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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.ses 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 n.o.bly, 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 pa.s.ser-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 G.o.d-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 compet.i.tion; 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 pa.s.s 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 G.o.d," 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 acc.u.mulation. It is an unwritten law that we pa.s.s on as we become fit, and we can at any moment begin a new thought att.i.tude 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 pa.s.s 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 be 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.