C11. Some Practical Mental Recipes.

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The thought contained in this issue is a partial review of what we have published for the last three years and a half. These truths are here brought again to your attention, because in the ground we have entered it is profitable at times to be reminded anew of these laws so new to us. We are habituated to our old and wrong methods of thought, and in the hurry of every‑day life and affairs are very apt to forget these spiritual laws, even though we are convinced of their truth.

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None of us can expect to believe and live up to new laws, principles or methods of life all at once. Though convinced of their truth there is an unyielding, stubborn part of us which is hostile to them.

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That part is our material mind or mind of the body.

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There is a Supreme Power and Ruling Force which pervades and rules the boundless universe. You are a part of this Power. You as a part have the faculty of bringing to you by constant silent desire, prayer or demand more and more of the qualities, belongings and characteristics of this Power.

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Every thought of yours is a real thing—a force (say this over to yourself twice).

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Every thought of yours is literally building for you something for the future of good or ill.

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What then is your mind dwelling on now in any matter? The dark or the bright side? Is it toward others ugly or kind? This is precisely the same as asking “what kind of life and results are you making for yourself in the future?”

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If now you are obliged to live in a tenement house or sit at a very inferior table, or live among the coarse and vulgar, do not say to yourself that you must always so live. Live in mind or imagination in the better house. Sit in imagination at better served tables and among superior people. When you cultivate this state of mind your forces are carrying you to the better. Be rich in spirit, in mind, in imagination, and you will in time be rich in material things. It is the mood of mind you are most in, whether that be groveling or aspiring, that is actually making physical conditions of life in advance for you.

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The same law applies to the building‑up of the body. In imagination live in a strong, agile body, though yours is now a weak one.

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Do not put any limits to your future possibilities. Do not say: “I must stop here. I must always rank below this or that great man or woman. My body must weaken, decay and perish, because in the past so many people’s bodies have weakened and perished.”

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Do not say: “My power’s and talents are only of the common order and as an ordinary person. I shall live and die as millions have done before me.”

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When you think this, as many do unconsciously, you imprison yourself in an untruth. You bring then to yourself the evil and painful results of an untruth. You bar and fetter your aspiration to grow to powers and possibilities beyond the world’s present knowledge. You cut from you the higher truth and possibility.

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You have latent in you, some power, some capacity, some shading of talent different from that ever possessed by any human being. No two minds are precisely alike, for the Infinite Force creates infinite variety in its every expression, whether such expression be a sunset or a mind.

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Demand at times to be permanently freed from all fear. Every second of such thought does its little to free you forever from the slavery of fear. The Infinite Mind knows no fear, and it is your eternal heritage to grow nearer and nearer to the Infinite Mind.

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We absorb the thought of those with whom we are most in sympathy and association. We graft their mind on our own. If their mind is inferior to ours and not on the same plane of thought, we, in such absorption, take in and cultivate an inferior and injurious mental graft.

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If you will keep company with people who are reckless and unaspiring, who have no aim or purpose in life, who have no faith in themselves or anything else, you place yourself in the thought current of failure. Your tendency then will be to failure. Because from such people, your closest associates, you will absorb their thought. If you absorb it, you will think it. You will get in the same mood of mind as theirs. If you think as they do, you will in many things find yourself acting as they do, no matter how great your mental gifts.

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Your mind surely absorbs the kind of thought it is most with. If you are with the successful you absorb thought which brings success. The unsuccessful are ever sending from them thoughts of lack of order, lack of system, lack of method, or recklessness and discouraged thought. Your mind if much with theirs will certainly absorb these thoughts exactly as a sponge does water.

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It is better for your art or business that you have no intimate company at all than the company of reckless, careless, slipshod and slovenly minds.

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When in your mind you cut from the unlucky and thriftless, your body will not long remain so near theirs. You get then into another force or current. It will carry you into the lives of more successful people.

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When you don’t know what to do in any matter of business— in anything, wait. Do nothing about it. Dismiss it so much as you can from your mind. Your purpose will be as strong as ever. You are then receiving and accumulating force to put on that purpose. It comes from the Supreme Power. It will come in the shape of an idea, an inspiration, an event, an opportunity. You have not stopped while you so waited. You have all that time been carried to the idea, the inspiration, the event, the opportunity, and it also has been carried or attracted to you.

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When in any undertaking we put our main dependence and trust in an individual or individuals and not in the Supreme Power, we are off the main track of the most perfect success.

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The highest and real success means in addition to wealth increasing health, vigor and a growth never ceasing into powers and possibilities not yet realized by the race.

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As regards your business, don’t talk to anybody, man or woman, regarding your plans or projects, or anything connected with them, unless you are perfectly sure they wish for your success. Don’t talk to people who bear you out of politeness. Every word so spoken represents so much force taken out of your project. The number you can talk to with profit is very small. But the good wish of one real friend, if he give you a hearing but for ten minutes, is a literal living active force, added to your own, and from that time working in your behalf.

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If your aim is for right and justice you will be led to those you can trust and talk to with safety. Your spiritual being or sense will tell you whom you can trust.

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When you demand justice for yourself, you demand it for the whole race. If you allow yourself to be dominated, brow‑beaten or cheated by others without inward or outward protest, you are condoning with deceit and trickery. You are in league with it.

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Three persons engaged in any form of gossip, tattle or scandal generate a force and send it from them of tattle, gossip and scandal. The thought they send into the air returns to them and does them injury to mind and body. It is far more profitable to talk with others of things which go to work out good. Every sentence you speak is a spiritual force to you and others for good or ill.

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Ten minutes spent in growling at your luck, or in growling at others because they have more luck than yourself; means ten minutes of your own force spent in making worse your own health and fortune. Every thought of envy or hatred sent another is a boomerang. It flies back to you and hurts you. The envy or dislike we may feel toward those who, as some express it, “put on airs.” The ugly feeling we may have at seeing others riding in carriages and “rolling in wealth,” represents just so much thought (i. e., force) most extravagantly expended, for in its expenditure we get not only unhappiness, but destroy future fortune and happiness.

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If this has been your common habit or mood of mind, do not expect to get out of it at once. Once convinced of the harm done you by such mood, and a new force has come to gradually remove the old mind and bring a new one. But all changes must be gradual.

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Your own private room is your chief workshop for generating your spiritual force and building yourself up. If it is kept in disorder, if things are flung recklessly about, and you cannot lay your hands instantly upon them, it is an indication that your mind is in the same condition, and therefore your mind as it works on others, in carrying out your projects, will work with less effect and result by reason of its disordered and disorganized condition.

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Ill temper or despondency is a disease. The mind subject to it in any degree is to that degree a sick mind. The sick mind makes the sick body. The great majority of the sick are not in bed.

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When you are peevish, remember your mind is sick. Demand then a well mind.

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When you say to yourself, “I am going to have a pleasant visit or a pleasant journey,” you are literally sending elements and forces ahead of your body that will arrange things to make your visit or journey pleasant. When before the visit or the journey or the shopping trip you are in a bad humor, or fearful or apprehensive of something unpleasant, you are sending unseen agencies ahead of you which will make some kind of unpleasantness.

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Our thoughts, or in other words, our state of mind is ever at work “fixing up” things good or bad for us in advance.

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As you cultivate this state of mind more and more, you will at last have no need of reminding yourself to get into such mood. Because the mood will have become a part of your every‑day nature, and you cannot then get out of it, nor prevent the pleasant experiences it will bring you.

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Our real self is that which we cannot see, bear or feel with the physical senses—our mind. The body is an instrument it uses. We are then made up entirely of forces we call thoughts. When these thoughts are evil or immature they bring us pain and ill fortune. We can always change them for better thoughts or forces. Earnest steady desire for a new mind (or self) will surely bring the new mind and more successful self. And this will ever be changing through such desire for the newer and ever more successful self.

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All of us do really “pray without ceasing.” We do not mean by prayer any set, formality or form of words. A person who sets his or her mind on the dark side of life, who lives over and over the misfortunes and disappointments of the past, prays for similar misfortunes and disappointments in the future. If you will see nothing but ill luck in the future, you are praying for such ill luck and will surely get it.

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You carry into company not only your body, but what is of far more importance, your thought or mood of mind, and this thought or mood, though you say little or nothing, will create with others an impression for or against you, and as it acts on other minds will bring you results favorable or unfavorable according to its character.

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What you think is of far more importance than what you say or do. Because your thought never ceases for a moment its action on others or whatever it is placed upon. Whatever you do has been done because of a previous long held mood or state of mind before such doing.

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The thought or mood of mind most profitable in permanent results to you is the desire to do right. This is not sentiment, but science. Because the character of your thought brings to you events, persons and opportunities with as much certainty as the state of the atmosphere brings rain or dry weather.

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To do right is to bring to yourself the best and most lasting result for happiness. You must prove this for yourself.

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Doing right is not, however, doing what others may say or think to be right. If you have no standard of right and wrong of your own, you are acting always on the standard held or made by others.

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Your mind is always working and acting on other minds to your advantage or disadvantage whether your body is asleep or awake. Your real being in the form of a thought travels like electricity through space. So when you lay the body down to sleep see that your mind is in the best mood to get during your physical unconsciousness the best things. For if you go to sleep angry or despondent your thought goes straight to the unprofitable domain of anger or despondency, and will bring to your physical life on awakening, first the element and afterward that ill success which anger and despondency always attract.

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Health is involved in the Biblical adage, “Let not the sun go down on your wrath.” Every mood of mind you get in brings to you flesh, bone and blood of a quality or character like itself. People who from year to year live in moods of gloom or discouragement, are building elements of gloom and discouragement into their bodies, and the ill results cannot be quickly removed.

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The habit of hurry wears out more bodies and kills more people than is realized. If you put on your shoes hurriedly while dressing in the morning you will be very apt to be in a hurry all day. Pray to get out of the current of hurried thought into that of repose. Hurried methods of doing business lose many thousands of dollars. Power to keep your body strong and vigorous—power to have influence with people worth holding—power to succeed in your undertakings comes of that reposeful frame of mind which while doing relatively little with the body, sees far ahead and clearly in mind.

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So, when in the morning, be you man or woman, you look at what is to be done and begin to feel yourself overwhelmed and hurried by the household cares, the writing, the shopping, the people to be seen, the many things to be done, sit right down for thirty seconds and say, “I will not be mobbed and in mind driven by these duties. I will now proceed to do one thing— one thing alone, and let the rest take care of themselves until it is done.” The chances are then that the one thing will be done well. If that is done well, so will all the rest. And the current of thought you bring to you in so cultivating this mood will bear you to far more profitable surroundings, scenes, events and associations than will the semi‑insane mood and current of hurry.

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All of us believe in many untruths to‑day. It is an unconscious belief. The error is not brought before our minds. Still we go on acting and living in accordance with our unconscious error, and the suffering we may experience comes from that wrong belief.

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Demand then every day ability to see our wrong beliefs. We need not be discouraged if we see many more than we think we have at present. They cannot be seen and remedied all at once.

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Don’t take a “tired feeling” or one of languor in the day time for a symptom of sickness. It is only your mind asking for rest from some old rut of occupation.

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If your stomach is disordered make your mind responsible for it. Say to yourself, “This disagreeable feeling comes of an error in thought.” If you are weak or nervous, don’t lay the fault on your body. Say again, “It is a state of my mind which causes this physical ailment, and I demand to get rid of such state and get a better one.” If you think any medicine or medical advice will do you good, by all means take it, but mind and keep this thought behind it. “I am taking this medicine not to help my body but as an aid to my spirit.”

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Your child is a mind which having lost the body it used in a past physical existence (and possibly of another race and country), has received a new one, as you did in your own infancy.

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Tell your child never to think meanly of itself. For if it becomes habituated to put out such thought, others will feel it and think of the child first and as a grown up person afterward to be of small value.

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Nothing damages the individual more than self depreciation, and many a child is weighted down with the elements of failure before it goes into the world through years of scolding, snubbing and telling it that it is a worthless being.

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Tell your child in all its plans to see or think only success.

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To keep in the permanent mood of expecting success brings causes, events and opportunities, which bring success.

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Let us also tell this to ourselves very often, for we are but children, also with physical bodies a few years older than the infants.

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We have as yet but the vaguest idea of what life really means, and the possibilities it has in store for us. One attribute of the relatively perfected life to come to this race is the retention or preservation of a physical body so long as the mind or spirit desires it. It will be a body also free from pain and sickness, and one which can be made or unmade, put on or taken off at will.

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Say of anything that “it must be done” and you are putting but a mighty unseen power for doing. When your mind is in the mood of ever saying “must,” whether you have in mind the particular thing you aim at or not, still that force is ever working on your purpose. But we need to be careful as to what that force of must is put on. “Must” without asking for wisdom as to where it shall be placed may bring you terrible results.

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Always in your individual aims and purposes defer to the Higher Power and Infinite Wisdom. The thing you may most desire might prove a curse. Be always then in the mood of saying, “There is a Power which knows what will bring me the most permanent happiness better than I do. If my desire is not for good let it not come, for in its place I shall have something better.”

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If you send your thought in sympathy to every one who calls for it, you may have very little left to help yourself. It is necessary to have great care in the choice of those on whom we put our love and thought. One may help build us up; another tear us down.

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We need to ask for wisdom that we may know whom to receive in close association.

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As you are a part of God or the Supreme Power and a peculiar part, you can always estimate yourself as the very best of such peculiar part. No one else can approach or equal or excel you, as you represent and put out your own peculiar powers, gifts or shadings of mind and character. You will in time command the world of your own mind, and while others may compel your admiration, you will do yourself a great injury if you worship them or abase yourself or grovel before them even in mind.

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Idolatry is the blind worship of anything or anybody save the Infinite Force from which alone you draw life, power and inspiration.

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The thought of a woman coming to you a man in sympathy or love whose ideas, aims and aspirations are equal to or above yours, may prove to you a source for strength of muscle, health of body and clearness of mind. Her thought so flowing to you is a real element. If a woman inferior to you mentally is your companion or much in your thought, your mind will be much less clear and your health will eventually suffer.

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Be you man or woman, your life cannot be complete and you cannot build yourself rapidly into higher and higher powers until you meet and recognize spiritually your eternal complement or completement of the other sex. And from such complement there is no departure.

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When we eat and drink let us remember that with every mouthful we place and build a thought into ourselves in accordance with the mood we are in while eating. So be sure to be bright, hopeful and buoyant while eating, and if we cannot command such mood of mind, pray for it. To ask night and morning of the Supreme Power for the highest wisdom (that is the greatest good and happiness), and to demand this in that frame of mind which acknowledges the superiority of that Wisdom over your own, is certainly putting you in the current of the greatest and most enduring health and prosperity. Because another and better current of thought then begins to act on you and will gradually carry you out of errors and into the right. It will lead you by degrees into different surroundings, different ways of living, and will in time bring you the association you really need and what is best for you.

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Q's note:

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We're meant to Elevate Ourselves so when the True Love of our Life appears, we actually know how to receive their Love!

 

Wink Wink ;)