E8. Buried Talents.

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A girl has a distaste for “housework,” if she has no aptitude for washing, scouring, cooking and sweeping, if she does not evidence the ordinary signs and proclivities for filling the position, the world accords to so many girls that of the “good housekeeper;” let her alone. Be sure that some power within her needs time and rest to grow. You do not make matters any better by forcing her to occupations for which she has no inclination. You are probably making matters much worse. You are developing an indifferent “house‑wife,” and starving possibly the soul of a woman of great ability, in some direction.

 

Rank heresy! Nonsense! you cry. “Every girl should be taught to bake, brew, boil, sweep, scrub and how to “keep house.” She should not be brought up in idleness.

 

Very good, drive your idle child to work, vex her soul with pots and pans. Ten or fifteen years hence, look upon her and see if she is an honor to your strict training. Many are the broken down creatures to‑day who might have “amounted to something,” had the talent or talents given them have been allowed time and rest in which to grow, and be recognized and fostered when they put forth their first buds of promise. You cannot drive a quality, a power, a talent in upon itself, without risk of dreadful results. Would you attempt to hammer back the apple bud and insist that it be a pear blossom? That is the rule of the world in thousands of cases. The bud of the youthful artist is discouraged, the rising genius repressed perhaps by the parent. Why? “Oh artists are such a poor lot. They do not, save in exceptional cases, make money.” True. And for such reason it is sometimes the parents that takes the child’s talent and buries it for him, or her.

 

Power and talent grow in repose. The solution of mineral producing the finest crystallization needs to be kept perfectly quiet while the new combination is forming. The best fruitage of mind whether of invention, art, science or sentiment, must form under similar conditions. Your “original thinker” develops best while he is apparently idle. “Industry” in what is called “literary work,” often makes “backs” of race horses. Every man and every woman contain in themselves the elements and powers in embryo of entire self reliance. Every individual should so base himself in his mind. You should say continually to yourself, “though I have not the power to carry out my design to‑day, still I am ever growing up to that power. If I lean or depend for help to‑day, still it is my aspiration to be independent of such dependency as soon as possible.”

 

Dependency on somebody or something is one of the unconscious errors in thought most prevalent to‑day. Theology has taught that we are “nothing without God.” So we are. But God or the Infinite Spirit of good and power is everywhere, and we have the glorious and, as yet, unappreciated power of ever calling to us and adding eternally to ourselves more and more of this spirit or element.

 

God or the Infinite Spirit of good “works in us and through us.” We are all parts of God and each individual as such part is ever glorifying God by gaining more and more Godliness. That is, more and more power for doing. We must hold the thought in our minds that we have more of this power to‑day than we had yesterday. We must cut loose more and more from the idea of a dependency on any one or any power, save the power we can ever call to ourselves. Every individual is an empire ever increasing in power.

 

“But are we not dependent on others in every phase of life?” may be asked. “How should we live did not others prepare our food, build our houses, wash our clothing, and minister to our many needs?” We answer, it is a law of nature that the more we wisely try to help ourselves, the more do we help others, and thereby get help from them. Wisdom makes effort to gain perfect health and a balanced mind. The mere possession of these alone is a benefit to all with whom we come in contact and many more. If your spirit is powerful and healthy it will send its invigorating forces to people far from you. A spirit which has reached the consciousness that it is through prayer or the laws of demand ever calling to itself new forces from the exhaustless source of force, and never losing an atom of that force, so called to it, is a benefit to thousands it may never see with the physical eye.

 

It is sending of its force to every person of whom it thinks. It is as a sun warming into life all on which it shines, even as our sun begets life out of the rugged rock on which its rays fall.

 

As you increase in patience, in exactness, in decision, in method, in neatness, in self‑control, in all that goes to make of yourself a relatively perfect organized being, do these qualities flow from you to others, and as they increase in these will they flow back from those they benefit to you. If you send this quality of thought to them from the impulse of love or desire to help, so will they respond in time and send the same quality back to you through the resistless impulse of love and gratitude. You cannot help others without being helped yourself. You cannot send out helpful thought to others without getting from them in return helpful thought so far as they have ability to give it.

 

You cannot injure others without being injured yourself. You cannot send any shade of evil thought to others without injury to yourself. If those to whom you send such character of evil thought meet it and turn it aside by the thought of goodwill to you, your thought will return to you. Self dependence brings to you the very result unwisely sought by dependence. The person who leans on you and depends on you for everything must tire you out at last. You will see eventually how great an injustice it is to allow any person so to depend. It cripples their own capacity for independence. It retards the strengthening of that power through exercise by which they could call to themselves more of any quality out of the elements, or, in other words, out of the boundless realm of Infinite Spirit or Force. You are offering yourself as a crutch to a person who has sound limbs. To encourage dependency in another is to strengthen their delusion in their own weakness. It is teaching them to be everlasting borrowers when they have a bank of their own. It is often as the lending to them of means which they cannot wholly appropriate or use to best advantage while others might be greatly benefited by such means and repay you a far better interest.

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It is right to expect return for what we give. It is right because it is a necessity. If you are ever giving another of the richness of your superior thought; if you are always planning and working for the entertainment and pleasure of some person who takes all you give and has for you little or no power to entertain you in return, you are injuring yourself and that other person. You are giving your bread and getting stones in return. You are teaching and encouraging that person to give only stones. You are encouraging a life of selfishness and stupidity. You are preventing another sun from shining, another God or Goddess from maturing. You may likewise through over‑much absorption of that person’s inferior thought being weighed down by it, crippled by it, and oppressed by an inertia or lack of energy not your own. You are swayed by their thought, and sometimes made to say and do things you would not were you freed from it. Your legitimate plans and schemes for your own advancement are retarded or crippled because your own thought, element of ambition, aspiration, courage and energy is adulterated and alloyed with the inferior thought of self‑dependency which is slavish. That mental slavery which is internally content to depend entirely on another has always in it the elements of cowardice and selfishness.

 

So if yours is the superior thought, and consequently you are the wiser person, you are in this case the greater sinner and wrong‑doer. Dependency is blind. It must be taught how to depend on itself, and “work out its own salvation.” Will you then (who can see) allow the blind slave of dependency to travel on and on without ever calling on its own rightful powers, without which it can never gain permanent happiness?

 

The cultivation of self independency and self reliance must commence in your own mind and by yourself.

 

Have you your rights to assert before an unjust person, or a reasonable request to make of him which you may imagine he will consider as audacious? Is it a person of whose past injustice you can speak freely before friends who sympathize with you, but when before him, the one of all ones who should hear, you are silent? Why? Because you are afraid to speak.

 

Deny in your mind at home, in the privacy of your chamber, that you fear that person. See yourself in mind making to him a fair, calm and cool statement of your case, and that without flurry or loss of temper. Make this mental statement in the sentiment and full desire of justice for both of you. See yourself in what you call imagination as one who only wants what is right and nothing more.

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When you do this you are actually doing your work. Your mind, your thought, as an unseen element traveling through the air is at that very moment acting on that person’s mind. As you have in mind presented your case in all justice and equity to him, so will your thought present itself as it flows from you to the person in question. You are then at that moment arguing your case with him and arguing with the element of thought, which is always the most powerful—the thought of justice of good‑will, which desires not revenge for wrong, but only redress.

 

But very many people who think of a wrong done them by another think what they dare not say to that person face to face. They may think in the spirit of revenge, of “getting even,” of causing some loss or suffering to the person in question because he has not done right. This process of thinking is the process of sending the thought element of some form of ugliness to the person thought of. It is the ugly thought of dependency—the slavish cowardly thought which puts out what it dare not put out in words before the person to whom such thought is sent. As so sent this thought element reaches the person in question. It irritates and annoys him. His thought of you is unpleasant. If in thought you see yourself as in fear of that person, so will he see, or rather feel you. This with a large class of mind arouses contempt. That works against your case. If by yourself you place yourself in mind as one who is not afraid of him, yet is not revengeful—as one who justice being done, is desirous afterward only of helping him, you are then sending him in thought the most powerful plea for yourself.

 

The “sense of justice” is not a mere metaphor. It is a quality in every person’s nature as real as earth or air. In some it is more alive than in others. When you send out just calm, cool thought, it acts on that sense in another as light acts on your eye. It makes that person hear your just plea. He cannot avoid hearing it. When you place yourself in mind before yourself according to your highest ideal of manhood or womanhood, you are so placing your higher self before the person to whom you send your thought. If so, you send yourself out in thought, you send out the strongest power.

 

The independent mind and life mean the freed mind. The freed mind is that which thinks no thought annoying to itself. It puts out then no element of thought save what is pleasing.

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to it and others whom that thought reaches. The mind so originating and sending out such thought to others is ever building itself up on a basis of independence of which the material (the thought of good‑will) is gladly given it by others. When others so send it, their thought of good‑will, they send also of whatever talent they possess. Your improvement in music, in painting, in any art or science will be quicker for the thought sent you by proficients in such art, who are friendly to you. Because as thought is element, the quality of their talent comes in their thought to you, is absorbed by you and is grafted on you so far as you have capacity to receive it. Your capacity to receive it depends on your freedom from all jarring of evil thought and your good‑will and unselfishness. Selfishness will close you to the absorption of such thought. Unselfishness will open for you the doors to it.

 

It brings to you ever more life to think of things full of life, health and vigor and, so far as convenient, have such things in physical form before you. Such as children in bounding health, trees and flowers, birds and animals not caged but in their native condition, water in motion, surfs, rapids and cataracts, moving clouds, and breezes. As either imaged or made in mind or sensed materially the thoughts they suggest bring to you the current of live healthy thought, and this acts and enters into your body, building into it like material. Any verse or description of this character is a very healthy sentiment to dwell on, and if it recurs frequently to your memory it is a very healthy sign, for every time it does so recur it is bringing a literal solid and lasting good to mind and body.

 

Not only do these live healthy thoughts rest and clear the mind and strengthen the body, but the live strong thought current which you connect yourself thereby with and which enters with them into your mind, sweeps away from it images of decay and death, cleanses it of unhealthy morbid imaginings, and as this clear, vigorous current gains more and more access to your mind, it will bear away wholly and for ever all the spiritual dust, cobwebs, vermin and uncleanliness which may have lodged there and caused you great pain.

 

As you grow more and more into this mental condition you will not only see but feel more and more life in the many expressions of nature about you.

 

Of whatever brings an emotion of fear or of rest or pleasure there must be something, some element to cause such emotion. The power we call spirit expresses itself in many forms. It binds together the tree in the shape we see it this month or this year. It changes the shape of that tree and increases its girth and height next year. The same mysterious force so forms and changes the shape of bird and animal up to the period of maturity. It is the moving power of the ocean of water below and the ocean of air above.

 

We, with our physical senses, only see or feel the physical part of the tree which spirit is so shaping. Those physical organs do not sense the real, the growing moving power of the tree, bird, animal or of ourselves.

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But we have in embryo or latent a set of senses far finer and far more powerful which will when ripened, sense, see and feel the real, the growing power of the tree, and of all live growing things. Those senses are already awakening and stirring when we get pleasure in the thought of live, vigorous things above spoken of. They are then literally going forth absorbing of the life or spirit of tree, bird, animal, wave, wind, and flying cloud, and bringing such life to us.

 

By this means or this mental condition, we may get the life or growing power of the tree, bird, or animal in ourselves. We get in the thought of the billows, the surge, the cataract, the breeze, the gale, their power in us. We may so get the youthful life of plant, bird or animal. We want their life in its youthful stage or up to maturity. That is their constructive period when they are building up their forms, or rather when this spiritual power is building up the material into such forms.

 

I do not mean that we should endeavor to force ourselves to the contemplation of these things. Forced contemplation is no contemplation at all. It is an attitude of mind having no power to absorb this life or spirit. It will only do harm. But if you are alive to the value of this kind of thought and desire it, it will come to you easily and naturally. You will then have more and more in your mind some image expressive of real vigorous life—the sun, a flower, a forest, an ocean beach, and such mind images will in no wise interfere with the power and force of your thought in your business or art—no more than your occasional glance at the flower in your buttonhole, a reminder of the affection of your wife who placed it there turns your thought from its proper course in the day’s affairs.

 

This kind of thought awakens into life our now latent spiritual senses. The more these are so exercised and awakened, the more power have they. The more power they gain the more of this life can they bring from all these forms of material life to repair, reconstruct and rejuvenate our bodies. For in reality it is mind or spirit that must be first so built before the body can be. When the spirit is so attracting to itself healthy or constructive spiritual elements, these must in time assimilate and express themselves in the body.

 

Spirit is also at work on all decaying forms of material organization. It is simply taking them to pieces. It is as a tearing down of the house and out of its materials building a new. So the decomposed matter and its portion of spirit also enters into the composition of the new and growing plant to build that up.

 

But we do not want this power of spirit to act on us. We do not want to absorb of the tearing to pieces or decaying power. Therefore, we will turn our minds from the destructive to the constructive spiritual forces, from the dead animal to the live one, from the weakness of material age to the force and fire of growing youth, from livid fungi in cellars and caverns to green, healthy growths in the sunlight, from stagnant pools to clear flowing brooks, from pictures of grief and gloom to pictures of joy, from sickness to health, from anxiety, seriousness and sullenness to cheer, liveliness and gaiety.

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A lively strain of music brings to you the mind sentiment or spirit of the person at the time of composing it. It brings also the spirit of those who are performing it. This is one great aid in bringing life. In the education of the future, music for every person will be deemed as necessary as is reading and writing at present, for it will be clearly seen that it is a most powerful means for bringing life, health and strength.

 

Many more persons have “music in them” than is generally imagined, and all of these can bring that music out of them on some instrument, or with the voice, even if unaided by others.

 

Music is inherent in every human spirit, and all spirit and some of our liveliest and most care dispelling melodies came without teachers direct from the sunshine of the negro’s heart while in captivity.

 

You do not need in order to get and absorb of their life or spirit to be always in the material sight of trees, waters or the country. If it come easy and convenient so to be among these things—if you can step from your door in nature’s heart or survey it from your window so much the better. But to take long walks in field or forest for sake of exercise or for sake of the fresher element you suppose you may absorb in so doing is, in some cases, a means of injury. If the body is in any degree weak you may, in so doing, give out more strength than you receive and return weaker than before. If the body is relatively strong and the weather is harsh or bitterly cold, you may expend more strength in resisting the elements than you will gain. You are not then always placing your mind as a magnet to attract to itself the real force or element, of which all in forest and field is the outward or seen, covering. You may be among those seen coverings of tree, plant, animal and other things nearly all the time, and attract nothing of their force. If so much of your mind is expended in moving your body about, you may not keep it in the state to attract and receive of that spirit. This is the mental condition of many a farmer who is at fifty rheumatic, complaining and almost broken down. He may have lived amid the most beautiful scenery, but little of his mind was appreciative of it. Therefore he could not draw from it. He saw in the tree chiefly firewood, cut it down without a shade of regret, and valued nature chiefly as a marketable commodity. So in a measure is it right and necessary for him so to do to gain his subsistence under our present material system of life. But in seeing only in nature what he could turn into cash, and in feeling so little of its spiritual meaning force and use, he cuts himself off from a source and supply of actual life.

 

But you, having a pleasure in the thought of these things, can draw their force or spirit to you in the city room, though the tall buildings about you almost shut out the sky; they cannot shut the forest, the breeze, the white‑capped wave out of your mind. Nor can they prevent their spiritual force from coming to you and recuperating you in mind and body. For whatever you open your mind to, that it must attract.

 

Why do children so love to watch the falling snow‑flakes? Because the spirit in its new body feels more intensely the spirit and force of the snow‑flake. Because that spirit is then more alive and keen as to its spiritual sense than it will be a few years later when it is, as it were, crusted over and blunted as to such keenness by the duller thought and error absorbed of the older people with whom it is in daily contact.

 

This is precisely the mental condition we wish to bring to ourselves. We want also that spiritual force which the child does receive. That will keep us ever young. We want this power of childhood without its ignorance and helplessness. We want to be wise without being unattractive or decrepit. Greater wisdom must bring life and youth in every sense. Decrepitude and the decay of old age do not prove the highest wisdom. They do prove ignorance. “The tree is known by its fruit.” A crop of weakness and failing powers proves defect somewhere.

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Suppose that you should suddenly find you had some new organs and senses in you similar to your mouth, stomach, and sense of taste. Suppose also that in tree, plant, animal and all healthy and vigorous things you should find a new substance or element unseen and unknown to you before, and that your new mouth was capable of taking it in and causing it to assimilate with and prove a source of strength and refreshment to mind and body.

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Now, exactly in this relation do your other and spiritual senses serve you, and exactly so do they take in and assimilate these spiritual elements to refresh and build you up. Only these powers analogous to the material mouth, taste and stomach are now in a relatively weak condition. They are like the weak infant stomach and limited capacity for getting sustenance and strength from solid foods during its earlier years. But like the infants, these spiritual organs or capacities must grow stronger by exercise and get more from what they feed on as they grow stronger

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It is this healthy, vigorous thought, the spirit essence and strength of nature and natural things that will not only benefit you, but also unfold your latent talents, making of you greater and ever greater beings. There are no finalities in the empire of thought.

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Q's note:

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"Power and Talent Grow in Repose." So does Inner Peace!

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