With the ever present increase of insanity, it is not only interesting but important that the subject of insanity should be studied from all view-points, and anything which can be contributed that will help in controlling or curing it, should be accepted as good material.
It is an apparent fact that the multitude knows very little about the cause of insanity and less about the cure. Investigation has in the past been directed to the physical side of the disease, and many of the insane hospitals are examples of physical comfort and perfect physical attention, but they are also living examples of the fact that to house, feed and clothe the demented does not necessarily mean a cure, and a call for deeper understanding is imperative.
Civilization needs each individual as a unit in the great working force of life, and those who need to be taken care of by a State take away a legitimate support and add just that much more to the burden of the State.
A civilization which can increase the independence of the individual and lessen the responsibility of the State is one to be directly desired.
Insanity calls for a closer study than has ever been given and only through a deeper realization of its cause, can a cure be brought about and individuals rendered of value to themselves and the country.
Insanity is nothing more or less than disassociated states of mind and need not in reality be any more serious than errors of refraction of vision, faulty locomotion or lack of coordination. It comes because individuals know nothing of the psychology of themselves or their own minds and is the result of over-intensified mental and physical activity and loss of poise, physically, mentally and psychically. The insane are not capable of understanding themselves, and up to the present day there are very few who are able to understand them.
The nurses, matrons and physicians of a great asylum are powerless to assist them because of their own ignorance of the true laws of psychology. The cases which simple, natural, physical methods will assist, are cured, but thousands of others are allowed to drag along with the dreadful stigmata of "hopelessly insane."
Insanity is increasing because civilization is changing, and conditions are changing. As conditions change the minds of men change and today subjective states of mind in the individual are becoming intensified. Instinct, reason, emotion, intuition, revelation and prophecy are all struggling for expression; unrelated and misunderstood they become disease; related and understood they can be made to bring forth a new race with new extensive reaches of intelligence.
There are few people so stupid but that they can testify to the conflicting states of emotions within themselves and there are many people who are perfectly familiar with states of consciousness with which many other people are entirely unfamiliar.
Wherever we go we are continually confronted with what the world calls "freaky" or "eccentric" people, and these people are found in all degrees from the slightly odd folks to those filling the asylums, and strange as it may seem, no matter how queer they may appear to other people, they never seem so to themselves.
There are many families with members whom the rest call irrational, irresponsible or "black sheep." Again, there are many families who have one child who, from the time of its birth, has called for methods of management entirely different from those used for the other children. There are many little sensitive creatures who are afraid of the dark and who have queer ideas and odd ways, and there are delicate little people who have bodies so finely organized that they are nearly broke into pieces with the natural things which the other members never notice. They are born sensitives and remain sensitives to the end of their lives, and only as they can be taught the truth about themselves can they be rescued from some form of mental disturbances.
These people as they grow older, become what is termed "psychics"; they are over-intensified in some of their deeper states of mind. They are not alone the product of civilization, but the product of race evolution. Many of them pass on in semi-normal states of self-support, but they are a well known class, and they are more or less unsuccessful in supporting themselves along natural lines of labor, and if they inherit wealth they run into vagaries and often degenerate lines of living; they squander their all and die in charity.
The common business world is full of psychics and it is correspondingly full of failures for this is not a faculty that makes for success or power with material things.
Psychics who are only slightly disassociated are always a source of annoyance to their friends, and often looked upon as irresponsible, and have to be looked after by some one who has patience enough to be with them, and often they are passed along as having an artistic temperament.
As long as their peculiar development does not interfere with normal action they are unmolested by the public. It is only when deeper states of mind become so over-intensified that they lose their normal relationship to normal things of the world that they are put under control. They are called paranoics, melancholics, demented and insane. A correct mental training would teach them to re-associate their mind and to live a moderately normal life, at least. All drunkards and drug fiends are psychics; degenerates are also psychics. These conditions are simply the result of loss of polarity of normal mind centers, resulting in the conflict of states of consciousness within themselves.
There are also many psychics in the ignorant and undeveloped classes. The witch women and seers, and many of the colored races are psychic. In the past, these people were looked upon as witches and their words and works were known as "witchcraft."
There are many psychics who are also great geniuses. Lord Byron and the "Mad Painter" of Belgium were psychics. History is rife and galleries of art and temples of literature stand as testimonials to some of the constructive productions of their minds, but beside them run dark stories born of their psychic uncertainty.
Criminals of certain types are psychics with no power of physical control and they pass into subjective control and live and do the things that are given them to do from the psychical mind and are often ignorant of their own condition.
Those whom the medical profession call paranoics are simply psychics, over-developed in the subjective faculties--a prey to all the disembodied forces of the subjective plane, and also to every floating thought on the physical plane; they are obsessed by ideas from within and without and their actions bear witness to this statement. Some very meddlesome women, and those who are the terror of a quiet community, are nearly always those who are in the control of the slower psychic forces and unable to consciously direct their own normal states of mind.
In science the psychics are called diseased. Science gives all actions a physical basis, but it is time to know that abnormal states of consciousness, that are only changes in the functional side of the mind and which have no apparent physical basis, are found in thousands.
Neurasthenics and psychasthenics present the mildest picture of disordered states of mind. All neurasthenics and psychasthenics are psychics and their diseases can only be fully understood by the psychologist. The scientist has long ago exhausted his knowledge of the cause and cure of these diseases and this is why all branches of metaphysical healing are overcrowded.
To understand this abnormal thing called "insanity," one must fully understand the normal, called "sanity." There are four distinct states of consciousness in every individual; these must be kept co-related and all of them manifest through the common everyday mind. These four states of consciousness areinstinct, reason, emotionandintuition. These four states of consciousness arefunctionsof the normal mind. When a patient becomes over-intensified in either one of these parts of the mind, mental disease results. The psychic is over-intensified in the emotional and intuitional functions of his mind, thus rendering his common sense statesuncommon, and according to the degree of over-activity, he is either a "freak," a creature of "temperament," a "genius" or a "dementia."
The ordinarily insane individual has lost all relationship with his natural, instinctive and reasoning mind. He is disassociated. Reason, instinct, emotion and intuition are all in conflict within him. The emotional and intuitional faculties overfunctioning distort his common understanding. His idea centers are not able to distinguish between the real and the unreal in thoughts. He becomes possessed and obsessed by ideas born of emotion and intuition that have no foundation in fact, and as time goes on, he loses complete control of his idea centers.
Every individual has definite idea centers within his own brain, and it is through these centers that ideas are coordinated, received or rejected. As over-intensification of feeling and emotion goes on, the normal action of the idea centers is interfered with and the individual has superinduced emotional and intuitional states which are no longer guarded by reason and thought. The emotion senses a purely imaginary condition and the idea centers have no power to reduce it to truth. As time goes on, all power of association is lost and the individual passes along, the plaything of his subjective states of mind. As he becomes more and more intensified subjectively, he opens the deep psychic currents both within and without himself, and loses his connection with his common mind and his physical body, and becomes a prey to all the psychic currents.
There are lives everywhere open to subjective thought currents, and all unknown to themselves they are allowing themselves to become disintegrated by the daily and hourly response they are giving to the stimulus of a plane they should master instead of allowing it to master them.
The psychic plane may become a pathway to power, or it may become the open doorway to a body and mind full of disease, insanity and absolute loss of power and poise.
There are many patients confined in the asylums today, who would never have been there, and who would be released and cured, if those in charge fully understood the truth of this unnaturally natural development and directed their attention to its control.
The first truth is, people are born into what is to them natural relationship with this psychic plane and go on for years misunderstood, pained and repressed, unable to rescue themselves from what they do not understand, and in the end the physical body does become diseased by the continual inroads of strain and repression; functional disorder and anatomical changes result. The farmer's wife loses her mental balance through repression of the fine emotional, intuitional side of her mind which finds no expression in the dull environment of the farm. The over-worked mother loses her mental poise; disassociation follows over-stimulation of the practical and repression of the artistic; and in emotional patients exaggerated states of feeling go on into greater disassociation for lack of strong sensible thought control.
And the second truth is, that many are born so close in relationship to the unseen plane and in such psychical correspondence, that some slight thing which weakens the will-power--sorrow, a disease that devitalizes the physical, some shock, or some prolonged or strained mental condition, breaks down the remaining law of separation, and the life is astray in the psychical world, manifesting abnormal, physical laws.
There is one great connecting link between the physical and the psychical through which all abnormal conditions can be corrected, and this is will power. When this power of will is broken, the life must become a manifestation of error, according to the generally accepted idea of normal relationship.
The will-power of an individual is dependent upon his ideation. Weaken his power to carry an idea, and his will grows correspondingly weak; thewillmustfollowthe idea; it is not a separate entity--willonly exists inpartnershipwith theidea.
Ideation, willingandmotionare the great human trinity from which everything else originates. When we inspect our minds, we find that a voluntary motion is always preceded by the idea of that motion. The idea is first and the will follows the idea. Ideas have definite sensory centers in the cortex of the brain and conscious ideation may be induced to produce a particular form of willing. All voluntary action depends, first, upon the ideas of action, then the willing to do, then the doing. The will-power, in its accelerating and restraining impulses, is modified by the degree of the intensity of the idea. Grief, fear, worry, anger, despondency, anxiety, hate, resistance are all negative ideas that weaken the idea centers and produce weakness of willing. These ideas persisted in at first produce indecision and after a while absolute inaction because the patient has lost the perfect co-relation of his idea centers, which associate instinct, reason, emotion and intuition.
In order to get complete control of the will we must get complete control of the idea centers and induce strong, positive ideas which the will cannot refuse to follow.
When we associate all states of consciousness--instinct, reason, emotion, and intuition, in one strong, centralized idea, it is impossible for physical expression to do anything else than follow this idea.
When one has come into certain conditions of negativeness in any part of his mind, and continues in it for any length of time, it takes more than his own power to modify these intensified conditions and bring about an inhibiting power of mind which will crowd them out, and allow the idea centers to receive a new thought-form and intensify it so that the will can pass it into action.
The abnormal individual is always weak in obeying his ideas and carrying out his impulse because there is a dissociation of idea centers and his mind becomes mixed in its responses and he cannot make for a true, harmonious expression on all of the planes of mind within himself--this is the condition of the neurasthenic and psychasthenic, and he needs some mind stronger than his own to hold his ideas true to what he knows to be true.
The first lesson for the diseased mental patient to learn is that if he wants to keep his mental balance or restore it, he must first inhibit all negative ideation and refuse to allow himself to be driven into wild bursts of psychical or mental energy along any one line. He must force himself to interest his mind in other things and to inhibit the over-active states of thinking. This is best done by a complete change of environment, and often a change of friends. Friends and environment, more than any other things, have the greatest power of keeping the mind intensified in its old thought ruts.
There is little hope of receiving a new ideation and acting upon it, when one allows himself day after day to drag through the same central sensations and receive the same nerve impulses, and register the same responses. By removing to a new environment, and substituting new mental and psychical vibrations the old states of consciousness are allowed to rest while a new unworked state of mind begins.
Psychical development is not a disease; it is an attribute of individual growth; no one is to blame if he has it or has it not; all that anyone needs to know is the truth about it and just how to control it and direct it. Subjective hearing and vision come just as naturally to us as life and death--they are a part of the great plan of unfoldment.
In teaching man to co-relate his many states of developing consciousness into one powerful state of mind, we use our everyday common sense. We give him a place of mental power and after such training he opens or shuts his mind to suit himself; he can live in either extension of consciousness at will and extending his understanding into the transcendent side of his own mind, he can become the modern mystic or seer. He can function in the purely material side of himself or he can become an intensified psychic or mystic by simply suspending and intensifying different centers within himself.
Concentration, centralization in ideas, conscious mental substitution, creation of strong mental ideas, and psychic displacement of the negative with the positive, both by the patient within himself and from the attendant or physician without, will bring insanity under control.
When men fully understand their own mind's scope, they will find that what the world calls un-natural states of consciousness, are only cerebral and psychic disassociation.
The greater freedom of the race, and the cure and control of insanity will be found in the deeper study ofalllevels of mind rather than the one or the few. Only as physical science unites with metaphysical, and these both unite with scientific psychical investigation, will humanity pass toward a solution of its insanity problems. Insanity, delusions, hallucinations, the so-called mental diseases will pass just because they have been naturally displaced by our higher scientific preventive psycho-therapy.
The asylum doors will only open as a place of refuge where men and women will be taught the psychology of the self; there will beschoolsnotcells. Outside the asylum doors there will be an ever increasing crowd of intelligent men and women psychologists, who will be awake to the first hint of psychic disassociation in an individual. With keen insight and scientific direction, they will teach the beginning paranoic, melancholic, neurasthenic, clairvoyant and psychasthenic the truth about themselves and the first hint of disassociation will be replaced by association, and rest homes, asylums and sanitarium doors will close forever!
"For since the fathers fell asleep all things continue as they were from the Creation."
Whenever we read the stories in the Bible, our minds are held with a deep interest, for through all its pages and in all its words, there breathes out the history of the hopes, dreams and aspirations of human hearts, and above every other story or hope or dream, there stands first in absorbing interest the history of the man Jesus, with his wonderfully inspired life. This wonderful Christ life as given in history is a benediction to the world, and his teachings have given us a great inextinguishable hope. In all his history there is one profound principle that never becomes obscured, and that is his eternal adherence to the Law of Life. He never forgot to speak the word that should show the true laws of Cause and Effect.
Nearly all the people of his day followed the letter of his word and not the spirit. When he spoke in parables they interpreted in fact, and even when he said: "I go to prepare a place for you, and if I go and prepare a place, I will come again and receive ye unto myself, that where I am, there ye may be also," they believed and interpreted it to mean really material facts, and began to build up their finite hope for a future kingdom, totally blind to the deep subjective law of his spoken word.
They really believed that if they waited a few years, at most, Jesus would return unto them, and in triumph and power gather them together and raise up a community of peace and love in this earth plane. They believed that through this they would become monarchs of a new world. Nothing in their minds revealed the impossibility of material form without fundamental facts beneath them.
The sick and suffering and discouraged of every class, knowing nothing of the higher laws, laid this hope to their hearts, and filled with a courage built on this belief, they taught themselves to stand silent beneath scorn and persecution, feeling inwardly, that when the hour of Christ's return came, their life would suddenly become powerful through some new dispensation.
The years came and went, one after another the apostles died with their hope still in their hearts; at last, only the lengthened life of John was left on which to hang expectancy, then he, too, died and the Jesus of their hope had not returned. Even then the church was reluctant to give up its teaching of the letter and it still held, that even while a few followers remained whose term reached back to Christ's time, it was not too late for his return, and the son of man might yet be sustained in his earthly kingdom.
Time went on until even the oldest memories of the promises passed; change after change came, and man could no longer find a finite place for his faith and trust, and then, as human life was pushed on by the great resistless ebb-tide of the Infinite, those who were still clinging to this false hope, broke forth in a wail of despair, and they cried, "Where is the promise of His coming?" "For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the creation."
We who read their history today and know the truth of Life's finer relationships, cannot but feel a pity for their failure, and the lingering death of their expectancy, even while we see that it was built on superficial human understanding.
In the great unrelated, ignorant hope of these people, we can read in letters of fire, the proof of the certainty of disappointment of every human hope that has not its conscious union with the great universal Laws of Life.
We can see now with the calm vision of those who have no part in their superstition that their hope was never built on the understanding and wisdom of creation, but upon weak, human desires and narrow personal expectation.
It can easily be seen that under the great Law Eternal it was not possible, that after training only a small part of the human race-thought there could be a return, a king of any sort, or that there could follow the perfecting of the race in any such a narrow, limited, personal way.
When Truth has become revealed to the minds of men, they at once see that laws remain, and that the human race is bound to fit itself to these, and looking back over the centuries, and on into the future, we find that Jesus taught us when he said, "I come not to destroy the Law, but to fulfill it."
Today we see how everything waits upon its own cause, and how change is only brought about by the processes of regular unfoldment. We know now that the Whole can only come into expression through the Part, and that the fulfillment of an individual, a nation, or a race must come under the silent operation of those spiritual laws of human understanding which neither the race nor the individual can outstrip.
Godislaw, andlawbegan whenlifebegan and only a deep union with the finer relationships of Life can ever bring us intodominionof power.
There has ever been and ever will be many expressions oflaw, and between the Absolute expression and the finite results there must ever be the grinding to dust and ashes of things which oppose either the lesser or the larger unfoldment.
When we look at life from the limited, personal view we can only see from the boundary line of the unfathomed self; but as we come into deeper consciousness, we learn that expectation and promise built on personal hope is one thing, and expectation and promise built on universal understanding of universal action is another.
We are a part of everything in the universe and as we come to look through the personal to the universal, we see clearly the inseparableonenessof God-consciousness and man-consciousness, and as we understand and master this relationship, we can read the real answer to our question: "Where are the promises?"
Human life has always been, and always will be, only the unfolding of the personal mind into recognition of the Absolute Mind.
The Universe is under the Law Eternal and in the degree that we know this, we stop our limitations; mankind is free in the Absolute Law, and only seemingly bound in the finite one. Not one jot or tittle of the Law ever passes away; all laws exist to be fulfilled, but human life evolves from level to level of consciousness, and through relationship with higher understanding it escapes the primitive expressions of the lower laws and unites itself with the higher.
The very first truth, then, for any life to learn is, that in this universe of law and order, we get just what we relate with--no more, no less! Nothing happens; everything is the natural expression of the action which produces it.
Jesus came into the world under the law of his own life; he was born to pass along and die expressing the forms of his higher knowledge; he came and went under his own laws, but these were too obscure for the minds of that race to comprehend, and they lived, hoped and died, ignorant of his great Cosmic relationship. Jesus was a son of the planet and his mission was to set laws of race consciousness into activity which would act as a spiritual fulcrum throughout the ages.
What was true in these olden days is still true today; we often go on hoping that fulfillment will come, when by the very nature of what we are doing, we cannot get the higher expression. Take the simple things of our everyday life, our hope of health or our hope of love, wealth, place, happiness, success and usefulness; often we really do hope to be well, and plan in a way for that end, while really at the same time every breath we draw builds for the transitory and fleeting. Like the Christians of old we do not understand higher relationships, and at last, worn out with disappointment we cry, "Where are the promises?" and do not see that until we have perfect thought relationships, we cannot hope for perfect results. It takes deep perception to find the immutable law that all physical phenomena is mental arrangement.
We get everything we find expressing in life through the law of conscious or unconscious thinking! We have, and hold and keep only the things we create for ourselves; there is no other law; no one can take our own away; no one can give us anything, for only what we create is our own, and we alone must create it in consciousness before we can possess it. When we create it in consciousness we really set the law in operation for ourselves and this law will pass it into form.
We make our relationships through the thoughts of our mind. Our mind is the universal mind, and it is inseparably connected with everything in the universe; and whatever we have or have not is a signal of just what we have related with in consciousness. This is the unwritten action of thelaw; no one limits us but ourselves; the Universal Life stands ready with its many levels of relationships to give to every one according to the power he has to create for himself and he is really and truly judged "according to the deeds done in the body."
Jesus could not give an ignorant and undeveloped race the gift of a glorified kingdom; nor could they give it to themselves until they had related in consciousness with the laws that would produce it, the thing we want and our point of attraction must be equal.
We come into life under correct laws; one is not born a Jew, an Assyrian, an Englishman or an American by chance; nor is one born well and rich, and another sick and poor by chance, buteachis the expression of thelawwith which he has related in his own consciousness.
Thoughts are things and it is a part of the Universal plan that thoughts from the human mind reach out into the Universal, or Cosmic mind, and there generate anenergywhich must in time embody informand become the world picture of just what has been stimulated into expression. When thinking passes into afixed powerin our life it can be used to destroy or construct the body or the environment and every thought spoken or unspoken is registered in thought forms in our atmospheric environment and must some day pass into material form.
Health is the expression of a law brought about by a certain line of thinking and disease is another expression. Wealth is one law, poverty is another, and any life can choose this daywhichhe wishes to be under, and choose this hour which law he will serve, and Jesus said, "Whomsoever ye yield yourself servants to obey, his servants ye are, whether it be sin unto death or salvation unto righteousness."
Jesus did not return to his disciples as they expected, because there was no Universal Law for such return. Just so with Health, Wealth, Love, Joy and Happiness. They can never come into expression for us so long as there is not established within us the Law of Natural Relationships.
We are learning at last that "Since the fathers fell asleep all things continue as they were from the creation," and it takes more than a fond imagination to pass our life from the law of inharmony, desire and pain, into the higher one of peace, power and happiness.
The moment a life desires anything it instantly becomes related with that thing, but it does not become a possession until all the conditions are fulfilled. Some minds think solightlyof everything that nothing ever becomes steadfast and certain. They drift aimlessly between loss and gain, health and disease, crying out, "Where are the promises," never realizing that promises are only fulfilled when the whole selfhood becomes grappled to the rock of understanding.
Human life is only agrowingtime, and each life will remain just where it is and express the laws of its level of consciousness until it develops out from them into others.
Sickness, poverty, wretchedness, disappointed hopes are common in the journey of Life; despairing human lives are common too, and lives full of rebellion can be found on every hand, but all these are the products of thoughts that produced them and show just where the consciousness has lingered.
Freedom from all these negative human experiences comes as the reward of inner growth; it can only come through unfoldment and transmutation into higher understanding. Human pain and loss, despair and disease, and the heart-breaks of life, are all the fruits of the Tree of Life whose root isTruth.
When sickness, sorrow and unhappiness have taken the place of health and joy in our life, we have no one to blame but ourselves; we can know that through a long line of perverted thinking, both inherited and acquired, we have become related with the laws in consciousness, and these laws are thoughts of self, hate, jealousy, strife, condemnation, resistance, etc. We have thought it unconsciously in the past, but until we stop and get up new thought relationships, these old things must go on. When we know the higher truth of New Thought Relationship, and the power of constructive thinking, we can begin then and there to change things and we instantly can clean out all the distorted thought energy, and pass the simple act of thinking into a creative form, quitting forever our response to the negative things around us.
We see the truth of "Whatsoever a man soweth, that also shall he reap," and we see, too, that this harvest field where we reap is the human life, and the seeds are thoughts, and we then and there fill our field of consciousness with thought-seeds of Health, Strength, Peace, Love, Joy and all the ten thousand beautiful constructive things, and we soon are living in a perfected thought world, surrounded by the dream pictures of our soul consciousness. We become like mystical seers, we can prophesy then about everything in our life without fear of contradiction, for knowing the Law that on the path "Like produces Like," and knowing the thought-seeds we sow, we can be certain of the future harvest.
Under the Law Eternal we cease to consider ourselves related to anything that we do not want. These things we do not want have ceased to exist for us, in the moment we have forgotten them in consciousness. We must refuse even to connect with them in memory. Sometimes this is a hard lesson: The Law of Memory is a peculiar force, it is the expression of fixed thinking--that which we cannot forget has made deep inroads into consciousness. Memory often keeps us related in strange ways, and hinders our unfoldment. Memory is the connecting link between the yesterday and today; it makes the past always the present and it remains the master of many lives and pours what it will into the field of consciousness until it is conquered.
We cannot go on to peace, power and divine unfoldment while we are wrapped around with olden memories, olden idols, fears and bondage.
It is an unwritten law that we pass on as we become fit, and any life can at any moment come away from the thought law of sin, sickness and death, into the law of peace, power, happiness and joy.
The great God-life wants us to have whatever we want, and will help us to get it and keep it. We have been told for ages to "ask and receive, seek and find, knock and it shall be opened." The Universal waits upon our recognition of its presence and before we ask it is given. The moment we know what we want and ask for it under the higher law of recognition, it is ours, then we only have to wait until we can manifest it. Over the same thought line which we pass out our desires, there passes back to us the answer to our prayers and our human pathway blossoms with the fruits and flowers of our deeper understanding.
The law of bondage will never become the law of liberty, but each one of us may come away into this perfect law of creative thinking as soon as we teach ourselves the simple act of picking out thoughts that relate us with the higher things of life. The kinds of positions, friends, conditions and environment we attract to ourselves under the positive conscious relationship are entirely different from the ones we will attract under the negative destructive thought laws. Good friends, happy environment, peace and love, are not made from the material of mind that recognizes only lack, loss, envy, despair, fear, condemnation and resistance.
When we want health, we must think health thoughts and becomeonewith the laws that make for health and live at health's heights; when we want wealth we must create a wealth thought vibration and link our lives with the levels of wealth. All the grand, good things of earth can only come and gather around us when we have lifted our consciousness to the level at which they can be touched.
In the light of this higher understanding we can see that in just the proportion that our human nature rises towards the Universal Wisdom, our human perception becomes widened, until, at last, we include all the laws of higher living, thinking and being, and we bring from the hidden center within ourselves a profound knowledge. As our life grows more and more in the power of perception, we retire farther and farther from the personal, the pessimistic, the limited belief of selfishness, condemnation, resistance, and we begin a new thought life filled with moral, intellectual and spiritual glory, and even though "since the fathers fell asleep all things continue as they were from the creation," we see the true laws of creation, and making pur minds one with these laws we pass with them and through them on to perfected human wisdom, we turn to the daily life then with a higher, holier and more glorified purpose and out from all the gloom of the past we find the promises have all been answered and that God has provided some better things for us, which without us could not be made perfect.
The final word, then, to the sick, discouraged and diseased world is this:
"The righteous are in the hands of their God (thelaw) and their life is full of immortality," and knowing this anyone may recognize their conscious union with whatever they desire; create it in their human thought world and project it into form in the Cosmic Consciousness; then with wide open soul eyes walk calmly on, expecting it and never laying down their demand until it manifests for them.
"Jesus said unto him, go and wash in the pool of Siloam. He went his way therefore and washed and came seeing."St. JohnIX, 7.
When we read the history of the ages behind us we cannot help but see that through every phase of human evolution there has run that subtle something which men call "the power of the unseen."
Matty of our forefathers lived in self scrutiny and subjective investigation, and many lived in lawless expression of their objective selves with no idea of life in its subjective action and form. As humanity advanced in its reverence it came to where lack of attention to regeneration and self-comprehension was followed by an inner sense of guilt, and those who know the power of the two states of consciousness, the outer and the inner, have grown to where they look upon it as abnormal to higher progress, to only enter these finer courts of being just to rest and renew the physical body.
Men instinctively know that life is too serious and mighty to pass along on the objective side of living without now and then going into the center of being and holding an earnest deep contact with the silent consciousness.
In the old thought world it was not strange for master men in every walk of life to pray. The powerful warrior turned his eyes from the field of battle to the strength of Heaven; the trusting mourner turned his eyes from the loss of earth to the gain of dying; even Milton gave himself to the discords of politics in action, and the symphonies of the seraphims. In the silence great lives everywhere have mingled the meditations of the Absolute with the thoughts of the discordant, differentiated and apparentnow.
There is not a family anywhere that does not possess at least one person who in himself holds the proof of how real and earnest a thing are the exercises and consciousness of the solitary vigil.
There is something of reverence yet in many lives as they recall the blessing given at meals and the evening hour of prayer. To the wayward and those living in the control of the outside things of life, it was an hour of bondage, but to those who were at all awakened to the call of the inside life, it was an even-tide of peace and power and rest.
It cannot be denied that the years have brought great changes in the methods of human worship. The contempt with which some of the later educators treat worship and religion betray an ignorance on their part both of the true office of revelation and reverence, and this blinds them to the real, innate, fundamental longing of human life.
There are many who come away from the old thought and who believe in the promulgation of a new truth, but they attempt to build up the new through the destruction of the old, and pass along as Iconoclasts seeking what they can destroy. These lives are the lawful product of the undeveloped human comprehension, and the only safety for the race is in the fact that only a few ever take them seriously, and these soon see that they are not inclusive enough to help more than the few, and that after a while, in order to meet the demands of their own increasing individuality, they must themselves pass into wider union, into worship and get away from their own limitations.
Humanity must forever pass between the outside and the inside of life, and only as each soul becomes awake in both conditions can it understand and unite with the laws of perfect being.
New Thought is conscious of the open door between the inside and the outside of life, the earth and Heaven, and it knows that each soul may live from choice in either state of consciousness and pass in and out at will.
Man instinctively knows the difference between the inside and the outside of living; he can easily detect the laws of action, and the laws of silence. The tendency of our New Thought development is to teach lives to pass more and more into the inside power or, in other words, to come into the unseen laws of being and work consciously with the energy that creates and which is unmanifested, while at the same time they manipulate the manifested, external things, and through the understanding of the finite are able to bring into expression the absolute power.
It is slowly dawning upon the present day intelligence that through this inner side of mind we can become more and more capable of controlling and directing the outer states of human consciousness and men are recognizing more and more that all physical objective form is inner spiritual arrangement.
Today humanity is looking at the cant and form and creed of the crowd, and giving them their own rightful place, power and function, but it is also looking at the unseen and daring to affirm that an audience with God is attainable, certain and possible and productive of its own natural expressions in its own realm of higher recognition.
Today more than ever before new strength is being born into what the world calls the devotional element of humanity and it is being born on a sane, healthy plane of understanding which bids fair to revolutionize the world.
It does not take long to see, when we look with a clear vision, that those who display most power today, and who are productive of the greatest good to the developing world are not those who are living in fixed relationship with the outside of life; it is true that those on the outer rim may boast of perfect physical strength and a perfect brain and a physical beauty, but the victory today is not from the without, but it is rather for those who are psychologically practical, mystically enlightened and subtle with a deep scientific relationship with all nature's finer forces and who know life not alone as a science or as a philosophy, or as a religion, but as an art.
The truth must some day beat its way into the developing minds of men that we are now alive in a great age, and are coming to where the inside power must become externalized and that those who today stand masters of life, and those who will continue to become masters of life and leaders in power and helpfulness, must do it by a development that is not so much characterized by their objective knowledge as by their subjective holiness or wholeness.
We must learn what we never seem to have learned before, that the moments we spend in the external world are not wholly our strongest or sanest moments and that all external outside action is the crudest form of energy, and that when we want thereal, we must turn the clear deep eye of our nature toward the inner, the silent, and then all our power seems to well up and meet us, because it is called in from the apparent to the Absolute of being.
The next great truth is that all the old ways of life are never thrown away until we have something to live by in the new; old truths never die, they are always existent, but their methods of expression must be changed to suit the developing intellectuality and spirituality of man.
In the old thought life prayer was the pathway to the interior world of power, but today we know that recognition must be the guide to the interior world of power. Prayer was the pathway of the old forefathers and prayer in its first inception was a straight road to the center of divine union, but after the minds of men, befogged between the glamour of the external and the power of the internal, evolved a form of prayer that led the race away from its center out into the rim of living, the power ceased; prayer became full of cant and form, words became meaningless and non-mystical; the truth that "God is a Spirit and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth" was lost in the increasing bewilderment of the mind.
After a while humanity, seeing the futility of objective kind of prayer, ceased its praying, not because it had worn out prayer, not because it had wandered from its desire of worship and soul communion, but because it had worn out the old useless method, and found the dross of the letter; no one stood developed to where he could push faith into a new interpretation.
Self examination and supplication is natural to every life as soon as it develops to a finer knowledge of what passes within itself. Until the last man of the earth is dead this natural cry for the communion with the inner states of consciousness and the union with the great absolute God-life will rise up and flourish and wax strong in the souls of men.
We have learned now too much of the inside of living to ever be happy with the outside form alone, and we have seen too much of the unseen forces within us to ever yield ourselves servants completely to the external powers. Our spiritual analysis is too fine to permit crude interpretation. Men are leaving the old just as the seed must forever leave the mould and dust of earth, and push its stalk up into heaven's bright sunshine.
Today we stop and in close self questioning and with a desire to know the truth, and nothing but the truth, We ask what is it that has rendered the old thought piety of our fathers unnatural and impossible to us? It does not take long to answer this if we look with eyes that have clearer sight. Men have turned away simply because they were too developed to be fed on the husks of a worn out expression that was no longer large enough to satisfy their developing thirst for Truth.
Our New Thought methods have come because men built them with their desires; they called for methods that would fit the increasing spiritual comprehension of developing humanity.
Today mankind is instinctively recoiling from every sense of separation from God which our fathers felt; human life has become more human; the outside of life is known at its real value, the inside of life is given its place and power; Love has become vitalized; human affection has become sweet and natural; human duties are blessed privileges and life is elevated to a pinnacle of power before unknown; social interests are now beginning in all and ending in all; the whole scheme of man's natural moral and religious existence has a true worth and dignity of its own, and humanity is listening, accepting and delighting to honor and obey. Only the life in the outside ranks of living will ever condemn this new rise of power, and only the cowardly can despise; it is whole, sane, sweet and divinely human and humanly divine in its application and privileges.
We lost, perhaps, a great part of the old time manner of communion with God because we first lost the old time spirit of supplication and the groveling spirit of the outside world, but we have not lost communion or devotion.
Today we are at home in the center of being, and feel and knowoneness. We have union now just as those whoknowtruth have always had, but the method differs, and Silence has taken the place of the spoken prayer, meditation and silence is the new pathway to the Cosmic heart, and through this the developing children of men walk into perfect union, receiving the messages of the Divine Host. They come into a grand comradeship with God, not in the old time spirit of supplication and service, not asking, not seeking really, not even penitentially suppliant, but in the new found glory of a faith that looks up in perfect confidence of itsoneness, and which speaks from the very depth of its own glorified selfhood, and knows that "I and my Father areoneand all my Father hath is mine."
The new race will keep all that is vital in the old one of prayer and communion, and it will add to it all the great power of its own awakened consciousness. We are awake now--wide awake to the despotism of the outside world and its laws--and we are equally awake to the law of the inner side of life and the dominion of the world of pure Being.
Today the silence of our new understanding has become for developed humans the pathway of God, and it is indeed the pool of Siloam in which all may bathe and be healed.
The Silence becomes for those who seek it a well of living water that springs up into everlasting life.
It is promised that "the pure in heart shall see God," and anyone who comes away from the outside of life and comes stripped to the soul into the inner side of his own being will find God there, for like the vision of the monk, He is always there, waiting to be manifest.
The outside of life is beautiful and sweet and has in it many forms of self-realization; it is part of the plan of human development, but it is only a part and the lesser side of living, and after we have mastered its secrets and understood our own relationship to it, it is natural to turn inward, and read the other side of our life's picture, and when we do this it will be strange indeed if we do not feel the Eternal presence so close upon our soul that we will long to say with bated breath, "Thou God seest me."
The silence of the inner side of life and the power it produces cannot be put into words; it is the pathway to the Absolute and thelanguageofthatland is not spoken in the outer world of sense and sight.
Knowthe inner side of life, thenliveit--this is the pathway of peace and power and along this way there is found that strange vital, vibrant glow of spiritual illumination sanctifying our senses, and filling our soul and leading our mind into the fulness of Him who fills all.
Life then becomes for us a something divinely sent, no longer distraught; no longer to suffer; nothing but reality and a reality that has been known by millions throughout the ages and will be known by millions yet unborn.
Do not think that this turning into the inner side of living is weakness and cowardice and fear of the external world and its happenings; it is not, it is simply all energies united; it is not fear nor halting power, but it is rather the strength of the superhuman; it is not illusion, not self-hypnotism; it is a divine reality; it is God's witness to those who seek after his illuminated heights.
This living in the inner side of life each day is essential for the preservation of equalization of our daily life. The outside of life cannot help but become wearisome, and when we come away into the silence of our inner self, we find the thrill of life and we find the human made radiant with the glory of the Divine.
The inner side of life answers all the questionings of our mind, and as we learn this truth we depend less and less upon the things created, but live constantly in the energy that creates, and through this operate our whole life.
Silence was first in the scheme of creation. Remember this: "The darkness and the silence knew. So is a man's fate born."
There is no creation that will last that is born on the plane of external action for the law of that plane is change. In the hush of the valley of silence we accumulate the inward power which pushes our external expression into bloom. In the inner side of living the soul enlarges its dimensions and when it comes back into the earthly things it gilds them with a glory not their own.
The inner side of life and its power is not a mysterious thing, it is only the finding of God, and when we meet Him face to face, we speak in a new tongue; we live in a temple not made by hands, eternal in the heavens, and we live in the truth of the olden mystics and say with the power of our new consciousness: "Our Father, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom has come, Thy will is done on earth, as it is in Heaven."