VII
“As A Man Thinketh”
"Our remedies in ourselves do lie
Which we ascribe to heaven."
—Shakespeare.
In
our great-grandfather's day, when witches flew around by night and cast
their spell upon all unlucky enough to cross them, men thought that the
power of sickness or health, of good fortune or ill, resided outside
themselves.
We laugh today at such benighted superstition. But even in this day and age there are few who realize that the things they see are but effects. Fewer still who have any idea of the causes by which those effects are brought about.
Every human experience is an effect.
You laugh, you weep, you joy, you sorrow, you suffer or you are happy.
Each of these is an effect, the cause of which can be easily traced.
But all the experiences of life are not so easily traceable to their
primary causes. We save money for our old age. We put it into a bank or
into safe bonds—and the bank breaks or the railroad or corporation goes
into a receivership. We stay at home on a holiday to avoid risk of
accident, and fall off a stepladder or down the stairs and break a limb.
We drive slowly for fear of danger, and a speeding car comes from
behind and knocks us into a ditch. A man goes over Niagara Falls in a
barrel without harm, and then slips on a banana peel, breaks his leg,
and dies of it.
What is the cause back of it all? If we can find it and control it, we can control the effect. We shall no longer then be the football of fate. We shall
be able to rise above the conception of life in which matter is our
master.
There is but one answer. The world without is a reflection of the
world within. We image thoughts of disaster upon our subconscious minds
and the Genie-of-our-Mind finds ways of bringing them into effect—even
though we stay at home, even though we take every possible precaution.
The mental image is what counts, be it for good or ill. It is a
devastating or a beneficent force, just as we choose to make it. To
paraphrase Thackeray—"The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to
every man the reflection of his own thought."
For matter is not real substance. Material science today shows that matter has no natural eternal existence. Dr. Willis
R. Whitney, in an address before the American Chemical Society on
August 8th, 1925, discussing "Matter—Is There Anything In It?" stated
that "the most we know about matter is that it is almost entirely space.
It is as empty as the sky. It is almost as empty as a perfect vacuum,
although it usually contains a lot of energy." Thought is the only
force. Just as polarity controls the electron, gravitation the planets,
tropism the plants and lower animals—just so thought controls the action
and the environment of man. And thought is subject wholly to the
control of mind. Its direction rests with us.
Walt Whitman had the right of it when he said—"Nothing external to me has any power over me."
The happenings that occur in the material world are in themselves neither cheerful nor sorrowful, just as outside of the eye that observes them colors are neither green nor red. It is
our thoughts that make them so. And we can color those thoughts
according to our own fancy. We can make the world without but a
reflection of the world within. We can make matter a force subject
entirely to the control of our mind. For matter is merely our wrong view
of what Universal Mind sees rightly.
We cannot change the past experience, but we can determine what the
new ones shall be like. We can make the coming day just what we want it
to be. We can be tomorrow what we think today. For the thoughts are causes and the conditions are the effects.
What is the reason for most failures in life? The fact that they
first thought failure. They allowed competition, hard times, fear and
worry to undermine their confidence. Instead of working aggressively ahead, spending money to
make more money, they stopped every possible outlay, tried to "play
safe," but expected others to continue spending with them. War is not
the only place where "The best defensive is a strong offensive."
The law of compensation is always at work. Man is not at the caprice
of fate. He is his own fate. "As a man thinketh in This heart, so is
he." We are our own past thoughts, with the things that these thoughts
have attracted to us added on.
The successful man has no time to think of failure. He is too busy
thinking up new ways to succeed. You can't pour water into a vessel
already full.
All about you is energy—electronic energy, exactly like that which
makes up the solid objects you possess. The only difference is that the
Loose energy round about is unappropriated. It is still virgin gold—undiscovered,
unclaimed. You can think it into anything you wish—into gold or dross,
into health or sickness, into strength or weakness, into success or
failure. Which shall it be? "There is nothing either good or bad," said
Shakespeare, "but thinking makes it so." The understanding of that law
will enable you to control every other law that exists. In it is to be
found the panacea for all ills, the satisfaction of all want, all
desire. It is Creative Mind's own provision for man's freedom.
Have you ever read Basil King's "Conquest of Fear"? If you haven't, do so by all means. Here is the way he visions the future:
“Taking Him ( Jesus) as our standard we shall work out, I venture to think, to the following points of progress:
“a. The control of matter in furnishing ourselves with food
and drink by means more direct than at present employed, as He turned
water into wine and fed the multitudes with the loaves and fishes.
“b. The control of matter by putting away from ourselves, by
methods more sure and less roundabout than those of today, sickness,
blindness, infirmity, and deformity.
“c. The control of matter by regulating our atmospheric conditions as He stilled the tempest.
“d. The control of matter by restoring to this phase of
existence those who have passed out of it before their time, or who can
ill be spared from it, as He 'raised' three young people from 'the dead'
and Peter and Paul followed His example.
“e. The control of matter in putting it off and on at will, as He in His death and resurrection.
“f. The control of matter in passing altogether out of it, as He in what we call His Ascension into Heaven.”
Mortals are healthy or unhealthy, happy or unhappy, strong or weak,
alive or dead, in the proportion that they think thoughts of health or
illness, strength or weakness. Your body, like all other material
things, manifests only what your mind entertains in belief. In a general
way you have often noticed this yourself. A man with an ugly
disposition (which is a mental state) will have harsh, unlovely
features. One with a gentle disposition will have a smiling and serene
countenance. All the other organs of the human body are equally
responsive to thought. Who has not seen the face become red with rage or
white with fear?
Who has not known of people who became desperately ill following an
outburst of temper? Physicians declare that just as fear, irritability
and hate distort the features, they likewise distort the heart, stomach
and liver.
Experiments conducted on a cat shortly after a meal showed that when
it was purring contentedly, its digestive organs functioned perfectly.
But when a dog was brought into the room and the cat drew back in fear
and anger, the X-ray showed that its digestive organs were so contorted
as to be almost tied up in a knot!
Each of us makes his own world—and he makes it through mind. It is a
commonplace fact that no two people see the same thing alike. "A
primrose by a river's brim, a yellow primrose was to him, and it was
nothing more."
Thoughts are the causes. Conditions are merely effects. We can mould
ourselves and our surroundings by resolutely directing our thoughts
towards the goal we have in mind.
Ordinary animal life is very definitely controlled by temperature, by
climate, by seasonal conditions. Man alone can ad-just himself to any
reasonable temperature or condition. Man alone has been able to free
himself to a great extent from the control of natural forces through his
understanding of the relation of cause and effect. And now man is
beginning to get a glimpse of the final freedom that shall be his from
all material causes when he shall acquire the complete understanding
that mind is the only cause and that effects are what he sees.
"We moderns are unaccustomed," says one talented writer, "to the mastery over our own inner thoughts and feelings. That a man should be a prey to
any thought that chances to take possession of his mind, is commonly
among us assumed as unavoidable. It may be a matter of regret that he
should be kept awake all night from anxiety as to the issue of a lawsuit
on the morrow, but that he should have the power of determining whether
he be kept awake or not seems an extravagant demand. The image of an
impending calamity is no doubt odious, but its very odiousness (we say)
makes it haunt the mind all the more pertinaciously, and it is useless
to expel it. Yet this is an absurd position for man, the heir of all the
ages, to be in: Hag-ridden by the flimsy creatures of his own brain. If
a pebble in our boot torments us, we expel it. We take off the boot and
shake it out. And once the matter is fairly understood, it is just as easy to expel an intruding and obnoxious thought from the mind.
About this there ought to be no mistake, no two opinions. The thing is
obvious, clear and unmistakable. It should be as easy to expel an
obnoxious thought from the mind as to shake a stone out of your shoe;
and until a man can do that, it is just nonsense to talk about his
ascendency over nature, and all the rest of it. He is a mere slave, and a
prey to the bat-winged phantoms that flit through the corridors of his
own brain. Yet the weary and careworn faces that we meet by thousands,
even among the affluent classes of civilization, testify only too
clearly how seldom this mastery is obtained. How rare indeed to find a man! How common rather to discover a creature hounded on by tyrant thoughts (or cares, or desires), cowering, wincing under the lash.
"It is one of the prominent doctrines of some of the oriental schools
of practical psychology that the power of expelling thoughts, or if
need be, killing them dead on the spot, must be attained.
Naturally the art requires practice, but like other arts, when once
acquired there is no mystery or difficulty about it. It is worth
practice. It may be fairly said that life only begins when this art has
been acquired. For obviously when, instead of being ruled by individual
thoughts, the whole flock of them in their immense multitude and variety
and capacity is ours to direct and despatch and employ where we list,
life becomes a thing so vast and grand, compared to what it was before,
that its former condition may well appear almost ante-natal. If you can
kill a thought dead, for the time being, you can do anything else with
it that you please. And therefore it is that this power is so valuable. And it
not only frees a man from mental torment (which is nine-tenths at least
of the torment of life), but it gives him a concentrated power of
handling mental work absolutely unknown to him before. The two are correlative to each other."
There is no intelligence in matter—whether that matter be electronic
energy made up in the form of stone, or iron, or wood, or flesh. It all
consists of Energy, the universal substance from which Mind forms all
material things. Mind is the only intelligence. It alone is eternal. It
alone is supreme in the universe.
When we reach that understanding, we will no longer have cause for
fear, because we will realize that Universal Mind is the creator of life only; that death is not an actuality—it is merely the absence of life—and life will be ever-present. Remember the old fairy story
of how the Sun was listening to a lot of earthly creatures talking of a
very dark place they had found? A place of Stygian blackness. Each told
how terrifically dark it had seemed. The Sun went and looked for it. He
went to the exact spot they had described. He searched everywhere. But
he could find not even a tiny dark spot. And he came back and told the
earth-creatures he did not believe there was any dark place.
When the sun of understanding shines on all the dark spots in our
lives, we will realize that there is no cause, no creator, no power,
except good; evil is not an entity—it is merely the absence of good.
And there can be no ill effects without an evil cause. Since there is no evil cause, only good can have reality or power.
There is no beginning or end to good. From it there can be nothing but
blessing for the whole race. In it is found no trouble. If God (or
Good—the two are synonymous) is the only cause, then the only effect
must be like the cause. "All things were made by Him; and without Him
was not anything made that was made."
Don't be content with passively reading this. Use it! Practice it!
Exercise is far more necessary to mental development that it is to
physical. Practice the. "daily dozen" of right thinking. Stretch your
mind to realize how infinitely far it can reach out, what boundless
vision it can have. Breathe out all the old thoughts of sickness,
discouragement, failure, worry and fear. Breathe in deep, long breaths
(thoughts) of unlimited health and strength, unlimited happiness and success. Practice looking forward—always looking forward to
something better—better health, finer physique, greater happiness,
bigger success. Take these mental breathing exercises every day. See how
easily you will control your thoughts. How quickly you will see the
good effects. You've got to think all the time. Your mind will do that
anyway. And the thoughts are constantly building—for good or ill. So be
sure to exhale all the thoughts of fear and worry and disease and lack
that have been troubling you, and inhale only those you want to see
realized.
