C5. What We Need Strength for.

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This faith for us is the source and secret of all happiness. It is not to be gained or realized by hard study, or drudging midnight memorizing from books old or new. It will come to you in all fullness, in all richness, in all inspiration, as you learn more and more to keep your mind in the right attitude to receive it, and as you do all knowledge will come to you as easily, readily, as the rain pours from the clouds.

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The right attitude is simply that of an earnest desire to receive of this Power.

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As this truth becomes to you as real as the Sun daily seen in the Heavens, you will know more and more that you have a real power to depend upon. Your own mind will answer all questions, and your power will gradually increase whether used through the body or otherwise. For previously in imagining your power as originating within your body, you were, through such belief, cutting off its flow to you from without. When the first feeling of physical fatigue came on, unconsciously you called for further supply of power from within.

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Yet a flow to you of power answers even this demand. But it was power you used in the wrong direction. It did not act on the machinery of your body to drive it ahead, but to rack and strain that machinery, as if the force supplied by the boiler was driving all the looms of the cotton mill backward instead of forward. You may have continued in this injurious mental habit, and it is for this reason that you may now be less able to call power to act on the body, since this reverse action has injured your physical machinery, worn it away or thrown it out of gear, and put the body out of proportion.

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Your body will by degrees fashion itself more symmetrically and become more shapely when you get your mind in the right current of thought.

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The Supreme Force enters also into your daily business. When you have done all you can, without strain, cease doing further, call on that Power, fall back in trust upon it as the child does on its parents. Demand or pray to learn more and more to trust to it. When you are in the trusting mood you are calling this force to you.

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The most practical men, the projectors and pushers of great undertakings, the relatively few moving men of the world, often unconsciously call for this Power, and often unconsciously put their minds in the right state for receiving it far more than is generally imagined. When things look dark, discouraging and perplexing, when a depressed state of mind comes, as come it

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will at times, such minds say in homely, every day phrase, “Well, I’ve pulled through before and I guess I will somehow this time.”

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Now this attitude of mind is a partial trust in a Supreme Power, or in other words a trust in something outside of ourselves.

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The words matter not in which an idea is expressed, and when a man or woman who is not afraid of taking responsibilities, sees the outlook dark ahead, and a momentary fear comes upon them, yet they say, “Well, I guess I’ll rub through somehow;” they get a certain rest out of this thought. They are calling to them the greatest Force in the universe.

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You need not always keep this kind of demand in memory, for when you have once got into the right channel or mental attitude you call unconsciously for force in the right direction, and it comes and works in the right direction whether you think of it or not, just as in all these past years you may have unconsciously worked force in the wrong direction.

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You cannot get out of your old habit or mental altitude all at once. The error or habit is one of ten, twenty, thirty or forty years’ growth. You will frequently slip back into it as you may into habit of gait, gesture or manner you wish to break—all of which are habits framed first in mind before being acted out in body. But as you have now received this idea it can never leave you, for no truth once received can never leave you. It comes to stay and grow, and in its growth slowly and surely push all error out.

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In any effort physical or mental, you want to cease trying to make effort through what erroneously you may have thought your power within your body. You need to learn or get your mind on the track of calling for power from without and giving yourself entirely up to its action on you. You want to say in your mind, “I plan a motion with my leg or arm or other portion of the body. It is enough for me to plan that, I call now for the force from without to move my body, and as it comes all I should do is to direct that force to the organ I wish to use. Then you are in the way of ceasing to try to manufacture that force, but only to direct or govern its action precisely as the engineer directs the steam to such part of the machinery he wishes to use.

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Similarly in all business undertakings you will have your plan, aim and purpose. Then call for power to move that plan or purpose. You may rest assured that such power as it comes will move you to action. But when it does not come in the form of new idea you will retard your business more than advance it through working and making strained effort simply because you think you must be doing something.

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You need not try to think continually of this idea in making your usual efforts, because you cannot always keep any one rule in your memory to the exclusion of everything else. This would retard you rather than advance. The memory is a faculty which will become wearied with the endeavor ever to keep any one thing before it, and weariness in any department of our beings is always to be avoided.

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You can safely rely on the spirit of this truth to help you, give you increase of strength and correct your old errors. That spirit does not need memory to hold it. It is beyond and behind memory, and when we try and force it on memory, we are again committing the error of trusting to the material instead of the spirit. When the spiritual part of our beings once accepts a truth it is then really educated in that truth. The spirit goes then to work in its own way to educate the body. It has many ways of its own for forcing this or any other truth on the notice of your material self and your material memory.

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The person skilled in any art, the musician, the orator, the marksman, the painter, all who produces wonderful results can tell very, very little concerning the methods by which they accomplish such results. They know that in time results come, and results often unlooked for. Through long practice? Yes, but not labored practice. No effort either in art or business really puts one ahead when such effort is laborious and irksome. It does set one back. When Power comes from the Supreme Source and is recognized as coming from that source it makes the effort a pleasure.

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In his effort and plan the most skillful worker puts his or her mind in a condition of surrender to the Supreme Force. He ceases trying hard to do. When so he ceases his spirit has most freedom to act and call to him power to act with. So quick is this action that it escapes the power of words to describe it, and the expert in any art may fill pages with words in the attempt to give the rules or methods how he does things and be no nearer explanation than before.

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Calling force to you from the Supreme brings inspiration, and your walk can be inspired as well as your speech, and “inspiration” is effort without strain—effort of any sort which gives pleasure in its performance, whether it be music or marksmanship or business. Inspiration forgets the body the instrument the spirit uses. Inspiration holds no effort as “work,” but only play. Inspiration knows no laws or methods made to attain it by man, and in its higher and higher flights is ever evading and going beyond such man‑made laws and methods.

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You need strength for many purposes of far more importance to you than in the use of this power by limb or muscle, or any material organ.

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What if a giant in mere muscle finds himself suddenly rooted in his tracks and unable to stir hand or foot? You know results akin to this are accomplished through what was called mesmerism forty years ago, what is called hypnotism now by many, and what may have some other name given it thirty years hence. What really is it! The power of one mind to master and control another mind, and this is done with the same power by which one physical body masters another, only it is applied without using muscle.

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This power all possess in embryo. When educated how to use it the man or woman of the future can never be ruled by the mere physical strength of others. Power used separate and apart from the body would not only paralyze the prizefighter’s muscles, but you would throw your own mind into him, send his own to sleep, and make him, if you desired follow you about as a dog follows its master.

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This is not a remote possibility. It is crudely evidenced and worked now. It must develop into far greater proportions. It must be known as the property of all, to greater or less degree, as strength of muscle is now the property of all in greater or less degree.

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But this is only one form of power working apart from the body. It can be used with a bad motive as muscular power is used for bad purposes. It is so used now, though people are unconscious that they do use it. But thousands of minds are to‑day influenced, swayed and controlled by other minds. Mesmeric power is but another form of such control. Such power is used in every household in the land. Slaves are to be numbered by thousands who have no idea they are slaves, nor how they become so. Masters exist also who know only they have mastery. Stranger than all, those really possessing the most power are often ruled by the weaker in mind through total ignorance of their own thought power.

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You may need power to overcome this mind‑crippling and body‑destroying bondage where you have unconsciously, and possibly for years, put yourself under another person’s will.

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The power gathered by man’s spirit can overcome and rise superior to all material agencies. It can make the body insensible to heat or cold. It was the power which enabled the three young Jews to walk through a glowing furnace unharmed. It made the serpent’s venom harmless to Paul. It brought all the so‑called miracles attendant on the departure of the Israelites from Egypt.

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These powers mean the “Lost Arts.”

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These possibilities and far more belong to you, and you need to know how to avoid wasting your power to realize them.

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Possibly you say on reading this, “But if these are our possibilities, they may not come to me for millions of years in the existence of my spiritual being; they are too far off in realization for my serious consideration.”

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This thought is a bar to all advance or growth in any direction. If you limit the utmost possibility for yourself you can conceive now, you limit and stop the very next step in your spiritual growth you might take to‑day. Your being reaches and projects its possibilities into the Eternity of the Future just as far as it can think and imagine possibilities, and when you say “they cannot be,” or they are so remote that it is almost equivalent to their not being, you have thrown a rock far ahead into Eternity to block your train.

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But you need not talk indiscriminately of these things to every one. You need not lose your head, forget the footing you should maintain in the present world of material things and try to fly to‑morrow, or pit yourself against a prize‑fighter because you have in embryo a power to subdue muscle which need not use muscle.

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You do not assert that the apple seed is a full grown tree, yet you know that from that tiny seed can come a tree. You will not say of the apple seed that it can only become a sprout—and no more. Neither should you say of your own powers that they can only develop relatively into sprouts, yet you will not assert that your spirit now but a seedling has all the growth and fruitage of a matured tree.

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The tendency with all to‑day is through ignorance to let our strength escape us or so use it as to bring no increase of power. We need this power to keep our minds in the proper condition to throw off all thought coming to us of any form of disease, for the thought of any disease brings some form of disease when we accept and believe it. Millions of people are now always thinking disease—that is, making it in thought first and of course in the material afterward. They had rather at their breakfast tables talk of their ailments than of health. Their minds are much of the time fastened on some form of physical ailment. These minds are ever sending their thought from them. The air is full of it. It fastens on us unawares and affects us with unpleasant symptoms. Many people on a hot day never make any mental resistance to the unpleasant effect on them of the heat. They send this great volume of non‑resisting thought from them. This current of thought meets you. You give way to it and suffer like the others.

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You do not then suffer so much from the actual heat as you do from the thought thrown off by others of the unpleasant effect of heat.

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Why can the laborer work in the glare of the hot sun when people of more leisure about him are fanning themselves and melting with heat? Because the laborer’s mind is concentrated on his work, and in this attitude does not receive the unpleasant thought of heat. He perspires as freely as those who are suffering, but the flow of perspiration causes him no unpleasantness. Put the same man in clean linen, a broadcloth coat and with nothing to do but walk about “like a gentleman,” and he will very likely suffer from the heat, because he has nothing to do; nothing to concentrate his mind upon, and for that reason his mind is in the proper condition to receive the thought of heat as it affects others unpleasantly.

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We must have in time a strength which will enable us at any time to turn the mind from anything which discomforts the body to something else like the laborer in the sun, and thereby ward off these unpleasant thoughts. When we can so turn them aside, we turn also aside the unpleasant results they cause the body.

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When you receive or absorb an evil or unpleasant thought so coming from another or others, as you think it you receive also the unpleasant symptoms it has caused another or others.

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We need a great deal of strength as drawn from the Supreme Source to throw off these evil forces. We contend now with that volume of thought which does not resist evil but accepts it as inevitable, dwells on it, and is therefore ever making more and more of the cough, the cold or other unpleasant feeling of the body and sending it out.

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This volume or current of thought so formed is as real as a current of water or air.

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The thought or force of millions on millions of minds now works in the wrong direction. It accepts a thousand physical ills as inevitable. It sends out continually the idea that the decay and weakness of old age are inevitable. It nurses and sympathizes with all its physical ailments instead of resisting them. It has a mind trained to nurse and develop sickness. Disease is expected and invited. It says and believes that children must have the measles, whooping cough and other ailments peculiar to infancy, and holds without question that humanity must ever remain heir to pain, sickness and death.

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All this thought and far more of the same order goes to form a “Power of Darkness.” It is the Power of the lower thought. It besets you at every turn.

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You need strength to resist this power now. Such resistance is the step for us to‑day preparatory to other steps, and more wonderful results in the future.

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Our chief need now is to use a great deal of the strength we draw from the Supreme Power to build us into a higher order of beings. We need to have great care how much of this force in the shape of sympathy we give others.

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Before we can make others a whole “we must make ourselves whole.”

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As we have said time and again, and as we are often obliged to say to ourselves, our thought is our force for all things, and we 

 

need to keep a great deal of this force to help ourselves. If it is scattered broadcast, if we give interest and sympathy to all who call for it, if we are always lending our interest and sympathy to people who repudiate these truths, who deem them visionary, who do not live in the same world of thought as ourselves, we give them of our strength as much as they can appropriate, and in return we get from their association error and disease. We are dragged down by the ills they fasten on us, and they are helped very little.

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Let those who will not or cannot see the ever expanding laws of life go their own way, be joined to their idols and suffer in their own way. If you have what you have proven to be a better way of living, and your neighbor is suffering because he cannot believe it or apply it, you will do him no good by your constant outflow of sympathy, thought or effort for him. You will thereby do yourself much harm.

 

But if he can take hold of the Law along with you, and see it as you see it, and try to live by it as you may try and live by it, he is then doing you a great deal of good as you are doing him good. Your mutual belief is a great strength and support to both of you.

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Those who can walk together in one mind or belief are of great help to each other. Those who try to walk together, with differing minds or beliefs, only cripple each other.

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You can think with kindness of your neighbor; though you cannot live with him. But when you get into any person’s life, whose motives and beliefs are contrary to yours, you will waste force on them and injure yourself.

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In friendship, sympathy and association we cannot get much into any other person’s life without bearing that person’s burthens.

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What troubles them must trouble us; their cares must, through sympathy, be our cares, as their joys are our joys. But if that person cannot believe as you do, that person’s mind is against you. He that is not with you in heart and soul is against you—possibly not consciously against you, but whether conscious or not, the injurious result to you is the same. If a man, through carelessness, drop a brick on your head the damage is the same to you as if he willfully flung it. Those whom we may call our friends and who think themselves really so, may by their different way of life and of thinking, drop unawares many bricks on our heads, and when we feel obliged to go out of their way to avoid them, we may be accused of being harsh and unnatural.

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Life has an ever‑growing charm and interest, when we can feel from month to month that we are gaining more and more mastery of the material agencies about us, that extremes of heat or cold discomfort us less than formerly, that we can put on a mood of mind as we would a suit of armor to throw off all manner of annoyances from disagreeable people or surroundings, or harsh noises, or unpleasant sights suddenly thrust upon us, that instead of being their slave we can make ourselves more and more unconscious of them, that when in the morning the whimsical body insists that it has no appetite, and we feel no disposition to take an amount of food necessary for its sustenance, we can command to us a vigorous appetite, and that the “Winter’s cold,” we thought we must endure for weeks we can throw off in a few days or hours.

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These are few, a very few of the things that we need strength to accomplish, and the more we silently call on the Exhaustless Bank of Supreme Power for that strength the more will be given us, and we shall go on from victory to victory, from joy great to joy greater, and from power great to power greater.

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Q's note:

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You are healing, Baby.  You are doing well.  Keep going! :)