Excerpts from

  Realization Made Easy
For Health, Wealth, Supply & Self-Direction
by Kate Boehme Atkinson




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Chapter 1

YOUR, INNER SOURCE OF POWER

IN my experience with patients and pu­pils I find that one and all ask help for clearer realization. All feel instinctively that it is essential to know Truth and to feel it in every fibre of the body, for this is Realiza­tion, to know and to feel Truth.

Let me explain simply. You can think of Energy without feeling it. A very weak per­son can think of the tremendous forces of the universe, and yet feel all the weaker himself by comparison.

The feeling of power or lack of feeling must depend upon his manner of thinking of En­ergy, If he thinks of it as outside of himself he but accentuates his weakness. If he thinks of it as within himself, he accentuates his strength. In the first instance he merely thinks Energy, while in the latter he feels it, and this feeling is Realization.

To this end I shall in the first lesson endeavor to bring home to you the absolute truth that Power or Energy is WITHIN.

Within what? Within the mind. From an invisible centre in Mind we, all of us, become visible, moving, acting entities or personalities, and what we externally become we have previously been, mentally.

Keep this well in mind in your subsequent study. Remember that the process of growth is from the invisible to the visible, and that the invisible is Mind and the visible is Body.

It is thus you are created, and thus you are re-created from moment to moment and from year to year.

In the invisible realm of Mind God dwells, in fact God is Mind, that is, He is Divine Mind, and you, in your inner, real essence, are one with that Mind, proceeding from it towards the outer circumference of life as the ray proceeds from the sun.

All things are created from a centre and grow outward. You will see that process everywhere in nature. The centre is usually a seed, which is a material, visible thing, but within that visible seed is an invisible centre, from which life springs and flows outward.

That invisible centre is Life. It is God, the Living Spirit of the Body of the Universe.

That Life or God is at your centre, and from it your life flows outward. God's Life is also Energy, the Energy that substands the entire Universe, yourself included. If that Energy were withdrawn from the Uni­verse, all Matter would instantly disappear. But such a withdrawal of Energy is incon­ceivable, for Energy simply is. It never was created, but always was, without begin­ning and without end. You cannot lessen the amount of Energy in the Universe, neither can you increase it. You can only increase or decrease its manifestation, making that manifestation sometimes more and sometimes less.

Now, since this unchanging, permanent Energy substands all its manifestations, and since it exists primarily in Mind, it exists in your mind, since you are one with the All-Mind, as the ray is one with the sun, or as the bay is one with the ocean.

This Energy is in your own mind, but you do not realize it, or in other words you do not feel it, because you do not know that it is in your mind, and because you are looking for it outside of yourself. Mental things can only be taken hold of or appropriated by mental means, that is by thought, and the only way you can take hold of Energy and make it your own is by means of your thought.

The hypnotist confers immense strength by making his subject believe that he has it. Through this belief he performs tremendous feats, even though his physique be frail and his muscle weak. When he takes hold of Energy with his mind, he possesses it, and can use it to any extent comparable with his belief.

Since this is true, it follows that if you men­tally see Energy as within your own mind, and persist in seeing it there until it becomes a fixed belief with you, you will begin to feel or realize Energy.

And it is the same with all other attributes or characteristics. Seeing yourself as one with the All-Mind, you will then know that, as Energy is within you, so is Goodness, Wis­dom, Love, Opulence, Health, Life, Vitality, and you will shortly begin to manifest all this, little by little, more and more, as the days roll by and your belief becomes more strongly fixed, and takes a deeper hold on your life and its activities.

Now, this in a word is Realization, and in walking the path that leads to it you get away from the falsities of life, and you know things as they are and not as they seem. To get away from the seeming and into the reality is to begin to realize.

Have you not seen a child reaching out to a bit of flickering sunshine on the floor? and have you not smiled indulgently at its baby efforts to grasp the golden plaything? Your smile is born of superior wisdom, but you are almost as ignorant of that which attracts you now as is the baby of his bit of sunshine. There was a time when you, like it, cried and kicked in childish rage because you could not grasp the sunshine in your chubby little palm. And here you are, chasing it still. No longer, as in your baby days, do you creep after it, for with the growth of years you have gained the power of running, and so you follow in swift pursuit your fleck of sunshine all over the world—and never grasp it.

Hence it follows that you are either crabbed and embittered, or saddened and melancholy. From the start the sunshine you sought was a bit of happiness, but always and ever it turned to illusion just as your hand closed upon it. You have reached the darkness of night. The sun has set, and there is no longer the tiniest speck of sunshine to follow.

So you say and think. But oh, child, in the house of Truth do you not know that the sun never sets to rise no more? Tomorrow is coming, and with it the sun; and if not to­morrow, then the next day, or the day after. Somehow, somewhen, somewhere, your sun will rise and shine, whether you believe it or not.

But you can never grasp sunshine in your hand. That has been your mistake. More­over, it would do you no good if you could so grasp and hold it, for sunshine is not so made. It is fine, etheric, permeating, and life-giving, as it could not be if solid enough to hold in your hand. Correct your illusion concerning the sunshine, and you will no longer chase it in vain. Place yourself in the right relation to it, and you will receive its delightful influx.

And now look at the above diagram while I explain it to you: It is that of a radiant figure set in a dark back­ground, and I have chosen it to represent a central truth in the law of Being, the Truth that God and Man are one.

You will notice that as the rays from the centre push outward they grow narrower, until finally they reach a point, and just for the purpose of illustration I am going to suppose that this point of the ray represents the mind of man before it opens up nearer to the Divine Consciousness, and has greater knowledge of Reality. Let the dark back­ground stand for negation, or matter, and you will see that the mind at this stage of its unfoldment has not at its command so much of the central light as it must possess when consciousness awakens in the wider and ever-widening ray as you trace it toward the centre. Consciousness begins at the point of the ray, where, of course, it is narrowed and limited. From this point it gradually awakens nearer and nearer to the centre, becoming wider and greater as it advances toward the centre. Look at the diagram, and trace consciousness from the point of the ray to its centre in Divinity, and you will see exactly what I mean.

If consciousness is awake only at the point of the ray, then I seem to be but a small being, but with a wider consciousness comes a wider sense of being; and so on until I come to the place where the ray joins the centre, which is the place of All-Consciousness. At that place you and I are seen to be one, but all along the Ray-Consciousness we are seen to be two, and therefrom arise our distinctive relations one with another. We act and re­act upon each other on the external side of life, impelled thereto by the inevitable sense of separation. All this is right and beautiful, and as it should be, provided that back of it lies the knowledge of oneness of essence. Without that knowledge of unity in variety discord rules, there is a tendency to fight for "mine" in contradistinction to "thine," caus­ing unrest of mind and disease of body. As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he; there­fore, it makes a great difference in your well-being that you think aright in your heart.

What does it mean to think in your heart? Does it mean more than to think in your mind? Yes, it does. To think in your heart is to realize—to feel as well as think. A great deal of the process we call thinking has no more life in it than the rattling of dry peas in a pod. Thinking in the heart is live thinking, or Realization.

Live thinking is always based on Truth, so to think of yourself as a little pigmy that has somehow come into this world, with no more self-generative power than an autom­aton, is dead thinking, because it has no foun­dation in Truth. It is a delusion, and so long as it holds you in its power you will deem yourself a weak creature indeed, a mere football to be kicked about by circum­stances, a mechanical toy like the doll that cries when you touch a spring, or the horse that walks when you wind up its machinery and stops when the machinery runs down.

This is dead thought, and as long as you think it you will be what it represents you to be; whereas, to know the truth that you can wind up your own machinery, or, better still, that you are the power-house behind all action, and controlling it, is to think the truth, to think in the heart, from whence are the issues of life.

There is but One Being, although there are many expressions of that Being, and these expressions are called beings, and some of them are called human beings. Trace every one of these beings back to its source, and it comes from the One Being in a con­tinuous flow, not separated in the least from that with which it is one.

If you can grasp this idea, though ever so faintly, you will begin to feel a greater sense of power. Consciousness will awaken at a place a little nearer to the Central Being, at a wider place in the ray. This ray we will call Human Being. It is really Divine Being, but its limitation in the ray makes it finite, or human, distinguishing it from the sun of Infinite Being.

Fénelon defines the oneness of Man and God in the following terms: "All that exists exists only by the communication of God's Infinite Being. All that has intelligence has it only by derivation from His Sovereign Reason; and all that acts acts only from the impulse of His Supreme Activity. It is He who does all, in all. It is He who at each moment of our life is the beating of our heart, the move­ment of our limbs, the intelligence of our spirit, the soul of our soul."

Fénelon was a holy and reverent man, not in the least given to presumption, and yet see how he places God in the inmost parts of our being.

It is a very childish idea, that of placing God on a throne up in the sky, and this idea was born in the childhood of the race, when men supposed the earth to be flat. We know now that it is round, and that the sky above us is under the feet of the nations on the other side of the earth, so that if God were above us He would be below them. A foolish conception, you will admit, and yet it lingers in your mind because your ancestors in the far-away past have transmitted it from gen­eration to generation, and it has been ac­cepted unthinkingly.

The moment you give form and location to God you destroy the spirituality of His Being, and you are as truly an idolater as the heathen who bows down to his idols of wood and stone.

The place to look for God is not a material locality, but within your own spirit, which is not of necessity within your body, for your spirit is as omnipresent as God's Spirit, if you did but know it. It has, however, its focus within your body, and it is there you must turn your thought.

The process of turning the thought inward is called "Introspection," which literally means to look into, or to look within. At any point along the ray consciousness, wher­ever you may find yourself, if you turn your attention inward toward the central Being, you are then introspecting.

And what will Introspection do for you? What is the good resulting from it? Why, just this:

Your weakest endeavor in this direction calls more Being into expression, go that your human being thus becomes enlarged, strengthened, and vitalized. Then with each accession of strength your intro­spection grows more penetrating, and you are able to draw more deeply on the Eternal Supply.

Chapter 2 

HOW TO USE YOUR THOUGHT-MACHINE

TO enter into Realization it is necessary to get away from the comparatively mean­ingless action that constitutes the greater part of our thinking. There is nothing to realize but Truth, and all thinking that does not move toward the knowledge of Truth is desultory, vague, purposeless, unreal, and useless.

You, the master workman, must learn how to use your thought-machine. You must also learn how to let it rest. You can use it or let it rest at will, for you are not at the mercy of your thought, even if you do seem to be. You really stand behind all your thought action, and have the power to con­trol and direct it. By developing this power you acquire the mastery over environment.

Edward Carpenter speaks to the point in his "Visit to a Gnani." He says: "That a man should be a prey to any thought that chances to take possession of his mind is commonly 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 try to expel it.

"Yes, this is an absurd position for man, the heir of all the ages, to be in—hag-ridden by the flimsiest 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 obnoxious thought from your mind as it is to shake a stone out of your shoe; and until a man can do that it is just nonsense to talk about his ascendancy 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."

Carpenter then goes on to say that this power has long been known and practised in the East, but that, like other arts, it re­quires practice to attain any degree of success when it no longer remains a thing of difficulty, or even mystery. He continues:

"While at work your thought is to be absolutely concentrated in it, undistracted by anything whatever, irrelevant to the matter in hand, pounding away like a great engine, with giant power and perfect economy, no wear and tear of friction, or dislocation of parts owing to the working of different forces at the same time. Then, when the work is finished, if there is no more occasion for the use of the machine, it must stop equally, absolutely—stop entirely—no wor­rying (as if a parcel of boys were allowed to play their devilments with a locomotive as soon as it was in the shed), and the man must retire into that region of his conscious­ness where his true self dwells.

"I say the power of the thought-machine itself is enormously increased by this faculty of letting it alone on the one hand, and of using it singly and with concentration on the other. It becomes a true tool, which a master workman lays down when done with, but which only a bungler carries about with him all the time to show that he is possessor of it."

I quote the foregoing because it bears so strongly upon my statement that it is possi­ble to think as you decree to think, and not as you are apparently obliged to through heredity, habit, environment, or any other cause commonly supposed to regulate and determine thought action.

Assuming this to be true, and you can prove it in your own individual experience, the question then arises: If I can direct and control my thinking, what shall be the manner of that direction and control? Granted the power, to what end shall I exert it? The answer is simple: Let your thought conform to the Cosmic Law; let it form a centre or nucleus, and build around that centre. That is the way all organisms construct themselves, and your mind should build itself in the same way if it would be organic, and it must be organized or organic in order to have power—it must resolve itself into an organic unity. To do this it must have a central purpose or idea, and move about that purpose as planets about the sun. Thought, to be alive, constructive, and powerful, must be thus organic. If not organized, it is vague, chaotic, and powerless.

It must then have its central nucleus or idea, and what shall be the idea? Observing the Cosmic Law, we see every growing thing to be a unity evolving itself into a variety, the one becoming the many. One is the basis of mathematics, and it is also the basis of all manifestation or expression. One is the basis of form, of proportion, of symmetry of action, of all that goes to make up the objective world.

Therefore to have the mind well organized according to the Cosmic Law, it must have the idea of one at its centre. You must see yourself and God as one, and see it strongly and permanently. It must be an abiding thought with you first, and then your thoughts must be trained to work around and about that central idea.

Somewhere in your mentality there has stood something which has meant God, or Perfection, or Infinitude, to you; but it has been a something that was shut away from you. God was enshrined in His own Perfection, and you were not only outside of this shut-away, self-enclosed Being, but it was sacrilege to identify yourself with it.

This idea falls short of unity, for it is making two ones, God (one) and you (one), and these two ones must be resolved into a single one before you can organize your mind.

I have shown you how to make the at­onement by seeing yourself as one with God in substance, and as flowing forth from God in external manifestation, as the ray flows forth from the sun.

See God, then, as at the centre of your Being, and see yourself, not as something separate, but as continually proceeding from that centre.

And you are not only one with God, but one with all Humanity, for every human being proceeds, just as you do, from this one central source, which does not divide itself, placing a part at your centre and another part at your brother's centre. It is whole and entire, as the sun is, and as the indivisible sun gives birth to many rays, so does God's Central Being give birth to many beings.

When you begin to see this you begin to follow the Cosmic method, starting with one as the nucleus of thought growth. Then your thought energy, instead of being scat­tered in numberless directions, is called in and concentrated upon an organic centre. This centre is alive with spirit, and from this centre you begin to grow. Previous to this your mind has been like floating pro­toplasm, incoherent, aimless, and wellnigh helpless.

The world is full of protoplasmic people, who have not yet learned the secret of an organic growth, and who are at the mercy of circumstances, or, like driftwood, moving in obedience to the push of every current. But ever within each one lies the germ nucleus of the higher organism, awaiting the stir of a new development.

A central conception lies back of the thought of every individual, and according to the na­ture of that conception is the character of the mind and thought. If the conception be true, even though not of the highest, the thought is comparatively vital. If it be positively untrue, then the thought is non-vital. This conception to which I allude is the idea the mind holds regarding itself, its nature, and its relation to that which it believes to be the cause of its existence

To understand this better let us look at the diagram above. It contains two figures. No. (1) represents the false concepttion: No. (2) represents the true. In the first lesson of this series I used the diagram of a radiant figure to stand for the entirety of Being, and endeavored to show that God and Man must be included in it, God being the Centre, and Man the ray pro­ceeding from the Centre. This is the true conception of the oneness or unity of Being, including both God and Man.

Figure (2) in this lesson stands for this true conception, as I have just said, while figure (1) stands for the false or mistaken conception, which represents God as a closed sphere, and Man as separate and apart from this sphere. In some mysterious fashion God is thus supposed to act through intervening space, externally upon Man, but there is the eternal separateness and aloofness, not only between God and Man, but between Man and Man.

It is small wonder that the mind holding such a conception of itself should be painfully conscious of its limitation, and feel itself cut off from its source of supply. It would not be putting it too strongly to assert that all the weakness, inability, poverty, disease, and wretchedness in the world today is in some way referable to this false concep­tion of the relation of Man to God. It has long held the human heart in bondage.

When once this is set right, the whole out­look on life changes, and all things are seen in a new light. One then passes into a mental realm, which is indeed a Kingdom of Heaven to the Hades of a former thought life.

I cannot lay too much stress upon the importance of getting this basic conception right to begin with. So often students write me that they have been studying for years, seeking that highest truth which shall bring them improved mental and physical condi­tions, but only find themselves floudering more and more helplessly in uncertainty, doubt, and general unhappiness.

This ought not so to be. This most essen­tial subject in the world should be made so plain and direct in its rendering as to reach the needs of all. Every mind must have its central truth about which to build its organic unity. When this is supplied it can work to a definite purpose, and be, oh, so happy in its working.

"A diagram," says Clerk Maxwell, "is a figure drawn in such a manner that the geo­metrical relations between the parts of the figure help us to understand relations between other objects."

It is with this intent that I have used, and shall go on using, geometrical designs in these lessons as a help to elucidate my meaning. The blank space in the centre of the radiant figure but poorly represents the wonderful reservoir of Being from which all things proceed, and yet that blankness may well symbolize the unexpressed.

Symbols are helps to thought and to reali­zation, for the mind soon learns to rise from the symbol to the reality of the thing symbo­lized, and is thus led little by little into the understanding of Life, and its ever-revealing mystery. In the non-understanding of Life lies the pain of living. With its understand­ing comes increasing gladness.

Professor Royce of Harvard, Dr. Caird of Glasgow University, and other thinkers of note emphasize the fact that there is but one Self in the Universe, and my diagram of the radiant figure will serve to explain how this can be. By following each ray from its point of expression to the centre whence all rays proceed, it is evident that they are one. This is the One Self. It is you, it is I, it is all men, it is all things.

Is this hard to realize? It seems the simplest and most evident truth in the world, although, I confess, there was a time in my life when I could not understand it, and that was, in consequence, a time of weakness, of sickness, of mental depression, of distrust in my own ability, of utter hopelessness, of the darkness of despair.

Now that I see this great and central truth, the world has changed for me, the sun has risen on my life, and all is well with me. So will it be with you.

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