B8. The Use of a Room.

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Every person should have a room entirely to him or herself. Great care should be taken regarding those who for social or business purposes are admitted to such room.

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It should be a room into which the sunshine may enter as much as possible. It should not be on the north or shady side of the house, for the cold and shady side of any material thing is a reflection in the physical of the shady and forbidding side of the spiritual, and if permanently lived in is certain to cast such reflection on your mind, and is not beneficial to physical health.

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A room into which no sunshine can enter cannot be either materially or spiritually purified.

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You need one place in the universe to which you can retire when you feel inclined, and shut out everything else so long as you desire; you need one place that you can call wholly your own, not subject to anyone’s invasion, and not to be entered by any one else without your permission.

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You need such a place to rest and gather your forces together. Because when you are a great deal among people, you must absorb more or less of their thought. You will then often see as the inferior mind sees. You cannot rid yourself of this thought unless you are at times alone. Your own mind has then opportunity given it to assert its power. As it does, it will throw off the power or thought of other minds, and see for itself.

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More than this; when you have a room sacred to yourself, you open the door and grant much more abundant opportunity for wiser and higher intelligences to reach you and give you of their mental richness. They can give you ideas of great use in the practical affairs of life.

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You are also placing yourself in the higher and constructive current of thought, all of whose influence is to build you up and make you more and more a power for doing good, first to yourself, next to others.

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You are very much out of the reach of these improving agencies if constantly in the world’s current of thought; if constantly associated with others who never get out of its hurry, worry, bustle and care. And a single person or companion, if constantly with you, or accessible to you at any hour, can bring you as much of this lower and damaging thought as could ten persons. It matters not whether one person holds the door open to such lower current or one hundred persons.

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In this use of a room, I do not mean that one should live a hermit in one; I imply only that temporary withdrawal from others necessary to get ourselves together. There are proper times for seclusion and times for association and society.

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If two persons are in sympathy and faith with these truths, the desire will grow more and more upon them as they see more and more clearly, to give real aid to each other; to help build each other up into more health, happiness and power. One will never object to the other’s occasional complete privacy and seclusion, knowing, as they will, the great benefits derived from it, and the certainty that each will share in the other’s benefit.

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For as you are built up in health, or in any power for drawing to you the best goods of the world, you must, through the sending of the strong desire to similarly benefit the person you most love, give such benefit to that person, providing he or she is in the same faith, belief, or order of thought as yourself.

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It is not necessary, while alone in your room, that you try to have your mind strongly set on putting yourself in a higher realm of thought, or drawing higher intelligences to you. You will be most liable to derive benefit from such sources when your hands are occupied with some detail of your toilet, or in the doing of any work not irksome to you.

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The mood in which you dress yourself, or perform any so‑called trivial act, is the agency, and creates the thought‑atmosphere into which beneficial or injurious unseen individuality can enter. If it be the mood of peevishness, despondency or irritability, it taps, so to speak, that current of thought, and on that current of thought, individualized intelligence of the same order can come and annoy you. If the mood in which you brush your hair is one of serenity, repose, and a certain loving absorption in the act itself, you connect yourself with the calmer, clearer, more peaceful, and at the same time more powerful current of thought, and on that the more calm, serene, individualized intelligence or ministering spirit can come to you, full of love, desire and power, to soothe your troubled mind and give you ideas, which in time will grow to forces sufficient to carry you and keep you permanently beyond the action of the disturbed thought‑element of the world about you.

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No possible effort of body is, in the spiritual sense, trivial. For any act must be done in some mood or condition of mind, and the mood in which you do one thing is the open door to the same mood in the doing of the very next act. If you snatch your hat hurriedly from the peg it hangs on, you are all the more liable to carry that hurried and careless mood into the most important act of your life.

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Order and method are the grand factors of success in any business or art. When you practice order and method in your room, you send order and method into your business or art. The tying of a knot in a deliberate, reposeful manner, sends at that moment the element of deliberation, repose and power as a force pushing in your favor, and so acting on other minds far from you. You are so working your force far from your body, when in writing you shape a single letter symmetrically, and not make lines and angles which you expect others to recognize as letters.

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Your room all your own, and not liable to invasion from others without your permission, is your workshop, where you can build up those “frames of mind” which you desire permanently to live in. If you cannot assert yourself with others, you can, when so alone, with yourself. The more you do this by yourself the more do you increase your power for doing it with others. You can in your room build up a positive frame of mind, often so necessary for refined and sensitive natures in their contact with the world. You can then go out with this positive frame of mind as with an armor, and are then the less likely to be browbeaten, disconcerted and dominated temporarily by those rough, arrogant natures, whose ruling inward motive it is to make every one else bend to their will. You may not accomplish this at once. You will in time. For every “frame of mind” you so put on, with right and justice as the ruling motive, adds to you an increase of power never to be lost. You may not see your growth in this direction immediately. But you will as the years roll on.

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You must be entirely alone at times to build up such states of mind.

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As we have said many times before, your thought acts far from your body. It acts on others for or against you. It is always so improving or injuring your business and material interests. It is prejudicing people in your favor or against you, according as you send it out in good will or in the mood of anger. It is necessary to repeat this to ourselves many times. And every reminder, by word or in print, binds this most important truth more and more to us, makes it more and more a part of ourselves, and in this way reminds us more and more to check an unpleasant flow of thought toward another.

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It is while your body is isolated in your room that your thought may act the strongest for beneficial results to you on others. It is not necessary, providing you are in the right condition of mind, that you try to send it to others. That would be a trying with the physical body so to send it. The right mental condition is that of repose, serenity and goodwill. That condition is a force of like character. It is a volume of such force ever going from you. It bears your special purpose or aim along with it to other minds whose motive and purposes are similar, and who, in time, will meet you physically and cooperate with you in the physical realm of life, as their minds are now doing in the realm of thought, which is by far the most powerful for effecting results in the material. Indeed, it is the real and only realm in which results are accomplished. They must first be done in the unseen kingdom of thought before they can take shape and can be seen, touched, felt, used, and enjoyed in the material.

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The kind of house you are to live in years hence, the quality of clothing you are to wear, the style of furniture you will use, are being made now in your mind. If you do not aspire to the better house, clothing and furniture; if you say in mind, “I can’t have the better,” then you are surely putting up the bars against the better. You are then making the inferior and continuing in it.

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When any room is devoted to a purpose, or when only a certain character of thought is put out in that room, it is literally filled more and more with such thought. Its power for good or ill continually increases. In other words, your condition of mind fills that room and also goes out from it. Any sensitive person will feel your mental condition immediately on entering. If such mental condition there is permanently peaceful, they will feel that peace. If it is much of the time disturbed, they will soon feel such disturbance.

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All rooms are filled with the thought‑element most put out by those who live in them, and this element left there acts on people more or less strongly, in proportion to their sensitiveness or capacity to feel the thoughts of others. For such reason you feel the devotional thought of a church, even when empty. You will feel there very different than if in an empty bar‑room.

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In a room where murder, robbery, or trickery has long been planned, or even thought, if never externally carried out, there is the thought of murder, robbery, or trickery in its air. Such element left there will predispose some to these crimes. If they dare not commit them, it will still cause them to entertain such thoughts, and amuse themselves by living in them. Another class of minds who are above the doing of these wrongs, even in mind, will be made very uncomfortable by this thought left there. Because, such order of mind, though it can not allow such thought to enter or be absorbed, will be occupied much of the time in resisting or throwing off an element foreign to it, and this constant resistance becomes soon exhausting, and causes unpleasant sensations.

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A room where only business is thought or talked, soon becomes filled with a business thought‑element. It becomes more and more connected with a business thought‑current. Ideas and plans for conducting business will come to those who so occupy and use that room quicker than in any other place. The more of system and order that pervades such room, the more of system and order will characterize the business. The prevailing mood in that room will be the prevailing mood in the business. If such room is entered or occupied at times by shiftless, reckless, and careless people, they will leave their thought there. This will adulterate and injure the thought‑atmosphere of the room. More or less of their thought will be absorbed by the more methodical and better regulated mind, and that carelessness is very liable in some way to be acted out.

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The movable tabernacle of the Jews during their exodus from Egypt, contained the apartment known as the “Holy of Holies,” into which none but the high priest could enter. It was in such room that the wonderful power was generated which was evidenced in so many miracles during this era of Jewish history. This power was the thought‑element of a very few minds bent on a purpose, thought of or talked out in a certain place. Thoughts, especially when talked out in a certain room, are literally left there. The more that such thoughts are so talked out, the more are they left there, and the more of their power is left there, providing it is not mixed up with the thought and talk of other persons different in purpose and motive.

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If such thoughts are concentrated on a purpose, say the furtherance of a movement, the growth of a business, the more of the peculiar power necessary to further such movement or business, is left there. You take that power with you when you leave that room and enter on the business or movement. You clothe yourself, on going out, with that thought‑element. On meeting with others in any way interested in such business or movement, it acts on them in your favor.

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It is an element, also, which attracts to you those interested like yourself, and of like motive. If you think and talk only of trickery in a room, the power you so generate will clothe you with an atmosphere of trickery, attract tricksters to you, and aid you in wrong doing and trickery which may succeed for a time, but is certain, through the operation of an inevitable law, to lead to misery at last.

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There is loss of this power coming of talking important business at random, and in any and all places. You leave then more or less of your power in those places. If you talk it truly in a certain room, and with another or others, in earnest like yourself, you are storing up of that power or thought‑element in that room, to draw from when you wish.

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Any room and all that is in it is literally saturated with the kind of thought most put out and talked in that room. You are placed so to speak, in a bath of such thought when you enter it. If tattle, back‑biting, scandal, and envy is most put out there, you are then in a bath, and absorbing tattle, back‑biting, envy and scandal. If peace, gentleness, control of mind and good‑will to all is the thought most put out there, you are in a bath of peace, gentleness, control of mind and good‑will, and will, in time, feel their good effects. If a room is specially devoted to any art, such as painting, sculpture, or music, or to the study and carrying out of any invention, the thought‑atmosphere of that room will become more and more highly charged with power to aid, improve, and give new ideas relative to such art, providing that only those enter there who are in a live sympathy with such art and invention, and who have also a live desire to improve themselves and benefit others.

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Into such a room, saturated with such thought‑element, individualized intelligence, unseen, as regards material bodies, and skilled in the particular art, invention or purpose to which such room is devoted, can come and give in their way great aid in the advancement of such art, invention or purpose. 

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But if your studio, be it the studio for art or business, invention, or writing, be also a gossiping place, a place free for idle, purposeless minds to enter and while away an hour, a place for low and scurrilous jest, there is brought and left an injurious atmosphere of thought. It is an adulteration of lower thought‑element, and will surely retard your advancement in the art, invention, purpose or business.

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It leaves an atmosphere into which the higher mind of unseen intelligences cannot readily enter. It is as muddy waters flowing into the crystal stream.

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No matter what purpose or what business you are engaged in, that purpose or business will, in accordance with these laws, be greatly aided if you have one room specially devoted to its planning, and talking it over with others interested in it; and if no other kind of thought enters it, the idea‑giving atmosphere of such room, devoted solely to such purpose, becomes more and more powerful.

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You will find that in a room so used and kept free from injurious thought‑elements, your skill In any art will increase more rapidly than elsewhere. If it is your business‑room, or “Holy of Holies,” plans for pushing business will there be presented more abundantly and more clearly than in any other place.

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Always remembering, that where the thought of right, justice, and good‑will predominate in any place, there will be generated the greatest power for the art, business or purpose, and the world is to know that the highest art and most successful business must be based on right, justice, and good‑will.

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The stage of a theatre is a place isolated from the body of the house. In and about that place, the predominant thought put out by many minds is that relative to acting. Such place then becomes filled with that thought. It is for such reason that the actor there feels a greater power and greater ease in throwing himself into his part than he would in a hall or a private house, where other kinds of thought were put out.

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The same law prevails regarding the private room of the banker or financier. Such places hold more of their thought and business power than any others.

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Your room, so used and filling with the best character of thought, will act as a magnet to attract to you that association most pleasant and profitable to you. It is not natural that man or woman should live alone. It is right that every man and woman should find his or her complement or “completement” in one of the opposite sex—and only one.

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Q's note:

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I love rooms that are simple yet elegantly decorated.  It's "Zen" kind of vibe that I love because it makes me feel Peaceful.  It's not hard to build and live in a home full of Love and Peace.  That's my Aspiration!  That's my Dream!!  What about you?