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."
