Chapter 1 - An Available God.....................

Chapter 2 - The Mechanism of Thought............

Chapter 3 - The Power of Constructive Thinking..

Chapter 4 - A Sovereign Remedy..................

Chapter 5 - The Master’s Methods................

Chapter 6 - The Healer..........................

Chapter 7 - Diagnosis and Prognosis.............

Chapter 8 - A Study in Realization..............

Chapter 9 - How to Heal Yourself................

Chapter 10 - Understanding: The Master Key......

Chapter 11 - Principles And Methods.............

Chapter 12 - Declarations for the Day...........

Chapter 13 - How to Train Yourself..............

Chapter 14 - The Impersonal Method..............

 

Chapter 1

An Available God

"I am the Lord who heals you" is our guarantee of healing and our proof that we must credit all healing, by any means whatever, to God. He alone is life, and is the Source of all the energies of life expressing themselves in material form. In the vegetable world "He gives their fruit for meat, and their leaves for medicine." Life, sense and intelligence exist in all living things, because God is in all living things. Therefore God, who is all that really is, is the I AM THAT I AM, with whom any intelligence, in conscious union, may say, "I am."

God is the only Absolute Reality, and He is Spirit. All material things are relative reality, and are limited and temporal. He is the Omni — the All – all Being, all Life, all Intelligence, all Wisdom, all Goodness, all Love, Health, all Abundance. Because of this unity of life, every living thing lives and moves and has its being in God, and is inherently a partaker of all His Completeness.

Because God is Omnipresent, that is, equally present everywhere, He is Immanent. He is indwelling in every living thing. His immanence guarantees the inherent goodness of every living thing, for He pronounced everything belonging to His Creation as "very good," before some personalities chose to become evil.

Life expresses itself by certain definite movements, which we call Laws, and no movement of life is possible apart from Law. In the purely spiritual realm, the Laws of Expression are invariable and absolute. God is only good, in whom is no evil. God is Light, and "in Him is no darkness at all." He is strength, in whom is no weakness at all. He is health, in whom is no sickness, and abundance, in whom is no poverty at all.

The same reign of Law prevails in the realm of material things, which we call relative reality. The movement of Power in certain definite channels of expression, called Laws, causes all that occurs. Whatever happens does so by Law. Everything that has ever happened has done so by Power, operating in obedience to the Law of Expression. Anything that has ever happened may therefore happen again, when that we have obeyed particular Law of Expression. Any recorded event may happen again, if we obey the Law. If it does not happen, we have not found and obeyed its Law of Expression – or it never occurred in the first place.

Any individual vegetable, animal or human expression of life must obey the Laws of Life Expression. The number of Laws that it can obey measures the richness and fullness of its experience and expression of life. Obedience to the law of inertia gives rest, and to the laws of motion makes all life’s activities possible. Obedience to the law of exercise gives a strong, active body, and to the law of education gives a trained mind.

Obedience to the "law of life in Christ Jesus makes us free from the law of sin and death." Our absolute guarantee of spiritual and physical welfare in a world governed by divinely ordained Laws is "If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land."

Disobedience to the Laws may be active or passive. One may intentionally violate the Law, or simply fail to keep it. In any event, the failure to obey the Law causes a negative condition that in turn may become active and aggressive, as indicated in the scriptural expression, "the law of sin and death."

Failing to obey the Law of Light, we have the negative darkness. Failing to obey the law of heat, we have the negative cold. Failing to obey the law of education, we have the negative ignorance. Failing to obey the law of goodness, we have the negative badness. Failing to obey the law of health, we have the negative disease, and these acts of disobedience, repeated often enough, may become the agents of our undoing.

The good things of life are either infectious or contagious. Health is contagious, and goodness is catching. Cheerfulness, optimism, gentleness, mercy, love, warm and thrill us, like sunshine, and under their influence everything of potential goodness in us moves upward toward strength, as a plant pushes upward toward the light.

Obedience to two Laws will lead to the realization of all good. They are the laws of ignoring the truth of appearances, and declaring the Truth of Reality, which we may call the Laws of Command of Attention and Declaration.

We practice the Law of Command of Attention by actively directing attention to the Absolute Truth of Reality. Jesus announced the general Principle of the Law of Command in its most extensive intention when he said, "Let a man deny himself." This does not refer to self-denial, such as abstinence from the so called "harmless amusements." Command of attention redirects one’s perception of oneself as a being apart from the social, national and cosmic life overall, and especially from being separate from the Life of Him whose moral and spiritual image we bear.

The Law of Command always redirects attention away from separation, and back to the essential Unity of all Life in God. Many body ills, imagined grievances and mental irritation will disappear by simply asserting the Truth of Reality: "This is good."

We cannot feel two definite sensations in the same part of the anatomy simultaneously, but will feel and report the stronger one. A simple redirection of attention produced by pressure or other means, which creates a sensation stronger than the troublesome one, will, if persisted in, give temporary and often permanent relief. For instance, a rubber band wrapped tightly around the middle finger’s first joint for five or ten minutes will relieve eye strain. Pressing the thumb in the roof of the mouth will often relieve a headache in the forehead.

The mind cannot simultaneously hold two strongly contrasting ideas. Therefore, by redirecting the mind from its obsession or fixation to some strong, positive, constructive idea, will give sure relief.

Observing frequent rest periods puts this law of relief in operation by redirecting attention, both for the body and mind. The physical heart sets an example of how to do a prodigious amount of work, by beating two beats and resting before the next two. We can find the physical energies to meet the most strenuous and exacting task by frequently taking a few minutes’ relaxation. We can greatly enhance our concentration by redirecting attention to something uplifting, relaxing and beautiful for a few moments.

The Law of Declaration consists in redirecting attention from effects to causes, from material sensations to spiritual facts, from relative reality to absolute Divine Life. If we direct attention to the body and its sensations, images and experiences of pain and weakness and sin will fill our perception. The Law of Command directs the attention to those spiritual realities, which by steadfastly beholding it, will fill our perception with images of God’s health, strength, goodness, love, peace and abundance.

"Look unto Me and be ye saved" is a call to fix the soul’s perceiving powers upon the abundant good. To envision anything requires a perceiving power, an instrument, and an objective. Our perceiving power passes through the eye, rests upon some landscape, and an image of beauty and harmony rides back over the visual track.

If you allow the perceiving power to focus on the body and its sensations as an objective, you will fill it with experiences of pain and weakness. Yet if you command attention upward and inward to behold God, who is perfect Being, the energies and experiences of His perfect health and peace will ride back over the visual track.

We each have the power to assimilate the substance of our mental and spiritual perceptions into our experiences. Jesus’ disciples, who worked in contact with him daily, began to drop their dark unlikeness to him and took on his characteristics. After he was gone, they continued to portray his image of physical and spiritual perfection. As others mentally beheld this image, they unconsciously assimilated it into themselves, and "all men took knowledge that they had been with him, and learned of him."

The command of attention became the law of the highest spiritual attainment, in the words of Paul, "For we all with open face beholding as in a mirror the Glory of the Lord, are changed from glory to glory after His image by the Spirit of the Lord."

The untrained vision finds it difficult to perceive the Absolute Being. Yet we have an objective of physical and spiritual perfection in the Master’s life, upon whom we may fix our eyes, and both physical health and spiritual wholeness returns to us over the visual track of our faith. Steadfastly beholding the Absolute, wholeness comes from the region of perfect health, which laughs in every cell, and moral perfection that shines in every soul faculty.

By steadfastly beholding God, health and strength replace weaknesses and diseases. His abundance surrounds and banishes material poverty. The bright shining of His Perfect Being dissolves the darkness of worries, failings and anxieties. We transform our whole life, for "no man can see God" and live after his former state.

Sit, relax your body, quiet your mind and calmly repeat these declarations to yourself: "I am one with the Absolute Life, who is perfect health and peace. God who is perfect Being, in whom I live and move and have my being, and who lives and moves and has His Being in me, of whose life I am a part as my finger is part of my hand, fills every part of my body with His Health, every department of my mind with His Peace and my whole spirit with His Love, making me perfectly well and whole." Repeat the treatment often.

Chapter 2

The Mechanism of Thought

The Absolute Being is behind all life expression. This life is self-existent apart from all material expression, and is the principle in all the individual forms of expression. Absolute Being is the all-knowing, the all-wise, the all-loving, the all-powerful, and the all-good being.

Absolute Being, in its differentiation in countless material forms, finds the beginning of adequate expression of all that it knows itself to be. Being the Life Principle of all living things, to them it imparts all the qualities held in eternal perfection in itself. This Infinite Intelligence reveals its motive in creation as love, beauty, and goodness.

We, as individual expressions, are inherently partakers of all the qualities of the Absolute, which is our Source. We do not create any of the qualities the Source expresses, but are distributors. We cannot create Power, or Love, or Beauty, or Goodness, but can distribute them and express them in variable form, according to our willingness and purpose to carry them up to their utmost variety of application by our power of choice, our imagination, and our persistence.

We, as individuals, hold a dual relation to Being. We relate our Life Principle or "self" to the Absolute Being of whose nature we partake, whose character we may express. We are related to the eternal Causative Power and we become Causative Agents in the world. Our bodies are partakers of relative reality, partake of its nature, and are subject to its laws, and stand in that classification of relative reality called "effects."

With this dual equipment, we may choose to identify ourselves with the great Cause until our capacity to express causation matches the Master’s declaration: "All power in heaven and earth is given me," which leads us to exercise and experience the Love, Beauty, Health, Life, and Abundance of God. Or we may choose to act in the world of effects, surrender ourselves to the sway and play of sensation, and the influence of circumstances until we become a conditioned circumstance, which leads to the domination of the senses, the presence of disease, which is the absence of health, the torment of fear, which is the absence of love, and the experience of death, which is the absence of life.

Yielding ourselves obedient to the Law of Spirit, we end in life abundant, or lending ourselves to the law of matter, we become obedient to the law of sin and death. Destiny therefore hinges upon our choice of masters. We either act upon the body and become its master, or react to the body and become its slave.

To understand the fundamental unity of mental, physical, and spiritual acts and states, we must necessarily define certain terms, which are so often used interchangeably that confusion arises.

Spirit is the original Life Principle in the first living cell, from which has evolved all the countless individual expressions of life. Spirit is the fundamental entity in every coordination of cells called the human body, and ensouled the first cell from which any single individual being has developed. The Life of God is Spirit, expressing in material form, and evolving to attain personality. Every cell brought the qualities and characteristics of its Divine Source with it into this incarnation, and by the law of cell growth, it assumes the character of its parent cells. The Life Principle extends with the material cell’s division, so that each new cell is endowed with the experiences of all its ancestors. As the Life Principle thus extends itself and passes through countless experiences, memories clothe it, from which a new form of activity arises.

The soul is the original Spirit, plus the accretions of all past incarnations that endow it with instinct, intuition, desires, classifications of experiences, and other forms of activity, subconscious, conscious or superconscious, in which stage of development we may call it the mind.

Mind is the soul plus the developed power to act — consciously, subconsciously, or superconsciously — upon its own inherited memory impressions or the sense perceptions of the objective world, making for ends, known or unknown, the result of which operation we call personality.

Personality is the mind, conscious or subconscious, in its threefold form of action, called Cognition, Feeling and Will, which in their ceaseless interplay upon each other, and their action upon the material world with the resultant reaction, produces the fixed qualities of being called character.

Character is the highest attainable climax for the individual life of the Spirit. Character objectively demonstrates the possession of qualities that the Spirit knew that it had before it left its Source in God, which it cannot forget. This individual expression of the Life of God, exercising practical freedom of choice and independence of action, uses the physical body as its instrument of separate expression, but it is the real entity, the egoic or self consciousness.

The physical body is always first in manifestation in the evolutionary process, and afterward the spiritual. However, we must ever keep in mind that the Spirit was before its material instrument and will continue afterward.

The argument for the soul’s immortality is that it is an essential part of the Life of "God who only has immortality." I am not a body with an immortal soul to save, but a Divine Life incarnating itself for a time in flesh, which it uses as the instrument of its personal unfolding.

The Six Senses are so many different channels through which our perceiving power moves out to act upon material objectives and, in turn, is acted upon by the impressions that move inward over the visual, auditory, and other sense pathways. Yet perception is not limited to the five sensory channels, for we may so extend the soul’s perceiving powers to exercise a seventh sense.

This seventh sense enables the soul to see Nathaniel around a material corner, the angels ascending and descending upon the unseen ladders of space, the horses and chariots of the Almighty, and other spiritual realities not perceivable through the normal activities of the eye or ear. We develop this seventh sense by constantly extending the perceiving powers beyond the normal range of the six senses. This is superconscious mental activity, through which the soul is in touch with all its past, including its ancestry with God, being elevated above the plane of consciousness so that it reports and registers its knowledge as objective knowledge.

The great Teacher, speaking of certain people of dim spiritual perception, said, "They have eyes to see which see not, etc." He further enjoined those who listened to him, "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear," all of which referred to the activities and perceptions of the inner spiritual individuality rather than to the physical body functions.

Understanding is that soul power that enables it to classify and formulate the reports of the six senses, all its past memories, and the higher perceptions of the seventh sense into an orderly method. It brings the spiritual realm’s ever present realities into view, enabling the soul to act instinctively toward ends that it does not objectively know, intuitively from the grounds of whose nature and reason it is unaware, and rationally by careful analysis of all known and classified facts. This is the psychological explanation of prophetic function in every age.

Thought is an inner perception toward a truth or fact that later takes on objective form through conscious mental action. Thought is an unuttered speech. Intensive thinking often results in spasmodic action of the vocal organs that seek to obey the mental stimulus to expression, which the will inhibits. Thought may originate from (1) some stimulus coming through the six channels of perception, from (2) some stimulus arising from the vast storehouses of memories, which the subconscious ceaselessly recombines, or the stimulus may arise from (3) the spiritual perception of truth as it is in the Divine Mind, which the self constantly contacts through the mind’s superconscious phase.

The nervous system furnishes the point of contact for communication between the self and its instrument, the body. The nervous system is dual, composed of the cerebrospinal and sympathetic systems.

The cerebrospinal system is composed of the brain and the spinal cord with its branches, composed of a series of ganglia that center in combinations called plexuses. We often call the principal one, the solar plexus, the abdominal "brain." The cerebrospinal system is the instrument of cognitive thinking and volition, while the sympathetic system is largely the instrument of feeling and reflex movements. Thought is the beginning, while expression is the ending of all life processes. The nervous system stands between this alpha and omega as the instrument of achievement.

For instance, say the self holds the thought of moving a finger. This thought is a vibration in the spiritual nature that reaches the antennae or fine little fibers of the brain’s gray matter. From there it passes to centers in the white fibers, which classify and shift it to a motor center. From there it travels as a motor impulse down a nerve to the finger, where the vibration distributes to many nerve divisions, which ramify the muscle, causing it to contract, and the purely mental conception of motion ends in its material expression.

Suppose this spiritual self holds the thought of warmth for the finger. The thought vibrations of warmth pass through the same processes, first of the gray matter, then the white and thence to the various centers for classification and the impulse is automatically switched to the vasomotor centers for the arm and travels down the blood vessels’ walls. Acting under this motor stimulus, the blood vessels dilate and they increase the flow of warm blood, and in a short time the thought of warmth in the mind is expressed in the sensation of warmth in the finger.

Thought is the method by which we may hold any purely mental or spiritual conception clearly in mind, transmit to any part of the body, and express it in material form.

The mind’s creative power and method of changing and reconstructing the body, or of regulating any functional activity therein, is unlimited. Conscious thinking may pass downward into subconscious activity for the body’s welfare, and to reform and regenerate the life and character. All the formative processes of truth in our characters, such as, "in the image and likeness of" and "we shall be like Him," depend on the soul’s superconscious functioning power.

The action of outer stimuli influences the body, as do those arising within. For instance, the eye waters freely under the stimulus of a cinder, yet grief or another emotion will open the fountain of tears more effectively than any material stimulus. Similarly, certain medicines may quicken or slow the heart’s action. We may slow it by percussing the seventh cervical vertebra, or quicken it by the same action on the first and second dorsal vertebrae.

Still, the most effective stimulus for the heart arises in the emotions, as anyone knows who has experienced the emotion of a great love or a great fear. Great joy or grief often so arouses the emotional reflexes that the organ cannot respond and the subject dies of a "broken" heart.

We find the same parallel of action in the stomach, the liver, the kidneys and all the organs. Certain organic changes in the body cause blood pressure, yet emotions more powerfully affect it than by any material cause. The mental and emotional states that we allow ourselves to indulge are the most potent energies for influencing the body’s condition for good or for ill. They furnish a vitally sound reason right thinking as the supreme cause of good health, and happiness and Godlikeness.

Since each of us has the power to direct our thinking, we have only ourselves to blame if we allow worry, fears and thoughts to fill our body with disease. We have ourselves to thank if we hear the Divine Voice within and obey it by filling our mind and emotions with ideals of love and beauty and service. We thereby clothe our body with the perfect health of God, keeps our mind in the calm and peace of God, and clothe our Spirit with the Love and Harmony of God.

After reading this lesson, practice as follows, twice daily for the month, finding time morning and evening to sit or lie down, relax the body, and hold this thought:

"My mind is an individual expression of the Divine Mind. God’s perfect Health fills every part of my body. God’s perfect Peace holds my mind in the poise of perfect self-mastery. God’s perfect Love keeps my spirit, soul, and body in perfect harmony and health."