"And he that talked with me had a golden reed to measure the city, and the gates thereof and the wall thereof. And the length and the breadth and the height are equal."
The building of a glorious perfected selfhood, this is the work of every life.
We all come into existence equal in privilege, we are all born equal in latent power, which, if developed, will keep us shoulder to shoulder in this game of living out; but not until this latent power is developed and brought out into external manifestation can any life really declare its mastery.
Life has one grand prize for all, and this prize is life's master position. The chance to compete for this prize is given to all at birth, but the power to push forward in the pursuit of it is only developed by those who know that it is really within them, and knowing this begin systematically to unfold it. Not everyone is equal in the externalization of this latent energy, and no matter how much or how little any life may possess it, still it has its own point of contact for power, and it can come forth in its own way in wisdom of conquest.
Life as we find it here on earth is like a great garden; each soul comes into this world garden and its place and keynote is struck upon the harp of life and the registration is made in the universal harmony; then it must work out its own part until it comes into perfect tune with the other parts of the great universal chord.
Not a life is born into expression here, but in the unseen realm an angel or higher master ministers at its birth, and its name is written in the Lamb's book of life (or the Universal Cosmic Mind). Each life drops into its own selected and appointed place; it has its own special mission to perform, its own lessons to learn, its own part to work out, and its own grand privilege of development.
In essence all life isone, and all humanity is the same; theOne Lifeis in all and through all, without regard to class, creed or color, but in manifested expression we must forever be different; some lives are younger in their unfoldment--they are unfinished; some have finer bodies through which to manifest consciousness; some are born into positions where there is more required of them than of others, for the price of usefulness is the ability to be useful; some are never useful and live idle aimless lives because they have not yet incorporated within themselves the power to be of use to others.
The nation, the race, the individual and the environment are simply signals which we hang upon ourself of just what we created and unfolded within our own consciousness.
We come the reaper of the things we sowed, and just where we find ourselves here is the picture of how well or how ill we have used the years behind us, but the privilege of new use and new development is still within us; we stand each day on the threshold of a new lifetime, ready to begin over and over again our new unfoldment.
Around each life is theAll Consciousness, and it can fashion for itself a new world, made of the cosmic substance with which it is connected.
The great unfolding mass of humanity pass along, taking themselves as a confused bundle of states of being, acted upon by the external force of people and environment, and in turn acting back with no conscious idea of creation, never knowing that with what measure we mete it shall be meted unto us.
This process of being acted upon and acting back unconsciously, produces a type of energy that cannot fail but bring forth masses of individuals who are in bondage, body, mind and spirit, for spirit has not sensed its eternal birthright of liberty.
Looking at this world garden full of natural wild flowers, called the "human race," New Thought sees clearly that whatever response an individual gives to his environment is the evidence of his own special power, and that this personal power may, by conscious control and direction, give him complete mastery, and through this he passes uninterrupted into possession of life's master position and the prize of peace and power and wisdom.
The individual is always the actor; the environment is always acted upon, and this acting and acting upon again gives forth an expression, and the exchange and inter-exchange between the two produces what the world calls the character of a life, and looking upon the product of this play of forces, we say "he is a genius," "he is a thief," "he is a God-man," or, "he is a degenerate," measuring with the example that is hung before our eyes.
Up to this point all men are really equal; they are simply alive in consciousness, but just as the gardener takes the flower and transplants it to specialized soil, and causes it to bud and bloom with all the energy within it, just so man's own consciousness can take his soul and teach him how he can lift himself into states of specialized human power and show forth all the glory of a divinely developed man.
Everyone can take his place at any level of living that he chooses just as soon as he knows that there is no one to say "no" to him but himself.
Strong positive thoughts put truth into the hearts of men, and this builds them upward and inward towards harmony.
This great universal law of harmonious consciousness is the reed with which everyone may measure himself and with which each one is taught to take his own dimensions and never lay it down until his city of character stands equal in height, breadth, and depth, and length.
When we measure ourselves by the golden reed of consciousness, we find by the signs of ourself and our environment if our city of self is right, and if it is not we can rebuild it in finer architectural fashioning.
There are many lives that have neither breadth, nor height, nor depth, they have only length; they pass along through life tied to one idea or at least a few ideas; they are narrow, bigoted, selfish and careless about the other dimensions of themselves; they see through their glass darkly, the things of their own immediate knowledge are enough for them; they are exclusive and powerful in one direction, and humanity might break itself to pieces just outside their narrow life for they neither hear nor care; they are all right, secure in their length of narrow, personal endeavor. They are afraid of anything that is outside of their own field of vision, and their life is altogether too small and straight and strained, for any but a few of their own kind to hold on to; their days are full of anxiety and worry, for their hold on truth is too weak to bring them to power, and wisdom.
Again, after we see how we measure in length, we can turn the golden reed upon ourselves for specialization in breadth, and often again we find a shortcoming. The breadth must also be equal; we cannot fail in our breadth and come into true wisdom, true breadth means inclusion--this may vary in degree, but there must never be exclusion of anything in the well-rounded character, there is conscious selection, but never exclusion; there is nothinginorunderorabovethe earth but that is companion with us on our journey toward divine unfoldment.
To make the breadth of our life measure up in fulness, we must look with wide open eyes at everything and everyone in life, and take it at its own point of unfoldment. Not in every life is found true wisdom of thought and expression, but if we know the truth we will see past all the undeveloped things within, to the beautiful God-self it is becoming and with wisdom and power and love include it in our own consciousness, waiting patiently for its development.
To have breadth we must open our ears and our life to the call of the world voice and live to answer it. We must hear it socially, ethically, individually, financially, politically, religiously, spiritually, mentally and physically not only in our own way, but in every way can that one find God within himself before he can find it through humanity; but when measured by the golden reed for the building of the new self, we must find God or Good in and through every living creature.
All people love themselves and most people love their own families; and this is right and good that it is so, but the breadth and height and depth must be equal and that means inclusion of the universal as well as the personal self. Jesus again told this when he said to the man who asked him "What shall I do that I may have eternal life?" And He said unto him: "Keep the commandments" and, "Thou shalt not bear false witness:" "And the young man saith unto Him, 'All these things have I kept from my youth up; what lack I yet?'" "Jesus saith unto him: 'If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell all that thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in Heaven and come and follow me.' But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions." So when Jesus measured him by the reed of breadth and deeper inclusion, he followed him no more, for the height, the breadth and the depth were not equal.
To give to ourselves and to our own, or to those who seem to have a claim on us for anything, is good, but, to give to those who have not claim or kinship nor power over us isgreatness. To include them in our own world, not by might or force, but through recognition of union with the one life--this is consciousness of breadth that remains immortal.
Again, the depth of a life must be equal, and how do we lack in this? There are thousands today who flit along on the crest of the wave of life's current, butterfly-like; they never really have a conscious thought. If "it only does not affect me" is their watchword, and freedom from anything serious is their only really serious problem. They know in an indifferent way that hearts break, that tears fall, that there are prayers that stagger upward through life's storm, but the froth and foam of life is in their eyes; they look out on the rim of a life where they see only self-indulgence, and when now and then they are hushed long enough to listen to the world cry, they turn away quickly for fear they will actually touch lives with the common people.
So long as they keep afloat they are content, their lack of depth does not disturb them, but often after they have wasted their all in riotous living, and the realities of life fall upon them, they cry out from the depth of their own self-made despair; their life was like a palace built on sand which the first fierce flood tide could destroy; it had no root, no place in consciousness when measured by the golden reed--the height, the breadth and the depth were unequal.
Unless the soul has root in soil divine, it cannot face earth's overwhelming expressions of the working out of the human laws which it sets in motion in the round of human living.
The life that would build sublime and lasting things to stand the test of time, must drop its consciousness into the Absolute, and sink the string of thought into the fathomless!
Lights and shadows are strangely blended all along the human pathway; so from the very center of the deeps of life the incense of our illumined selves must still send up a faint sweet breath outward and onward,--then the breadth as touched by the golden reed is equal.
Again, the height of the perfect self is also measured. No house so low but it must have a window opening to the sky.
Again, there are many lives that touch the golden reed as it measures outward, downward, but are insensible of upward power.
Above the surge and din of life, amid its sorrows and its strife, the soul that comes under the glory of the golden reed, must lift itself to the hills of specialized wisdom greater then the common consciousness.
We can find many noble, moral, natural lives equal in length and breadth and depth, but the height is lacking. Within many minds is lack of great sublime ideals, ideals that should be born in the illumined centers of the self. There are many who have no communion with their source; they are kind, sociable, natural, humanitarian, but lacking in that great wonderful psychological essence which makes the human half divine; the height of their life is unfinished, the golden reed is broken; they walk on superior in their knowledge until in some supreme hour of human grief, their soul is forced through some Gethsemane and opens its eyes to the need of a strength beyond their own. Death, the grave and love teach them to look up, and hope higher than the earthly kingdom.
And once more the measure of our soul goes on, and we find that often all is equal, but the height isover-reached; there are many forgetting breadth and length and depth who measure into the very hill-tops of illumination, making their whole expression a dream of no value to themselves or others. They are pure children of spirit; they live in a world peopled with the dream-children of their mind and everything they produce is vapid and useless in the world in which they live and have being; everything seems to pass away from them and their productions are as nothing under the crush and strain of life around.
Useis the world's great test of anything; unless it can be utilized by some one it is valueless to aid humanity; everything that comes forth into form from any state of consciousness must prove its own power to persist, or it vanishes and is forgotten.
Nothing too high, nothing too low, nothing too wide, nothing too narrow, too shallow, but all perfectly adjusted--this is the measure of self, and when we know this the illumined life works out its own unfoldment, passing at will to any degree of consciousness.
This is the finished product of the life that knows how to specialize in consciousness and it is made possible through deeper illumination. It gives to everyone the glorious physical, a depth of perception, radiant with a refined energy and alive with all the latent power of instinct and harmony, and with this the brilliant mind with its breadth of unanswerable logic, its fine facts, science of order and laws of physical adjustment. And added to both these we find the dream vision of the psychic, with the poet's soul of inspiration, sublime ideality and the gentle tender heart, alive with all the common human emotions; and at last, blended and transmuted and made vibrant by that great spiritual insight born on the heights of human revelation we find ourselves whole, grand, developed, humanly divine creatures, walking in glad comradeship with God.
This is the "Holy Grail" of selfhood and in the light of our higher understanding we look downward and outward and upward, and the length and the breadth and the height are equal. We pass from the old race thought of limitation and live in a divine atmosphere, and can say with a wisdom born from this fuller comprehension:
"We know that if our house of this earthly tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God--an house not made with hands, Eternal in the heavens."
"No man liveth to himself and no man dieth to himself."
The more we look at humanity and study its expressions, the more we become convinced of the truth of these words. It is not hard to see that our human ties are closely knit with everything and everyone, but it is not always easy to understand how they have come to their sometimes almost hopeless tangle.
We are a part of everything in the universe, seen and unseen, and as we have within us a response to every emotion, hope dream, impulse of any kind known or recognized by the human race. As we study and understand our relationship to people, things and expressions, we cannot help but grow deeper and deeper into the clearness of the great truth, namely, the universal and abiding one-ness of man and God.
Some of our relationships in this one-ness are very indistinct and obscure, while some are very distinct and painfully objectified.
The first Truth for us to take up is this--wehaveandexpressin our being and our environment just these things with which we have related ourselves, either through inherited or acquired lines of thinking; no one gives to us but ourselves, no one takes away from us but ourselves, no one is to blame but ourselves whatever we have or have not; we, and we alone, are the architects of our own fortune or misfortune.
We get everything in life by the law of conscious or unconscious relationship with it through the simple act of thinking; our thoughts are lines of transference over which may pass to us not only the things which we desire, but also those which our fear brings down upon us and which we do not desire.
Unconscious relationship differs from conscious relationship and brings us the things with which we have connected through the law of omission; conscious relationship is union, and brings everything into expression under the law of commission.
Both of these lines are constant and their results undeniable, but one brings us the whole, the constructive, while the other opens our life for the control of the destructive, the limited.
When thinking passes into a fixed power in our life, it may be used to perfect or destroy the whole mechanism of our present and our future. Long lines of conscious and unconscious thinking bring about certain expressions, and these expressions in time become a part of our very existence, and our environment, good or bad, bears witness to this relationship.
One day upon the streets of Boston I saw an old woman selling newspapers; her hair was gray, her skin brown and wrinkled, her clothing shabby and only half sufficient for the chill of the hour; she was simply poverty-stricken, and her old, thin, piping voice trembled as she called her papers in an effort to compete with the crowds of newsboys around her. Many bought her papers, drawn to her through pity, and her evident need. I felt sorry that with her gray hair so near the grave life should have only this to offer her, and I sought a reason for it. I asked her to tell her story.
She was the daughter of a minister; her mother had been the proverbially meek little woman of history, perfectly fitted to be her father's wife. Her grandfathers on both sides of the parental tree had been ministers; she gave me a graphic sketch of the long line of concentration which she had been born into and in which she continued.
There was a long line for concentration and relationship with lowliness of spirit, for grace, for the utter sinking of self; lack of demand for place or power; lack of self-righteousness, absolute submission sown through generations, sown for her in her own life. It had to bring forth its fruit and it did bring it forth in the form of that gray-haired, beautiful, ragged old woman, who, in the days of her declining years, gathered her harvest on the cold streets of a rich city, underfed, poor and alone.
She was still true to her inherited concentration, for while I questioned her she said, "Health, money and happiness were not for her," and that "her family had borne the cross of poverty and sickness all their lives and borne it nobly, and some day the Father would give them their reward." Don't you see that the mind that is poised where her mind was, and where her family's mind had been for generations, could not escape the law which they had built for themselves.
Here was an example of unconscious relationship; can't you see how unwittingly she hourly and daily made anew her relations with the very things which must by their very nature divorce her from the things which she never sensed belonged to her. The fixed thinking handed down to her from the past, bound her like a galley-slave and kept her life held against the law which was daily destroying her; she was unconsciously related and she remained unconsciously related to the laws which made for loss and lack in her life, unable to see the paths where she turned aside from her Father's house, and His universal abundance; blind to her power of new creating.
When we begin to study our lines of unconscious relationship we find that we are appalled almost at the ten thousand little tendrils which bind us to our old relationships; we think ourselves "good easy man" this moment, and the next moment sees us opening the door of our life to thought forms which if entertained, will certainly become for us a poor relation, and demand our support for ages. We daily open our lives to endless tramp thoughts which dwell with us and in the end beggar us.
We need hourly to set a guard on our field of unconsciousness, and absolutely refuse to admit into our daily mind any thoughts less than those which distinctly relate us with all the beautiful things of life, and we must never forget the truth of the power of our own personal creations. We can be what wewillto be; we can be related to whatever we choose to be related to; we can choose this day whom we will serve and start the hour of our rebuilding.
Whatever we have or have not is a positive picture of our relationship and tells to every passer-by the story of just how well we know how to control, and direct our own thoughts, and whether we are living unconsciously or consciously.
The way to get the Perfect Liberty for ourselves is to understand fully the secret of relating ourselves with it through the power of conscious thinking.
The moment that a life desires anything, be it health, wealth or love, it becomes related with that thing, and the thought establishes a line of direct transference; desire is the first out-reaching for the things which are necessary to fully develop our life. It is the God-push within us trying to get our consciousness into expression.
In the past, the educators often called this power of conscious relationship, "persistency"; have you not seen people whom the world called "hobby riders" or "freaks"? These people are only perverted in the expression of conscious relationship; they hold their relationship to one thing to the exclusion of every other thing in their life.
It is just as much a form of misdirected energy to sink everything in life to one idea; to sacrifice health, friends, position, peace, everything, in order to gain one thing, as it is to have a diverse, indefinite, faltering idea of relationships and purposes. The true position is between them:Allthings work together for the final good of man, and union withallthings, notonething, is the law ofuniversaldevelopment.
Once we have decided what we want to be related with we can afford to let everything take its own appointed time and place in our life, bringing everything up in its appointed place. All that we have to do is to keep our fixed point of attachment with it and this attachment is made through power thoughts.
Substance is always changing and so is our position to it under the common law, but under the conscious law of creation we change our position over and over again, but we keep the same hope until in some expected hour we stand face to face with our hope manifested in form.
There is no use running after anything; no use straining after it! We gain liberty not by resistance, denial or renunciation, but through union; under the old law we worked on the plane of competition; in the perfected imaging or thinking we are living under the law of divine attraction, and whatever we relate ourselves with in thought must come and join us.
When we are under this law thousands of unseen hands reach out to lift us into peace-crowned heights, and into relation with what we desire.
When sickness has taken the place of health in our life, when disease has crowded out our ease and comfort, we can know that by a long line of perverted thinking, perhaps both inherited and acquired, we have become related with those things which are under the law of pain, destruction and disintegration. We may have done all this thinking unconsciously in the past, but there is now no excuse for us to go on with this old relationship; it is senseless to again fill up our field of consciousness with the old thought concepts.
When we know the truth of this transference into form through thought relationship, we have perfect liberty; we look at ourselves in a new light, and begin to then and there pass this simple act of thinking into lines which will connect us with just these things which we desire; we quit forever our thought relationship with conditions which speak for lack or loss or limitations.
We fill our field of consciousness with thoughts of the strong, and the health of life; we shut out the diseased, the dwarfed, the imperfect. We force the pictures of hospitals and sanatoriums out of our mind; we look at our bodies no matter how they look, or how much of disease they are then expressing, and we see only thewhole, the new, the complete. We force ourselves toknownothing but the greatall healththoughts; we go back again and again to our relation with the abundance of health; we make ourselves deaf and blind and dumb to the absence of wholeness and our body slowly swings into line, and begins to express for us the nature of our conscious thinking.
We cease to consider ourselves related to anything that we do not want. Disease, pain, lack of health may have its place in the lesser relationships of the human plane, but it is not found in the kingdom of consciousness--the all-health within us; it cannot exist in this new world of spiritual chemicalization with which we have taken up our relations.
When we want this perfect law of liberty, we do not recognize the existence of the old, we simply occupy our whole thought time with the new things with which we wish to make union.
Every condition of life that we consider desirable for ourselves we convince ourselves is already ours, we reach out and lay hold of it, and give it a line of transference into our life. This is not castle building, this is Divine Relationship--the Perfect Law of Liberty!
We see the truth that the strong, the healthy, the happy, the powerful are living in the same world, in the same universal energy that obtains for the diseased, the weak, the sick, the unhappy; there is no reason why they may not have every good and perfect gift.
There are almost as many healthy as there are sick in every hospital--the doctors, nurses, porters, cooks, and servants, all hale and hearty, putting in their whole time caring for those who are half dead with disease. What makes the difference? Just the difference of relationship. They have not accepted mentally the same conditions, and even surrounded as they are with the sick and diseased, they refuse to be bound by the laws which these patients have endowed with power over themselves.
They have learned the two great truths: There is nothing in all the world that has any power over us except that with which we endow it, and there is nothing in all the world of which we need be afraid. Disease and sickness are signals of great negative conditions of mind which we have recognized in thought, and exalted to thekingchair in our life and endowed with power to hold us in bondage.
We may escape in just that hour that we sense the power of our own personal creation, and set up a conscious relationship with the positive constructive things in our own consciousness. We become lords of our physical conditions and our environment just as soon as we cut out all thought relationship with the laws which make for loss and lack. "The spirit beareth witness with our spirit day by day that we are the Sons of God," and as soon as the soul knows this it senses its divine relationship, and is born again on the planes of a higher consciousness, and in the wisdom of its understanding it builds itself new conditions, and lives in a new world, surrounded with the objects of its own creating, at first subjectively, but in time manifested on the objective plane, to bear witness to the truth which its soul knows and obeys.
When this is done we live in a new world made perfect by our own inspired workmanship; we know nothing of disease and pain, we have never a morrow of fear, "our today of content is eternal."
There are many who have mastered health, because it was the first thing they demanded, and after they have done this, they find that they are still related to the laws which make for poverty and lack in material possessions; they have liberty in flesh but not the perfect law of it in environment. There are those who have known the grinding hand of need, who have stood with crushed lives, hopeless; with courage dead and the devil of despair crouched on their shoulder, whispering words of disappointment; there are those who are homeless in a land of homes, and those who are starving in a world of plenty; what can we say to them? How can we comfort them and point them to the hope of a new endeavor?
The world is full of these half-fledged lives and we must answer them. In order to meet this expression we must go back again to our first truth, our first statement:--"Wehaveandexpressin our being and our environment just these things with which we have related ourselves, either through inherited or acquired lines of thinking; no one gives to us but ourselves, no one takes away from us but ourselves, no one is to blame but ourselves whatever we have or have not; we, and we alone, are the architects of our own fortune or misfortune."
As soon as we can teach a life to know the truth of its own power of conscious thought relationship, it can face about and begin a new line of attraction and accumulation. It is an unwritten law that we pass on as we become fit, and we can at any moment begin a new thought attitude which, if persisted in, will relate us with everything which we conceive to be opulence or abundance.
When we want to come into perfect liberty for wealth, we must never recognize poverty or the things which make for it; we must refuse to sense a separation from whatever we desire; the universal abundance is for all, and we get and express just the amount we have power to connect.
Theall willwants us to have whatever we want, remember this! And it will aid us to secure what we want and help us to keep it just so long as we show we can make intelligent connection with it.
We must believe in our divine kinship with supply, and the divine kinship of every other soul with it; over the same line which we send out our desire for abundance there will pass back to us the answer to our prayer; the things we seek are seeking us; this is a great psychological truth which we can prove to ourselves if we try. Under the lines of the higher spiritual affinity the lines of transference never cross; our gain never becomes another's loss, andvice versa.
The whole scheme of life is for freedom; it is only the perverted building of the minds of men that have externalized lack and bondage. We have forgotten the eternal promise, "With what measure ye mete it shall be meted unto you," we have related with lack of supply, never knowing the truth that no one limits us but ourselves.
Under the law of liberty, we place ourselves in the very heart of divine opulence and though at first we cry abundance from the very depth of poverty, if we hold our life servant to this relation, all lack will slowly slip away from us, and we can, anddowalk out into new relations of attraction, and become one with all that our Father hath.
This, then, is the truth of perfect liberty:
"To him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath."
"To him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath."
Those who have laid hold of the Divine truth of abundance of supply and related themselves with it through the power of conscious thinking may go on in calm security from demand to supply, coming each day deeper into the universal cosmic opulence of health, wealth, love and usefulness.
The word, then, to the sick or poverty-stricken or loveless is this: Recognize your union with whatever you desire; reach out and make relation with it through the power of conscious thinking; look with wide open soul eyes straight into the face of the Universal Being, and taking your wants firmly into your mind walk on in your daily life demanding them and expecting them to manifest; never lay down your consecration until it does express for you.
Make every conscious relationship one with health, wealth, love and usefulness, accompanied by peace, power, plenty and divine realization.
As soon as we lift our personal life to the level of the universal life in positive recognition of our own, it will come to us and abide.
Union with the cosmic life is a possible thing here and now; the human life is but the remote picture of our place in the universal; our life's relations may become the flowers on our tree of life, and our manifold experiences the fruits of our own growing and all life be one perfect round of liberty born from conscious righteous choice.
"And He stood between the living and the dead, and the plague was stayed."
The greatest secret of the age is the connection with and manipulation of the cosmic energy.
In every age and every race men have stumbled on to relationship with their atmospheric environment and have each demonstrated it in their own way, but it remained for the twentieth century investigators to give us the real key to our continuous connection and the methods by which this connection could be demonstrated to the thinking world.
The minds of the past taught us the existence of an atmospheric environment and to a degree manifested our connection with it, but accomplished it through the medium of objective lines of connection and transference; today we are finding the new truth that man is able to create his own environment even to the most minute thing and create it from atmospheric energy lifting his creations aloft in his life in finite form through the medium of a power that, in its first expression, far transcends sight and touch.
Today we know that the great Cosmic currents in which the whole world lives, and moves, is nothing but a vast undifferentiated sea of energy. This energy is acting always in the formless as electrical currents; these currents are always waiting to be set in motion with any other current which corresponds with them in electrical reaction either positive or negative.
Man's whole atmospheric environment is formed of these currents and he is a localized attracting center, registering in himself and his environment just those electrical reactions with which he relates under the great Cosmic law of correspondence.
We have found in the past that these atmospheric currents can be sent as vibrations through the medium of any object that is brought into relation with them and the degree of registration depends upon the instrument used.
In some rates of vibration these waves may be made to become heat; in others, cold; in others, light; in others, sound; in others, just motion, without sound being separated. Physical science has given us examples too numerous to mention of the positive expression of enforced vibration in relation to objective things, but it was left for Marconi to show conclusively that these vibrations may be produced and transmitted through the medium of the atmospheric waves themselves, and psychology has shown that any instrument, either mechanical or human, may register vibrations in the very moment they are attuned to them.
Atmospheric environment has passed deeply into the development stage scientifically, and even in this it does not yet really appear what it may be, but it is easy to see how all atmospheric energy becomes really a substance from which every skilled mechanic may create his own expression.
Metaphysically, it is plain to see that man is only one part of this great cosmic energy, and that standing as he does, a localized point in the ocean of formless vibrating ether, he becomes a specialized, attracting center and the lines which connect him with this ocean of energy are his own thoughts.
In the physical plane men use wires and machines and objective localization, but on the higher planes of consciousness we only need to use the vibrations of that plane, and the higher connecting thought wires become as tangible to those who use them as do the objective connections on the physical planes.
On the human plane our thoughts become the metaphysical avenues of connection; with thoughts we reach out into this formless ocean of cosmic energy and create through recognition the things which we desire, and our environment under this law becomes the world-picture of just what we have had the power to create for ourselves.
This cosmic substance is neither great, nor small, finite nor infinite, it simply is substance from the highest to the lowest expression of life. There is no escaping this universal product of energy. We ourselves are It!
The physical universe, and everything that we call matter, is simplyuniversal energymanifested in form; everything expressed on the physical plane is cosmic energy materialized; and every human being is only this cosmic energy localized and expressed in human flesh and form. Form is only the physical side of Divine mind.
In this ocean of universal energy or atmospheric environment which we call formless, there is always some form of some kind, but the formless is a form too high for our human mind to comprehend, we have not yet reached the plane of unfoldment where we have cosmic recognition.
As we investigate this atmospheric environment, we find it has two distinct forces at work within it, and these forces are the positive and negative reaction of its atoms. This positive and negative reaction of the atoms is continually going on, and they each have their corresponding embodiment in the eternal world of matter; they act independently or together, and when one has learned how to blend these two reactions in his consciousness, as do the skilled magi, he has come to the center of his own and universal being.
In the manifested world of substance, mankind takes its place in one or both of these energies; it is drawn into their expression by the universal law of attraction. Each life is in its first expression, positive or negative in its cosmic polarity. In the universal interpretation, we learn to look upon the positive life as the creative, and the negative life as the receptive.
Every individual is just what he is by the natural law of his own cosmic relationship, and he will remain just what he is at any point of progress, and express himself in his own way until he grows into a deeper state of comprehension, and knows the method of changing his cosmic positions.
When we get the truth of the universal energy in our minds and realize that this energy is really positive and negative, and that both these reactions have their corresponding material manifestation in ourselves, then we are ready to go farther into the study of the registration of this energy, and from this into the higher psychology of function.
There is nothing in this atmospheric environment of ours that is not endowed with intelligence. Everyone who postulates afirst causebegins with the universalintelligence. Thisintelligenceis given to us as a beginning, it remains with us to the end.
The acceptation of the truth of the unity of intelligence is the first step toward investigation. All finite life is an embodiment of universal substance and intelligence in some form--this is truth.
Physical scientists everywhere are showing us the infinitesimal lives working continually and in ways that are wonderful.
Psychologists are opening daily the hidden chambers of this physical and metaphysical world, and giving us high lights on what we once thought impossible of investigation; they are showing us astounding examples of conscious ideation in every order of life, and are aiding us to draw interesting conclusions.
There is a great universal intelligence and a remote finite expression of this intelligence; the lesser is always dependent upon the greater and our human life becomes the microcosmic pattern of the macrocosmic world.
With this premise firmly under our feet let us go on to the question of the intelligence of the physical tissues of the human body, and our relation to disease, health, poverty and opulence.
Every cell of our physical body is intelligent and capable of being instructed into finer grades of expression; this is the process by which we refine matter into spirit and by which we pass from a lower to a higher expression of wholeness and build our cells into a grade of consciousness so high that we produce objective expressions of such perfect response that we become the higher revelation of the cosmic consciousness.
The higher we go in intellectualizing ourselves, the closer we draw to the cosmic consciousness, and the more familiar we become with its laws. The highest life is the one that includes the most.
It is a natural law that we have at all times unconscious thought relation to the universal abundance and our thoughts are the conscious agents of construction and destruction, and we work through them as soon as we are old enough to think and reason.
Disease and poverty would never manifest for us if we did not some time recognize it in our atmospheric environment with our thoughts, and work it out on the objective plane through the law of atomic attraction.
Whenever doubt, worry, anger and negative thoughts take possession of our field of consciousness (the everyday mind), we are creating these things for ourselves in the cosmic currents and they cannot refuse to register in form either in our body or in our environment.
It can be seen that if, year after year, we separate ourselves from the positive creative cosmic intelligence, and put up our images of personal limitation, the creative intelligence is joined to the weaker energy and cannot refuse to work out the conditions with which they are related.
The human mind is the agent which must be taught to stand as sentinel and force our minds to people our currents with thoughts which make only for the perfect health, perpetual opulence and divine realizations.
The minor intelligence of our cells would just as readily work out the universal law of perfection if we only knew enough to intelligently direct them and not overpower them by our negative personal directions.
When we have once established in our minds the truth of this universal cosmic intelligence, in which there is no sickness, poverty or death, unless we recognize it, it does not take us long to work out better conditions for ourselves in the physical body and environment.
No matter what our lack may be, we can know that it is because we have set our human thought to work under a personal negative law instead of a positive creative universal one. We have only to stop, face about, and begin to direct our thoughts intelligently, and in union with the higher plan, and solicit co-operation with all the finite forces around us.
If we find ourselves diseased, with pain, and physical mal-positions we can speak to our physical cells as we would to a friend and connect them with the higher creative currents and help them to get into a higher form of building; they are ready at any moment to answer, "The sheep know their shepherd's voice and obey it." They must begin to build in the new likeness and in the very moment that we consciously direct them; this is the law, there is no appeal from it.
Everything comes to us from the Infinite atomic ethers through the law of Divine attraction, and when we have built and rebuilt our cells into an intelligent relationship with absolute wholeness, we become a magnet, so highly sensitized and so magnetic and carefully polarized, that we are an attracting center for everything in our atmospheric environment, and our physical body and our environment become the expression of our thought world.
When we know enough to send our thoughts into the universal energy with only the recognitions of positive creations, such as health, wealth, love, divine realization and actualization, then our material world must be made the immediate reproduction of these things.
The sick world passes along with all its thoughts poised in the destructive recognition; we meet them upon this pathway, and knowing the law of the higher constructive power of building we must meet their questioning with some answer that will restore them to the state of consciousness they have lost.
The very first truth that every sick life must know is that thoughts arethings, and make themselves felt in form, and that in the great atmospheric energy, like attracts like. Our consciousness becomes for us the wireless stations which attract and register the universal messages, and each station attracts its own from whatever plane or state of consciousness it vibrates.
The invisible world issomethingand its substance issomething, and that we do not understand it and have improper correspondence, is no proof that the power of correct correspondence does not exist.
There are great occult laws of relationship always awaiting our deepening comprehension:
"Till one appears who bears,All nature silent is,Silent for evermore,Beating its waves of forceOn an unanswering shoreTill one appears who bears."
"Till one appears who bears,All nature silent is,Silent for evermore,Beating its waves of forceOn an unanswering shoreTill one appears who bears."
The cosmic atmospheric energy in which we live, move and have our being is always ready to become manifested in form, and may become manifested by anyone who knows how to create a form for himself.
It has been manifested in many varied forms by the children of men, but it has not yet entered into the hearts of men to conceive of the glories that are yet awaiting them when one appears who really does hear, and knows the full truths of cosmic power.
This is the secret of Cosmic Therapeutics, and those who know this secret really do become the twentieth century mystics and are rulers over the manifestations of finite and infinite energy. When we come to this point of demonstration we are the world's greatest physicians. With this knowledge we may conquer not only disease and poverty and despair, but we may overcome the last enemy--Death, and live and have being in a world of universal power.
There are grades and grades of intelligence both in the human and the Absolute mind: All grades of cosmic currents are ever ready waiting to respond to those who touch them; there is nothing mysterious or unattainable about them; they are the natural results of natural laws, and we come into union with them through growth and recognition.
We first come to a consciousness of our universal, atmospheric relationship with all that is, then we learn to understand the response that comes to us from every person and everything; then we reach out in perfect faith with our deep of need, calling to the deep of supply, and the doors of a thousand hidden chambers of nature open bringing divine revelation into our souls.