the Chinese god, Tao: “Tao, considered as an entity, is obscure and vague, yet within It there is form. Obscure and vague, yet within It there is substance. Tao is ultimate thought and dwells in silence; hence Being cannot be defined. It is what It is. It can, however, be appropriated.”
To appropriate God, it is first to know and believe in God. Considered as a great impersonality, you can reach out to that force surrounding you, knowing your real self to be of It, one with It, and then you only appropriate what is your own. “Acquaint thyself with God,” is but another way of saying Bion’s favorite maxim: “Know thyself.” To know one’s self is to recognize one’s divinity to become acquainted with one’s own soul. That is the highest, the truest religion. This word religion is made up of two Latin words, “re” and “ligio,” to bind back; and, therefore, true religion means to bind the soul (the immortal ego) back to its spirit fatherhood. They only are truly religious, who have learned of the fatherhood, of the unity of life, of the omnipresence of spirit.
Subconsciously many have been so illuminated by their own divine selfhood that their intuitions have risen superior to logic as directing force in their business and in all their professional affairs. They followed the highest, truest, noblest leadership; in fact, that leadership was so formidable that they were compelled to follow it. They, in so doing, were always successful. Genius follows such guidance; and, when praises are won, feels itself unworthy the honors received. So, during the ages, man has worked and failed, worked and succeeded, blindly. Why?
With wrong ideas concerning God, he lost sight of, or did not recognize, his own divine selfhood.
Jesus taught the truth, but its simplicity and real meaning was lost in the puzzling logic of the theologian. He taught the unity of all in “I and the father are one.” “Not I” (the personal or mortal I), “but the father within me,” and “Greater works than these shall ye do.” Shakespeare tells of the bank or force from which he drew when writing. In the epilogue to the Tempest we have the last lines Shakespeare ever wrote for the public, after taking leave of the spirit force which had guided his pen so many years:
“Now my charms are all o’ erthrown,
And what strength I have’s mine own,
Which is most faint.”
Like Emerson, Shakespeare recognized the soul force within, illuminated by spirit. It spoke beyond the range of his mortal, intellectual self, and his consciousness of it must often have provoked him to say in hearing his own praises sung: “Not unto me, not unto me.”
Men of destiny everywhere have asked, “Why to us?” Mozart astounded the musical composers of Europe at five, and genius has always been a wall impregnable to the logic of intellect.
The way to power, therefore, is through acquaintance with one’s own soul. The seeker gains an entrance to its portals by recognizing the unity of life. He then sees spirit illuminating and governing all life. This is no new theory of God. They who had written and spoken from the center (which I call the intuitional, though this is of it simply, as the center can never be reduced to possession) are only understood when the divine (subjective), not the intellectual self, listens. The truth of inspiration may reveal itself to the simplest, while the theologian is vainly trying to bring it to light through his dogmas. All have the right to interpret the intuitional. If one single thought expressed by Jesus is revealed to your selfhood as “If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light,” then trust that revelation and never look up what the commentators may say about it.
Go in the silence and say I will know the truth. I have the right to know it. Within, I have heard, at times, the voice of prophecy; I will acquaint myself with the source of wisdom. You need say no more than this, and your thought may shape the language other; still, with some words expressing like resolves, hold yourself passive and wait the coming of the message. Thus you attract to you what you desire. Your peaceful faith will hasten the coming of the blessing; that opens the way, because it makes your atmosphere true.
All power is of Spirit, of God. You are one with God. Every noble purpose within you is born of God; and the dream of advancement is God’s picture and promise of what may be yours. Know this, and in the silence hold as yours already. It is yours long before full manifestation to your outward self. Its invisible substance must be possessed by your subconscious mind first; and, through firmly holding it up consciously to the light of spirit, it takes form and is revealed to the senses. Such action is in perfect harmony with the teachings of Jesus, “Whatsoever ye desire when ye pray, believe that ye receive and ye have already. ” Jesus never taught men to be beggars to an unwilling or an unknown God. Believe in yourselves, believe in your own divinity. Deny man’s weakness, but remember there is no growth or uplifting in denials. Assert the truth and the fulfillment of noble desire. Bring yourself to full realization that these statements spring (as they do) from your divine selfhood. In absolute faith you hold up the bright pictures of noble desire and resolve; that is your work.
Spirit, one with your divine selfhood, will illuminate and give visible form and expression to them (if you hold them firm and true) for that is Spirit’s work. Do your part faithfully, that is all there is for you (your conscious self) to do. Thus is all true power born. Within you, it lies dormant; till, by conscious action, it is brought to light. To work intelligently is to work consciously. As you so work, flashes of light, bringing to your consciousness knowledge, will shine forth again and again. You will repeat in full realization the inspired lines from Edgar Allan Poe, “All power is of God of God alone.” And yet, that God is within your reach. That God is no monarch sitting on a throne in a material heaven. He is around you. He is here. He is everywhere. Your most cherished wish cannot be dearer to you than to Him. He, Himself, recognizing your gifts, whispered to your consciousness that wish. By telling you of it, He simply disclosed a treasure that was yours. You have a task to do to take possession of the treasure. Do not pale at this task to be performed, however, because all “Its ways are ways of pleasantness, and all its paths are peace.” Your daring and your bravery are delight to spirit. Trust it.
“Forward in the strength of manhood!
Forward in its fire of youth!
Aim at something; ne’er surrender,
Arm thee in the mail of truth.
“Forward, then! bright eyes are beaming,
Fight, nor lose the conqueror’s crown,
Stretch thy right hand, seize thy birth right
Take it, wear it, ‘tis thine own!
“Slay the giants which beset thee,
Rise to manhood, glory, fame,
Take thy pen, and in the volume
Of the gifted, write thy name.”
VI – HARMONY.
It will be conceded by all students in metaphysics of the present age, that the spiritual ego is one with Omnipotent force, and when attuned to harmonious vibrations with the Infinite, possesses all the power over its own physical environment and its surroundings that has been attributed by the theologian to God. Allowing this to be a correct statement of truth, the chief end of man is to consciously possess the power to bring himself into these harmonious vibrations. This done, he has solved the problem of living.
The purpose, the aim, of the student in advanced philosophy today, therefore, is not to learn a new philosophy, but to make practical the one he knows to be true. Students are everywhere discussing theories of vibrations and the laws which govern them in short, they are experimenting. Are they experimenting on right lines? Vibrations pass through atmosphere, and can only reach the intelligence of him whose atmosphere will permit. The wires are already laid. You may connect your house and office with a wire and not be able to speak across it; you must have at each end a properly adjusted transmitter and receiver, that you may give and receive messages across the line.
Primarily, we start with the assumption that all life is one, that all intelligence is bound together by subtle unseen chords on which thought can travel, and on which thought does travel, whether we will or not. It is not my purpose here to offer any argument to prove the truth of this philosophy, which is so old and so new. Laotze, who wrote of Tao, the Chinese God, twenty-five hundred years ago, recognized it, and declared that though Tao could not be defined, he could be appropriated. All great thinkers, even before Laotze, and since then, have agreed as to the oneness of life. All advanced thinkers of the present day start with the acceptance of the unity of life, and demonstration has, in a thousand ways, proved the truth of this mighty unity. Accepting this, then, as true, we, as individuals, are desirous of coming into harmony with the supreme force of the universe. All readily acknowledge that we must get into harmony with the infinite vibrations, to attain the power or force we would grasp.
I hold that the connections with the harmonious vibrations desired are made by establishing the proper atmosphere around us. Then, with atmosphere correct, we only need to know how to sit to attract to us the vibrations that will bring from infinite force the fulfillment of every noble desire and purpose of the mind.
It has often seemed to me that errors have been made by the seeker trying to establish connection by not recognizing that the connecting link was his own atmosphere. Until that is understood and the connection made, vibrations from the source are impossible; after that, vibrations from the source must come, if only the seeker passively waits. Let the student remember always that all the wires are up and strung; all life is bound together by indestructible chords. He is not asked to establish new lines; they were all strung ages and ages ago, and they are as universal and eternal as life. But, though these wires are strung, and though these wires bind together all the thought world of the universe, he only may speak over them who can establish the connections. The illustration cited at my very commencement will explain this. You cannot talk from your house to your office over a wire that passes between them, without the proper instruments are placed at either end. Your atmosphere constitutes both the receiver and the transmitter on mental lines, and must be perfectly adjusted and toned in order to receive the vibrations, or they can never reach your consciousness.
Just here it is proper to state that among the thousands who have sought for light and found it, and the thousands who have sought for light and not found it, there has been much haphazard work. Why one found the light and another failed to find it has not been satisfactorily explained. The reason of this, it appears to me, is because some have stumbled on psychic laws and won; while others have failed, simply because they did not stumble the right way. We now live in an age that demands intelligent demonstration of theories tested and proven to aid one in the attainment of desire. If there be laws which, followed, give man all the force he desires, he not only wants to know these laws, but also how to make them practical in his life. The philosophy resting on these laws has long claimed to show the way; now let us see if we can learn how to adapt it to our needs.
I have here in my introduction, in a concise way, set forth the primary tenets of the advanced philosophy which I believe the majority of my readers are familiar with, and generally accept. I have also clearly set forth that under that philosophy, power from the infinite force of the universe comes through vibrations on lines that have always existed and that could never be broken down. To establish the connection, however, it is necessary to know how to connect our entities with the infinite Mind, so as to send and receive the messages we desire. I have boldly stated also to you that the instrument through which we must speak and call, and through which we must hear and understand, is the individual atmosphere each establishes about himself. In other papers I have had much to say of atmosphere and have clearly demonstrated, I believe, that the individual controls absolutely his own atmosphere. If you are a slave to the vague philosophy of heredity, environment, or the stars, this claim of one’s absolutely controlling his own atmosphere may not be accepted by you at this time. However, I cannot enter into an argument to prove the statement I make as to atmosphere correct, for that proposition has already received full consideration.
I will therefore premise that you do accept that as true, for I cannot understand how you can advance mentally today unless you have not only accepted it, but proven its truth. My position, then, is clearly laid before you, together with the facts I have assumed as agreed upon, before starting forward in our search for the ways to the ends to be gained, and to the victories to be won. In all demonstrations there must be some agreement and assumption as to facts, even in geometry, we do not attempt to demonstrate that “A straight line is the shortest distance between two points,” or that “A curved line is changing its direction, at every point.” These are axioms; and, therefore, you will consider any statement I have made as to the oneness of life, as to the subtle chords that bind together all life, and as to individual atmosphere being within the control of each, the axioms on which the demonstrations herein attempted are based.
One of the best ways of illustration is to seek familiar examples in history or biography and learn the real lesson they teach.
Were we to turn the pages of history back until we reached the latter part of the fifteenth century, we would find there an atmosphere that was general throughout Europe, particularly the southern portion, exciting individual minds to independence and to a breaking away from the theological environment, whose walls of prejudice had so confined thinking men, that within its cloisters alone the stamp of authority had to be affixed to give statements of philosophy or science any value in the world. There had been a gradual mental growth, no doubt, during all the thousand years of medieval darkness; but, at that particular period, there came a bold awakening. Within that atmosphere of independent thinking there was an uprising of the spirit of daring adventure, the spirit of research, the spirit of exaltation in the discovery of some of the mental possibilities latent within the individual. Long before, Chaucer in England and Dante in Italy had attained bold heights in fancy’s realm of poetry; but then Galileo and Keppler read the story of truth sung in the mysterious rhythmic movement of the glittering stars.
Columbus, with clairvoyant vision, saw worlds unknown; and nations dreamed of conquests beyond the seas, and limitless extensions of territory. Ignorant mariners dared to sail in ships, directed in their course to cross the rim that would drop them, as many feared, into an unfathomed abyss of space. Kings gave audiences to thinking men, in spite of the warnings of the ecclesiastics. In short, the atmosphere of mental outreaching was so powerful and so generally diffused that the masses then living found their own individual atmospheres harmonizing with the thought current which swept the earth at that period of history. Some of the ecclesiastics even asked themselves the question, if the theories of Columbus, Galileo and Keppler were not true. These, however, were men of a liberal turn of mind, and men who came in contact with thinking people. The great majority of the ecclesiastics, however, had, through the teachings of the church and through their enthusiasm to be renowned workers in its cause, made their individual atmospheres so dense through prejudice arising from so-called orthodox thinking, that the atmosphere and vibrations of the age did not affect them; and, therefore, they were never brought into connection with the wires and chords on which Truth’s vibrations were being sounded from infinite Mind.
This page of history furnishes us with a most wonderful example of the power of individual atmospheres to enslave, or uplift man. I do not intend to enter here into the causes that brought about the uplifting atmosphere of this age; they are quite clearly understood by every thinking person. The illustration, however, primarily shows how men, being both philosophers and scholars, may live in an age with mental currents lifting the masses to a conception of truth, and yet they, having built a mental wall around themselves, could not receive a single vibration of truth, though these vibrations were being shot through the air with almost resistless force. These philosophers and scholars, prejudiced as they were, could not understand that they themselves had builded the walls of their own prison house.
A similar illustration may be found nearer home, in our own times. A few years ago an investigation was made by the legislative departments of New York State into the several public departments of the City of New York, then under the management of a party which had controlled the city government for many years, and corruption was found everywhere. The tax-payers, the thoughtful ones, who took a pride in their city, were startled at the revelations made. Protection, a word that had always been made to signify a mantle of security, guarding each individual in all his constitutional rights, was made to signify a cloak to cover and assist the growth of vice and crime. The foremost newspapers in the city forgot party lines, and rose as one to throttle and overcome the scorpion which investigation had disclosed as nursed and guarded by the powers which had so long been in control. A thought-wave of righteous indignation and invincible purpose arose; and on its current boldly went forth, hand in hand, in perfect harmony, those who had been political enemies before, but who now found a common cause against the foe that must be overcome.
The result of that campaign was a triumph, brought about, unsuspectingly perhaps, by a psychic law, which is absolute. However, during that campaign, in spite of all the irresistible force of that thought current, and the general diffusion of that atmosphere, which meant that a higher intelligence ought to rule in this beautiful city, many men were so tied by party lines that they, though honest themselves, yet voted to keep a party in whose leaders had so abused their trust. I do not speak of the masses who always go, right or wrong, with their party. I speak of the many intelligent men, in this particular case, who voted with the party just the same as they had for years; because, in their mental work, they had surrounded themselves with an atmosphere that would not permit them to receive vibrations that swept over and far beyond the limits of the great city.
The reformers came into power, and their record has now become a matter of history. I will not discuss it; each man may judge for himself; but, at the close of its legal term, a greater city had been organized out of a group, which in many particulars had acted as one. Nominations were again to be made, but no unit could be found to stand against the so-called representative element that works only for spoils. Harmony against that element had been broken. The campaign took on the usual features; party aggrandizement as to the leaders, and relentless criticism from one to another. Harmony’ s chords were unstrung on the harp which three years before had been laid away, perfect in every part. The opposition elements, on the other hand, were made to accept a single leader; they obeyed, there were no divisions within themselves, they stood a unit, they were harmonious, they won. In short psychically considered, there was nothing to prevent their winning. Practically considered, from a psychic standpoint, they stood for harmony, and the other candidates were the ones who censured, and the ones who took upon themselves the right to abuse. Many men who could have been moved by a thought-wave of right, felt there were no vibrations worthy along the lines they had followed so long, and so sat at home, or voted with those whom they had called enemies before.
Let us now turn to some personal examples that are familiar, and note how individuals have created atmospheres of force about them, which enabled them to connect with the infinite force and gain the object of their desire.
Napoleon Bonaparte, the idol of France, and a commander whom his soldiers idolized and almost deified, was always certain of the attainment of the object of his desire. He brought an atmosphere about him that connected himself with infinite force, which gave him power to awe the multitude wherever he moved. He was in harmony with a great psychic law – its influence made him the envy and terror of men and nations. His philosophy, his secret of preserving always the atmosphere he needed for the ends he had in view, is reflected in a single sentence which he repeatedly uttered: “Impossible is the adjective of fools.” His fall later is readily accounted for by the thoughtful reader; his atmosphere became disturbed, doubt or fear found lodgment in his consciousness, and then all was lost.
Abraham Lincoln, whose wonderful statesmanship became the wonder of the world, whose eloquence, at times, rose to the height of inspiration, even he saw himself nominated and elected President of the United States long before his name was ever mentioned for that high office. During the memorable debate with Douglas, when he saw his possibilities of succeeding to the senatorship receding, and when told how his sentiments on the question of slavery would be answered by Douglas, said: “Let him reply that way if he will he may gain the senatorship thereby, but he will never be President of the United States.” “But, Mr. Lincoln,” his friend expostulated, “this is not a question of presidency.” To this Mr. Lincoln replied: “I am thinking of 1860 that game is worth a thousand senatorships.” Two years later came 1860, and Lincoln led the forces and won in that great contest. Even when canvassing for the senatorship, he doubtless imaged himself as the successful candidate in the following campaign. I feel confident that he held that image firmly during the years preceding the nomination, that he never lost sight of it for a moment, that this produced an atmosphere about him of such intensity and of such wonderful radiance, that it penetrated through walls of mental creation, blending other mentalities as one with his in that great campaign of principle and freedom.
Mary Anderson played in 1878 and 1879 to audiences in Chicago containing barely one hundred people; all the critics declared that she was a failure, and the great body of theater goers, except in a few favorite places, kept aloof from her performances. It is known that Mary Anderson even then believed herself a great actress; she did not say “I will become a great tragedienne,” she said, “I AM.” She did not even stop to say anything in argument against the critics. Here she was following a psychic law, doubtless without recognizing it. What they said of her did not disturb her she knew. Led divinely by psychic law, she seemed to know that every ideal must first be perfectly and completely conceived mentally; that the holding of the ideal and imaging it with perfect form and shading must precede its visible creation to the world. This mental imaging surrounded her with an atmosphere which gave her the connecting links to the wires or chords that brought to her the force or power she would, and made her a few years later what she grew to be, the pride of all lovers of the art of refined acting.
Probably no man in the present age stands forth before metaphysical students more prominent than the scientist, Professor Elmer Gates, of Washington. I have great pride in being able to name Professor Gates as a personal friend; and, although he has written very little for publication as yet, I am familiar with much of the work he has done. Along metaphysical lines he has made wonderful progress, and he always speaks most frankly and freely of his, proofs and tests. I want to present here a demonstration of his, that comes within the scope of my subject.
Professor Gates was once visited by a capitalist, who said to him: “I have a granite quarry; and I know you have made some wonderful inventions. I want to know if you can present me with any inventions, by the use of which I can cheapen the cost of the production of this granite for building purposes.” “Very well,” Professor Gates said, “I will look into the subject, and sit an hour each day for one month, and give you all the inventions that come to me, under an arrangement to be agreed upon. ” The details of the contract I do not care to enter here, but they were in substance this; that this gentleman would pay a stipulated amount for an hour a day of Professor Gates’ time for one month, and receive for such payment all the inventions obtained. Professor Gates told me that he first visited the quarry and looked over the problem as well as one could on the ground.
He next purchased some books containing articles bearing upon the commercial question and read these carefully. Just here while cultivating correct atmosphere by the means already described, it is to be noted he read these books just one hour per day and that hour was kept sacredly; he, while reading, occupying the same chair and room daily, time and place being made a factor in the sittings. The results of the Professor’s efforts in this particular case, were four new inventions, on which letters patent were granted by the United States Patent Office, and which inventions were deemed by the owner of this quarry of many hundred times the value of their cost. You will note in this case that Professor Gates first surrounded himself with a correct atmosphere, and it will be particularly interesting to you, I know, to note how he produced that atmosphere; that done, as I understand the philosophy I am herein presenting, he came in direct contact with the wires or chords that bound him to infinite Mind.
Professor Gates has made a specialty of sitting for inventions, and his notes show that he has brought forth over twenty-two hundred. Many of these, of course, have never been patented or brought into practical use. In fact, in many cases, in sitting for inventions, he was doing so largely to test and prove his theories. Once I asked him the question, if he did not believe that inventions were often received by him through telepathy from another inventor who had been working on the same lines. He told me he had no doubt about it; but claimed that he could readily distinguish between thoughts arising through conscious mind, subconscious mind, and telepathic communication. When one has made himself so sensitive, let me say just here, as to always be certain whether the thought is conscious or subconscious, he has made a great stride in psychic development, even though he may sometimes mistake a telepathic communication for that of the subconscious.
Here it might be well to say a word about prayer. Every student in the advanced metaphysics of the age is frequently asked if he does not believe in prayer, or in the answer to prayer. It seems to me that the illustrations which I have been presenting clearly show that many have learned the way to power without understanding psychic laws. Now, as to prayer. One may have the orthodox idea that God is a personality, as described by the theologian, who ruled at one time over nothingness, and by a word brought into physical existence all life; and, after that, fashioned laws to regulate that life and continue it. Now, let one kneel in prayer and appeal to that God in the skies. Even though he so beseeches, the very act shows that down in his heart he believes he has some right to call on that God to bring to him what he begs. In short, there is some faith inherent within him, or he could not make the prayer. Naturally you will note the effect of the attitude and act. He is taking a preliminary step toward creating correct atmosphere. If he succeeds in doing that, no matter if his theories are all wrong, he will make connections thereby with the lines that reach the infinite force desired and gain the aid he seeks. This is my reply to the question: “Is prayer answered?”
To make my paper still more practical, in addition to the many illustrations herein given, let me present one other, that the ground may be so fully covered that all will clearly understand my theory as to merging one’s self into harmony’s vibrations.
A friend of mine, who is a teacher of the Delsartian system, and has made a great reputation for herself as such a teacher, wrote me a short time ago, saying that she wished to make herself recognized as a leader among the teachers of that art, and that she felt herself lacking in fluency in expression. “Now,” she said, “tell me what to do.” I knew that she was master of all the books could teach on the subject. I knew she held a prominent position and was in receipt of a most liberal compensation for her work; I, therefore, knew that she was master of all the drudgery of the work; that to gain what she would, she must now learn and obey psychic laws. Here are the suggestions I gave to her:
“First, for fluency in expression, to express thought on a chosen subject in the best possible terms, you start to create a correct atmosphere by the use of some formulas, which stand for your ideal; and, as you repeat them in the silence, you must image yourself as possessing already all they express. Your true ego, of course, has all power, because it, through vibrations, possesses all the masterly brilliancy of expression the Infinite can conceive; therefore, you are only calling from the inexhaustible storehouse some of your own treasures. What shall these formulas be? You may fashion them better than I; but I will give a few here which you may adopt, or you may use others that suggest themselves: I AM intelligent expression; I AM the exponent of thoughts unexpressed; I AM the expression of crystallized thought; I AM language that images thought; I AM the magnet that draws the substance that molds thought into perfect expression; I AM the magnet that attracts and holds listeners, seeking truth in the science of expression; around me are the emanations of the Infinite on all the lines of expression, and I enter into the infinite vibrations of intelligent thought; I AM, therefore, the ideal of expression.
Second, for grace, power, beauty and force on the lines of Delsarte: – I AM the embodiment of the intelligent expression of thought through movement; I receive through the Infinite, the vibrations that gave to the world Delsarte; the world is ready for advanced expression on these lines, and I AM selected to receive and give them to the world; I AM the exponent of the advanced philosophy of expression; I AM the magnet that draws this grace from the Infinite, and the reservoir of power that scatters it out to the thinking world; I AM master of the art I AM supreme. When I say you must image yourself as possessing already, I want you to understand that that image must not be a shadowy or a vague one, neither must it be one that you look at in the distance. You must see it directly in front of you, standing before you, just stepping out, as it were, of the frame of a picture, perfect, complete, in every way. Unless the image is so defined and held firmly in the silence, the light of spirit, shining upon it, would not reflect a perfect ideal.
From my standpoint these are all the suggestions you need; they, carefully followed, should bring you into the harmonious vibrations that will give you all you seek. You want to come into the harmonious vibrations of infinite poise, power, and symmetry, that met the intelligence of Delsarte; but what he learned, you, in no way, want to copy. Years have passed since he learned the grace, the power, and the character in poise. The Infinite has more to give you today than It could give to him. You are now ready to receive it; then hold yourself in silence, so as to receive it. In your daily work, pause, and passive wait, in listening attitude for guidance; something new may be told you at any time. It will be very little to the untrained artist, but to you it will be a revelation. Then, when the day’s tasks are done, relax in whatever way seems best to you. Do not think that your spiritual advancement demands of you any sacrifice so that you cannot enjoy even a good dinner, applaud a good story well told, or enter pleasantly and heartily into any jollity of life.”
In my introduction, in laying out the ground I would cover in this paper, I stated my axioms, and claimed that after one had learned the secret of producing the atmosphere he desired, there was nothing left for him except to learn how to sit and wait. With these illustrations I have been emphatic, as I have frequently been in other papers, in suggesting that we should always sit when reaching for advancement, at the same hour each day, in the same chair, and in the same room; but care should be taken not to draw the head forward, as I would have you preserve a straight line from the base of the spine to its connection with the base of the brain. Having relaxed, you may fold your hands or let both of them rest in your lap, and then keep still. By keeping still, I mean that you do not stir. If stray hairs seem to fall over your face and tickle, you must learn not to move your hand to brush them away. Knowledge can only come to you from the Infinite when you are still.
Of course, it may come in a moment of stillness, when you are sitting listlessly; but the discipline herein proposed is to put yourself consciously into an attitude to draw that power and force. I appreciate that I am writing to thoughtful people, many of whom may have made great progress on metaphysical lines. For all that, I have tried to be as full and clear in presenting some of the truths I have learned, as if I were addressing only amateurs in the thought. For this, perhaps, I should apologize, and yet I could hardly present the subject satisfactorily in any other way. I am familiar with the teachings of the various schools of Christian, mental, and spiritual science healers; I recognize the good in each. From each I have received help. Indian thought occupied me first, however, and later I was led naturally to look into spiritualism, or spiritism, to find the psychic law governing spiritual phenomena. I believe I have discovered it, though I am not quite ready to present it yet in detail. This has aided me greatly in carrying forward my experiments and learning the law of how to gain power, how to attain desire, how to live.
We live in a most wonderful age of mental development, and whatever of truth any of us can bring to light, ought to be given to the world as a duty we owe to mankind. I have presented here a method which I trust some may find practical; each, however, must find a method of his own, differing more or less from that of another student. My experiments are proving to me the truths of this philosophy. Work it over, sift it, modify it as you the reader may find necessary to bring you to the way, the truth, and the life.
I AM that I AM – who speaks it
Feels a thrill of a power sublime
For the thought is Divinity’s breathing
And echoes grand harmony’s chime.
You speak it, and listen, and know,
Of the oneness of life that holds all
Of the unity, perfect and vast,
That awakens as Spirit may call.
I AM that I AM can you grasp it,
And the truth it brings home to you?
You are what you will, do you know it?
Within is the word, it can do
All you ask it gave birth to desire
That told of the blessings to be,
If you but accept the message in faith,
From all bondage the word sets you free.
I AM that I AM, tis the language of soul,
That breaks from the selfhood divine.
It’s a truth that it learned in its pilgrimages far
From material things in realms where shine
Through the ethers the thoughts that take hue,
And in colors more truly reflect,
What is meant, what is felt, what is known,
Than the choicest of words we select.
I AM that I AM live close to this truth.
And daily commune with your God,
With the light that’s within, the Self of all selves
Tis the path that the genius has trod.
What would you, tis yours if you ask,
If believing, you know as you call,
The oneness of thought, the oneness of power
Life’s absolute oneness, you one with the ALL
VII – THE ASSERTION OF THE I.
“All that ye need is near ye,
God is complete supply Trust have faith, then hear ye Dare to assert the I.
“Power is within and about ye,
Keep toward the light thine eye.
Naught can come near to rout ye
Who have dared to assert the I.”
To control thought is the secret of all advancement, and that power to control is ours, if we exercise it. Instruction as to how to control thought has been too general and vague. One’s intelligence quickly accepts the truths of the philosophy from which we deduce two conclusions: “Man’s individuality is a product of thought,” and “Man controls his own thought.” And yet, the same intelligence that declares itself in complete harmony with this philosophy, goes on too often in the self-same way with its criticisms on self, thereby proving that it has never taken the lesson home. In short, the great mass of humanity seems to be content to be tossed about with the driftwood of thought, rather than to make the necessary effort to assert the I and know its divine power. To break up old and erroneous habits of thinking is not the formidable task reformers have declared. Man is not weak, but strong; when he speaks from the divine self-hood, he is a god, and around the vibrations of “I will,” he builds a fortress.
“How shall I a habit break?
As you did the habit make;
As you gathered, you must lose;
As you yielded, now refuse.
Thread by thread, the strands we twist.
Till they bind us neck and wrist;
Thread by thread, the patient hand
Must untwine ere free we stand.
As we builded stone by stone.
We must toil un helped, alone,
Till the wall is overthrown.
“But remember as we try,
Lighter every task goes by;
Wading in the stream grows deep,
Toward the center’s downward sweep;
Backward turn and step ashore,
Shallower is there than before.
Ah, the previous years we waste
Leveling what we raised in haste
Doing what must be undone,
Ere content or love be won,
First across the gulf we cast.
Kite-born threads till lines are passed
And habit builds the bridge at last.”
Having a definite purpose in view, you first should image yourself as having already reached the height you would. Sit down in the silence, and over and over again sketch mentally the picture, till you can instantly call it to mind and see it clear with all its perfect shadings. This is the preliminary work or drill. Use thought only to sketch clearly the picture at first; that is, don’t anxiously question as to how you will get the material to paint it, or where you will procure the canvas on which it will rest. Your first task is to see yourself as you would make yourself. No architect can draw the elevation and plans for the building until he definitely conceives them. The picture must be clear and perfect in his mind before he commences the drawings; so you must first see clearly what you desire, what you would rather be; then, that perfect picture stands forth as the goal.
Persistently you must turn to it, and draw yourself to it to harmonize thought, so as to call the forces to you that you may attain.
I cannot dwell too long on this image or picture drawing. If you follow the lead of the school of painters called Impressionists, in this imaging, your drawings will be too shadowy or too blurred to serve your purpose. There must be nothing indefinite about them. They must be clear and perfect. Their aura will lack alike the repelling and the attractive force required, if every line does not stand out full and clear.
Granting the picture has been drawn so perfectly that instantly the mental eye can call it up and rest its gaze there, we turn to our philosophy and ask the path to the possession of the ideal. Naturally, you will note the reason why I have made preliminary the definiteness of imaging the ideal. Without that, you have no goal; if there be no goal, there can be no paths and roads, for paths and roads must lead to place.
The mistake made by the logical for ages has been the studying to find the path leading to the goal or light, fancy had rudely sketched as an unfixed place more attractive and more desirable than the one occupied. Longing or wantonly desiring something better than one possesses, and blindly seeking paths to the unknown and unimagined, means merely that the individual is trying to get away from something he dislikes. He then is seeking paths that lead from a place or so- called environment, that is all. He is trying to free himself from something; that is aimless.
Let me try and emphasize this with a few practical illustrations. In a rustic school, we find a young girl who has exhibited a taste and skill for drawing and sketching. Her teacher recognizes in her something more than talent; and the young girl’s ambition rises at times to a craving for better instruction, for an opportunity to test herself. With that ambition comes the realizing sense of her surroundings, the poverty of her parents, it may be, or some other obstacle the logic of sense perception suggests. If the practical, so-called, predominates in her, her ambition is checked with the “impossibles” and “cannots” of conscious reasoning, and she may go through life with the refrain of what she wished and could not trembling on her lips. The false teachings and the false philosophy of the ages so weighted the atmosphere about her that she did not see the light. She looked for paths and could not find them. She did not recognize the message, nor whence its source. Had she done that she might have imaged the ideal and held it firm; then paths would have opened. You may decide to go west to-night, but until you fix your destination more specific than “the west,” there is no need of your studying railway timetables.
Robert Fulton first applied the power of steam to navigation, and the practical men of the day laughed at the folly of his wasting time and money on what was deemed by them a useless toy. He was his own engineer on that first trip from New York to Albany; and, though people at places along the banks of the river crowded to see the strange craft, not a single fare was collected. About to return from Albany, one man came asking the fare, $6.00 and paid it. Even that was a God-send to Robert Fulton, for his purse was drained. That round trip, however, made people more wise, and the practicability of the invention was demonstrated. Steam power was practicable for navigation, they said; but they also said: Of course, it can never be used on the ocean, for the wood required to run it (coal was not to us a fuel then) would more than load the vessel. Robert Fulton did not trouble himself about the question of fuel, nor of that of many other paths to the end he kept his eyes fixed on the light.
With vision beyond the reach of clairvoyance, he saw steam moving mighty vessels over all expanses of water. How the steam would be manufactured did not disturb him. He recognized God’s message to him from the infinite, then he imaged the material creation to be, and firmly held that image to the light. Against poverty, against ridicule, against the known scientific laws, against the undreamed source of fuel supply, he labored in the cause of truth to attain an ideal and to bless mankind. Clairaudient he may have been, though, if so, he never told it; but it seems to me, as I write, that he must have heard over and over again the inspired words of those ancient guides, “Keep toward the light thine eye.” By so doing, faith became triumphant, and the ceaseless soul breathings of “I can” and “I will’s” reverberating force, opened all paths to the clearly defined and perfect goal.
History is full of examples showing how perfectly men have followed psychic laws subconsciously to the attainment of purpose. Today, in an effort to gain power, the advanced thinker, with full recognition of these laws, is only asking their application to himself. I trust now we have reached that plane where doubt cannot come. If one questions the message, let him wait in the silence still. There, and there alone, must he seek knowledge; there must he wait, until he knows. It is true that I have been emphatic on this in other papers; but, in this, we must review somewhat, that the philosophy may stand out in all its completeness.
With the message of inspiration and promise, came to you first a shadowy picture afar off. Again and again the picture came, and half consciously, as you gazed upon it, you heard the word, “yours.” Never doubt after that. Through every fiber of your being ran a thrill of joy; it was the infinite force of the universe bringing you into fellowship with your own divine self-hood. Recognize your oneness with it and know the truth. The image will rise from the mist surrounding, like the face from the canvas touched by the brush of the artist inspired from the unseen. The longed-for becomes the true, the real. Without hesitation over ways and paths, you know the image as the real, that it is, and is yours.
“True majesty is self -poised man
There is no higher thing.
Man has lived all, has made the span
From molecule to king.
“So live for what thou art today,
Thy thought blooms every hour,
Thy spirit knows no truer way
Than free-thought’s full-blown flower.
“Self is thy stronghold; stand for self”
Tis the noblest attitude.
The universe of love and wealth
Cannot thy claim elude.
“Hold high, hold strong; have faith that moves
The mountains, sails the air.
Be fearless, for thy love behooves
To more than priest or prayer.
“Be thine own prayer; be thine own priest;
Permit no man to say.
In what thy soul finds flow or feast,
Or where thy joyful sway,
“Stand thou for truth, with love beside;
Then in thy radiant soul.
Naught of ill can thee betide
Or turn thee from thy goal.
“All, all is thine, O prescient man!
No link in all life’s chain
But lends thee to the utmost span,
Far reaching to remain.
“The Source, the wordless All-in-all,
Which fills man will conspire
To cast himself into the thrall.
With his celestial fire.”
The series of papers which I have presented to you, lead up to this. You have become acquainted with the deathless ego. You know it to be a cell in the creative force of the universe. It is useful to that force, and harmonizes with all the thought cells that make up the sublime unity of the life principle. To assert the I is to declare truth. You cannot doubt that. But where are your doubts? Have you not risen above them? Did not the light of truth long ago dissolve them? You know it did; and, standing forth in the light, recognizing the great Impersonal God of life and your relations to It, in joy and love you speak from the center declaring the truth in, “I AM supreme.” Those three words, spoken with faith from the center of your being, which is the center of the universe to you, will call to you the power you need.
“Descend not to despond,
But ever look beyond,
Where shines the light
Through day and night,
God and thyself – leave thoughts of self,
Speak truth, and teach the right.
“Some truth there be
All do not see
To you become most clear;
So let them hear
That they may grow, till they shall know
God is in each and everywhere.
“All purpose high
Shines from the I,
Each temporal good
Stands as it should.
Even as you stand, full is the hand
Of bounty from the boundless shore.”
In concluding, let me give an interpretation of “work out your own salvation,” quite different from the orthodox one. The expression is not a command. Truth, expressed in language, often seems like commands. To “work out your own salvation” is to attain “your own ideal.” That is the goal your fondest desire has imaged, and that is your divine right. The acceptance of this truth will bring you to a true comprehension of the real meaning of the love of God.
“What wouldst thou? All is thine –
The ways are opening for thee,
The light of truth doth shine,
Then halt not – question not,
Be Still and assert the I”
VIII – THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL.*
* Read before the School of Philosophy, New York City, June 8, 1899.
The allegory of the Garden of Eden is now, at this period of history, first being given an intelligent interpretation. We have clung tenaciously to the letter, and have thereby lost sight of the spirit, the lesson, the truth. Not recognizing the real entity in the human form, we expanded the family tie of blood through genealogical studies to cover the whole human race, until we found in Adam and Eve a common parentage. Cunning devices have been resorted to, to account for racial differences. Noah, chosen of God as representing the most perfect type of human perfection, must curse his own son to account for the negro; and the record is absolutely silent as to the North and South American Indians, and as to, at least, one of the Asiatic races.
As the study of soul and its far-reaching powers progresses, in the spirit illumination now appearing, ushering in the dawn of a new century, the stumbling blocks of the early historian disappear. Adam’s advent could not represent the beginning of soul life. Where there is a beginning there must be an end. The soul, the unseen, through vibrations, binding and blending it with creative energy, gave expression to material form. This material form (the effect) then, became the casing that soul had created for itself. It gave it a new phase of existence. Within materiality there was for it growth, as well as fetters to be broken. The Adam ages typifies the entrance of soul into material form; it represents the childhood of humanity. The Garden of Eden stands for the nursery and schoolroom of today, where physical force is gained and mental culture started to fit the youth to dare to partake of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Had the soul sent forth no breathings to consciousness of undeveloped powers within, humanity might have halted when it lad solved the simple problem of sustaining physical life. Had the soul, the real entity, remained silent, separate and distinct from the objective personality, there would have been no advance, no progress, no art, no culture, no national emblems, no evil, no war, no honor, no patriotism, no heroism, no glory.
Little by little has man’s conscious self come to a realization of the countless treasures contained within the soul. Little by little has conscious selfhood learned how to appropriate them, so as to fulfill the desires of the mind.
To grow, to attain to the possibilities of intelligent manhood, to fit others to live worthily in this thought-age of history, some brave and fearless minds generations ago broke from the dogma of tradition and led the way for the unborn millions to reach the heights only obtainable by those who have dared to eat of the tree of knowledge. It was a most materialistic age when writers could conceive of a creator so cruel and despotic as to tempt his own creations to seek knowledge, the purpose of which was to destroy and not to uplift. They did not understand man, and hence their ignorance of God. They wrote from their plane of comprehension. Suffering and torture were, in their philosophy, the only forces to bring or compel man to right action. For holding this belief, they are no more to be censured than a child is to be censured for not comprehending the intricate laws involved in the use of steam and electricity. Their understanding was bounded by a low horizon. They wrote for the intelligence of the age they lived.
Thousands of years have passed since the record contained in the books of the Old Testament was written. Evolution has been at work, and it has brought to man’s consciousness some knowledge of the real selfhood and its relations to the entire cosmos. It is right, therefore, that the intelligence of this age should boldly raise its voice against the teachings of the devotees of that childhood of ignorance, as it would against the stupidity of him who would insist that no hooks should ever be read by humanity except the fairy tales that interest early childhood.
Does one ask why this tree of knowledge, bringing possible advancement to the entire world, is mentioned as both good and evil? No one can know good unless he finds its correspondent, or its contradiction, which has been named evil. To lay we know that this word is only the opposite of good a relative term. There can be no such entity as evil. Mentality could not define such an entity, and thought could not conceive of it. The word evil represents to our mind a lesser good than we crave; that is all. The tree whose fruit brings good and evil to him who partakes, has possible dangers lurking within the knowledge it offers. In short, he who claims knowledge must pay a price for it. Is this not always life’s refrain? Let ambition crave what it will, toil and self-sacrifice crowd the path to the prize. If won at all, it is to be won by effort. In the childhood of humanity, this effort, this labor was called evil; and, even today, one may often debate as to whether the good sought is worth the price it demands. He who raises this question is not likely to be a winner of prizes. He who studies limitations; and, in fear, holds back powers to use when some possible contingency arises, is likely to drive away the good which nonresistance would permit to flow to him.
By the exercise of this false mental economy he creates his own evils or devils, by making his own selfhood, through fear, an attractive magnet for those very evils. We have made a mistake in trying to shun evil, by building up guards against it; for, by so doing, we have made evil the central attractive force of the “I AM.” Whenever one tries to build up defenses against evil, he mentally makes it an entity and gives it power. Long ago “Resist not evil, but overcome evil with good,” was regarded a sort of moral command which simple folk liked to quote to one another when the offending one was caught. That is not its meaning. It is rather an inspirational statement of a great scientific truth. To resist evil is like Don Quixote, to make battle with offenseless wind-mills, and thereby to create a center around the “I AM” for the atmosphere of fear. This resisting, therefore, means the detaching of your soul, your “I AM,” from your body, and sending it forth through the ethers to gather the logic of a false philosophy, to bring sustenance and life to the shadowy myth your thoughts have lifted into being. You are expending force on the non-being by engaging in such fruitless battles.
We have all centralized thought too much on the ways and means of providing for an expected or dreaded evil day to come. We believed we could ward it off by providing against it. This has been, and is, making life a struggle. History has told us that someone, thousands and thousands of years ago, brought all of this sin and evil into the world by first being tempted, and then eating the fruit of that tree of knowledge. Some historians went so far as to say that Eve was not merely tempted, but that she had great curiosity, great inquisitiveness. They assert that her downfall, and the downfall of all mankind, was the outcome of her individual curiosity and weakness combined. Who gave her that curiosity, and who sent her forth as the mother of mankind with a weakness or vanity that would permit her to yield to temptation?
You and I know that those historians were not contemporaneous with the events. We know they lived thousands of years after the events of which they wrote could possibly have occurred, and that there were no authentic records to consult. You and I will refuse to accept a history so unauthentic. We could not reverence a God who would create a temptation, a tempter, and a being with a weakness or a curiosity to be led to her downfall, thus bringing countless millions of unborn souls into disrepute. We have tried to interpret symbolic language with the logic of conscious mind. We have failed. This Garden of Eden is rather a mental state than a material enclosure; this tree of knowledge a mental upreaching to the fulfillment of lofty ideals, not a fruit-bearing tree whose fruit brings to those who eat it inward cravings to know and feel the right and wrong. In the intuitional light of the new century, let us seek the grander meanings in these symbols. Let us seek truth, no matter how many dogmas are shattered by the revealings of such seekings.
“Greater than earth is her ruler man,
Her master, sovereign, since he began;
Greater than sunlight that greets earth’s youth
Is the wondrous, fathomless light of Truth.”
I use the word man as sexless to represent humanity as a whole. Were I to consider for a moment the sex idea in the Adam age, which age marked the entrance and blending of soul into material entities, I would then find the real meaning in the symbols of the Garden and the Tree. This entrance of soul into physical entities was not a downward movement, for there is no retrogression in the spiritual universe, even though poets have sung of the battles of angels. Until the Adam age, man was not; since then, the ages slowly but surely have marked his ascent. Whittier grasped the truth and sang:
“Oh, sometimes gleams upon my sight
Through present wrong, the eternal Right;
And step by step since time began.
We see the steady gain of man.”
Historians who wrote the record were often automatic writers, such as we have today. When symbolic language was used, they were merely the instruments to record a soul-language which even their own logic could not interpret. This record tells us that woman ate first of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, then brought and gave it to her companion. That part of the record is simple; but their logic could not grasp the true purport of the eating, because they believed man to be absolutely distinct and separate from God.
From the garden of materialism and intellectuality, woman, typified by Eve, reached mentally to the unknown, the unseen, and caught the vibrations of creative energy, only felt by those who may lift selfhood to the intuitional plane of spirit consciousness. From that remote period of time to this day, woman has always been in advance of man on intuitional lines of soul communication with the Infinite. The fruit of the tree of knowledge, therefore, is the material form of expressing the thought, readily understood in this age, of awakening to spirit consciousness, the realization of the Divine within the human. When this awakening came to her, bringing the sunlight of truth, and showing her more of the possibilities of growth than thought had ever conceived of before, she ran to her companion, not with face bowed with shame, but with face radiant with refulgent light, to tell him of the greater unfoldment possible. With knowledge, came its responsibilities, and the logic of conscious mind lost the true meaning of the symbols.
The Garden of Eden of today is the youth plane of mental activity, the mental nursery of humanity; its walls, the conservative lines of thought of those who speak from the record, the scribes whose mental horizon was and is bounded by the conclusions of those who have read much and thought little. In this garden or field, youth is nourished. His parents, his teachers, tell him of those who have lived, and of their philosophy. They drill him on the table of figures, they teach him to analyze so-called composites and to find the elements therein blended in harmony; they teach him the psychology of language and its different forms; they introduce a wilderness of subjects to awaken mentality to vigorous action. All this in the Garden of Eden. Now, shall he, thus equipped, remain within it? Shall he, within it, follow this path or that, gleaning truths or knowledge which others have found? Shall he travel over what he may of these paths and then stop? It will be to him precisely as he wills.
If he has grown weary of learning to repeat truths, or conclusions (not always truths) that others have spoken; if he yearns for the beyond, he is mentally seeking to taste the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Let him not think this craving is mere abnormal curiosity; let him not think it weakness; let him not think it temptation. The time is ripe. He has learned his lesson on the plane where the masses dwell. The Master has, through vibrations, advised him of some of his possibilities, and, ringing in his ears from the unknown, he hears the combined command and entreaty, “Come up higher!”
He who knows he is called and he alone, should eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Just here it is proper to add that the call to “come up higher” is made to each and all; and yet, please note that I affirm he only who knows he is called should eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Let me put this more clearly. Too many are moved by the wishes of parents, or friends surrounding them, as to what particular fruit they should eat of the tree of knowledge. Many simply drift along seizing, as they pass, such fruit as may fall in their way. This accounts for the great mass of humanity which we sum up as “average intelligence.” Average intelligence, to my mind, means those who reflect the machine drill of the schools, combined with a fair appreciation of the methods of business regime as pursued in the mercantile, manufacturing and shipping industries throughout the world. To eat from the tree of knowledge means to advance beyond this plane, whether one may call it that of “average intelligence,” or some degrees higher or lower than that.
Napoleon was not merely a soldier when a boy at school. Even there he was a leader, a commander, a general. He created an army among his own schoolmates, and fired them with ambition to be his willing tools. They were happy to be the instruments to fashion the triumphal arch for him. The masses want leaders, and find self-glory in extolling those whom they have elected to command. This is right. It is in accordance with universal law. The leader heard the call and accepted long before those surrounding him ever imagined in him the requirements of leadership. He, in silence, partook of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and waited in faith. The inspiration or call he may have held sacred in his own mind; still, he knew. Neither was he anxious or troubled about the offering of opportunities he knew that in the fullness of time he could create them.
The tree of knowledge, then, is the mental or spirit plane beyond the traditions of history, beyond the limits of the conclusions of the wise and of the sages. To seize its fruit requires mental courage and daring. Your place on that plane is first known to you, and to you alone. The spirit voice that brings the message may startle your consciousness, may thrill your entire being, but its word, its message comes to you alone. If you counsel with others to determine your action, you are asking the logic of conscious mind to help you to interpret the meaning of an intuitional communication. Here you can have no advisers. You must go in the silence and communicate directly with the Infinite if you would still await direction. Many have known when God spoke to them, and conscious mind could not bring a doubt to disturb. Again, many have realized the message only as a longing; its promise came to their consciousness like a bright ray of hope light yet only to make shadows deeper. When shall we learn the meaning of longing? When shall we learn the meaning of man? When shall we learn the meaning of “God?”
“A fiery mist and a planet,
A crystal and a cell;
A jelly fish and a saurian,
And the caves where the cave men dwell;
Then a sense of law and beauty
And a face turned from the clod
Some call it Evolution,
And others call it God.
“Like the tints on a crescent sea beach
When the moon is new and thin,
Into our hearts high yearnings
Come welling and surging in
Come, from the mystic ocean,
Whose rim no foot has trod
Some of us call it Longing,
And others call it God.
“A haze on the far horizon,
The infinite tender sky.
The ripe, rich tints of the cornfields,
And the wild geese sailing high;
And ever on upland and lowland.
The charm of the golden rod
Some of us call it Autumn,
And others call it God.
“A picket frozen on duty,
A mother starved for her brood,
Socrates drinking the hemlock.
And Jesus on the rood;
The million who, humble and nameless.
The straight hard pathway trod
Some call it Consecration,
And others call it God.”
We have found the tree of knowledge to symbolize a mental plane beyond the confines and limits of the walls surrounding the Garden of Eden, where thought began its work by learning of the thoughts of others. Still one may ask: Why the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and whence arose the idea of its bearing a forbidden fruit? I have followed a line of intuitional reasoning which clearly demonstrates to my consciousness that the fruit of the tree could not be a forbidden one. I have endeavored to illustrate that one is called by the Infinite to eat of the fruit of the tree. Let us see if we can find the meaning of “evil” as here used, and how the word “forbidden” came in. The tree of knowledge, representing an advanced mental plane, comprises within itself all truth, all knowledge, all unfoldment. It is impossible, or, to speak more emphatically, forbidden to anyone to bring to his consciousness all knowledge during a single incarnation, even though he has learned the secret so that he may extend that single incarnation over a thousand years. If called (and I repeat, all are called), and one recognizes the call, it is to help advance him on one or more of the many special lines of knowledge.
It may be music, or painting, or poetry; it may be teaching, or healing; it may be clairvoyant vision; it may be inventive creation; it may be this or that leadership; but all knowledge, all truth, all possible unfoldment comprises more than infinite energy can give to any single mortal. That is forbidden, and better still it is unsought. The call, then, to “come up higher” is on lines clearly presented to one’s consciousness. The “evil” is the sacrifice one makes to attain the good. He who seeks his good cannot grasp the idle pleasures smiling near the path to the goal. He must turn aside from these and find his joy as new mental heights are reached, whither love and ambition lead him. The chief evils that beset him will be the thoughts of others. Many seem to think they have the right to dim or crush the ideals of their friends. If the seeker listen to these counsels and these arguments, he may be made to feel that the price he is paying for his good is too great and cease all striving. In such case, evil, which his thought fashioned into an entity, has overtaken him. He has lost the purpose of living, because he has turned backwards. It was the mathematical genius, Lewis Carroll, who wrote “Alice in Wonderland,” who discovered that “evil” was “live” spelled backwards. Evil has no abiding place in the hearts and homes of those who really live.
Fortunately, we live in an age where each is believed to have the right to his own thoughts. They are his private property; their conclusions are his individuality. Parents now respect the thoughts of the child still in the nursery; and philosophers often stand amazed at the bright thought thrown out by the youngest in the class. We have grown to a better understanding of man, and this has given us a nobler conception of God. We know law to be universal, and that creative God could not have existence but for law. The personality of God has faded from our minds; in its place stands the impersonal thought-energy of the universe. From that thought- center come the vibrations to our consciousness, not forbidding, but inviting us to partake of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Within those vibrations we find the links binding man and God as one. In silence the volume of truth is opened to us, and we read the promise; that our hopes, our ideals are the fruits freely offered to us from this center of intelligence, and only waiting our reaching forth, claiming, and appropriating our own.
IX – CONDITIONS.
Life is made up of a series of preparations to meet contingencies or events that are shadowed or promised to appear a little way beyond. To prepare for these, youth devotes years to study. The technique he must be master of, at least; and schools, colleges and universities furnish him with this equipment. He passes beyond their teaching to the so-called “School of Experience,” and there he finds a wilderness of ideas, theories, thoughts, conclusions, confusions. He questions if he has provided himself with proper equipment. One may claim knowledge with bold statements, but when confronted with life’s experiences, he often is forced to acknowledge it to be simply belief or theory. He himself is brought to confess that he, too, is only an experimenter like others in the mental arena of life. The path to the goal he would reach is made over a series of conditions. Some have a wonderful faculty that seems to bring these conditions about, others seem to be divinely led and deride individual effort, ascribing their success solely to luck, or to the mysterious unknown called Providence.
At this period of history in which you and I have the honor of living, a gleam of light has come, a revelation to humanity. It is not the voice of prophecy coming through some single human instrument to whom the light was brought. It is not a dogma or theory of some sect of worshipers of the God of intellect we have vainly sought so long. It is not a revelation born in the cloisters of superstition and fear. The gleam of light, the revelation, shines on humanity as a whole in these opening years of the twentieth century, because humanity has mentally developed so that it can receive the vibrations of truth which have filled the ethers of the air for ages. Prior to this age, along the line, some few have felt some of these vibrations, and have left records which required this age to interpret. In other words, man’s condition his mental condition is such at this time that he can learn more of himself and his relations to the entire cosmos than at any previous period of history. All may not, and all will not embrace the opportunity offered; still, to some extent, all humanity will be influenced.
To know how to attain the conditions that your highest good may come to you, is the problem of the age, is the purpose of right living, is the wish and desire of the noblest and the best. These conditions are to be reached through a victorious warfare, a warfare to be waged against the selves. If you are already receiving the vibrations of truth, you have linked yourself to the infinite energy of the universe; then, you have always God and yourself on your side; and, as an inspired writer has told us, God and one constitute a majority. Let me add, they constitute an invincible army, always on your side. What are the conditions, then, desired? Those that will enable you to bind and hold yourself, through vibrations, one with the infinite force of the universe.
Some theorists (for we have many theorists in the philosophy of the advanced thought of today) may tell you that the way to produce’ conditions and to constantly hold them is an open and clear one, easy to follow and to keep. I have not found it so, neither have I found any one so completely master of the science that he always knew. However complete our knowledge may be in some lines of research, there are countless paths yet to be trod, countless experiments yet to be made. What I may present to you on this, or any theme, as truth, will be conclusions, not deduced from theories, but arrived at by repeated practical tests.
That my introduction be made complete before our next step, let us for a moment recall from our experiences some of the messages we have received through clairvoyants from our spirit friends or spirit guides. Whether entities bring the messages, or they come from infinite force through vibrations need not be here discussed. We are told of some advancement or joy in store for us that these forces are helping to bring; sometimes they are more forcible and say that they will bring it to us. In our anxiety we ask when, and are told as soon as we can be surrounded with the necessary or required conditions. Often we have asked what we could do to help to that end, and about the only intelligent reply or direction we receive is, “Be passive.”
May there not be a great philosophy in this reply? My subject, it will be noted, will carry me beyond the border-land of physical life, and first a few of what I understand to be truth’s accepted axioms best be stated. The individual soul is firmly meshed in the physical entity, but the life principle of the soul is far- reaching and throbs through the potent power of the central force, or creative energy of the universe, call it Tao, Om, Being, God, what you will I The mind is the link, linking soul with the material, and soul with the immaterial universe, though behind it, and of itself a part, is the great unseen entity of Being. From mind emanates thought, born both of the material and immaterial. Thoughts produce conditions mental conditions. As thoughts spring from mind, and mind is bound both to the material and immaterial universe, they are operated upon, not only by material surroundings, hut by the eternal essence of life found in the spirit influence with which it is as directly connected, whether we recognize it or not, as with man’s every-day self or consciousness.
In a general way, the philosopher tells us today conditions are the outward manifestation thought. To make them what we would, he tells us to think right thoughts. With this I AM in complete harmony. The problem is, how to think and hold right thoughts. Few probably have ever gone into a careful analysis and discovered that our conscious self chief opposing factor to our ideal self. There is the evil to overcome, the skepticism conscious or unreal selfhood. Our ideal is our nobler, our real selfhood. Life’s purpose is to bring into visible existence or expression this ideal. Conscious self rises to crush hope by calling ideals dreams. We live our lives on and between the planes attained and the planes desired. We long to be what we desire to be, but teachers have ever been telling us to be strong to meet disappointment; to expect disappointment and to brave it. Their philosophy was built on false premises. It made evil a potent force of the universe. It had been handed down to them from a generation that had not seen the light. Now we are waking to knowledge. Our own intelligences are telling us of man’s oneness with God, with creative energy. This knowledge comes from within. It comes from within, and yet our real selfhood reaches beyond all the vibrations of matter.
It is at one with all life, and life is the unseeable, the spiritual. Our ideals are goals that are shown us from infinite energy by spirit guides who are its instruments to lift us to the place we aspire to. To reach that plane, we climb the steps placed one upon the other and called conditions. To reach a height in a building, we must pass upward by successive stages. We cannot reach the third floor of a building without having passed the second. To attain an ideal, we construct a building; the steps or floors leading to the longed-for treasure are mental conditions that must be passed to reach it. The foundation is faith. If you accept the philosophy of the thinkers of this age, you know your ideals can be realized. Your better-self tells you so, and your spirit guides echo the thoughts or wishes of your better-self, and promise you their aid. To give you that aid, they tell you the conditions must be made right. What can you do, if anything, to help make those conditions right?
Primarily, you must be in harmony with the philosophy, or you cannot follow its teachings. I must assume that you have passed that point in the way. Assuming that, you start to climb the heights between your conscious self and your ambition or desire, alone, but not alone. If you accept the philosophy, you know you could not have the fond desire that has become indwelling in your selfhood unless it were attainable. If you are true to your selfhood, you will create an atmosphere about you that will permit the vibrations from infinity to reach you. With your acceptance of the philosophy must come absolute faith. With faith firm, you fix your eye upon the light, and lo! the vibrations of infinite power reach you, and the clairvoyant might see your spirit friends throng about to aid you. You have created the conditions which made it possible for this force to reach you.
The first step, then, to right conditions is faith in this philosophy. Many claim to possess it one moment, and the next are talking of the “ifs” their conscious selves are asking respecting it. The spirit of the age is skepticism, and for this I am glad, not sorry. As long as religion, as generally taught over the world, is based upon faith and belief in certain theories which have been handed down with veneration as proceeding from Being, so long will faith and belief continue to be the will o’ the wisp, eluding intelligent comprehension. If a clergyman tell me there is a great Being beyond all law, sitting in the heavens and governing the universe, and asks me to believe it because he so asserts, I will ask his authority for the statement. If he tells me the Bible, I will reply I do not so understand it. He then may tell me I have no right to my interpretation of that book; that I must go to others who have interpreted it; that I must study their theories, their dogma. I refuse to do this, and he tells me I sin because of unbelief. I do not accept his judgment; I claim he has no right to judge I appeal to a higher court.
True faith in anything is built on experience. The experience of others can only help if you can make the proof by a like experience. I open my chemistry, and I read, “Sulphuric acid will dissolve copper.” That is a statement; 1 may not know whether it is true or not. In the chemical laboratory the student must prove his work no matter what the books say. He puts that statement to the test, he pours some sulphuric acid at high temperature on copper, he watches the effect, the copper is dissolved; now he knows that statement to be true he did not know it before. There is no need, then, to tell him to have faith; his experience has crystallized faith that might have been waning into positive knowledge.
The Old Testament came to us in sections; the New Testament indirectly through the Greeks, a people of wonderful imagery. The theologian had the manuscripts in his keeping long before the art of printing made their reading general. We may have them in very incomplete shape; still the various books of the Old and New Testament show that the writers of them wrote of their experiences, of their talks with saints, with angels, with devils, and with God. If they had experiences like these recorded, they had the proofs like the student in the laboratory. Faith can be firm if proofs are furnished. Assert as we may without proofs, faith is blind and unsteadfast. The theologian tells us that Moses and Noah talked with God; that David learned from God direct the family, community and national idea; that Jeremiah and Isaiah were instructed by God of the mental resources of man, and that Jesus held daily communion with him; but, he adds, these experiences are obsolete, they are impossible at the present time. Here I join issue with him. If any experience has been passed through by man at any period of the world’s history, it follows that a like experience may have been passed through ten thousand times by others before, and will be repeated again and again forever.
The mental wave of thought of the opening years of this century calls the theologian to his proofs. We have learned something of the law governing conditions. We have obeyed the law, sometimes consciously, sometimes subconsciously; and, by obeying the law, we have had some experiences of our own. We have learned that life is eternal; we have proved it. Proved it by experiences as patent to intelligence as the experiments of the student in the laboratory. Then, why have we faith? Because we know from experience. Now, if the experience of myself, or the experience of some friend of yours bring within you a desire to know the philosophy on which it rests, we return to the study of the law of conditions. You will note I do not ask you to accept any theory built on the dogma of tradition. The religion the new century is ushering in is something grander than that. It will restore the true meaning of the word religion, for it will bind the material entity to the immaterial essence from which it emanated. I ask you to seek to produce conditions that you may bring to your consciousness the proofs of experience.
What would you? To this question humanity replies: “I would attain my ideal!” First, I ask you to believe that you could not have the ideal if its attainment were not possible. That thought I want first to fix in your mind; that done, you have built about you the first condition essential. It ought to be simple to believe your heart’s desire will come to you. Let us see. You cannot believe it will not come to you. Sit down silently and ask this question mentally. Doubts you may have, but you cannot believe your good will not come to you. Having reached this point, without a thought of ways and means to the end, sit one half-hour each day in the silence, holding some thoughts you may silently express in language assertive of the desire or longing sought. Within a few weeks, possibly within a few days, you will find faith expanding and filling your being. Seek the same time each day, sit in the same room, sit in the same chair. You do not want to concentrate too deeply. It is a concentration akin to passiveness which I am suggesting. With faith firm, the light or good will stand out clear to your mental vision. This condition will surround your personality with an atmosphere that wards off doubt and its attendant evils; and calls to you, through vibrations from the central energy of the universe, the force that crystallizes about you into the spirit entities seen by the clairvoyant. All life’s possibilities will then glow with radiant light, and you will retire from controversies and the negatives of existence into the delightful atmosphere of purpose fulfilled.
You will note I urge you not to stop to deny evil. If it is not, let it rest in nothingness. In other words, do not seek to find the evil about or in you, and then deny it. You call a negative and an exceptional force about you by so doing. The atmosphere of attraction can never be created by shouting negatives. A bad structure might be demolished thereby, but a good one must be built of thoughts that fashion ideal structures.
With the cross-currents of thoughts dashing through the ethers everywhere, and with our contact and blending with divers atmospheres in our daily work, we must call a strong force from the unseen to keep us firm to keep and hold the conditions we would. We must not note too grievously our own slippings; mind resting there may overthrow the good work done. “Be ye diligent,” is not a command of Being; it is a statement of the law. Why self-criticism disturbs the conditions built up, and the reason why conditions are built up as I have outlined, leads us into the mystic. Up to this point, I have brought before you only experiences proven and the lessons they teach.
Now I pass for a few moments, before closing, over the border-line of human knowledge into the intuitional breathings, half-heard, half revealed, half-reasoned, and my conclusions here you may reject or accept, as you please. I have shown you how to create conditions, and have proved by experience that that is the way to the ideal plane of living. Now, on the other side of the border-line there is a force we draw on, seemingly administered by a host of spirit entities who tell us, as they may, of how they are trying, and how they are helping us. When the right conditions are brought about, then they tell us, realization will come. I have suggested how you could produce the right conditions on this side. Without that aid from you, their forces are scattered by disturbing elements which you attract by surrounding yourself with the atmosphere of doubt and fear.
Keep your atmosphere true by calling right conditions and you are not merely giving aid to your spirit band, but it may be you are enabling them to create conditions in the spirit world to bring new and other forces in the band to bring direct to you the vibrations of power you need. You have a work to do on this side they have a work to do on that. They are so true that they will strive to help you, even though you are oblivious of them. They are patient, they are loving; how could it be otherwise, for they are emanations from the harmonious links of vibrative energy that binds your soul to the central force from which emanates the life principle. They link you to the supreme force of the universe of which you are a part. They demonstrate the eternal oneness of life, and the mightiness of vibrations that reach consciousness through the sense of sight at one time, and of hearing at another.
Through them, you speak to a holier selfhood and learn of the divine within seeking expression. Then will dawn on your intelligence the realizing sense of the unity of life. This relationship reveals your oneness with God. You turn now to Emerson’s “Over-soul,” and read understandingly: “From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all. I, the Imperfect, adore my own Perfect. I am somehow receptive of the great soul, and thereby I do overlook the sun and the stars and feel them to be but the fair accidents and effects which change and pass. More and more the surges of everlasting nature enter unto me, and I become public and human in my regards and actions. So come I to live in thoughts, and act with energies which are immortal. ”
You may then read these words and feel their truth. You will have placed yourself in harmony with the law of life. Resting on it, you conform your advancement to its requirements; and you come into communion and fellowship with the impersonal the only the omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent God.
X – FAITH.
Faith is the key that unlocks the treasure house of the universe. This is a conclusion which may be rightly drawn from each and every religion that has ever been handed down to man. This is a single kernel of truth they all contain. The path to the end is through the gateway of faith. If the faith be absolute, the result will come note carefully, please, if the faith be absolute, the result will come, whether it be a blind or an intelligent faith. If one accepts this statement as to the omnipotence of faith, its attainment must be the secret of power. Blind faith is essentially spasmodic. If built on either the experiences of others, or the beliefs of others, doubts, which may be called destroyers of power, are as certain to arise as environment changes, as the sun in heaven is certain to shine. The theologian has himself accepted the philosophy of others; he asks his listeners to do the same. Doubtless he is honest; but because a man is honest does not mean that he is right. Willingness on the part of the individual, even desire on his part to accept the philosophy of the theologian, may not suffice to permit it.
Youth is bold in his undertakings. He is not fettered by the wisdom of the wise or the experiences of the past. His refusal to permit these fetters to bind him has made advance and progress possible. The wise glory in his spirit, and even the scribes, steeped in the accepted lore of the ages, are amazed at beholding the new truths he brings to light. The cause of youth’s daring has been almost universally ascribed to his want of experience. Perhaps the cause is not the want of something, but the actual possession of something never dreamed of by the book-worms of research.
To be clear as to the path to the temple of intelligent faith, I must draw the line between it and blind faith. Widely as they may differ, as day and night do differ, one, like day and night, blends into the other at times, so that the dividing line is lost in the mist of uncertainty. If we would found our faith so that it will stand forever, it must be founded on actual knowledge. Belief is only experimental, the test laboratory, where, from the alembic, tested, tried and proven, must come the faith that never fails.
Facts concerning external things may be brought me in divers ways. I may glean much information from the experiences of other Knowledge, however, cannot be brought to any one by another; it is the fruit of experience.
The statements of others, the suggestions of others may point the way to knowledge. Our faith in them may lead us to make the tests; but, through the school of experience each must go to gain the knowledge he craves. It is true our faith in the unseen will reach beyond the known; it can only be intelligent and steadfast when its foundation pillars rest on the crystallized thought-boulders hewn out in the broad laboratory of personal experience.
To know how to live, how to make the best use of one’s half-awakened faculties, one must learn how to connect himself, so as to draw power from the infinite source of power. If the infinite source of power is a somewhat capricious personality, resting in some sphere in the heavens, to which one only gains access by humbling himself and begging; let us learn how to humiliate ourselves and how to beg, to gain the favors we desire. If theology has not found truth, I must seek it elsewhere. It is my right to know. I could not have the longing for truth unless it were possible I may attain it. I look for the pillars on which rest the foundations of the religions of the western world. I find them chiefly to be the conclusions of the devout followers who have studied the faiths of others. Their temple of belief rests then on a foundation of belief. Instead of actual knowledge as a foundation stone, I find a theory. Let this satisfy whom it will, it does not satisfy me.
Four hundred years ago only, the church declared the Bible a safe guide, even on scientific questions. Then only a few dared to think on independent lines; the clergy claimed to hold the keys to all knowledge. The first chapter of Genesis was interpreted most literally. This Earth was the center of a system called the universe. Sun, and moon, and stars, and planets were but the attendants of our little planet, a flat surface of land and water resting on strange foundations wild imagination had conceived. All this was called truth once, and he who dared think otherwise and give expression to his thought must go to prison. At that period of history the miracles of the Bible were interpreted literally; to refuse to believe them were heresy and sin, exposing one to dire physical tortures. Belief was then a thing to be forced into one by torture. The Romish Church does not like to be told today how it attempted to fetter and bind the thoughts of Galileo and Keppler, who only begged a hearing for truth.
Within the past century, the scientist found every religious body arrayed against him as he first told the story of evolution. The geologist found history written in the rocks, but many preachers declared that when God made those rocks He might have placed on them such marks as He pleased. . When the geologist went so far as to claim, to possess proofs to show that the days of creation were each a series of years or ages, then one was even within my memory, dismissed from the chair he occupied in one of our denominational colleges. If these facts prove anything, they prove that our western religious bodies, at least, have not been seekers for truth; but rather bands or societies standing in the support of some dogma handed down to them from some remote period of history, and called sacred because of its age. Old lamps may sometimes be better than new ones, old violins are often priceless; but, old faiths will not be revered in this age of the world, simply because of their antiquity. The child of the last quarter of the past century will ask the mental pillars on which it rests be shown him. Does the foundation rest on the known? If the foundation stands on a wavering belief, the faith can never be firm.
Many of our advanced thinkers of this period of history, who know the truths vibrating through the glorious mentality that fills the ethers of the air, in their effort to lead others to the light, have implied or half said to those seeking knowledge, you may carry your old beliefs with you. They have done this in the utmost kindness of heart, expecting knowledge would later dissipate those errors of belief. I cannot agree with them that it is the best way. I cannot favor one enter the laboratory to seek truths by the tests of experience, fettered and shackled with the weight of ancient beliefs he feels he must uphold and defend. Better he wait a little, wait till he can come in a negative or passive state, but come filled with a noble desire to learn the truth. Let us be honest. If we have proved that the ideas held by the theologian of God and man and salvation are wrong, let us boldly put forth our proofs. The relationship between God and man must determine everything. If God is beyond all law, if He can change it when He wills, if He is to be appealed to by man in prayer for aid which He may grant or not, but what He may do no rule can determine; if all this be true, why, man can only wait and pray, hope and fear, and win or fail. God’s favor may be sought; still man must be content to accept what the theologian calls God’s will. Where did the theologian get all this from? From the records containing the beliefs and the supposed beliefs of others. Let us say frankly to all that we don’t believe the theologian’s conclusions as to the relationship between man and God. Then let us state, not our beliefs, but some of the facts we have proven.
If all power comes from God, we must learn how to appropriate that power, hence the relationship must be learned. Laotze, long before the coming of Jesus, saw the light. What was truth as to the true relationship between God and man twenty-five hundred years ago is true today. Truth is eternal. It may be well to note just here that a philosophy built on belief may not be essentially erroneous. The belief might be true. I only claim that belief is an unsafe foundation stone. In the case of the modern theologian, I do, however, go further and claim that his philosophy does not express the true relationship between man and God, or Being. I recognize how the church may be a moral power in the land, how wisely it may distribute charity, and how much it has done by founding institution of learning for the education and elevation of man. Though that service has been and is great, intelligence broadened now seeks its widest field of activity. On the threshold of a new century it stands looking into the unknown for light. It wishes to carry on its upward march no burdens, no false beliefs which it is hound to bear and uphold.
Years ago I made a careful examination into some remarkable cases of chronic diseases alleged to have been cured by Christian, and mental scientists. Several of these cures had been brought about, as claimed, by absent treatment. In many of these investigations, I had with me a physician who was a professor in a prominent medical college, a thorough skeptic on the possibility of mind’s eradicating any organic disease, found by diagnosis, seated in the system. I marveled at the result, of our investigation he was astounded, and threw up his bands, saying: “Are we doctors utterly ignorant of the cause and cure of disease?”
That question of his I left unanswered. It, however, took a great hold on me. Unsettled I knew the science of medicine to be as to foundation pillars. In fact, the best and wisest physicians have declared over and over again that the modem system of medication is empiricism. Is disease a delusion? I asked. Absent treatments, found effective by proofs, I must accept, became to me a subject of absorbing interest. The giver of these entered the domain of the subtle field of telepathy. I road again the marvelous stories from Cicero to Flammarion of how mind had spoken to mind; and, then, in the silence, sought to learn the philosophy, the truth. I awoke to it, and found we had been speaking in monosyllabic sentences, since man has kept a record of events, truths we did not recognize. All life’s unity is expressed in God IS All. The theologian had declared man was created in the image of God, and then, in theory and in fact, broke the unity and blending by also declaring that man was in rebellion against God’s law. When the truth dawned on me, I knew that the central energy of the life principle must be the central energy of the universe. That, through vibrations, all life was one, and that these bound all existence to action. All attraction, of every nature, found its expression in vibrations. Could we but place ourselves in harmony with the thought we would, our vibrations of health and warning and love and power must be felt whither we might send them.
The light came to me in the silence. That light was then but little more than a suggestion, a belief. I have made many tests since, and now it has become to me a philosophy. It brought me to understand Laotze and Eastern thought. It taught me the true cause of these remarkable cures by both present and absent treatment. It/ told me of the law of vibrations proving the facts of telepathy. Let me relate one or two recorded incidents of telepathy cited by Flammarion in his “Urania.”
From an old volume of Cicero, written over 2000 years ago, this story is taken: “Two friends arrived at Megara and put up at separate lodgings. One of them had hardly fallen asleep when he saw his traveling companion before him, who said to him with a tragic air that his host had formed a plan to assassinate him, begging him at the same time to go as quickly as possible to his assistance. The other awoke, but convinced that he had been deceived by a dream, he soon fell asleep again. His friend appeared to him anew, and entreated him to hasten, as the murderers had just entered his room. Much troubled, he could not help feeling surprised at the persistence of the dream, and was inclined to go to the help of his friend; but reason and fatigue finally prevailed, and he lay down again. Then his friend appeared to him a third time, pale, bleeding, disfigured. ‘Unhappy man,’ he said to him, ‘you would not come to me when I implored you. It is too late to help me now; all that remains is to avenge me I Go at sunrise to the gate of the city. You will meet there a cart laden with manure; stop it, and order it to be unloaded; you will find my body concealed in it. Render me the honor of burial; seek out my murderers and punish them.’ Persistence so determined, details so minute allowed of no more hesitation. The friend arose, hastened to the gate indicated, and overtook and stopped the driver, who, surprised, made no attempt at resistance, and the body of the murdered man was at once discovered concealed in the cart.”
Agrippa d’Auzigne gives an account of an historical event at the time of the death of the Cardinal of Lorraine, well authenticated in every way: “The King being at Avignon, on the 23d day of December, 1574, Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, died there. The Queen, Catharine de Medicis, retired to rest earlier than usual, having at her coucher, among other distinguished persons, the King of Navarre, the Archbishop of Lyons, Madame de Ritz, Madame de Lignerolles and Madame de Sannes. Two of these ladies have vouched for the truth of this account. As the Queen was bidding them good night, she threw herself back on her pillow with a shudder, covering her face with her hands; and with a violent cry called those present to her assistance, at the same time pointing out to them the Cardinal, who stood at the foot of the bed, holding out his hand. She cried out several times, ‘My Lord Cardinal, I have nothing to do with you.’ The King of Navarre immediately sent a gentleman of his suite to the lodgings of the Cardinal, who brought back word that the Cardinal had at that moment expired.”
Some years ago a society was organized in England for the particular purpose of studying this phenomena; and it is called the “Society of Psychical Research.” Its President is Professor Balfour Steward of the Royal Society of London, and associated with him are the most illustrious servants of England. This society has made several important publications of phenomena under the general title of Telepathy, having first made rigorous investigations as to the evidence in each case. Camille Flammarion in “Urania” cites several, from which I select:
“In the following case observed recently, the witness was as wide awake as you or I are at this moment. The person in question is a certain Mr. Robert Bee, living at Wigan, England. Here is a curious revelation written by the observer himself.
“On the 18th of December, 1873, I went with my wife to visit her family at Southport, leaving both my parents, to all appearance, in perfect health. On the following day, in the afternoon, taking a walk by the seashore, I was seized with so profound a melancholy that it was impossible for me to interest myself in anything, so that we made no delay in returning to the house.
Suddenly my wife, showing some uneasiness said that she would go to her mother’s for a few minutes. A moment later I myself arose from the sofa and went to the parlor.
“‘A lady, dressed as if she were going out, approached me, coming from the neighboring bedroom. I did not remark her features as her face was not turned toward me. I immediately addressed her, but I do not remember what I said.
“‘At the same instant, and while she was in front of me, my wife returned from her mother’s room and passed just by the place where the lady stood without appearing to observe her. I exclaimed in surprise: ‘Who is that lady, whom you now just passed by without noticing her?’
“‘I have passed nobody’ replied my wife, Still more astonished than I was – ‘What!’ returned I, ‘you did not see a lady just now, who stood a moment since exactly where you are standing? She came out of your mother’s room and must now be in the vestibule.’
“‘It is impossible,’ answered she, ‘there is absolutely no one in the house but my mother and ourselves.’
“‘In fact no stranger had been there and the search which we made at once showed no other result.
“‘ It was then three minutes of eight o’ clock in the morning. The next morning a telegram announced to us the sudden death of my mother, from heart disease, precisely at the same hour. She was in the street at the time, dressed exactly like the stranger who had passed before me.’”
Such is the recital of an eye-witness. Investigations made by the Society for Psychical Research have demonstrated conclusively the authenticity of the testimony. How is it to be explained? Still another case:
“Mr. Frederick Wingfield, living at Bell Isle en Terre (Cotes-du-Nord), wrote that on the 25th day of March, 1880, having gone to bed late, after having spent a part of the evening reading, he dreamed that his brother, living in the County of Essex, England, was sitting beside him; but that, instead of answering a question which he addressed him, he shook his head, arose from the chair and went away. The impression had been so vivid that the narrator sprang, half asleep, from his bed and called to his brother.
“Three days afterwards he received the news that his brother had been killed by a fall from his horse on the same day, the 25th of March, at half-past eight in the evening, a few hours before the dream occurred which has just been related.
“An investigation proved that the date of this death was as is given, and that the author of this recital had written down his dream in a memorandum book when it occurred, and not afterwards.”
In his work on “Phenomena of Magic,” published in 1864, Gougenot Mousseaux relates the following fact, which he certified to be authentic.
“Sir Robert Bruce, of the illustrious Scotch family of that name, was second officer on board a vessel. One day, while nearing Newfoundland, as he was making his calculations, he fancied he saw the captain seated at his desk; but on looking with attention, he found it was a stranger, whose gaze, fixed coldly on him, astonished him greatly. The captain, whom he met when he returned to the deck, noticed the look of astonishment, and asked what it meant.
“‘But who, then, is at your desk?’ said Bruce to him.
“‘No one.’
“‘Yes, there is someone there; is he a stranger? – and how did he come there?’
“‘You are dreaming or you jest?’
“‘Not at all; will you come down and see?’
“They went down to the cabin, but no one was sitting at the desk. They made search throughout the vessel; but no stranger was to be found.
“‘The man I saw, however, was writing on your slate; his writing must he there still,’ said Bruce.
“They looked at the slate; these words were written on it ‘Steer to the Northwest.’
“‘But this is written by you or someone on board, is it not?’
“‘No.’
“Each one in turn was requested to write the same sentence; but no one’s handwriting resembled that on the slate.
“‘Well, let us follow the advice given by these words; steer the ship to the northwest; the wind is good, and will permit us to try the experiment.’
“Three hours later the man on the look-out signaled an iceberg, and they saw close to it a vessel disabled and crowded with people, bound for Liverpool from Quebec. The passengers were taken on board Bruce’s vessel by the lifeboats. At the moment when one of the men was going on board the vessel which had rescued them, Bruce started back, greatly agitated. He had recognized the stranger whom he had seen writing the words on the slate. He told the captain this new incident.
“‘Will you oblige me by writing Steer to the Northwest on this slate?’ said the captain to the newcomer, presenting to him the side that had no writing on it.
“The stranger wrote the words as he was requested.
“‘Well, do you acknowledge that to be written by you?’ said the captain, struck with the identity of the writing.
“‘Why, you have seen me write it! How could it be possible for you to have any doubt about it?’
“For sole response, the captain turned the other side of the slate up and the stranger stood confounded to see his own handwriting on both sides of it.
“‘Had you dreamed that you wrote on this slate,’ said the captain of the wrecked vessel to the man who had just written on the slate.
“‘Not at all; I have no recollection of it.’
“‘What was the passenger doing at midday?’ said the captain to the captain of the disabled vessel, whom he had rescued.
“‘As he was very tired, he was sleeping soundly. As nearly as I can recollect, it was shortly before midday. An hour afterward, at the most, be awoke and said to me: ‘Captain, we shall be saved this very day!’ adding: ‘I dreamed that I was on board a ship that had come to our rescue.’ He described the vessel and it’s rigging, and it was with great surprise that we recognized your vessel as you came toward us, from the exactness of the description. Finally the passenger said in his turn:
‘ What seems strange to me is that everything here appears familiar to me, and yet I was never here before.’”
Telepathy is now practiced by many. To master its philosophy will he more than an intelligent triumph; it will be man’s awakening to immortal truth, to the continuity of life, to the meaning of vibrative mysteries, and to the eternity of being.
From the life of Swedenborg, Flammarion quotes: “On the 18th of July, 1759, returning from England, this savant landed at Grottenborg, and went to dine at the house of a certain William Costel, where many guests were assembled. At six o’clock in the evening, Swedenborg, who had gone out, returned to the drawing-room, pale and in great consternation, telling them that a fire had just broken out in Stockholm in the Sudermolm, in the street on which he lived, and that the flames were spreading rapidly toward his house. He went out again and returned, lamenting that the house of one of his friends had been burnt to ashes and that his own house was in the greatest danger. At eight o’clock, after having gone out a third time, he exclaimed joyfully: ‘Thank God I the fire has been extinguished at the third house from mine.’”
I knew I could not call the multiplied cures I had investigated “happenings,” nor these and other astounding proofs of telepathy as remarkable “coincidents,” There must be a law controlling all. That law is perceived when one comprehends the true relationship between God and man. You and I may never completely learn it; yet we can learn all of it we may be able to appropriate; and that is all we can use. If, then, we are bound to Being, the great impersonal energy of the universe, and we seek the fulfillment of desire, let us not doubt or fear; but place ourselves in harmonious vibrations with infinite force, claiming our own. Ways and methods of doing this may differ. Experiments are yet to be tried. If you have succeeded in bringing to your consciousness knowledge of the true relationship between yourself and Being, your foundation is secure. I succeeded through the paths of which I have advised you. They brought me to know something of the powers within our own selfhoods, in the silence, if you are disturbed or doubt and when belief dawns, prove it truth by tests of experience. The Rosicrucians understood bow to appropriate from the soul reservoir; but their language will often seem fusing to the logic of conscious mind. If you are in earnest, you will find the way, through vibrations, to the central force of the verse; because, from it, come the pulsations; the life principle. Ways to attain desires may and will present problems from time to time; yet the way starts through harmonious vibrations. In seeking them, there is upliftment; new paths must open, leading often to richer treasures than desire could picture or conceive.
There is no great and no small
To the soul that maketh all:
And where it cometh all things are;
And it cometh everywhere.”
XI – BACK OF VIBRATIONS.
Back of vibrations, what? Vibrative force gives density and form to all matter. By vibrations between the atoms of stone, or wood, or metals, is hardness and strength maintained. When vibrations between the atoms of wood in a chair or table cease, these atoms fall apart and the piece of furniture crumbles. Thought vibrations reach out from the individual and revert back, giving action to life and energy to being. All attraction is vibrative action and this force holds worlds in space and controls the movements of the universe. All life’s forces find their expression in vibrations. When, in any form of matter, vibration between the atoms cease, it shows change, usually called death or destruction. Still, the atoms remain ; they have sought a new form of matter to give expression to their endless life, and there their ceaseless vibrations are going steadily forward, forever and forever. With these atoms there is no time or rest.
To the All, the Source, the mighty Center, intelligence may not spring with a single bound. All the links in the chain must be grasped. Back of vibrations lies the energy directing their expression. The student in advanced thought who has learned the magic power of atmosphere and the secret of how to control it, has passed the gateway leading to the avenue of supply through vibrations from infinite force, by creating the atmosphere of attraction. He has called power to himself through spirit law. Strong as this makes him, he would go nearer the Source. If, after creating correct atmosphere, he knows how to call, through vibrations, what he would, be it health or youth, success or power, wealth or fame, he now finds within himself a mighty desire to throw out to others some of his possessions.
Just here it is but fair to state that many have been doing this noble work most unselfishly — often succeeding, often failing. Sometimes they have been full of encouragement ; sometimes full of doubt. When meeting others who have long been identified with this labor of love, often they have given expression to their experiences with: “Have we really a science after all? ” They turn to an exact science like mathematics, and observe that there the law is always unfailing. They may say, I sat for such a one, and immediately he felt the vibrations of health; for another, and the bad habit (so called) of years of yielding was overcome. Then again, just as diligently, just as confidently, I tried and failed – failed utterly. If a science, where is the trouble, is asked almost in despair. Let us see.
Mathematics has been cited as an exact science. For all that, even though we follow the rule (the law) we may make errors in our figures; then, we find our answer wrong. We attempt the proof and it fails. Here we may have followed the law rightly, but a single error in multiplying or dividing brought us a wrong result. The science is not less exact, because of our error.
Now, in spiritual science there is much experimenting. The unity of life is partly grasped, and the enthusiastic student, in his noble purpose of doing good, rushes into the field not half prepared. Possibly he has not paused to think how sacred a thing is mental treatment for the overcoming in another of erroneous beliefs in sickness, or disposition, or environment, or poverty, or fear.
To learn formulas, to seek the right word, to assert truth, are all good preliminary exercise to quiet conscious mind, and help one to appreciate the mighty force bound up in his own atmosphere. Until he goes through the discipline (whether it may take months, or years and years) so that by an act, a word, he surrounds himself with the atmosphere required to connect with the vibrations he would, for the particular case in question, until he is able to do all this, I say, he is an experimenter in thought’s kingdom of power. I have known some who have accomplished wonders in healing, who, at times, give way to violent anger and sarcasm. Imagine one undertaking a treatment immediately after having been the principal in such a controversy.
I do believe in the parting of ways. As one advances in the spiritual philosophy of this age, he is sure to find new and congenial friends. There are friends that were, whom he must leave behind. Not even a single argument is required for this parting. You may reach out your hand with a smile to him and firmly say: “This is my way yours seems other.” Don’t even affirm that it is different from yours it seems to be. When you know your “I AM,” and can claim understandingly the power you would, you may, in the silence, talk truth with him. With a full comprehension of the real source of vibrations, you may even pierce another’s atmosphere in spite of the barriers he may have erected.
Now, with whatever school you may class yourself, you know that in harmonious vibrations is healthful existence for every form of matter. Let a foreign force appear. It may be the constant dripping of water on a single point of a beam of wood in a building. Notice the effect. This new force is foreign to the world. For a time, the force of the vibrations in the atoms of the wood resists this foreign element, demanding recognition. If, however, this new force is continued, a question of power between atomic vibrations arises. If those of the wood begin to yield, then harmony is disturbed; and sooner or later the beam, weakened by loss of atoms, is broken by the weight depending upon it for support. Thought vibrations through the ethers are in many respects more subtle than those between atoms in solids, though, in many respects, we find great similarity. To bring health vibrations to one, we must connect him through vibrations with infinite force. This connection may be made direct, or we may send them to him by receiving them first ourselves. It often seems to me that this philosophy of vibrations has not received the attention it merits from mental healers generally. Only through vibrations can mind speak to mind. Mind is the sole link between the earth (or conscious) self and the real self or spirit. It is the sole link, therefore, between the real self of another and the infinite force of the universe you would call to that other. Now, the force or energy back of these vibrations.
Before we call on that, however, let us review a little to see that we have learned our lesson right. We have a purpose to accomplish, and that purpose we know, let us say, to be the good of another. We want to reach that other’s real self. We know the way we must first fix our atmosphere in order to call to us the vibrations we would. We may have to penetrate a mental wall built up by his atmosphere of doubt, of prejudice, of error, of superstition. Then, to accomplish this, we must mentally call to ourselves almost a magic force. We must be the instrument to give intensity to vibrations from Infinity. If we can learn the energy on which they depend, why not appropriate from it? Without this, our labor is in vain; with it, consciously exercised, no failure can ever come.
Do you see the purpose of this philosophy of vibrations now? Many, not understandingly, have followed it and won. They were subconsciously directed. Again, therefore, they often tried and failed. All through ignorance of the law. They have formulas and methods, yet the law underlying was never learned. But, like the young, inexperienced assayer who has never taken a thorough course in chemistry and mineralogy, they find, foreign elements often render formulas inoperative.
With a clear understanding of the relationship between one’s atmosphere and infinite vibrations, the force back of vibrations becomes apparent. How often have you spoken the that names it flippantly! It’s name is emblazoned on every form of inanimate or animate life. Atoms vibrate because of its mighty energy; men and nations bow to its controlling force, and the universe in space keeps rhythmic time through the dictates of this invisible director of all. Ages ago it was named. It is the crowning force of nature; it has been called the greatest thing in the world it is the opening thought of life it is the sweetest memory of existence its halo is divine its breathing is inspiration. This mighty entity called Love, then, in its purest and highest sense, is not merely a sentiment expressing mutuality of attraction between individuals. It is the vital force on which the entire cosmos rests. Love is the force that, by its attractive power, awakens the ego to its possibilities in the accomplishment of purpose. Behind the throne of all vibrative action it stands, for Law and Love are one. To know its voice is to catch the whispers of inspiration to heed its warning is to walk in the light.
The Rosicrucians knew it and sang: “God is Love, and God is Law, and we are Law; and God and Love and Law are One, and we are Love, and we are One, and we are God.” The Rosicrucians knew that mind, through thought and the spoken word, produced the vibrations linking God (the cause) to man (the effect). They also knew and understood that this blending proved the eternal oneness of power. Emerson, in the silence, learned the truth and wrote: “There is no bar or wall to the soul, where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins.”
This oneness is primarily recognized by all advanced thinkers, and also that all power comes from appropriating God of whose oneness we are. All of us are a unit as to the philosophy; but in its application some confusion has arisen. In our efforts to appropriate health, joy? power, wealth, success, we, to say the least, have often experienced disappointments. Over and over again must the road be traveled to find our errors. Our purpose is to link the effect with the cause consciously. They blend through vibrations, and vibrations coming from the cause must reach the effect if perfect connection between the two are made. The effect must make the connection, and its atmosphere is the link to connect through vibrations. Make your atmosphere true. Your thought and your spoken word determine your atmosphere. Both must be at one, and always remain at one, with your purpose and desire. No matter how much money you have in your bank, you must fill out your check and properly sign it before you can connect with the bank so as to make use of any of the money you have there. You, the effect, in life’s throbbing realm, must connect with the Infinite, the cause, or its supply (boundless though it be, and free to all) can never reach your consciousness. You (your conscious self) must recognize the oneness of life to connect with the supply. Recognizing that, you know your right to call for the fulfillment of your desire. Desire is Love’s message to your conscious self, advising what is yours to claim and to possess.
You will note here the illustration just cited. The fact that you have money in the bank is most important if you have need of it. There is the supply, and there is a way to avail yourself of it. Still, because you have money in the bank, you cannot go to the paying teller and simply say: “Give me this, or that sum.” Such a demand he cannot and will not recognize. You must present a check or draft, properly drawn and signed. Mental laws are as fixed as laws pertaining to banking. Indeed, they are more firmly fixed, because there is no one to take the responsibility of an over-sight or omission here or there. The effect, by study of the cause, and by a
constant upreaching to it, blends itself with the cause and proves and establishes its fatherhood, and its oneness with creative energy.
Here it is seen that our destiny is absolutely within our own keeping. Love speaks through desire what maybe our conscious possession. Then, let us rejoice and fear not, for the way is open and clear.
“Thy faith has made thee whole,” is the epitome of the philosophy I have herein been presenting. Through faith, correct atmosphere is established to connect one (the effect) with vibrations from the Infinite or impersonal cause; then Love can send its supply, be it what it may, because the way is open.
Blind faith has over and over again, through the action of the unfailing, inevitable law, brought the supply. In this age of active mentality, however, there can be nothing of steadfastness in blind faith, in faith without knowledge. When the theologian tells us of the miraculous power of faith and the need of cultivating it, does he not fail, in the dogma he presents, to satisfy our intelligences why we should have faith that our requests will be granted by that capricious God in the skies? The same theologian tells us, “Our way may not be God’s way.” He, to my intelligence, at least, has made an absolute separation between the cause and the effect, so that such a blending as our philosophy recognizes were impossible. He assumes man born in sin, and in rebellion against God’s laws. In short, I do not accept his dogma, and I do not believe in humiliating the divine in man by repeating responses like: “Have mercy upon me, a miserable sinner.” The philosophy which is herein presented is founded upon the eternal oneness of life. To connect our true self with the cause (Infinity), thought must be centered, not upon the material selfhood, but upon the divine in the human that always was and always is; this brings the real, the invisible, to our consciousness.
If I can present some of the truth, showing the links in the chain from cause to effect in a way to help any one of you to a clearer conception of the path to the supply, then your faith must increase. Your faith made absolutely perfect, you are one with God in all things. Who of us will ever attain that height? No matter whether we ever reach it or not, let us rejoice that it is attainable, and that every step upward means a grander life to .each of us. Therefore, let us firmly assert our divinity, knowing, as we do so, that thereby we are binding ourselves to the source, and opening and clearing the channel of supply from the great impersonal It of the universe to our individual selfhood.
Herein, I have shown mind to be the sole link between selfhood and its source, the impersonal cause; and vibrations from the cause, the method of receiving what one would, from the cause containing the supply. Next, I have shown that atmosphere, formed by thought and the spoken word (combined) is the instrument connecting mind at this end with cause at the other end of the line. You have only to make the connection at this end; that is all there is for you, your conscious self, to do. Some hour kept sacred in the day for daily sittings in the silence, is the best way to free your atmosphere from doubt, fear, and superstition, and to tone it to receive the breathings from the invisible divine selfhood whose throbbings are struggling to reach your consciousness. These daily sittings will throw lightness and brightness over the entire day. In the midst of hurried debates on business questions, you will stop for a moment to receive the pulsations from the infinite source clearness of vision will come, compelling right action you will recognize a higher selfhood solving the intricate and perplexing problems you may consciously travel with thought wherever it goes, and life’s grand unity will lose all its mystery. Then faith will be triumphant, for you will have blended cause with effect, and you will not simply believe but know the oneness of all life.
The greatest of students and experimenters in material science have with one voice substantially declared: “Experimental research but brings us at last face to face with an infinite and eternal Energy from which all things proceed and to which all are related.” This eternal Energy we have found to be back of vibrations, and have called it Love. Still, Love and Law and Energy and God are one. There is the cause; and man, the effect, can never wholly separate himself from the cause, for in it centers the life principal. Man (the effect), however, may surround himself with such an atmosphere as to practically cut himself off from the supply, which would fill and satisfy every noble desire of the mind. Our philosophy asks no blind faith; a superficial glance at progress, at humanity as a whole, proves its truth. New tests are asked, and they will furnish new proofs. Follow up your own proofs.
As you reach back to cause, and find its fountain head; and, as you recognize that noble desire (even though it may be mingled with ambitious purposes) is Love’s message to you telling of what is waiting your call in her mighty storehouse of supply, then you will have grasped the secret of existence, and you will know the meaning of the fatherhood of God.
“What do you wish most? Peace in your heart,
That you may give others, and ease every smart –
Every sting of Dame Fortune that hides a sharp dart
Your love would ward off. What then is your part?
“To call Love to yourself from the air from the All,
Believe that it comes and Love answers the call.
From Love universal not the least child can fall
Love shelters each one, we are one with the All.
“Hope never is dead, tho’ we stifle it oft,
And call shadows about that come not from aloft;
It abideth within close to Love fair and soft
Doth she show her face, when we have doffed –
“Our burdens – our shadows – our griefs and our pains
And come forth in glory, and free from all stains
That we fancied must ever be ours, despite rains
Of tears, and of penitence these Love disdains.
“Love wants only Love, and she claimeth her own.
When freed in the heart that to power has grown;
She shows that no blessing, no treasure has flown,
She heeds not the reaping, knowing how she has sown.
“Weary heart, rest awhile, learn to be still.
Seeking thine own, and uplifting thy will
To join forces with truth, banish visions of ill.
And faith then shall warm thee with life’s loving thrill”
XII – WASTED ENERGY.
Were it possible for us to make a calculation as to the material forces in the universe which are taken advantage of for the purposes intended, and the material forces in the universe that go to waste, the footing would be alarming. Everywhere, in the material universe, force is wasted. It has been particularly noted in charging the secondary or storage battery in our electrical appliances. It is possible we do not know how fully to measure the wasted force, but everywhere the inventor is trying his best to improve on the inventions we have, to save it. It is not so much a part of the inventor to increase or add to power; it is rather his part to economize and save from waste.
In the mental realm, all agree that worry and anxiety fetter and bind that worry and anxiety waste the life force that worry and anxiety add a burden of years that worry and anxiety are the rocks on which the gathered force of intellect is broken; and worry and anxiety are born of fear.
As in the material so in the mental world, the economic question of the day is how to conserve energy, how to use the force within ourselves, how to prevent waste, with its alarming train classified as mental wrecks. In a general way, the scholar, the philosopher, the thoughtful man admits force is wasted, as force is scattered; but all his life seems to imply this must be, and he goes on in the same old way, though possibly admitting he will take the better way when it is shown him. With the philosophy we claim as ours, (though both old and new) the problem of right living is solved when one knows how to stop the waste, to use force only to ends desired, to dictate the central points on which it shall be directed, to be unerring, because he does not guess, because he knows. The philosophy of the new century, in which we are in harmony, calls for concentration of effort. This must be attained. Environment’s walls are seemingly very formidable, and must be broken down if they restrain and do not protect. If we were to succumb to environment’s forces, or if we were to allow the philosophy that has been deduced by some from the experiences of the past to guide us, there is little growth possible. We must rise above a reasoning from premises that were assumed as true under an erroneous philosophy; we must revolutionize the trend of thought for ages, if we would know and conserve the mighty force within our control.
Some of the paths to power, as my experiments have demonstrated, have been pointed out in the series of papers going before. Historical examples have also been cited to prove my position true; and now we come to review, condense, absorb and make practical the method to conserve energy and make use, as far as our requirements may demand, of the real or divine force of the universe.
In order to do this, it is best we pause at the threshold and note the errors in the philosophy that has directed man for so many ages. Let us prove a philosophy erroneous rather than simply declare it so. Let us see if it is not evident to every thinking mind that it is erroneous. Then let us look for our proofs as to why the new is true. The student must have reached this point, or he is not in a position to advance, according to the plan herein given. Optimism is a sweeter philosophy than pessimism, but we only want the true. Unless the optimism I present to you is true, it cannot endure. If true, it means unfoldment to grasp it, it means advancement to practice it, it means happiness to live it, it means purpose fulfilled when one has made himself one with it.
Back in the history of man, back of all historical records; and, I might add, long after they began, might, not justice, as the ruling force with nations and with men. Under such a regime, the weak grew to fear the more powerful; physical strength among men and people and tribes and nations stood as the representation of power. Mentality had its childhood then, and its first proofs of power came when the few overcame the many in repeated battles; when skill and planning, not physical strength or numbers, won the victory. To the warrior, priding himself on his physical strength, the shock must have been astounding. He could not understand nor interpret the new force just appearing. His mentality only grasped the power in numbers and strength. Time passed on, the more intelligent grew to be advisers and leaders, and became chiefs, or kings, or priests. The more mystery they could surround their power with, to the masses who look to leaders, the more permanent might be that power. Some claimed wisdom from the stars in the heavens; others had it told them in dreams; others by unseen beings with whom they held converse. All taught, as far as history at this dim period may tell us, the danger of the masses not following the leaders’ decrees.
They are led by fear. There might be reward for obeying, but there was always destruction and death for disobeying. In short, history clearly shows that the so-called learned, in the early ages did not strive to distribute their knowledge. They hoarded it for power; they taught the more ignorant to fear. By and by ecclesiasticism came forward in Egypt, and by the decrees of its priests, lovely girls, possessing youth and beauty and virtue, were burned alive under their orders, to appease the angry gods. Under such conditions even through the opposition of those whose mentality had expanded to some extent grew, step by step, the power of human thought. Then can one question why fear became almost an integral part of being why it has played so formidable part in hampering man’s progress? From the Jehovah’s, mentally conceived by the priests of ancient religions, came the mandate “Thou shalt not” The Jewish Jehovah was a centralized unity of Egyptian pantheism whose commands were the negatives of forbidding. Hurriedly recalling all this, need we wonder more why fear still fetters the ascent of man? And yet, growth is fairly defined by saying it means the overcoming of fear.
Our ancestors built castles on mountain tops, only accessible over a single drawbridge which could be drawn up and the narrow pass guarded by a small force. Intellect invented gunpowder and engines of war that can hurl death’s missiles for miles and miles. Safety of the individual is now not in guarded fortifications; they failed to protect, and a mightier force rose preeminent, and rights of property and person found protection, even with nations at war with each other. Law the unseen became triumphant. Law, the outgrowth of centralized intelligence, strove to reflect the law of Being intuition disclosed. The Rosicrucians were intuitional mental giants, and they sang of the blending of law and God and man. Love of law, and love of God, and love of man, (where fear held place before) in this age rise in the human heart. Under that set of vibrations, there is no abiding place for fear. No shackles of fear restrain now the investigations of man in his approach to truth. No religious dogmas can hold him; tortures, their advocates can no longer inflict, and ridicule and ostracism are but weak weapons that turn into boomerangs, when hurled by ignorance at the honest investigator of the depth of the far-reaching tendrils of law. Coke wrote, “Law is the golden chain that binds the universe to the throne of God. ” Coke was orthodox, and yet he saw the blending; had he gone a step further, he might have rightly said that in its entirety, law is complete justice, and justice is absolute right, and on that throne (one in its interlacing) sits Principle of Energy the center of the universe-the impersonal God.
I have tried to illustrate by the facts of history the reason why fear became so formidable, why it was nurtured by the leaders, and why in the battle of intellect for power, it always had this foe to overcome. With all the triumphs of thought, of mentality, this demon fear is not yet dead. When he passes into nothingness, the Nirvana, or the Kingdom of Heaven, will be won. His complete overthrow is as certain as it is certain that the sun will rise on a day when truth shall have dispelled all error. Man must progress to this point. One after another will learn to eradicate fear from his consciousness Leaders have lived who felt hardly a tinge of its force; leaders are to come who will smile when they glance over history’s pages and note the false teachings of the past that gave that nonentity, that myth, a power.
The ecclesiastics who found joy in teaching fear of an avenging God, themselves feared truth, and consigned Galileo and Keppler to prison. They did not ask, may not these teachings be true? The church had given its theory of the universe and made the earth the center. Has the church yet learned (and I use the word church to embrace every religion of the western world) that truth will assert and prove itself in spite of any or every dogma or creed in the world? Behind truth is law, and law and God are one in essence and in power; in its own way this force will unfold latent energies and gifts till man shall know.
Why, only a few years ago, scholars were not slow to assert that brain had sex, as well as physical separateness. Woman’s brain was not adapted to stand the strain of the severe demands of the college curriculum. Within the last thirty years the college standard has been raised far beyond its requirements prior to that date, and woman’s colleges have multiplied, and the doors of our great universities have been opened to her. That fear, which was almost universal, has been dispelled; and all the learned professions have opened their doors to woman, which forces the philosopher to acknowledge that brain is sexless. Another superstition overthrown, another dogma shattered, another cause for fear wiped out forever. In my introduction I claimed that worry and anxiety were born of fear, and that they wasted the life force. I have been endeavoring to show first how this nonentity fear grew from nothingness to a monster; but now, with man’s better comprehension of truth, it is shrinking before the spread of intelligence, so that it is fast being reduced to a Lilliputian. Devil, evil, and fear are words meaning the same thing, all expressing a nonentity, created by those called wise, because their own unfoldment did not permit them to comprehend the cause that produced the effect. They theorized, and evil became to them a recognized power in the world. To oppose that conclusion or deduction required almost God-like mentality.
One placed himself in opposition to the accepted philosophy of the age in which he lived. It is now becoming patent to the thoughtful investigator why the reformers and philosophers and scientists in all ages brought with the truth they gave to the world, limitations and errors. One’s consciousness is a growth. He can only grasp the truth his unfoldment permits. A sudden shock has awakened to light; and a false philosophy has thereby been partly overthrown. This meant a step upward, it meant an unfoldment. The receiver of the light became a teacher to aid advancement, but he came hampered. He broke from one error, and invented theories to uphold a myriad of superstitions to which the masses yet clung. Luther had his limitations; Cromwell his prejudices and desire to annihilate fortresses; Washington his slaves; Franklin his weaknesses, and Napoleon his wild ambition to conquer. Each, however, was a prophet in his time; each taught a truth which is the heritage of all who live today.
Darwin stood for truth, and truth alone; Ingersoll to tear down the false; to point out errors in creeds, leaving the thoughtful to do their own building, he not even suggesting the way. With the dawn of the new century, the ethers vibrate with thought. Ecclesiasticism has had its day. The bold dare speak and dare publish thoughts at variance with any and every philosophy or religion. They stand forth, not as iconoclasts, but as suggestors of the need of making experiments on new lines. One central thought seems to dominate, and that is that fear shall no longer enslave. Man shall no longer study the volume of limitations. He shall now give expression to the divine within him. To study limitations is wasting force; to question power within one to achieve his ideal is ignorance; to fear the ascent to Desire’s mountaintop is puerility; to question your ability to win the good you long for is stupidity. How prophetically Ella Wheeler Wilcox often writes!
“Trust in thine own untried capacity
As thou wouldst trust in God Himself.
Thy soul
Is but an emanation from the whole.
“Thou does not dream what forces lie in thee,
Vast and unfathomed as the grandest sea.
Thy silent mind o’ er diamond caves may roll;
Go seek them, but let pilot Will control
Those passions which thy favoring winds can be.
“No man shall place a limit to thy strength;
Such triumphs as no mortal ever gained
May yet be thine if thou wilt but believe In thy
Creator and thyself. At length,
Some feet will tread all heights now unattained –
Why not thine own?
Press on; achieve! achieve! ”
Hope desire is but the message. Recognize this, and forbid fear an entrance into being. Know you can be what you will to Desire points to the attainable. There is a for you to do, but it is joy to do this work. For in your consciousness must come the: that knows no waning. Let others call you dreamer if they will, hut still idealize and tensify that dream. Dream, but do not dream. Intellect, judgment, hands and feet are your instruments to use as aids to the attainable heights.
Back of all, enthroned in your consciousness, is the abiding faith that seemed to be born in you the moment you realized the reality of desire the divinity of your selfhood.
“Hope is of the valley : Effort stands
Upon the mountain top, facing the sun ;
Hope dreams of dreams made true and great deeds
done ;
Effort goes forth with toiling feet and hands,
To attain the far off sky-touched table-lands
Of great desire ; and, till the end is won,
Looks not below, where the long strife begun
In pleasant fields, met torrents, rocks and sands.
Hope ; but when Hope bids look within her glass
And shows the wondrous things which may befall,
Wait not for destiny, wait not at all ;
This leads to failure’s dark and dim morass ;
Sound thou, to all thy powers, a trumpet call.
And, staff in hand, strive up the mountain pass.”
Once eradicate all thoughts of fear between
one and the accomplishment of purpose, and
work to the end loses all its drudgery. Faith
pictures the attainment glorious in color, and
the path to it becomes refulgent with light.
No force then is wasted on struggles created by
doubts of the possession in one’s self of the powers
necessary to bear him onward to the success desired.
Our philosophy tells us that full consciousness of the longing is a suggestion prompting to effort, with the absolute promise that success must follow, as the night the day. There may be a technique to be learned ordinarily involving some drudgery; but one, imbued with the faith that must come upon accepting this philosophy, finds joy even then, for every step is upward, and he knows there can be no step backward.
Man has wasted energy for centuries upon centuries because he separated himself from the great cause. He had been taught to fear the central force of the universe, to approach It with fear and trembling, to beg in all humbleness that his desires might be granted him. He was to declare his own unworthiness, and even then to beg. An erroneous philosophy cannot endure. Were not man directly related to the cause, his advance had never been. That essence of divine intelligence was ever active; but it could not fully assert itself till man’s unfoldment would permit him to comprehend the truth. That day has now dawned. There is restlessness over our religious dogmas, and various sects are now tearing down the narrow walls of belief. The Yogis of India have awakened the western world to a grander idea of the religion of Buddha.
The teachings of Confucius are now understood to be a philosophy, and not a religion. Man is doing his own thinking and investigating and interpreting, without the aid of any priest. He can serve his purpose in the world only by making use of his own powers; to learn how to do this is fast becoming his religion. That he may waste no force to this end, he recognizes desire as attainable. He fixes purpose, and knows self-criticism only weakens and turns from goals he may win. He fills his being with an abiding faith that his good must come to him. He then consciously recognizes his real selfhood, and all around and within him one with him are harmoniously blended happiness, success, honor power, duty and love.
XIII – SOMETHING ABOUT GENIUS.
When a crisis arises in a nation and it demands a hero to save its life, the hero appears. When the very air breathed seems to make half the world inventors, some one is certain to arise to be called the sphinx. When people grow greedy for a better literature, the supply comes, though none may know where or how the geniuses were taught Is there a law underlying all these facts? Are mighty thought currents set in motion by human minds, that draw to themselves through a subtle, undefined law of attraction, as the rushing mountain river takes in the smaller brooks and streams, until an irresistible mental force is gathered creating new conditions, new laws, a miraculous uplifting of individual mental power? Has overstudy of physical phenomena blinded ns to the more potent power which makes psychical phenomena possible?
We have studied the genius, bowed before his God-like qualities, admired, wondered and praised him. He represents a force too subtle for analysis, we say, and his appearance is not to be accounted for by a law. We face the unsolved problems with assertions declaring them incapable of solution. We seem content with ignorance.
In boyhood, one reads Emerson’s “Over-soul,” and thinks it rhetoric. Today a new light is being thrown upon it. Emerson was telling of man’s fountain of supply, of a force on which man might lean, if he would, of a power more certain and more wonderful than that of the greatest dynamo in the physical world. He was trying, in part, to tell what the story of Jesus taught him. It was a new interpretation, and all authority was against it. He cared little for recognized authority, knowing the countless instances in which that authority had been found unworthy of acceptance; and yet his readers hardly comprehended the truths he uttered. They were fascinated with his diction, but failed to grasp his thought.
Over and over again have we questioned if two people could ever be made to understand each other. We do not listen to new propositions with receptive faculties. We listen with our prejudices. All existence is a battle-field, and our narrow prejudices will battle against their overthrow, though their marshaled foes be the white-clad heroes of Truth. Again and again we have seen this battle fought and won by right; still, the ignorance of today finds its supporters and defenders among the accepted scholars of today. Where is our boasted intellectual growth? Where our vaunted progress? We are today the slaves of our prejudices; our environment is our prison-house.
The true genius is a strange compound, full of boldness; and, at the same time, excessively diffident. He is bold in his work, soaring often to heights to which angels dare not aspire; and yet he meets the praises of the world with the diffidence of a maiden fresh from convent life. He seems to question if he is entitled to the honor. His best work, apparently, comes forth through him only as the instrument. Whence the creative power that flashed through his consciousness he hardly knows. His it is, and yet not his. We may ask if it were inspiration, but what is inspiration? Who inspired him? How? Why? Can the secret be revealed? Does the higher power control him, or he the power?
First, it is to be observed that a true genius is unhampered by any conventionalities. They are meaningless to him. He is beyond the deductions drawn from the lessons of the past, and he rejects their teachings. He breaks over every environment. He has discovered a hidden force. He stands on a higher plane. He never doubts, he never fears. He does not need to guess, to hope he knows. Who gave him this knowledge? Not books, nor teachers, nor experience. We can write denials without limit; they only deny. Must we forever deny and stop there? Denials help; they cleanse the mind of error, and then there is room for truth. If we can learn the secret of the genius, we shall gain in power though none of his be ours.
The genius’s first step forward is not made with any rash force. He often sits listless. He waits. Waits, seemingly, for the message to come to excite him to activity. Waits for direction from a mightier force than intellect. The real center, the dynamo of thought, is only reached when man is brought to realize that he is one with infinite power; that that infinite power without, or separate from his own spiritual consciousness, would be finite. Once man advances to this plane, he becomes the instrument to do the will of the All-powerful. He has then no need of instruction that books or experience may bring. His strength is supreme; doubts cannot come; he believes, he knows. Believes not church dogmas, not creeds written by man, but the truth spoken by the Nazarene when he said “I and the Father are One.” The Christ within us is never assertive, and it will not manifest itself until we have learned to still the action of our hap-hazard, guessing intellect. Even Jesus himself said to His disciples, “Greater things than these shall ye do.” He foresaw the possibilities to be reached by gradual spiritual unfoldment, when man should realize himself not a reflection of God, but rather the expression of God. God is all, filling all space; we are included in that all. God, being an invisible presence, can have no personality, but man is the projector of that great Invisible into visibility. Just in proportion as one grasps this truth, thereby recognizing and claiming his birthright, will that one manifest to the world the divinity within him.
If this philosophy be true, it may be asked why the genius may not teach it. The question is complicated; the philosophy is true and subtle; and is both old and new. Though obeying its laws, the genius, as a rule, does not understand it. A flash of light came to him from the great soul dynamo, and then he learned of the power within. Why and how it cams he did not question. He awoke to knowledge, and rejoiced in its possession. Paul’s conversion was instantaneous, and Newton’s discovery developed from a simple incident. For one rapt moment each, in seeming listless mood, when intellect was resting from her weary battles, found himself in complete harmony with his own spiritual self, and the Kingdom of Heaven was found. The God within, always ready to help, was unhindered, for an instant; and then the work was done.
Burns, untutored, caught a glimpse of that divine light, and sang the songs that gushed forth from his soul. He merely uttered what his inner consciousness breathed. He could not help it. He was only the instrument to record the melodies God (his subjected self) sang while he listened.
Lincoln, withdrawing his gaze from the smoke and horror of the battle-field, saw freedom fettered and humanity outraged, and the God within him spoke. The emancipation proclamation was published; and a whole nation, startled, saw that its President in reaching one hand down to the slave had grasped the God of the universe with the other. By that act a new force was created which saved the Union. A thought current was established, bearing on its bosom the emblem of right and freedom, and naught could resist its progress. The intellect never gave birth to such a God-like deed as that.
We may never know how Bulwer came to write “The Coining Race.” He had studied Eastern thought, and naturally reflected some of its teachings; and yet it was his inner consciousness, his soul, that taught him the possibilities of vril.
Chatterton’s active mind was completely obliterated or unhinged by the spiritual self within. The prose of life was torture to him, for the material is not of the spirit. He became over-spiritualized for his physical strength; and, having tasted the joys of Heaven, he could not endure the cares of this work-a-day world. The intelligence surrounding him failed to understand him, so he rashly destroyed both his works and himself.
What light burst upon Franklin that led to his flying a kite in the midst of a thunderstorm? Why did Morse conceive the telegraphic alphabet before he made a test? What power directed Shakespeare when he wrote, “I’ll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes?” Whence comes the mighty power of a single word like patriotism? Is not love as real as existence, and what has its genuine force to do with intellectual culture?
If one may gather from all this that the genius touched some hidden spring to wake his inner consciousness (soul) to action, and to take control of his work; the inquirer now comes abreast of the subject before us with the momentous question, HOW? Does he stumble on the concealed button? Though a law may underlie the result of the pressure, is there a law which will tell one how to find the hidden spring? If it be conceded that our argument thus far is correct, that it is the awakening to one’s soul endowments that creates the genius, that that done a law is disclosed which is irresistible in its movement and power; then, it is equally certain that this acquaintance with the true ego can be obtained by a law as clearly defined as the one by which the ego acts. Is any other conclusion possible? To concede the one, we must concede the other. What is there in the experiences of geniuses that is tangible on this subject? Have any of them written anything to suggest that they had found the center of being in themselves? Let us see. Matthew Arnold was certainly directed by none of the dogmas of religion when he wrote:
“Once read thy own breast right.
And thou hast done with fears;
Man gets no other light.
Search he a thousand years.
Sink in thyself t there ask
What ails thee – at that shrine.”
He wrote this from the center. He knew the world was not yet ready for it, because he was a teacher and knew the generally accepted philosophy.
Robert Browning was bolder. He lived more at the center. He wondered why the general reading public could not understand him. He repeatedly declared himself openly; but few of the world of readers grasped the primary truth, that imagination and the soul, the center of being, have the same source. How could Browning have expressed himself more clearly on this subject than in these lines:
“Truth is within us all; it takes no use
From outward things, whatever we may believe
There is an inmost center in us all
Where truth abides in fullness; but around.
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems us in.”
In the Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Honest Man’s Fortune” we have convincing proof that these writers, in reflective mood, clearly recognized the power of the soul:
“Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man.
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.”
Shakespeare, the unapproachable, turns on the searchlight, revealing the mystery over and over again; but he only holds it to the center for brief instances of time, then dashes into the materiality of life:
Hamlet’ s
“There are more things in heaven and earth
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy”
is suggestive of knowledge Shakespeare himself possessed but might not speak; while,
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,”
is a positive statement of truth a mighty genius utters, without a thought of the intellectual philosophy which might bring one to the same conclusion. His most reflective mood in this play is doubtless reached in
“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.”
Quoting at random from his plays we find him full of positive statements as to the power of mind over matter.
“None can cure their harms by wailing them.”
“When remedies are past, the griefs are ended
By seeing the worst, which late on hopes depended.
To mourn a mischief that is past and gone
Is the next way to draw new mischief on.”
“We, ignorant of ourselves,
Beg often our own harms, which the wise powers
Deny us for our good. ”
The “Tempest” is a play which reflects, as a whole, Shakespeare’s perfect acquaintance with his true ego. Prospero stands for the personality of God or good, developed in the mortal Shakespeare. The power of Prospero is only used for good. A storm is created; a shipwreck follows; and yet no harm comes. Instead of harm, wrongs are righted; hearts are lighted up with love; forgiveness is asked with perfect faith that it rejoices alike “him that gives and him that receives;” and life and love seal an eternal Now with peace, and joy and rest. Then Shakespeare most timely and fittingly declares his work done.
Emerson perfectly understood the true source of the power of the genius, and clearly and boldly declared it:
“This overestimate of the possibilities of Paul and Pericles, this underestimate of our own, comes from the neglect of the fact of an identical nature.”
“A man’s genius, the quality that differences him from every other, the susceptibility to one class of influences, the selection of what is fit for him, the rejection of what is unfit, determines for him the character of the universe”
Emerson, however, in “The Over-soul,” is most complete in his wonderful revelation of the center:
“All goes to show that the soul of man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the vast background of our being, in which they lie an immensity that is not possessed and that cannot be possessed.”
Henry More tells of the undivided union of the soul and God in,
“But souls that of His own good life partake,
He loves as His own self; dear as his eye,
They are to Him. He’ll never them forsake:
When they shall die, then God Himself shall die.
They live, they live in blest eternity.”
Robert Holt, of London, in a little poem, most daintily tells the story as it came to him:
“We talk not of God in such phrases,
As hide or entangle the truth;
Nor sing with the dreamer who praises
The sensuous visions of youth;
But humbly avow that we know not
The form of the Fountain of Light,
Whose brilliant, bright harmonies flow not
From aught that is subject to sight.
Yet our hope is eternal progression,
With charity fruitful in all,
For time never knew retrogression.
Nor God e’en a thought could recall. ‘
But o’er us, around us, and in us,
Abideth the Giver of Might,
Who tenderly teaching would win us ,
To trust that the true is the right.
So sink we to slumber unfearing,
Assured that our Father is nigh, ‘
And wake up in the morning revering,
Or sleep on, unquestioning why.”
These quotations from geniuses tell us that all of them recognized a higher power directing and guiding. Some of them hint at the way of approach to it; but, as a rule, they are more or less vague on that subject. The poet can hardly be expected to be didactic. When he nears that plane the intellect is guiding his pen; when he feels his best and greatest thoughts he writes from the seat of the emotions. These have little to do with logic, they have all to do with the soul. The new metaphysics of today is founded on the bold proposition that all can learn how to reach this center. These scientists tell us that when Jesus said “I AM the truth and the life,” the “I” did not mean his personality. It meant the true “ego.” It is within each one of us. It is as potent with us today as it was with the great teacher, did we only know. To learn, to know, will come to him who first perceives the truths of the philosophy; and then devotes himself to the patient and indefatigable study of its laws which relate to the calling forth of the powers of the soul. These laws are pregnant with truth, and step by step is taken with full demonstration.
Great freedom is allowed, as unfoldment cannot run on absolutely parallel lines; still, there is a harmonious blending of experiences as each advances in knowledge of Being.
He who seriously desires any worthy attainment can gain it, if he unites that desire with perfect faith that the good he wishes will come to him. Once he grasps the full power of the ego within him, he will know that desire implies in itself the power to reach and satiate it. The genius must, therefore, first have desired what afterward became his. With desire followed expectation, which, enlarged into belief, opened the way for vibrations to pass to consciousness from the soul-center dynamo; and then knowledge asserted itself, and the genius was born.
XIV – SHAKESPEARE: THE GENIUS. HOW HE TOLD HIS SECRET IN THE “DREAM” AND THE “TEMPEST.”
Genius has been for ages the shrine before which intelligence has bowed. To that shrine, it came with adoration and with questionings. The genealogical records were searched, but heredity offered no solution for the irregular and seemingly spasmodic appearances among men of these mighty leaders. Environment and education presented no theories to account for the advent of the marvels. A flash from the Infinite found lodgment in human brain, was the best modern religion could say in way of explanation. The over-zealous demander of demonstrable proofs he who is usually called an agnostic found, upon investigating, nothing beyond the ordinary in the man, and tried to account for the works done by arguing that a combination of intellects centered to produce them; and then he busied himself to find the other ones who told the genius how and what to do. The mystery surrounding the advent and growth of genius gave the subject a wonderful fascination to the multitude, as well as to the scholar. Gradually, it was observed that the greatest of geniuses were best understood and appreciated by geniuses possessing, in a lesser degree, the powers of their superiors. Scott left the field of poetry to Byron, and Goethe bowed before Shakespeare.
To discover truth, one must break from generalizations. Startling as may seem the facts of history, there must be a cause for every effect. Secrets are being pierced in every decade which, for ages previously, had been declared by the wise as permanently sealed from human comprehension. These philosophers assumed to know the limits of thought. Their own intelligences fixed the boundary lines, but these lines were extended in turn again and again in the unfoldment of man. Today the study of the limits of human possibilities has lost its former charm. To help one’s own selfhood to its highest good is now the purpose of living, the holiest of religions. We have done with the study of limitations. If all power is within the soul of man, let us find the way to that reservoir. If it is fixed somewhere in the skies, let us climb there by instruments man may invent and build. We have computed the orbits of the planets; measured the heights of mountains on the moon, and we have weighed the stars. The source of power cannot be lodged higher than the star containing the dwelling-place of the personal Deity, so fully and so magnificently described by the ecclesiastic.
That wonderful home, filled with gold and silver and jewels and pearls and diamonds; material treasures which the immaterial soul freed from the body could never use, was to be its eternal dwelling-place. Strange consistency, strange logic! We have found the ecclesiastic so often in error as to his conclusions on scientific lines, that we are not restrained from our investigations when he declares: “God has placed His seal there man (or human thought) can go no further.” How does he know? Who taught him the limits of thought, of human possibilities? If there are secrets man has not penetrated (and I admit there are myriads of them) it is simply because his unfoldment has not permitted it yet.
I deny any philosophy that limits the powers of man. I see in such a philosophy only the excuse of ignorance when asked for a cause not fathomed. Because one does not know, does not mean that the limits of the attainable have been reached. Man is better understood today than at any previous period of history. His unfoldment was restrained for centuries by the “cannots” and “dare-nots” of the “know-nots” who claimed to be the “know-alls” of humanity. In seeking the cause today in any field of investigation, we do not permit ourselves to be hampered by any conclusions drawn from theories held but never proven. We care nothing about them. If true, we will find the proof. Mysteries of centuries are being revealed, because man now reads the open book without prejudice. Much of the learning of the past has ceased to be learning. The investigator has no love, or even respect, for thousands of volumes quoted as authority for years and years. Too often conclusions were reached through traditions, and superstition made those traditions sacred. This age asks for truth, and he who claims to assert it must bring his proofs.
The secrets of a genius lie, I claim, in his power to appropriate the riches contained within his own soul. Though he must consciously do this, it is possible he may not comprehend the law to the attainment of the end. With the light thrown upon us during the last few years of the century just closed, we find a thousand barriers to understanding broken down; and now, from the printed page, we see reflected more than author or reader ever saw before. The whole secret is there, but revealed to only those who may know.
The mystery of genius is being transformed into the unfoldment of power through conscious appropriation of one’s own soul force. This unfoldment may be stimulated, but it cannot be hurried faster than one may consciously apprehend.
My work here is not to generalize, but to limit myself to the study of a single genius, and practically to that of his unfoldment as evidenced in the background of two of his plays. My introduction, therefore, is simply suggestive of the purport of our study. The student of Shakespeare notes his unfoldment by grouping his plays into four periods; each group reflects his thought and life at that particular period, and each represents a step upward in power till he stood alone Master.
Shakespeare, a country lad, found his way to London. Row we do not know; but why we now do know. No conscious reasoning could have sent him thither, for his education and experience gave him no preparation for advancement in any field of labor in the metropolis. It must have been a suggestion from the subconscious. He then obeyed a soul command; that was the first step on the way to bring into action the endowments of his soul. He found London, he found the theater; then, on conscious mind first dawned the possibilities of the use of those soul endowments. He commenced by revising old plays. This gave him some technical discipline in the use of language and taught him to appreciate the purpose of art, to please. A hurried glance at his literary growth is preliminary to my purpose.
Beginning with the retouching of old plays, he followed this with the writing of entire scenes as in “Titus Andronicus” and “First Part of King Henry VI.” both attributed to Shakespeare, yet very little of his work in either. Next comes his first original comedy, “Love’s Labor Lost” presenting sketchy characters, not fully defined. The rapid farce of “Comedy of Errors” followed, and then a pure vein of poetry was reached in “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The Italian story next received his attention, and “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” “All’s Well that Ends Well” and “Romeo and Juliet” followed in quick succession. Then the writer seemed to lay hold of real life. He dropped rhyme to a large extent, and became bolder in his creations. “The Merchant of Venice,” written doubtless in 1696, artistically breathed forth mastery the artist suddenly conscious of something brilliant. It was the outburst of the successful man, at last sure of his own powers. He next ventured on the domain of history, and one after another of the historical plays followed. Then there came a pause, as though the day of brightness were ended to this author, and deep night settled around him. The master then plunged beneath the surface of life, within the utmost recesses of human thought, and there studied the mystery of evil.
The tragedies of life were told. It was a period to the author, as many of his readers have I perceived, following broken faith and broken pledges on the part of friends; and yet his belief in human virtue did not wholly desert him; in “Lear” there is a Cordelia, in “Measure for Measure” (which is a bitter comedy, at best) an Isabella, in “Macbeth,” a Banquo. Following this darkness came a brighter and purer sky, as though the writer came forth purified and strengthened. He then presented his four romance plays, “Pericles,” “Cymbeline,” “Winter’s Tale” and “The Tempest.” They sparkle with the delight of vigorous life, they glow with the heroism of noble womanhood and noble manhood, and they are sanctified by the godliness of forgiveness. Shakespeare’s literary work has been thus grouped by the Shakespeare Society of London. The first period is that of apprenticeship and experiment; the second gives us the comedies and historical plays; the third, the tragedies; and the fourth, the romance plays.
With this classification, we find “Midsummer Night’s Dream” in the first group, and in the last group, “The Tempest.” Between these two productions were the growth and development of the master literary genius of the world. As metaphysical students, as of that band striving to make occult proofs open to all, let us see if the poet has not presented us with the story of his own unfoldment in these two plays, which we may designate as his two, and as his only fairy plays.
Shakespeare was not over twenty-eight years old when he wrote “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” probably not more than twenty-six, as it is settled that the play was written as early as 1592, possibly as early as 1690. The “Tempest” was written in the latter part of 1610, so that the author devoted himself to vigorous literary work twenty years after writing his first, before he wrote his second fairy play.
The “Dream” is a great advance on what Shakespeare had produced before. His fancy was in full glow, and it delighted in boyish fun. Dr. Furnivall, of the London Shakespeare Society says: “It is a poem, a dream, rather than a play,” and Edgar A. Poe wrote: “When I am asked for a definition of poetry, I think of Titania and Oberon of the “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” As we study this play, for my present purpose, it is not for the successions of incidents and scenery and humor and fun; it is not for its poetic thought which fills imagination with a world of suggestions on which to build ideals; it is not for the triple stories of the loves of devoted lovers; but for the great background of it all. Back of all these creations of fancy is their creator who gave this brilliant love-song to the world. His creations we know, but it is him, the creator, whom we would know. Let ,us recall first, the young author striving, in that remarkable Elizabethan age, to hold his place as a dramatist among the university men (led by Ben Jonson) who all had read much Latin and much Greek. He could not call on scholarship for aid, for that temple he had not yet entered; but fancy’s realm was open to all, and no boundary lines have ever been drawn to the limitless world imagination covers. In one speech only of Theseus does the author put himself in this creation.
“The poet’ s eye in a fine frenzy rolling
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven:
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothings
A local habitation and a name.”
The key-note of the play is found in Theseus’ instructions to Philostrate:
“Stir up the Athenian youth to merriments:
Awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth.”
There are two commands in these two lines, one to mortals (Athenian youth) and the other to immortals (fairies). In short, there had been enough of battles and wars, diplomacy and treaties; now was the time for merriment, song, and surprises. Hard reason with its square toes was closeted and sealed within; the doors of wonder-land were opened and fairy kings and queens and courtiers entered, and for three days ruled that portion of the Athenian world. When Shakespeare held himself passive, having first attuned his mind to the vibrations of fairy-land, he practically gave the mischief making Puck, Robin Good-fellow, the direction of his thought, and wrote for this “shrewd and knavish sprite.” That wood near Athens glowed with color and was peopled with beings who were more than kings as to power, but pigmies as to knowledge of how to use power. They waited for suggestions, and then blundered in their work. They corrected their blunders when bid; but whether they erred or obeyed, they were alike happy and joyous all life was a dream with them.
Shakespeare entered fairy-land an experimenter, he came forth from it a poet. The portals of life’s possibilities opened to him when he laid aside his pen after completing the writing of this play. He was a young man, just passing the threshold of the great school of experience. Its lessons, later learned, were sealed volumes as yet to him. Still was he asking, where is power? His association with university men had told him of the mental discipline to be acquired by classical training. He knew his want of it could be made up by study and experience. Power was something more subtle who held the keys to that mighty storehouse? The child- mind traced it to a fairy-land, and the young author in search must seek. The dearest corner in the temple of imagination is peopled with fairies, and youth is fond of dreaming there. To abdicate to the unseen forces, even though we name them fairies, is the first step upward to bring one’s consciousness to feel and to receive the vibrations of truth sent forth by the soul. Power is within, though seemingly without. The way to one’s soul must be opened that the stream may flow from the source, fill and waken the active or conscious self to knowledge.
In the “Dream,” the youthful author presents us with a world where fairies rule. Man was their sporty their pastime. Life, success, happiness, were the accident of chance. Man was helpless, and environment was real and absolute. An unknown and an unknowable force ruled the world. This is the philosophy of youth, the philosophy of inexperience, the dogma of ecclesiasticism. Shakespeare happily made his fairy world a world of playfulness; yet, within its shadows, there were divine realities. No character in this play could be a reflection of the author’s ideal, for that ideal was not yet fully created. Here, in his work, he was only the instrument to record youth’ s imaging’ s. He shaped characters that fairies managed and directed. The real source of power was to him yet unknown; if, in fairy-land, the “Dream” tells us how it would be used.
Time passed on. Life’s work grew more serious and its purpose more real to Shakespeare. The apprentice became the actor, the dramatist, the poet, the successful business man, the sufferer, the master. His work done, he bade farewell to his fellow-actors, his literary friends, the nobles who loved him, and sought rest and peace among the scenes of old Warwickshire, where his boyhood was spent.
Of his four romance plays, “The Winter’s Tale” was the last one written, while “The Tempest” just preceded it. I take it, that his purpose was that “The Tempest “ should be his last work; but that genius struggled for another expression, and then came “The Winter’s Tale.” In spite of this, I hold that the Epilogue to “The Tempest” was written later still, and that it is the master’s farewell to his muse, his good-by to the new dramatic art he had created.
I speak of the new dramatic art Shakespeare had created. Prior to the Elizabethan age, the Greek model was followed by the dramatist. Ben Jonson held to it religiously, and Shakespeare was criticized by his contemporaries for not observing it. In “The Tempest,” Shakespeare preserves, for the first and only time, the Greek unities of time, place, and action, the entire action of the play being comprised within three or four hours. Of the heroes of “The Tempest” and “The Winter’s Tale,” Dr. Furnivall writes: “Shakespeare has seized in Miranda on the new type of sweet country-girl, unspoiled by town devices, and glorified it into a being fit for an angel’s world. He shows us more of Perdita than of Miranda; and, heavenly as the innocence of Miranda was, we yet feel that Perdita comes to us with a sweeter, more earthlike charm, though not less endowed with all that is holy and pure, than her sister of the imaginary Mediterranean isle.”
Primarily, to understand “The Tempest,” one must see in Prospero, Shakespeare, the Master. Till then, he was only the artist seeking to please; then, having reached his own ideal he must create a Prospero to reflect it. He, as dramatist, had won all wealth, honor, renown. His literary enemies had become his greatest admirers. Ben Jonson, whose quarrel with Shakespeare was most serious, thus eulogized him:
“To draw no envy (Shakespeare) on thy name,
Am I thus ample to thy book and fame;
While I confess thy writings to be such
As neither man nor muse can praise too much,
“Thou art alive still while thy book doth live,
And we have wits to read and praise to give,
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek
From thence to honor thee, I would not seek
For names; but call for thundering Aeachylus,
Euripides and Sophocles to us;
Pacurius, Accius, him of Cordova dead
To life again, to hear thy buskin tread,
And shake the stage.
“But stay, I see thee in the hemisphere
Advanced, and made a constellation there
I Shine forth thou star of poets, and with rage
Or influence, chide or cheer the drooping stage.”
The key-note in the “Dream” is a call to merriment; the key-note in “The Tempest” is a call to realization through forgiveness and freedom. Life was then not a sealed volume; it was an open book, and Miranda must be taught of it, for “the hour’s now come.” The thread running through the whole play is the thought that the true freedom of man consists in service.
Prospero, deprived of power by deceit and the use of physical force, finds in solitude and silence the real source of power. Attractive mental force is studied, and its philosophy mastered. Men who would not are drawn from sea courses they planned, and brought to the little island where even the elements obey Prospero’s will. Fairies no longer rule; they are now but the attendants of a mightier force; they obey the man who had merged his soul (his divinity) into his consciousness. The man also had grown so strong, that he avenged wrongs with forgiveness. He spoke, and hatred dissolving grew into love. Love and love alone was eternal. The fairy play produced for Ferdinand ended, he turned to his surprised auditor with,
“These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air ;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve.
And, like this unsubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a wrack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
As the central figure, director of fairies, of men, of earth’s physical elements, stood Prospero, ruling all, forgiving all, loving all. As the central figure among the dramatists in the Elizabethan age stood Shakespeare then, overtopping all, forgiving all, loving all. Then would the Buddhist have declared that Shakespeare’s Yogihood was complete. In that supreme moment, when no longer he feared the scorn of the great or the envy of the envious, he was at peace with all the world. He had sought and obtained forgiveness from his own soul for the wrongs he had done ; and then, in the fullness of his joy, he gave forgiveness to all who had ever wronged him by word, or thought, or deed. Then, life was love ; and, within him, the Christ was born.
The End