"_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--we _have_ and
_express_ in 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 we _will_ to 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: ALL
things work together for the final good of man, and union with _all_
things, not _one_ thing, is the law of _universal_ development.
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 the _whole_, the new, the complete.
We force ourselves to _know_ nothing but the great ALL HEALTH
thoughts; 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 the _king_ chair 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:--"We _have_ and _express_ in 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.
The ALL WILL wants 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, and _vice 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, and _do_ walk 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."
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.