The Game of Life and How to Play It

THE GAME

Most people think of life as a battle. But it is not a battle; it is a game.

It is a game, however, that cannot be played successfully without knowing spiritual law. The Old and New Testaments give the rules of the game with wonderful clarity. Jesus Christ taught that it was a great game of Giving and Receiving.

“Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” This means that whatever a person sends out, in word or deed, will return to him. What he gives, he will receive.

If he gives hate, he will receive hate. If he gives love, he will receive love. If he gives criticism, he will receive criticism. If he lies, he will be lied to. If he cheats, he will be cheated.

We are also taught that the imagination, the faculty that forms images in the mind, plays a leading part in the game of life.

“Keep thy heart (or imagination) with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life.” (Prov. 4:23.)

This means that whatever a person pictures will, sooner or later, take outward form in his affairs.

I know of a man who feared a certain disease. It was a very rare disease and difficult to catch. But he pictured it continually and read about it until it appeared in his body. He died, the victim of a distorted imagination.

So to play the game of life successfully, we must train the imagination. A person whose imagination is trained to picture only good brings into his life “every righteous desire of his heart”: health, wealth, love, friends, perfect self-expression, and his highest ideals.

The imagination has been called “The Scissors of the Mind.” Day by day it keeps cutting out the pictures a person holds there, and sooner or later he meets his own creations in the outer world.

To train the imagination successfully, a person must understand how his mind works. The Greeks said, “Know Thyself.”

The mind has three departments: the subconscious, the conscious, and the superconscious.

The subconscious is simply power without direction. Like steam or electricity, it does what it is directed to do. It has no power of induction; it does not reason things out for itself.

Whatever a person feels deeply or pictures clearly is impressed upon the subconscious mind. The subconscious then carries it out in the smallest detail.

For example, a woman I know always “made believe,” as a child, that she was a widow. She “dressed up” in black clothes and wore a long black veil, and people thought she was very clever and amusing.

She grew up and married a man she deeply loved. Within a short time he died, and for many years she wore black and a sweeping veil.

The picture of herself as a widow had been impressed upon her subconscious mind. In due time it worked itself out, regardless of the havoc it caused.

The conscious mind has been called the mortal or carnal mind.

It is the human mind, and it sees life as it appears to be. It sees death, disaster, sickness, poverty, and limitation of every kind, and it impresses these upon the subconscious.

The superconscious mind is the God Mind within each person. It is the realm of perfect ideas.

Within it is the “perfect pattern” that Plato spoke of: the Divine Design. For there is a Divine Design for each person.

“There is a place that you are to fill and no one else can fill, something you are to do, which no one else can do.”

A perfect picture of this exists in the superconscious mind. It usually flashes across the conscious mind as an unattainable ideal, “something too good to be true.”

In reality, it is a person’s true destiny, or destination, flashed to him from the Infinite Intelligence within himself.

Many people, however, do not know their true destinies. They strive for things and situations that do not belong to them, and these would bring only failure and dissatisfaction if they were achieved.

For example, a woman came to me and asked me to “speak the word” that she would marry a certain man she was very much in love with. She called him A. B.

I replied that this would violate spiritual law. But I said I would speak the word for the right man, the “divine selection,” the man who belonged to her by divine right.

I added, “If A. B. is the right man, you can’t lose him. If he isn’t, you will receive his equivalent.”

She saw A. B. often, but their friendship made no progress. One evening she called and said, “Do you know, for the last week A. B. hasn’t seemed so wonderful to me.”

I replied, “Maybe he is not the divine selection. Another man may be the right one.”

Soon afterward she met another man, who fell in love with her at once and said she was his ideal. In fact, he said all the things she had always wished A. B. would say to her.

She remarked, “It was quite uncanny.”

She soon returned his love and lost all interest in A. B.

This shows the law of substitution. A right idea was substituted for a wrong one, so no loss or sacrifice was involved.

Jesus Christ said, “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” He also said that the Kingdom was within man.

The Kingdom is the realm of right ideas, the divine pattern.

Jesus Christ taught that a person’s words play a leading part in the game of life. “By your words ye are justified and by your words ye are condemned.”

Many people have brought disaster into their lives through careless words.

For example, a woman once asked me why her life had become one of poverty and limitation. She used to have a home, surrounded by beautiful things, and she had plenty of money.

We found that she had often grown tired of managing her home. She had said again and again, “I’m sick and tired of things. I wish I lived in a trunk.” And she added, “Today I am living in that trunk.” She had talked herself into a trunk.

The subconscious mind has no sense of humor, and people often joke themselves into unhappy experiences.

For example, a woman who had a great deal of money joked constantly about “getting ready for the poorhouse.”

Within a few years she was almost destitute. She had impressed her subconscious mind with a picture of lack and limitation.

Fortunately, the law works both ways. A situation of lack can be changed into one of plenty.

For example, on a hot summer day a woman came to me for a “treatment” for prosperity. She was worn out, dejected, and discouraged. She said she had just eight dollars in the world.

I said, “Good. We’ll bless the eight dollars and multiply them, as Jesus Christ multiplied the loaves and the fishes.” For He taught that every person has the power to bless and to multiply, to heal and to prosper.

She asked, “What shall I do next?”

I replied, “Follow your intuition. Do you have a ‘hunch’ to do anything, or to go anywhere?”

Intuition means in-tuition: being taught from within. It is a person’s unerring guide, and I will discuss its laws more fully in a later chapter.

The woman answered, “I don’t know. I seem to have a ‘hunch’ to go home. I have just enough money for the fare.”

Her home was in a distant city, and life there was one of lack and limitation. The reasoning mind, the intellect, would have said, “Stay in New York, get work, and make some money.”

I replied, “Then go home. Never violate a hunch.”

I spoke these words for her: “Infinite Spirit, open the way for great abundance for ——. She is an irresistible magnet for all that belongs to her by divine right.” I told her to repeat them continually as well.

She left for home immediately. One day, while calling on a woman, she was brought back into contact with an old friend of her family.

Through this friend she received thousands of dollars, in a most miraculous way. She has often said to me, “Tell people about the woman who came to you with eight dollars and a hunch.”

There is always plenty along a person’s path. But it can be brought into visible form only through desire, faith, or the spoken word. Jesus Christ made it clear that a person must make the first move.

“Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” (Mat. 7:7.)

In the Scriptures we read:

“Concerning the works of my hands, command ye me.”

Infinite Intelligence, God, is always ready to carry out a person’s smallest or greatest demands.

Every desire, spoken or unspoken, is a demand. We are often startled to have a wish suddenly fulfilled.

For example, one Easter I saw many beautiful rose-trees in the florists’ windows. I wished I would receive one, and for an instant I saw it in my mind being carried through the door.

Easter came, and with it a beautiful rose-tree. The next day I thanked my friend and told her it was just what I had wanted.

She replied, “I didn’t send you a rose-tree. I sent you lilies!”

The florist had mixed up the order. He sent me a rose-tree simply because I had set the law in action, and I had to have a rose-tree.

Nothing stands between a person and his highest ideals, and every desire of his heart, except doubt and fear. When a person can “wish without worrying,” every desire will be instantly fulfilled.

In a later chapter I will explain more fully the scientific reason for this, and how fear must be erased from consciousness.

Fear is a person’s only enemy: fear of lack, fear of failure, fear of sickness, fear of loss, and a feeling of insecurity on some level. Jesus Christ said, “Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?” (Mat. 8:26.)

So we must substitute faith for fear. Fear is only faith turned upside down. It is faith in evil instead of good.

The object of the game of life is to see one’s good clearly and to wipe out every mental picture of evil. This must be done by impressing the subconscious mind with a realization of good.

A very brilliant man who has achieved great success told me he had suddenly erased all fear from his consciousness by reading a sign that hung in a room. Printed in large letters was this statement: “Why worry? It will probably never happen.”

These words were stamped permanently upon his subconscious mind. He now holds a firm conviction that only good can come into his life, and therefore only good can appear in it.

In the next chapter I will deal with the different methods of impressing the subconscious mind. It is a person’s faithful servant, but one must be careful to give it the right orders.

Every person always has a silent listener at his side: his subconscious mind.

Every thought and every word is impressed upon it and carried out in amazing detail. It is like a singer making a recording on the sensitive disc of a phonograph. Every note and tone of the singer’s voice is registered. If he coughs or hesitates, that is registered too.

So let us break all the old, bad records in the subconscious mind, the records of our lives that we do not wish to keep, and make new and beautiful ones.

Speak these words aloud, with power and conviction:

“I now smash and demolish, by my spoken word, every untrue record in my subconscious mind. They shall return to the dust-heap of their native nothingness, for they came from my own vain imaginings. I now make my perfect records through the Christ within: the records of Health, Wealth, Love, and perfect Self-Expression.”

This is the square of life: the Game completed.

In the following chapters I will show how a person can change his conditions by changing his words. Anyone who does not know the power of the word is behind the times.

“Death and Life are in the power of the tongue.”
(Prov. 18:21.)

THE LAW OF PROSPERITY

“Yes, the Almighty shall be your defense,
and you shall have plenty of silver.”

One of the greatest messages the scriptures give to humanity is that God is man’s supply. Through his spoken word, man can release everything that belongs to him by divine right. He must, however, have perfect faith in his spoken word.

Isaiah said, “My word shall not return unto me void, but shall accomplish that whereunto it is sent.” We now know that words and thoughts are a tremendous vibratory force, constantly shaping a person’s body and affairs.

A woman came to me in great distress. She was going to be sued on the fifteenth of the month for three thousand dollars. She knew of no way to get the money and was in despair.

I told her that God was her supply, and that there is a supply for every demand.

So I spoke the word! I gave thanks that she would receive three thousand dollars at the right time and in the right way. I told her she must have perfect faith, and she must act on that perfect faith.

The fifteenth came, but no money had appeared. She phoned me and asked what she should do.

I replied, “It’s Saturday, so they won’t sue you today. Your part is to act rich. That shows perfect faith that you will receive the money by Monday.”

She asked me to have lunch with her to help keep up her courage. When I met her at a restaurant, I said, “This is no time to economize. Order an expensive lunch. Act as if you have already received the three thousand dollars.”

“All things whatsoever ye ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.” You must act as if you had already received.

The next morning she phoned and asked me to stay with her during the day. I said, “No. You are divinely protected, and God is never too late.”

That evening she phoned again, very excited. “My dear, a miracle has happened! I was sitting in my room this morning when the doorbell rang. I said to the maid, ‘Don’t let anyone in.’ But the maid looked out the window and said, ‘It’s your cousin with the long white beard.’

“So I said, ‘Call him back. I would like to see him.’ He was just turning the corner when he heard the maid’s voice, and he came back.

“He talked for about an hour. Just as he was leaving, he said, ‘Oh, by the way, how are your finances?’

“I told him I needed money, and he said, ‘Why, my dear, I’ll give you three thousand dollars on the first of the month.’

“I didn’t want to tell him I was going to be sued. What should I do? I won’t receive it until the first of the month, and I must have it tomorrow.”

I said, “I’ll keep on ‘treating.’” And I said, “Spirit is never too late. I give thanks that she has received the money on the invisible plane, and that it appears on time.”

The next morning her cousin called her and said, “Come to my office this morning, and I’ll give you the money.” That afternoon she had three thousand dollars in her bank account, and she wrote checks as fast as her excitement would allow.

If you ask for success but prepare for failure, you will get the situation you prepared for.

For example, a man came to me asking me to speak the word that a certain debt would be cleared. I found that he spent his time planning what he would say to the man he owed when he failed to pay the bill. In doing so, he cancelled out my words. He should have pictured himself paying the debt.

The Bible gives a wonderful illustration of this. Three kings were in the desert without water for their men and horses. They consulted the prophet Elisha, who gave them this astonishing message:

“Thus saith the Lord—Ye shall not see wind, neither shall ye see rain, yet make this valley full of ditches.”

A person must prepare for the thing he has asked for, even when there isn’t the slightest sign of it.

For example, a woman needed to find an apartment during a year when apartments in New York were in very short supply. It was considered almost impossible. Her friends felt sorry for her and said, “Isn’t it too bad? You’ll have to store your furniture and live in a hotel.”

She replied, “You needn’t feel sorry for me. I’m a superman, and I’ll get an apartment.”

She spoke the words: “Infinite Spirit, open the way for the right apartment.” She knew there was a supply for every demand. She knew she was “unconditioned,” because she was working on the spiritual plane, and that “one with God is a majority.”

She had been thinking about buying new blankets when “the tempter” spoke up. This was the adverse thought, the reasoning mind, and it suggested, “Don’t buy the blankets. Maybe you won’t get an apartment after all, and then you’ll have no use for them.”

She promptly answered, to herself, “I’ll dig my ditches by buying the blankets!” So she prepared for the apartment and acted as though she already had it.

She found one in a miraculous way. It was given to her even though there were more than two hundred other applicants.

The blankets showed active faith.

Needless to say, the ditches the three kings dug in the desert were filled to overflowing. (Read II Kings.)

Getting into the spiritual swing of things is not easy for the average person. Thoughts of doubt and fear surge up from the subconscious. They are the “army of the aliens,” and they must be put to flight. This explains why it is so often “darkest before the dawn.”

A big demonstration, the visible arrival of what one has asked for, is usually preceded by tormenting thoughts.

When you make a statement of high spiritual truth, you challenge the old beliefs in your subconscious. “Error is exposed” so that it can be put out.

This is the time to repeat your affirmations of truth again and again, and to rejoice and give thanks that you have already received. “Before ye call I shall answer.” This means that “every good and perfect gift” already belongs to man, waiting only for him to recognize it.

A person can only receive what he sees himself receiving.

The children of Israel were told they could have all the land they could see. This is true of every man. He possesses only the land within his own mental vision.

Every great work and every major accomplishment has come into being through someone holding to the vision. And often, just before the big achievement, comes apparent failure and discouragement.

When the children of Israel reached the “Promised Land,” they were afraid to go in. They said it was full of giants who made them feel like grasshoppers: “And there we saw the giants, and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers.” This is almost everyone’s experience.

But a person who knows spiritual law is not disturbed by appearances. He rejoices while he is “yet in captivity.” That is, he holds to his vision and gives thanks that the goal is already accomplished, that he has already received.

Jesus Christ gave a wonderful example of this. He said to his disciples: “Say not ye, there are yet four months and then cometh the harvest? Behold, I say unto you, lift up your eyes and look on the fields; for they are ripe already to harvest.”

His clear vision pierced the “world of matter.” He saw the fourth-dimensional world clearly, with things as they really are, perfect and complete in Divine Mind.

So a person must always hold the vision of his journey’s end and claim the manifestation of what he has already received. It may be perfect health, love, supply, self-expression, a home, or friends.

These are all finished and perfect ideas registered in Divine Mind, which is man’s own superconscious mind. They must come through him, not to him.

For example, a man came to me asking for treatments for success. He had to raise fifty thousand dollars for his business within a set time. The deadline had almost passed when he came to me in despair. No one wanted to invest in his enterprise, and the bank had flatly refused him a loan.

I replied, “I suppose you lost your temper at the bank, and so you lost your power. You can control any situation if you first control yourself.”

“Go back to the bank,” I added, “and I will treat.” My treatment was: “You are identified in love with the spirit of everyone connected with the bank. Let the divine idea come out of this situation.”

He replied, “Woman, you are talking about an impossibility. Tomorrow is Saturday. The bank closes at twelve, and my train won’t get me there until ten. The deadline is tomorrow, and anyway, they won’t do it. It’s too late.”

I replied, “God doesn’t need any time and is never too late. With Him all things are possible.” I added, “I don’t know anything about business, but I know all about God.”

He replied, “It all sounds fine when I’m sitting here listening to you, but when I go out, it’s terrible.”

He lived in a distant city, and I heard nothing from him for a week. Then a letter came. It read: “You were right. I raised the money, and I will never again doubt the truth of everything you told me.”

I saw him a few weeks later and said, “What happened? You evidently had plenty of time after all.”

He replied, “My train was late, and I got there at a quarter to twelve. I walked into the bank calmly and said, ‘I have come for the loan,’ and they gave it to me without a question.”

It was the last fifteen minutes of the time he had been given, and Infinite Spirit was not too late.

In this case, the man could never have succeeded alone. He needed someone to help him hold to the vision. This is what one person can do for another.

Jesus Christ knew this truth when he said: “If two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven.”

A person gets too close to his own affairs and becomes doubtful and fearful. The friend or “healer” is not close to the situation, so he sees the success, health, or prosperity clearly and never wavers.

It is much easier to “demonstrate” for someone else than for oneself. So if you feel yourself wavering, you should not hesitate to ask for help.

A keen observer of life once said, “No man can fail if one person sees him successful.” Such is the power of the vision. Many a great man has owed his success to a wife, a sister, or a friend who “believed in him” and held without wavering to the perfect pattern!

THE POWER OF THE WORD

“By your words you will be justified,
and by your words you will be condemned.”

A person who knows the power of the word becomes very careful about what he says. He only has to watch how his words come back to him to see that they do “not return void.” Through what he says aloud, a person is constantly making laws for himself.

I knew a man who said, “I always miss the streetcar. It always pulls away just as I arrive.”

His daughter said, “I always catch the streetcar. It’s sure to come just as I get there.” This went on for years. Each of them had made a separate law for themselves, one of failure and one of success. This is the psychology behind superstitions.

A horseshoe or a rabbit’s foot has no power in itself. But when a person says it will bring good luck and believes it, that belief creates expectation in the subconscious mind. The expectation then attracts a “lucky situation.”

I find, however, that this will not “work” once a person has advanced spiritually and knows a higher law. One cannot go back, and must put away “graven images.”

For example, two men in my class had been very successful in business for several months when suddenly everything collapsed. We tried to analyze the situation. I found that instead of making their affirmations and looking to God for success and prosperity, each of them had bought a “lucky monkey.”

I said, “Oh, I see. You have been trusting in the lucky monkeys instead of God. Put away the lucky monkeys and call on the law of forgiveness.” A person has the power to forgive, or neutralize, his own mistakes.

They decided to throw the lucky monkeys down a coalhole, the chute into a cellar where coal was stored, and everything went well again.

This does not mean that one should throw away every “lucky” ornament or horseshoe in the house. But he must recognize that the power behind it is the one and only power, God. The object simply gives him a feeling of expectation.

One day I was with a friend who was in deep despair. As we crossed the street, she picked up a horseshoe. At once she was filled with joy and hope. She said God had sent her the horseshoe to keep up her courage.

At that moment, it was indeed about the only thing that could have reached her consciousness. Her hope became faith, and she eventually made a wonderful “demonstration.”

I want to make the distinction clear. The two men I mentioned earlier were depending on the monkeys alone. This woman recognized the power behind the horseshoe.

In my own case, it took a long time to free myself from the belief that a certain thing brought disappointment. Whenever that thing happened, disappointment always followed.

I found that the only way I could change my subconscious was by declaring, “There are not two powers. There is only one power, God. Therefore there are no disappointments, and this thing means a happy surprise.” I noticed a change at once, and happy surprises began coming my way.

I have a friend who said nothing could make her walk under a ladder. I told her, “If you are afraid, you are giving in to a belief in two powers, Good and Evil, instead of one. Since God is absolute, there can be no opposing power, unless people create the false idea of evil for themselves.”

I went on: “To show that you believe in only One Power, God, and that evil has no power or reality, walk under the next ladder you see.”

Soon afterward she went to her bank. She wanted to open her box in the safe-deposit vault, and there was a ladder standing in her path. She could not reach the box without passing under it.

She shrank back in fear and turned away. She could not face the lion in her path. But when she reached the street, my words rang in her ears, and she decided to go back and walk under the ladder.

It was a big moment in her life, because ladders had held her in bondage for years. She went back to the vault, and the ladder was no longer there!

This happens very often. If a person is willing to do something he is afraid to do, he does not have to do it.

This is the law of nonresistance, which is so little understood.

Someone has said that courage contains genius and magic. Face a situation without fear, and there is no situation to face. It falls away under its own weight.

The explanation is that fear attracted the ladder into the woman’s path, and fearlessness removed it.

So the invisible forces are always at work for a person, who is always “pulling the strings” himself, even though he does not know it. Because words carry vibratory power, whatever a person puts into words, he begins to attract. People who constantly talk about disease always attract it.

Once a person knows the truth, he cannot be too careful with his words. For example, I have a friend who often says on the phone, “Do come see me, and we’ll have a fine old-fashioned chat.”

This “old-fashioned chat” means an hour of about five hundred to a thousand destructive words. The main topics are loss, lack, failure, and sickness.

I reply, “No, thank you. I’ve had enough old-fashioned chats in my life. They are too expensive. But I would be glad to have a new-fashioned chat, and talk about what we want, not what we don’t want.”

There is an old saying that a person should only dare to use words for three purposes: to “heal, bless, or prosper.” What a person says about others will be said about him. What he wishes for someone else, he is wishing for himself.

“Curses, like chickens, come home to roost.”

If a man wishes someone “bad luck,” he is sure to attract bad luck himself. If he wishes to help someone succeed, he is wishing and helping himself to succeed.

The body can be renewed and transformed through the spoken word and clear vision, and disease can be completely wiped out of the consciousness. The metaphysician knows that every disease has a mental counterpart. To heal the body, one must first “heal the soul.”

The soul is the subconscious mind, and it must be “saved” from wrong thinking.

In the twenty-third psalm, we read, “He restores my soul.” This means that the subconscious mind, or soul, must be restored with the right ideas.

The “mystical marriage” is the marriage of the soul and the spirit, that is, of the subconscious and the superconscious mind. The two must become one.

When the subconscious is flooded with the perfect ideas of the superconscious, God and man are one. “I and the Father are one.”

That is, a person is then one with the realm of perfect ideas. He is the man made in God’s likeness and image (imagination), and he is given power and dominion over all created things: his mind, his body, and his affairs.

It is safe to say that all sickness and unhappiness come from breaking the law of love. “A new commandment I give to you: Love one another.” In the Game of Life, love, or good will, takes every trick.

For example, a woman I know had for years the appearance of a terrible skin disease. The doctors told her it was incurable, and she was in despair. She was an actress, and she feared she would soon have to give up her profession. She had no other way to support herself.

She did, however, get a good engagement, and on opening night she was a great “hit.” The critics gave her flattering reviews, and she was joyful and elated.

The next day she received notice that she was dismissed. A man in the cast had been jealous of her success and had gotten her sent away.

She felt hatred and resentment taking complete possession of her, and she cried out, “Oh God, don’t let me hate that man.” That night she worked for hours “in the silence.”

She said, “I soon came into a very deep silence. I seemed to be at peace with myself, with the man, and with the whole world. I continued this for the next two nights, and on the third day I found I was completely healed of the skin disease!”

By asking for love, or good will, she had fulfilled the law (“for love is the fulfilling of the law”). The disease, which came from resentment held in her subconscious, was wiped out.

Constant criticism produces rheumatism, because critical, discordant thoughts cause unnatural deposits in the blood, which settle in the joints.

Abnormal growths are caused by jealousy, hatred, unforgiveness, fear, and similar states. Every disease is caused by a mind that is not at ease.

I once said in my class, “There is no use asking anyone, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ We might just as well ask, ‘Who’s the matter with you?’”

Unforgiveness is the most common cause of disease. It will harden the arteries or the liver, and it will affect the eyesight. Endless ills follow in its wake.

One day I visited a woman who said she was ill from eating a poisoned oyster. I replied, “Oh, no. The oyster was harmless. You poisoned the oyster. What’s the matter with you?”

She answered, “Oh, about nineteen people.” She had quarreled with nineteen people and had become so out of harmony that she attracted the wrong oyster.

Any disharmony on the outside shows that there is disharmony in the mind. “As within, so without.”

A person’s only enemies are within himself. “And a man’s enemies will be those of his own household.” Personality is one of the last enemies to be overcome, because this planet is going through its initiation in love. That was Christ’s message: “Peace on earth, good will toward men.”

The enlightened person therefore tries to perfect himself through his dealings with his neighbor. His work is with himself: to send out good will and blessings to everyone. And the remarkable thing is that if you bless someone, he has no power to harm you.

For example, a man came to me and asked me to “treat” for his success in business. He sold machinery. A rival had appeared on the scene with what he claimed was a better machine, and my friend feared defeat.

I said, “First of all, we must wipe out all fear and know that God protects your interests, and that the divine idea must come out of this situation. That is, the right machine will be sold, by the right man, to the right man.”

I added, “Don’t hold a single critical thought toward that man. Bless him all day, and be willing not to sell your machine if that isn’t the divine idea.”

So he went to the meeting fearless and nonresistant, blessing the other man. He said the outcome was very remarkable. The other man’s machine refused to work, and he sold his own without the slightest difficulty.

“But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you.”

Good will creates a great aura of protection around the person who sends it, and “No weapon formed against him shall prosper.” Love and good will destroy the enemies within oneself, and so one has no enemies on the outside!

“There is peace on earth for the one who sends good will to others!”

THE LAW OF NONRESISTANCE

“Do not resist evil. Do not be overcome by evil,
but overcome evil with good.”

Nothing on earth can resist a person who is completely nonresistant.

The Chinese say that water is the most powerful element because it offers no resistance at all. Yet it can wear away a rock and sweep everything before it.

Jesus Christ said, “Resist not evil,” because He knew that in reality there is no evil, and therefore nothing to resist. Evil has come from man’s “vain imagination,” that is, from a belief in two powers, good and evil.

An old legend says that Adam and Eve ate from “Maya, the Tree of Illusion,” and so saw two powers instead of the one power, God.

Evil, then, is a false law that man has made for himself through “psychoma,” or soul sleep. Soul sleep means that man’s soul has been hypnotized by the race belief in sin, sickness, death, and the like. This belief is carnal, or mortal, thought, and his affairs have pictured outwardly the illusions he holds.

We read in an earlier chapter that man’s soul is his subconscious mind. Whatever he feels deeply, good or bad, that faithful servant brings into outward form. His body and his affairs show what he has been picturing. The sick man has pictured sickness, the poor man poverty, and the rich man wealth.

People often ask, “Why does a little child attract illness when it is too young even to know what illness means?”

I answer that children are sensitive and receptive to what others around them are thinking about them, and they often act out their parents’ fears.

I once heard a metaphysician say, “If you do not run your subconscious mind yourself, someone else will run it for you.”

Mothers often attract illness and disaster to their children without realizing it. They do this by constantly holding the children in fearful thoughts and watching for symptoms.

For example, a friend asked a woman whether her little girl had had the measles. She replied promptly, “Not yet!” Her answer implied that she expected the illness. She was therefore preparing the way for exactly what she did not want for herself and her child.

The man who is centered and established in right thinking, however, cannot be touched or influenced by the negative thoughts of others. He sends out only good will to his fellow men and is without fear. In fact, since he sends out only good thoughts, he can receive only good thoughts in return.

Resistance is hell, because it places man in a “state of torment.”

A metaphysician once gave me a wonderful recipe for taking every trick in the game of life. It is the height of nonresistance. He put it this way:

“At one time in my life I baptized children, and of course they had many names. Now I no longer baptize children; I baptize events. But I give every event the same name. If I have a failure, I baptize it success, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost!”

Here we see the great law of transmutation, which rests on nonresistance. Through his spoken word, every failure was transmuted into success.

For example, a woman who needed money, and who knew the spiritual law of opulence, was constantly thrown together in business with a man who made her feel very poor. He talked about lack and limitation, and she began to catch his poverty thoughts. So she disliked him and blamed him for her failure.

She knew that to demonstrate her supply, she first had to feel that she had already received it. A feeling of opulence must come before opulence appears.

One day it dawned on her that she was resisting the situation and seeing two powers instead of one. So she blessed the man and baptized the situation “Success”! She affirmed, “Since there is only one power, God, this man is here for my good and my prosperity.” That was exactly what he did not seem to be there for.

Soon afterward, through this man, she met a woman who paid her several thousand dollars for a service she had performed. The man then moved to a distant city and faded harmoniously out of her life.

Make the statement, “Every man is a golden link in the chain of my good.” All men are God in manifestation. They are waiting for man himself to give them the opportunity to serve the divine plan of his life.

“Bless your enemy, and you rob him of his ammunition.” His arrows will be transmuted into blessings.

This law holds for nations as well as for individuals. Bless a nation, send love and good will to every one of its inhabitants, and it loses its power to harm.

Man can gain a correct idea of nonresistance only through spiritual understanding. My students have often said to me, “I don’t want to be a doormat.” I reply, “When you use nonresistance wisely, no one will ever be able to walk over you.”

Another example: one day I was impatiently waiting for an important telephone call. I resisted every call that came in, and I made no outgoing calls myself, reasoning that they might interfere with the one I was expecting.

I should have said, “Divine ideas never conflict; the call will come at the right time,” and left it to Infinite Intelligence to arrange. Instead, I began to manage things myself. I made the battle mine, not God’s, and I stayed tense and anxious.

The bell did not ring for about an hour. Then I glanced at the phone and found that the receiver had been off the hook all that time, and the line was disconnected. My anxiety, my fear, and my belief in interference had brought about a total eclipse of the telephone.

Realizing what I had done, I immediately began blessing the situation. I baptized it “success” and affirmed, “I cannot lose any call that belongs to me by divine right; I am under grace, and not under law.”

A friend rushed out to the nearest telephone to ask the company to reconnect my line. She went into a crowded grocery store, but the owner left his customers and placed the call himself.

My phone was reconnected at once. Two minutes later I received a very important call, and about an hour after that, the one I had been waiting for.

One’s ships come in over a calm sea.

As long as a person resists a situation, he will keep it with him. If he runs away from it, it will run after him.

For example, I said this to a woman one day, and she replied, “How true that is! I was unhappy at home. I disliked my mother, who was critical and domineering, so I ran away and got married. But I married my mother! My husband was exactly like her, and I had to face the same situation all over again.”

“Agree with thine adversary quickly.” This means agreeing that the adverse situation is good. Stay undisturbed by it, and it falls away under its own weight. “None of these things move me” is a wonderful affirmation.

An inharmonious situation comes from some inharmony within the man himself. When nothing in him responds emotionally to that situation, it fades from his path forever.

So we see that man’s work is always with himself.

People have said to me, “Give treatments to change my husband,” or “my brother.” I reply, “No, I will give treatments to change you. When you change, your husband and your brother will change.”

One of my students had a habit of lying. I told her it was a failure method, and that if she lied, she would be lied to. She replied, “I don’t care. I can’t possibly get along without lying.”

One day she was on the phone with a man she was very much in love with. She turned to me and said, “I don’t trust him. I know he’s lying to me.”

I replied, “Well, you lie yourself, so someone has to lie to you. And you can be sure it will be exactly the person you want the truth from.”

Some time later I saw her, and she said, “I’m cured of lying.”

I asked, “What cured you?”

She replied, “I’ve been living with a woman who lied worse than I did!”

People are often cured of their faults by seeing them in others. Life is a mirror, and we find only ourselves reflected in the people around us.

Living in the past is a failure method and a violation of spiritual law.

Jesus Christ said, “Behold, now is the accepted time,” and “Now is the day of Salvation.” Lot’s wife looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt.

The robbers of time are the past and the future. If the past keeps a person in bondage, he should bless it and forget it. He should bless the future, knowing that it holds endless joys for him. But he should live fully in the now.

For example, a woman came to me complaining that she had no money to buy Christmas gifts. She said, “Last year was so different. I had plenty of money and gave lovely presents, and this year I have scarcely a cent.”

I replied, “You will never demonstrate money while you feel sorry for yourself and live in the past. Live fully in the now, and get ready to give Christmas presents. Dig your ditches, and the money will come.”

She exclaimed, “I know what to do! I will buy some tinsel twine, Christmas seals, and wrapping paper.” I replied, “Do that, and the presents will come and stick themselves to the Christmas seals.”

This, too, showed financial fearlessness and faith in God. Her reasoning mind was telling her, “Keep every cent you have, because you can’t be sure you’ll get any more.”

She bought the seals, paper, and twine, and a few days before Christmas she received a gift of several hundred dollars. Buying the seals and twine had impressed her subconscious with expectancy and opened the way for the money to appear. She bought all her presents in plenty of time.

Man must live suspended in the moment.

“Look well, therefore, to this Day! Such is the salutation of the Dawn.”

He must be spiritually alert, always waiting for his leads and taking advantage of every opportunity.

One day I kept saying silently, “Infinite Spirit, don’t let me miss a trick,” and that evening I was told something very important. It is essential to begin the day with the right words.

Make an affirmation as soon as you wake up. For example:

“Thy will be done this day! Today is a day of completion; I give thanks for this perfect day, miracle shall follow miracle and wonders shall never cease.”

Make this a habit, and you will see wonders and miracles come into your life.

One morning I picked up a book and read, “Look with wonder at that which is before you!” It seemed to be my message for the day, so I repeated it again and again: “Look with wonder at that which is before you.”

At about noon I was given a large sum of money that I had been wanting for a certain purpose.

In a later chapter I will give the affirmations I have found most effective. However, no one should use an affirmation unless it is completely satisfying and convincing to his own consciousness. Affirmations are often changed to suit different people.

For example, the following has brought success to many:

“I have a wonderful work, in a wonderful way, I give wonderful service, for wonderful pay!”

I gave the first two lines to one of my students, and she added the last two.

The result was a very powerful statement, because there should always be perfect payment for perfect service, and a rhyme sinks easily into the subconscious. She went about singing it aloud. Soon she did receive wonderful work in a wonderful way, and gave wonderful service for wonderful pay.

Another student, a businessman, took it and changed the word “work” to “business.” He repeated, “I have a wonderful business, in a wonderful way, and I give wonderful service for wonderful pay.” That afternoon he made a forty-one-thousand-dollar deal, though there had been no activity in his affairs for months.

Every affirmation must be carefully worded and must completely “cover the ground.”

For example, I knew a woman in great need who made a demand for work. She received a great deal of work but was never paid anything. She now knows to add “wonderful service for wonderful pay.”

It is man’s divine right to have plenty, more than enough! “His barns should be full, and his cup should flow over!”

This is God’s idea for man. When man breaks down the barriers of lack in his own consciousness, the Golden Age will be his, and every righteous desire of his heart will be fulfilled!

THE LAW OF KARMA and THE LAW OF FORGIVENESS

We receive only what we give. The Game of Life is a game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, actions, and words come back to us sooner or later, with astonishing accuracy.

This is the law of Karma, which is Sanskrit for “Comeback.” As the Bible puts it, “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

A friend once told me a story about herself that shows the law at work. She said, “I make all my Karma on my aunt. Whatever I say to her, someone says to me. I’m often irritable at home. One day my aunt was talking to me during dinner, and I said to her, ‘No more talk. I want to eat in peace.’”

“The next day I was having lunch with a woman I very much wanted to impress. I was talking eagerly when she said to me, ‘No more talk. I want to eat in peace!’”

My friend has a high level of spiritual awareness. For that reason her Karma comes back to her much more quickly than it would to someone who is still living on the purely mental plane.

The more we know, the more we are responsible for. A person who knows Spiritual Law but does not practice it suffers greatly as a result. “The fear of the Lord (law) is the beginning of wisdom.” If we read the word “Lord” as “law,” many passages in the Bible become much clearer.

Consider “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord” (law). It is the law that takes vengeance, not God. God sees man as perfect, “created in his own image” (imagination), and given “power and dominion.”

This is the perfect idea of man, recorded in Divine Mind and waiting for us to recognize it. We can only become what we see ourselves to be, and we can only achieve what we see ourselves achieving.

An ancient saying puts it this way: “Nothing ever happens without an onlooker.”

We first see our failure or success, our joy or sorrow, before it moves into visible reality from the scenes we have set in our own imagination. We have seen this in the mother who pictures illness for her child, and in the woman who pictures success for her husband.

Jesus Christ said, “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

Freedom from all unhappy conditions, then, comes through knowledge, and specifically through a knowledge of Spiritual Law.

Obedience comes before authority. The law obeys us when we obey the law. The law of electricity, for instance, must be obeyed before electricity becomes our servant. Handled in ignorance, it becomes a deadly enemy. The same is true of the laws of Mind!

Here is an example. A woman with a strong personal will wanted a house that belonged to an acquaintance. She often formed mental pictures of herself living in it. In time, the man died, and she moved into the house.

Several years later, after she had learned about Spiritual Law, she asked me, “Do you think I had anything to do with that man’s death?”

I replied, “Yes. Your desire was so strong that everything made way for it. But you paid your Karmic debt. Your husband, whom you loved devotedly, died soon afterward, and for years the house was a white elephant on your hands.”

Still, the original owner could not have been affected by her thoughts if he had stood firmly in the truth, and neither could her husband. Both of them, however, were under Karmic law.

Feeling such a strong desire for the house, the woman should have said, “Infinite Intelligence, give me the right house, just as charming as this one, the house that is mine by divine right.”

Divine selection would have satisfied her completely and brought good to everyone involved. The divine pattern is the only safe pattern to work by.

Desire is a tremendous force. It must be directed into the right channels, or chaos follows.

In demonstrating, that is, in bringing a desire into visible form, the most important step is the first one: to “ask aright.” We should always ask only for what is ours by divine right.

To return to the example: suppose the woman had taken this attitude: “If this house I want is mine, I cannot lose it. If it is not mine, give me its equivalent.” Then, if the house had been the divine selection for her, the man might have decided to move out in a harmonious way. Otherwise, another house would have been provided in its place.

Anything forced into reality through personal will is always “ill-got,” and it “ever has bad success.”

We are told, “My will be done, not thine.” The curious thing is that we always get exactly what we want once we give up personal will. Letting go allows Infinite Intelligence to work through us.

“Stand ye still and see the salvation of the Lord” (law).

For example, a woman came to me in great distress. Her daughter had decided to take a very dangerous trip, and the mother was filled with fear.

She told me she had tried every argument. She had pointed out the dangers her daughter would face and had forbidden her to go. But the daughter only grew more rebellious and more determined.

I said to the mother, “You are forcing your personal will on your daughter, and you have no right to do that. Your fear of the trip is only attracting it, because we attract what we fear.”

I added, “Let go, and take your mental hands off. Put the matter in God’s hands, and use this statement: ‘I put this situation in the hands of Infinite Love and Wisdom. If this trip is the Divine plan, I bless it and no longer resist it. But if it is not divinely planned, I give thanks that it is now dissolved and dissipated.’”

A day or two later, her daughter said to her, “Mother, I’ve given up the trip.” The situation had returned to its “native nothingness.”

Learning to “stand still” seems to be very hard for us. I have dealt with this law more fully in the chapter on nonresistance.

I will give another example of sowing and reaping, one that came about in a most curious way.

A woman came to me saying that the bank had given her a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill. She was very upset, because, as she said, “The people at the bank will never admit their mistake.”

I replied, “Let’s analyze the situation and find out why you attracted it.” She thought for a few moments and then exclaimed, “I know! I sent a friend a lot of stage money, just as a joke.” So the law had sent her some stage money in return, because the law knows nothing about jokes.

I said, “Now we will call on the law of forgiveness and neutralize the situation.”

Christianity is founded on the law of forgiveness. Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the Karmic law, and the Christ within each person is that person’s Redeemer and Salvation from every inharmonious condition.

So I said, “Infinite Spirit, we call on the law of forgiveness and give thanks that she is under grace and not under law, and cannot lose this twenty dollars, which is hers by divine right.”

“Now,” I told her, “go back to the bank and tell them, without fear, that the bill was given to you there by mistake.”

She did as I said. To her surprise, they apologized, gave her another bill, and treated her with great courtesy.

Knowledge of the Law, then, gives us the power to “rub out our mistakes.” We cannot force the outer world to be what we are not inwardly.

If we want riches, we must first be rich in consciousness.

For example, a woman came to me asking for treatment for prosperity. She took little interest in running her household, and her home was in great disorder.

I said to her, “If you want to be rich, you must be orderly. All people with great wealth are orderly, and order is heaven’s first law.” I added, “You will never become rich with a burnt match in the pincushion.”

She had a good sense of humor and immediately began putting her house in order. She rearranged the furniture, straightened out her bureau drawers, and cleaned the rugs. Soon she made a large financial demonstration: a gift from a relative.

The woman herself was made over. She keeps her finances at a high pitch by always watching over her outward surroundings and expecting prosperity, knowing that God is her supply.

Many people do not realize that gifts and purchases are investments, and that hoarding and saving always lead to loss.

“There is that scattereth and yet increaseth; and there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty.”

For example, I knew a man who wanted to buy a fur-lined overcoat. He and his wife went to various shops, but he found none he wanted. He said they all looked too cheap.

At last he was shown one that the salesman said was worth a thousand dollars. Because it was late in the season, the manager would sell it to him for five hundred dollars.

All he had at the time came to about seven hundred dollars. The reasoning mind would have said, “You can’t afford to spend nearly everything you have on a coat.” But he was very intuitive and never reasoned things out.

He turned to his wife and said, “If I get this coat, I’ll make a ton of money!” His wife gave her consent, though weakly.

About a month later, he received a ten-thousand-dollar commission. The coat made him feel so rich that it connected him with success and prosperity. Without the coat, he would not have received the commission. It was an investment that paid large dividends!

If we ignore these inner promptings to spend or to give, the same amount of money will leave us anyway, in some dull or unhappy way.

For example, a woman told me that on Thanksgiving Day she announced to her family that they could not afford a Thanksgiving dinner. She had the money, but she decided to save it.

A few days later, someone came into her room and took from the bureau drawer the exact amount the dinner would have cost.

The law always stands behind the person who spends fearlessly, with wisdom.

For example, one of my students was shopping with her little nephew. The child begged for a toy, and she told him she could not afford it.

Suddenly she realized that she was looking for lack and was not recognizing God as her supply!

So she bought the toy. On her way home, she picked up from the street the exact amount of money she had paid for it.

Our supply is inexhaustible and unfailing when we trust it completely, but faith or trust must come before the demonstration. “According to your faith be it unto you.”

“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Faith holds the vision steady, so that the negative pictures are dissolved and dissipated, and “in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.”

Jesus Christ brought the good news, the gospel, that there is a law higher than the law of Karma, and that this higher law transcends it. It is the law of grace, or forgiveness.

This law frees us from the law of cause and effect, the law of consequence. We are “under grace, and not under law.”

We are told that on this plane we reap where we have not sown. The gifts of God are simply poured out upon us. “All that the Kingdom affords is his.” This lasting state of bliss awaits the person who has overcome the race thought, or world thought.

In the world thought there is tribulation, but Jesus Christ said, “Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”

The world thought is the thought of sin, sickness, and death. Jesus saw that these were absolutely unreal. He said that sickness and sorrow would pass away, and that death itself, the last enemy, would be overcome.

We now know, from a scientific standpoint, that death could be overcome by stamping the subconscious mind with the conviction of eternal youth and eternal life.

The subconscious is simply power without direction. It carries out orders without questioning them.

Working under the direction of the superconscious, the Christ or God within us, the subconscious would bring about the “resurrection of the body.”

We would no longer cast off our bodies in death. Instead, the body would be transformed into the “body electric” that Walt Whitman sang of. For Christianity is founded on the forgiveness of sins and on “an empty tomb.”

CASTING THE BURDEN Impressing the Subconscious

Once people understand their own powers and how their minds work, their great desire is to find a quick and easy way to impress good upon the subconscious. A merely intellectual knowledge of the Truth will not bring results.

In my own case, I found that the easiest way is “casting the burden.”

A metaphysician once explained it this way. He said, “The only thing that gives anything weight in nature is the law of gravitation. If a boulder could be carried high above the planet, there would be no weight in that boulder. That is what Jesus Christ meant when he said: ‘My yoke is easy and my burden is light.’”

Jesus Christ had overcome the world vibration. He functioned in the fourth-dimensional realm, where there is only perfection, completion, life, and joy.

He said: “Come to me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” “Take my yoke upon you, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

We are also told in the fifty-fifth Psalm to “cast thy burden upon the Lord.” Many passages in the Bible state that the battle is God’s, not man’s. A person is always to “stand still” and see the Salvation of the Lord.

This shows that the superconscious mind, or the Christ within, is the part of us that fights our battles and relieves us of burdens.

It follows that we violate law when we carry a burden. A burden is an adverse thought or condition, and that thought or condition has its root in the subconscious.

It seems almost impossible to make any headway by directing the subconscious from the conscious, reasoning mind. The reasoning mind, the intellect, is limited in what it can conceive, and it is filled with doubts and fears.

How scientific it is, then, to cast the burden upon the superconscious mind, the Christ within. There the burden is “made light,” or dissolved into its “native nothingness.”

For example, a woman who urgently needed money “made light” of her burden upon the Christ within, the superconscious. She used this statement: “I cast this burden of lack on the Christ (within) and I go free to have plenty!”

Her burden was the belief in lack. When she cast it upon the superconscious, which holds the belief of plenty, an avalanche of supply was the result.

We read, “The Christ in you the hope of glory.”

Here is another example. One of my students had been given a new piano. There was no room for it in her studio until she moved out the old one, and she was perplexed. She wanted to keep the old piano, but she knew of no place to send it.

She became desperate, because the new piano was to be delivered immediately. In fact, it was already on its way, and there was nowhere to put it. She said it came to her to repeat, “I cast this burden on the Christ within, and I go free.”

A few moments later her telephone rang. A woman friend asked whether she might rent the old piano. It was moved out a few minutes before the new one arrived.

I knew a woman whose burden was resentment. She said, “I cast this burden of resentment on the Christ within, and I go free, to be loving, harmonious and happy.”

The almighty superconscious flooded her subconscious with love, and her whole life was changed. For years resentment had held her in torment and imprisoned her soul, the subconscious mind.

The statement should be made over and over and over, sometimes for hours at a time. It may be said silently or aloud, quietly but with determination.

I have often compared this to winding up a victrola, the hand-cranked record player that will not play until its spring is wound. In the same way, we must wind ourselves up with spoken words.

I have noticed that when one is “casting the burden,” after a little while one seems to see clearly. Clear vision is impossible while one is in the grip of the carnal mind. Doubts and fear poison the mind and body, and the imagination runs wild, attracting disaster and disease.

By steadily repeating the affirmation, “I cast this burden on the Christ within, and go free,” the vision clears. A feeling of relief comes with it. Sooner or later the good manifests, whether as health, happiness, or supply.

One of my students once asked me to explain the “darkness before the dawn.” In an earlier chapter I mentioned that often, just before a big demonstration, “everything seems to go wrong,” and deep depression clouds the mind.

This means that the doubts and fears of the ages are rising out of the subconscious. These old derelicts of the subconscious come to the surface so that they can be put out.

That is the moment to clap one’s cymbals, as Jehoshaphat did, and give thanks for being saved, even while one seems surrounded by the enemy, the situation of lack or disease.

The student went on, “How long must one remain in the dark?” I replied, “Until one can see in the dark.” And “casting the burden enables one to see in the dark.”

Active faith is always essential for impressing the subconscious.

“Faith without works is dead.” Throughout these chapters I have tried to bring out this point.

Jesus Christ showed active faith when “He commanded the multitude to sit down on the ground” before he gave thanks for the loaves and the fishes.

I will give another example to show how necessary this step is. Active faith is, in fact, the bridge over which man passes to his Promised Land.

Through a misunderstanding, a woman had become separated from her husband, whom she loved deeply. He refused every offer of reconciliation and would not communicate with her in any way.

When she came to know spiritual law, she denied the appearance of separation. She made this statement: “There is no separation in Divine Mind, therefore, I cannot be separated from the love and companionship which are mine by divine right.”

She showed active faith by setting a place for him at the table every day. In this way she impressed the subconscious with a picture of his return. More than a year passed, but she never wavered, and one day he walked in.

The subconscious is often impressed through music. Music has a fourth-dimensional quality and releases the soul from imprisonment. It makes wonderful things seem possible and easy to accomplish!

I have a friend who plays her victrola every day for this purpose. It puts her in perfect harmony and frees her imagination.

Another woman often dances while making her affirmations. The rhythm and harmony of music and motion carry her words forth with tremendous power.

The student must also remember not to despise the “day of small things.”

Before a demonstration, “signs of land” invariably appear.

Before Columbus reached America, he saw birds and twigs that told him land was near. It is the same with a demonstration. But students often mistake these signs for the demonstration itself and are disappointed.

For example, a woman had “spoken the word” for a set of dishes. Not long afterward a friend gave her a single dish that was old and cracked.

She came to me and said, “Well, I asked for a set of dishes, and all I got was a cracked plate.”

I replied, “The plate was only signs of land. It shows your dishes are coming—look upon it as birds and seaweed.” Not long afterward the dishes came.

Continually “making believe” impresses the subconscious. If one makes believe he is rich, and makes believe he is successful, “in due time he will reap.”

Children are always “making believe,” and “except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

For example, I know of a woman who was very poor, yet no one could make her feel poor. She earned a small amount of money from rich friends, who constantly reminded her of her poverty and told her to be careful and save.

Regardless of their warnings, she would spend all her earnings on a hat, or give someone a gift, and be in a rapturous state of mind. Her thoughts were always centered on beautiful clothes and “rings and things,” but she never envied others.

She lived in the world of the wondrous, and only riches seemed real to her. Before long she married a rich man, and the rings and things became visible.

I do not know whether the man was the “Divine Selection.” But opulence had to manifest in her life, because she had imagined only opulence.

There is no peace or happiness for man until he has erased all fear from the subconscious.

Fear is misdirected energy. It must be redirected, or transmuted into Faith.

Jesus Christ said, “Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?” “All things are possible to him that believeth.”

My students ask me so often, “How can I get rid of fear?”

I reply, “By walking up to the thing you are afraid of.”

“The lion takes its fierceness from your fear.”

Walk up to the lion, and he will disappear. Run away, and he runs after you.

In earlier chapters I showed how the lion of lack disappeared when a person spent money fearlessly. That spending showed faith that God was his supply, and therefore a supply that could not fail.

Many of my students have come out of the bondage of poverty and are now bountifully supplied, because they lost all fear of letting money go out.

Their subconscious minds are impressed with the truth that God is both the Giver and the Gift. Since one is one with the Giver, one is also one with the Gift. A splendid statement is, “I now thank God the Giver for God the Gift.”

Man has so long separated himself from his good and his supply, through thoughts of separation and lack, that sometimes it takes dynamite to dislodge these false ideas from the subconscious. That dynamite is a big situation.

In the example above, we see how the individual was freed from his bondage by showing fearlessness.

One should watch oneself hourly to detect whether the motive for an action is fear or faith.

“Choose ye this day whom we shall serve,” fear or faith.

Perhaps one’s fear is of a certain personality. Then one should not avoid the people one fears. One should be willing to meet them cheerfully. They will either prove to be “golden links in the chain of one’s good,” or they will disappear harmoniously from one’s path.

Perhaps one’s fear is of disease or germs. Then one should be fearless and undisturbed in a germ-laden situation, and one would be immune.

One can only contract germs while vibrating at the same rate as the germ, and fear drags people down to the germ’s level.

Of course, the disease-laden germ is the product of the carnal mind, since all thought must take outward form. Germs do not exist in the superconscious, or Divine Mind. They are therefore the product of man’s “vain imagination.”

“In the twinkling of an eye,” man’s release will come, when he realizes that there is no power in evil.

The material world will fade away, and the fourth-dimensional world, the “World of the Wondrous,” will swing into manifestation.

“And I saw a new heaven, and a new earth—and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away.”

LOVE

Every person on this planet is undergoing an initiation in love. “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another.” In Tertium Organum, Ouspensky states that “love is a cosmic phenomenon,” and that it opens to us the fourth-dimensional world, “The World of the Wondrous.”

Real love is selfless and free from fear. It pours itself out on the person it loves without demanding anything in return. Its joy lies in the joy of giving.

Love is God in manifestation, and the strongest magnetic force in the universe. Pure, unselfish love draws to itself what belongs to it. It does not need to seek or demand.

Hardly anyone has the faintest idea of what real love is. People are selfish, controlling, or fearful in their affections, and in this way they lose the very thing they love.

Jealousy is love’s worst enemy. The imagination runs wild, picturing the loved one attracted to someone else. If these fears are not neutralized, they always take outward form.

For example, a woman came to me in deep distress. The man she loved had left her for other women and told her he never intended to marry her. She was torn apart by jealousy and resentment. She said she hoped he would suffer as he had made her suffer, and added, “How could he leave me when I loved him so much?”

I replied, “You are not loving that man, you are hating him.” Then I added, “You can never receive what you have never given. Give a perfect love and you will receive a perfect love.”

“Perfect yourself on this man. Give him a perfect, unselfish love, demanding nothing in return. Do not criticize or condemn, and bless him wherever he is.”

She answered, “No, I won’t bless him unless I know where he is!”

“Well,” I said, “that is not real love.”

“When you send out real love, real love will come back to you, either from this man or from someone equivalent. If this man is not the divine selection, you will not want him. Since you are one with God, you are one with the love that belongs to you by divine right.”

Several months passed, and things stayed about the same, but she was working conscientiously on herself. I told her, “When you are no longer disturbed by his cruelty, he will stop being cruel, because you are attracting it through your own emotions.”

Then I told her about a brotherhood in India whose members never said “Good morning” to one another. Instead they said, “I salute the Divinity in you.” They saluted the divinity in every person, and in the wild animals of the jungle as well. They were never harmed, because they saw only God in every living thing.

I said to her, “Salute the divinity in this man, and say, ‘I see your divine self only. I see you as God sees you, perfect, made in His image and likeness.’”

She found that she was becoming more balanced and was gradually losing her resentment. He was a captain, and she always called him “The Cap.”

One day she said, quite suddenly, “God bless the Cap wherever he is.”

I replied, “Now that is real love. When you have become a ‘complete circle,’ and the situation no longer disturbs you, you will have his love, or you will attract its equivalent.”

I was moving at the time and had no telephone, so I was out of touch with her for a few weeks. Then one morning I received a letter that said, “We are married.”

At the first opportunity, I went to see her. My first words were, “What happened?”

“Oh,” she exclaimed, “a miracle! One day I woke up and all the suffering had stopped. I saw him that evening, and he asked me to marry him. We were married in about a week, and I have never seen a more devoted man.”

There is an old saying: “No man is your enemy, no man is your friend, every man is your teacher.”

So we should become impersonal and learn what each person has to teach us. We would soon learn our lessons and be free.

The woman’s lover was teaching her selfless love, which every person must learn sooner or later.

Suffering is not necessary for human development. It is the result of breaking spiritual law. Yet few people seem able to wake themselves from their “soul sleep” without it.

When people are happy, they usually become selfish, and the law of Karma automatically goes into action. People often suffer loss because they fail to appreciate what they have.

I knew a woman who had a very nice husband, but she often said, “I don’t care anything about being married, but that is nothing against my husband. I’m simply not interested in married life.”

She had other interests and hardly remembered she had a husband. She thought of him only when she saw him. One day her husband told her he was in love with another woman, and he left. She came to me upset and resentful.

I told her, “This is exactly what you spoke the word for. You said you didn’t care anything about being married, so the subconscious worked to get you unmarried.”

She said, “Oh yes, I see. People get what they want, and then feel very much hurt.”

She soon came into perfect harmony with the situation and understood that they were both much happier apart.

When a wife becomes indifferent or critical and stops being an inspiration to her husband, he misses the encouragement of their early relationship and grows restless and unhappy.

A man came to me depressed, miserable, and poor. His wife was interested in the “Science of Numbers” and had had his numbers read. The report was apparently not very favorable, because he said, “My wife says I’ll never amount to anything because I am a two.”

I replied, “I don’t care what your number is. You are a perfect idea in Divine Mind, and we will demand the success and prosperity that Infinite Intelligence has already planned for you.”

Within a few weeks he had a very good position, and a year or two later he achieved brilliant success as a writer.

No one succeeds in business without loving the work. The picture an artist paints for love of the art is the artist’s greatest work. The pot-boiler, painted only to pay the bills, is always something to live down.

No one can attract money while despising it. Many people keep themselves in poverty by saying, “Money means nothing to me, and I have contempt for people who have it.”

This is why so many artists are poor. Their contempt for money separates them from it.

I remember hearing one artist say of another, “He’s no good as an artist, he has money in the bank.”

This attitude separates a person from their supply. To attract something, you must be in harmony with it.

Money is God in manifestation, as freedom from want and limitation. But it must always be kept circulating and put to the right uses. Hoarding and saving come back with grim vengeance.

This does not mean we should not own houses and land, stocks and bonds, for “the barns of the righteous man shall be full.” It means we should not hoard even the principal when an occasion arises that calls for money.

By letting money go out fearlessly and cheerfully, we open the way for more to come in, because God is our unfailing and inexhaustible supply.

This is the spiritual attitude toward money, and the great Bank of the Universal never fails!

We see an example of hoarding in the film Greed. A woman wins five thousand dollars in a lottery but refuses to spend it. She hoards and saves, lets her husband suffer and starve, and eventually scrubs floors for a living.

She loved the money for its own sake and put it above everything else. One night she was murdered, and the money was taken from her.

This is an example of how “love of money is the root of all evil.” Money in itself is good and useful. But when it is used for destructive purposes, hoarded and saved, or valued above love, it brings disease and disaster, and the loss of the money itself.

Follow the path of love, and all things are added, because God is love and God is supply. Follow the path of selfishness and greed, and the supply vanishes, or the person is cut off from it.

For example, I knew of a very rich woman who hoarded her income. She rarely gave anything away, but she bought and bought and bought things for herself.

She was very fond of necklaces. A friend once asked her how many she owned, and she replied, “Sixty-seven.” She bought them and put them away, carefully wrapped in tissue paper.

If she had worn the necklaces, that would have been perfectly legitimate. But she was breaking “the law of use.” Her closets were full of clothes she never wore and jewels that never saw the light.

Her arms gradually became paralyzed from holding on to things. Eventually she was judged incapable of managing her own affairs, and her wealth was handed over to others to manage.

In this way, people who are ignorant of the law bring about their own destruction.

All disease and all unhappiness come from breaking the law of love. The boomerangs of hate, resentment, and criticism that people send out come back loaded with sickness and sorrow.

Love seems almost a lost art. But anyone who knows spiritual law knows it must be recovered, because without it, a person has “become as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.”

For example, I had a student who came to me month after month to clear her consciousness of resentment. After a while, she reached the point where she resented only one woman, but that one woman kept her busy.

Little by little she became calm and harmonious, and one day all her resentment was wiped out.

She came in radiant and exclaimed, “You can’t understand how I feel! The woman said something to me, and instead of being furious I was loving and kind. She apologized and was perfectly lovely to me.

“No one can understand the marvelous lightness I feel inside!”

Love and goodwill are invaluable in business.

For example, a woman came to me complaining about her employer. She said the employer was cold and critical, and she knew the employer did not want her in the position.

“Well,” I replied, “salute the Divinity in the woman and send her love.”

She said, “I can’t. She’s a marble woman.”

I answered, “Remember the story of the sculptor who asked for a particular piece of marble. When someone asked why he wanted it, he replied, ‘Because there is an angel in the marble.’ Out of it he produced a wonderful work of art.”

She said, “Very well, I’ll try it.” A week later she came back and said, “I did what you told me to, and now the woman is very kind. She even took me out in her car.”

People are sometimes filled with remorse for an unkindness they did to someone, perhaps years ago.

If the wrong cannot be put right, its effect can be neutralized by doing someone a kindness in the present.

“This one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth unto those things which are before.”

Sorrow, regret, and remorse break down the cells of the body and poison the atmosphere surrounding a person.

A woman said to me in deep sorrow, “Treat me to be happy and joyful, because my sorrow makes me so irritable with my family that I keep making more Karma.”

I was asked to treat a woman who was mourning her daughter. I denied all belief in loss and separation, and affirmed that God was the woman’s joy, love, and peace.

The woman regained her composure at once. But she sent word through her son that I should stop treating her, because she was “so happy, it wasn’t respectable.”

This is how “mortal mind” loves to cling to its griefs and regrets.

I knew a woman who went around bragging about her troubles, so naturally she always had something to brag about.

The old idea was that a woman who did not worry about her children was not a good mother.

Now we know that a mother’s fear is responsible for many of the illnesses and accidents that come into children’s lives.

Fear vividly pictures the disease or situation it dreads, and these pictures take outward form unless they are neutralized.

Happy is the mother who can sincerely say that she places her child in God’s hands, and therefore knows that the child is divinely protected.

For example, a woman woke suddenly in the night, feeling that her brother was in great danger. Instead of giving in to her fears, she began making statements of Truth.

She said, “Man is a perfect idea in Divine Mind and is always in his right place. Therefore my brother is in his right place and is divinely protected.”

The next day she learned that her brother had been close to an explosion in a mine but had miraculously escaped.

So each of us is our brother’s keeper, in thought. Everyone should know that the person they love dwells in “the secret place of the most high, and abides under the shadow of the Almighty.”

“There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.”

“Perfect love casteth out fear. He that feareth is not made perfect in love,” and “Love is the fulfilling of the Law.”

INTUITION OR GUIDANCE

“In all your ways acknowledge Him, and
He shall direct your paths.”

Nothing is too great to accomplish for the person who knows the power of his word and follows his intuitive leads. Through the word, he sets unseen forces in motion. He can rebuild his body or reshape his affairs.

Choosing the right words is therefore extremely important. The student carefully selects the affirmation he wishes to launch into the invisible.

He knows that God is his supply, that there is a supply for every demand, and that his spoken word releases this supply.

“Ask, and you shall receive.”

Man must make the first move. “Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you.”

I have often been asked exactly how to make a demonstration.

I reply: “Speak the word, and then do nothing until you get a definite lead.” Ask for the lead, saying, “Infinite Spirit, reveal the way to me. Let me know if there is anything for me to do.”

The answer will come through intuition, or a hunch. It may come as a chance remark from someone, a passage in a book, and so on. The answers are sometimes startlingly exact.

For example, a woman wanted a large sum of money. She spoke the words: “Infinite Spirit, open the way for my immediate supply. Let all that is mine by divine right now reach me, in great avalanches of abundance.” Then she added: “Give me a definite lead. Let me know if there is anything for me to do.”

The thought came quickly: “Give a certain friend a hundred dollars.” This friend had helped her spiritually. She told the friend, who said, “Wait and get another lead before giving it.”

So she waited. That same day she met a woman who said to her, “I gave someone a dollar today. For me, it was just as much as it would be for you to give someone a hundred.”

This was an unmistakable lead, so she knew she was right to give the hundred dollars. The gift proved a great investment. Shortly afterward, a large sum of money came to her in a remarkable way.

Giving opens the way for receiving. To create activity in one’s finances, one should give. Tithing, or giving one-tenth of one’s income, is an old Jewish custom, and it is sure to bring increase. Many of the richest men in this country have been tithers, and I have never known it to fail as an investment.

The tenth part goes out and comes back blessed and multiplied. But the gift or tithe must be given with love and cheerfulness, for “God loves a cheerful giver.” Bills should be paid cheerfully. All money should be sent out fearlessly and with a blessing.

This attitude of mind makes man the master of money. Money then obeys him, and his spoken word opens vast reservoirs of wealth.

Man limits his own supply through his limited vision. Sometimes the student has a great realization of wealth but is afraid to act.

Vision and action must go hand in hand, as in the case of the man who bought the fur-lined overcoat.

A woman came to me asking me to “speak the word” for a position. So I demanded: “Infinite Spirit, open the way for this woman’s right position.” Never ask for just “a position.” Ask for the right position, the place already planned in Divine Mind, because it is the only one that will bring satisfaction.

I then gave thanks that she had already received it and that it would manifest quickly. Very soon she was offered three positions, two in New York and one in Palm Beach, and she did not know which to choose. I said, “Ask for a definite lead.”

Time was almost up, and she was still undecided, when one day she telephoned me: “When I woke up this morning, I could smell Palm Beach.” She had been there before and knew its mild, fragrant air.

I replied, “Well, if you can smell Palm Beach from here, that is certainly your lead.” She accepted the position, and it proved a great success.

A lead often comes at an unexpected time. One day I was walking down the street when I suddenly felt a strong urge to go to a certain bakery a block or two away.

My reasoning mind resisted, arguing, “There is nothing there that you want.”

However, I had learned not to reason, so I went to the bakery and looked at everything. There was certainly nothing there I wanted. But as I came out, I met a woman I had often thought about, who badly needed the help I could give her.

So often, one goes for one thing and finds another.

Intuition is a spiritual faculty. It does not explain; it simply points the way.

A person often receives a lead during a “treatment.” The idea that comes may seem quite irrelevant, but some of God’s leadings are “mysterious.”

One day in class, I was treating that each individual would receive a definite lead. Afterward a woman came to me and said, “While you were treating, I got the hunch to take my furniture out of storage and get an apartment.” She had come to be treated for her health.

I told her I knew that in getting a home of her own, her health would improve. I added, “I believe your trouble, which is a congestion, has come from having things stored away. Congestion of things causes congestion in the body. You have violated the law of use, and your body is paying the penalty.”

So I gave thanks that “Divine order was established in her mind, body and affairs.”

People hardly imagine how their affairs affect the body. There is a mental correspondence for every disease. A person might receive an instant healing by realizing that his body is a perfect idea in Divine Mind, and therefore whole and perfect. But if he continues his destructive thinking, hoarding, hating, fearing, and condemning, the disease will return.

Jesus Christ knew that all sickness came from sin. Yet after healing the leper, he warned him to go and sin no more, lest something worse come upon him.

So for a permanent healing, man’s soul, or subconscious mind, must be washed whiter than snow. The metaphysician is always searching deep for the “correspondence.”

Jesus Christ said, “Condemn not, lest you also be condemned.”

“Judge not, lest you be judged.”

Many people have attracted disease and unhappiness by condemning others.

What a man condemns in others, he attracts to himself.

For example, a friend came to me angry and distressed because her husband had left her for another woman. She condemned the other woman and kept saying, “She knew he was a married man, and she had no right to accept his attentions.”

I replied, “Stop condemning the woman. Bless her and be through with the situation. Otherwise, you are attracting the same thing to yourself.”

She would not listen. A year or two later, she herself became deeply interested in a married man.

Whenever a man criticizes or condemns, he picks up a live wire and may expect a shock.

Indecision is a stumbling block on many paths. To overcome it, repeat the statement, “I am always under direct inspiration; I make right decisions, quickly.”

These words impress the subconscious. Soon one finds oneself awake and alert, making the right moves without hesitation.

I have found it destructive to look to the psychic plane for guidance, because it is the plane of many minds, not “The One Mind.”

As a man opens his mind to subjectivity, he becomes a target for destructive forces. The psychic plane is the product of man’s mortal thought and lies on the “plane of opposites.” He may receive either good or bad messages there.

The science of numbers and the reading of horoscopes keep man down on the mental, or mortal, plane, because they deal only with the Karmic path.

I know of a man who, according to his horoscope, should have died years ago. Yet he is alive and leads one of the biggest movements in this country for the uplift of humanity.

It takes a very strong mind to neutralize a prophecy of evil. The student should declare: “Every false prophecy shall come to nothing; every plan my Father in heaven has not planned shall be dissolved and scattered; the divine idea now comes to pass.”

However, if anyone has ever given you a good message of coming happiness or wealth, hold on to it and expect it. Through the law of expectancy, it will manifest sooner or later.

Man’s will should be used to back the universal will: “I will that the will of God be done.”

It is God’s will to give every man every righteous desire of his heart. Man’s will should be used to hold the perfect vision without wavering.

The prodigal son said, “I will arise and go to my Father.”

It often takes an effort of will to leave behind the husks and swine of mortal thinking. For the average person, fear is so much easier than faith. Faith, therefore, is an effort of the will.

As a man becomes spiritually awakened, he recognizes that any outer disharmony corresponds to a mental disharmony. If he stumbles or falls, he may know that he is stumbling or falling in consciousness.

One day a student was walking along the street, condemning someone in her thoughts. She was saying to herself, “That woman is the most disagreeable woman on earth,” when suddenly three Boy Scouts rushed around the corner and almost knocked her over.

She did not condemn the Boy Scouts. Instead, she immediately called on the law of forgiveness and “saluted the divinity” in the woman. Wisdom’s ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.

When one has made demands on the Universal, one must be ready for surprises. Everything may seem to be going wrong when in reality it is going right.

For example, a woman was told that there was no loss in Divine Mind. Therefore, she could not lose anything that belonged to her. Anything lost would be returned, or she would receive its equivalent.

Several years earlier, she had lost two thousand dollars. She had lent the money to a relative, but the relative had died without mentioning the debt in her will. Since the woman had no written record of the loan, she never received the money, and she was resentful and angry.

She decided to deny the loss and collect the two thousand dollars from the Bank of the Universal. She had to begin by forgiving the relative, because resentment and unforgiveness close the doors of this wonderful bank.

She made this statement: “I deny loss. There is no loss in Divine Mind; therefore, I cannot lose the two thousand dollars, which belong to me by divine right.” “As one door shuts, another door opens.”

She was living in an apartment house that was for sale. Her lease contained a clause stating that if the house was sold, the tenants would have to move out within ninety days.

Suddenly the landlord broke the leases and raised the rent. Once again injustice lay in her path, but this time she was undisturbed. She blessed the landlord and said, “Since the rent has been raised, I will be that much richer, for God is my supply.”

New leases were drawn up at the higher rent, but by some divine mistake, the ninety-day clause had been left out. Soon afterward the landlord had a chance to sell the house. Because of the mistake in the new leases, the tenants kept possession for another year.

The agent offered each tenant two hundred dollars to move out. Several families left; three stayed, including the woman. A month or two passed, and the agent came back. This time he asked her, “Will you break your lease for fifteen hundred dollars?”

It flashed on her: “Here comes the two thousand dollars.” She remembered having told friends in the building, “We will all act together if anything more is said about leaving.” So her lead was to consult her friends.

These friends said, “Well, if they have offered you fifteen hundred, they will certainly give two thousand.” So she received a check for two thousand dollars for giving up the apartment.

This was certainly a remarkable working of the law. The apparent injustice was simply opening the way for her demonstration.

It proved that there is no loss, and that when man takes his spiritual stand, he collects all that is his from this great Reservoir of Good.

“I will restore to you the years the locusts have eaten.”

The locusts are the doubts, fears, resentments, and regrets of mortal thinking.

These adverse thoughts alone rob man, for “No man gives to himself but himself, and no man takes away from himself but himself.”

Man is here to prove God and “to bear witness to the truth.” He can prove God only by bringing plenty out of lack and justice out of injustice.

“Prove me now in this, says the Lord of hosts, and see if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour out a blessing so great that there will not be room enough to receive it.”

PERFECT SELF-EXPRESSION or THE DIVINE DESIGN

“No wind can drive my ship off course,
nor change the tide of destiny.”

Every person has a perfect form of self-expression. There is a place that each of us is meant to fill and that no one else can fill. There is something each of us is meant to do that no one else can do. This is our destiny.

This achievement exists as a perfect idea in Divine Mind, waiting for us to recognize it. Because the imagination is the creative faculty, we must first see the idea before it can take form in our lives.

So our highest request is for the Divine Design of our lives.

We may not have the faintest idea what that design is. Some remarkable talent may be hidden deep within us. The request should be:

“Infinite Spirit, open the way for the Divine Design of my life to manifest; let the genius within me now be released; let me see clearly the perfect plan.”

The perfect plan includes health, wealth, love, and perfect self-expression. These four make up the square of life, and together they bring perfect happiness.

Once you have made this request, you may find great changes taking place in your life, because nearly everyone has wandered far from the Divine Design. In one woman’s case I know of, it was as though a cyclone had struck her affairs. But the readjustments came quickly, and new and wonderful conditions replaced the old ones.

Perfect self-expression will never feel like labor. It will be so absorbing that it seems almost like play.

The student also knows that we come into the world financed by God. The supply needed for our perfect self-expression will therefore be at hand. Many a genius has struggled for years with the problem of money, when a spoken word and faith would have quickly released the necessary funds.

For example, after class one day a man came up to me and handed me a cent.

He said, “I have just seven cents in the world, and I’m going to give you one, because I have faith in the power of your spoken word. I want you to speak the word for my perfect self-expression and prosperity.”

I “spoke the word,” and I did not see him again until a year later. One day he came in, successful and happy, with a roll of yellow bills in his pocket.

He said, “Immediately after you spoke the word, I was offered a position in a distant city, and now I am demonstrating health, happiness, and supply.”

A woman’s perfect self-expression may lie in becoming a perfect wife, a perfect mother, or a perfect homemaker. It does not necessarily require a public career.

Ask for definite guidance, and the way will be made easy and successful.

You should not try to visualize or force a mental picture. When you ask for the Divine Design to come into your conscious mind, you will receive flashes of inspiration. You will begin to see yourself achieving something great. This is the picture, or idea, that you must hold without wavering.

The thing you are seeking is seeking you. The telephone was seeking Bell!

Parents should never force careers and professions on their children. With a knowledge of spiritual Truth, the Divine Plan could be spoken for in early childhood, or even before birth.

A treatment before birth should be: “Let the God in this child have perfect expression; let the Divine Design of his mind, body and affairs be made manifest throughout his life, throughout eternity.”

“God’s will be done, not man’s; God’s pattern, not man’s pattern” is the command that runs through all the scriptures. The Bible is a book about the science of the mind. It tells us how to release the soul, or subconscious mind, from bondage.

The battles it describes are pictures of human beings waging war against mortal thoughts. “A man’s foes shall be they of his own household.”

Every person is Jehoshaphat. Every person is also David, who slays Goliath, which stands for mortal thinking, with the little white stone, which stands for faith.

So we must take care not to be the “wicked and slothful servant” who buried his talent. There is a terrible penalty for not using one’s ability.

Fear often stands between a person and perfect self-expression. Stage fright has held back many a genius. It can be overcome by the spoken word, or treatment.

The person then loses all self-consciousness and feels simply like a channel through which Infinite Intelligence expresses Itself. Such a person is under direct inspiration, fearless and confident, because he feels that it is the “Father within” him who does the work.

A young boy often came to my class with his mother. He asked me to “speak the word” for his upcoming school examinations.

I told him to make this statement: “I am one with Infinite Intelligence. I know everything I should know on this subject.”

He knew history very well, but he was unsure of his arithmetic. When I saw him afterward, he said, “I spoke the word for my arithmetic and passed with the highest honors. But I thought I could depend on myself for history, and I got a very poor mark.”

People often suffer a setback when they are “too sure of themselves.” This means they are trusting their own personality rather than the “Father within.”

Another of my students gave me an example of this. One summer she took a long trip abroad, visiting many countries whose languages she did not know. She called for guidance and protection every minute, and her affairs went smoothly and miraculously.

Her luggage was never delayed or lost. Rooms were always ready for her at the best hotels, and she received perfect service wherever she went.

Then she returned to New York. Because she knew the language there, she felt God was no longer necessary, and she looked after her affairs in an ordinary way. Everything went wrong. Her trunks were delayed, and she found herself surrounded by discord and confusion.

The student must form the habit of “practicing the Presence of God” every minute. “In all thy ways acknowledge him.” Nothing is too small or too great for this.

Sometimes a trivial incident becomes the turning point in a person’s life. Robert Fulton, watching water simmering in a tea kettle, saw a steamboat!

I have often seen a student hold back his own demonstration through resistance, or by trying to dictate the way it should come. He pins his faith on one channel only and insists on exactly how the result must arrive. This brings everything to a standstill.

“My way, not your way!” is the command of Infinite Intelligence. Like every other power, whether steam or electricity, it needs a nonresistant engine or instrument to work through. The human being is that engine or instrument.

Over and over again, we are told to “stand still.” “Oh Judah, fear not; but tomorrow go out against them, for the Lord will be with you. You shall not need to fight this battle; set yourselves, stand ye still, and see the salvation of the Lord with you.”

We saw this in the earlier accounts: the woman who received two thousand dollars through her landlord once she became nonresistant and undisturbed, and the woman who won a man’s love “after all suffering had ceased.”

The student’s goal is Poise! Poise is Power, because it gives God-Power the chance to rush through a person, “to will and to do Its good pleasure.”

When poised, a person thinks clearly and makes “right decisions quickly.” “He never misses a trick.”

Anger blurs vision and poisons the blood. It is the root of many diseases, and it causes wrong decisions that lead to failure.

Anger has been called one of the worst “sins,” because its consequences are so harmful. In metaphysics, the student learns, sin has a much broader meaning than in the old teaching. “Whatsoever is not of faith is sin.”

The student discovers that fear and worry are deadly sins. They are faith turned upside down. Through distorted mental pictures, they bring about the very thing a person fears.

The student’s work is to drive these enemies out of the subconscious mind. “When Man is fearless he is finished!” Maeterlinck says that “Man is God afraid.”

So, as we read in the previous chapters, we can only conquer fear by walking straight up to the thing we are afraid of.

When Jehoshaphat and his army went out to meet the enemy, singing, “Praise the Lord, for his mercy endureth forever,” they found that their enemies had destroyed each other. There was nothing left to fight.

For example, a woman was asked by one friend to deliver a message to another friend. She was afraid to deliver it, because her reasoning mind said, “Don’t get mixed up in this affair. Don’t give that message.”

She was troubled in spirit, because she had given her promise. At last she decided to “walk up to the lion” and call on the law of divine protection.

She met the friend who was to receive the message. Just as she opened her mouth to speak, her friend said, “So-and-So has left town.”

This made the message unnecessary, since the situation depended on that person being in town. Because she was willing to deliver it, she was not required to. Because she did not fear, the situation vanished.

The student often delays his demonstration by believing it is incomplete. He should make this statement:

“In Divine Mind there is only completion, therefore, my demonstration is completed. My perfect work, my perfect home, my perfect health.”

Whatever he asks for is a perfect idea already registered in Divine Mind, and it must manifest “under grace in a perfect way.” He gives thanks that he has already received it on the invisible plane, and he actively prepares to receive it on the visible plane.

One of my students needed a financial demonstration. She came and asked me why it had not been completed.

I replied, “Perhaps you are in the habit of leaving things unfinished, and your subconscious has fallen into the habit of not completing things.” As it is on the outside, so it is on the inside.

She said, “You are right. I often begin things and never finish them. I’ll go home and finish something I started weeks ago, and I know it will be symbolic of my demonstration.”

So she sewed diligently, and the piece was soon finished. Shortly afterward, the money came in a most curious way.

Her husband was paid his salary twice that month. He told his employers about their mistake, and they sent word that he should keep it.

When we ask, believing, we must receive, because God creates His own channels!

I have sometimes been asked, “Suppose someone has several talents. How is he to know which one to choose?”

Ask to be shown definitely. Say: “Infinite Spirit, give me a definite lead, reveal to me my perfect self-expression, show me which talent I am to make use of now.”

I have known people to enter a new line of work suddenly and be fully equipped for it, with little or no training. So make the statement: “I am fully equipped for the Divine Plan of my life.” Then be fearless in grasping opportunities.

Some people are cheerful givers but bad receivers. They refuse gifts out of pride or for some other negative reason. This blocks their channels, and they invariably end up with little or nothing.

For example, a woman who had given away a great deal of money was offered a gift of several thousand dollars. She refused it, saying she did not need it.

Shortly afterward, her finances became “tied up,” and she found herself in debt for that same amount. We should graciously accept the bread that returns to us upon the water. “Freely ye have given, freely ye shall receive.”

There is always a perfect balance between giving and receiving. We should give without thinking of any return. Yet we violate the law if we refuse the returns that come to us, because all gifts come from God, and we are merely the channel.

A thought of lack should never be held over the giver.

When the man gave me the one cent, I did not think, “Poor man, he cannot afford to give me that.” I saw him rich and prosperous, with his supply pouring in. It was this thought that brought it to him.

If you have been a bad receiver, you must become a good one. Accept even a postage stamp if it is given to you, and open up your channels for receiving.

The Lord loves a cheerful receiver as well as a cheerful giver.

I have often been asked why one person is born rich and healthy and another poor and sick.

Wherever there is an effect, there is always a cause. There is no such thing as chance.

This question is answered by the law of reincarnation. A person passes through many births and deaths until he knows the truth that sets him free. He is drawn back to the earth plane by unsatisfied desire, to pay his karmic debts, or to “fulfill his destiny.”

The person born rich and healthy carried pictures of health and riches in his subconscious mind during his past life. The poor and sick person carried pictures of disease and poverty. On any plane, a person manifests the sum total of his subconscious beliefs.

However, birth and death are man-made laws, for “the wages of sin is death.” They come from the Adamic fall in consciousness, which was the belief in two powers.

The real man, the spiritual man, is without birth and without death. He was never born and has never died. “As he was in the beginning, he is now, and ever shall be!”

So through the truth, a person is set free from the law of karma, sin, and death. He manifests the man made in “His image and likeness.” His freedom comes through fulfilling his destiny, which means bringing the Divine Design of his life into manifestation.

His lord will say to him: “Well done thou good and faithful servant, thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things (death itself); enter thou into the joy of thy Lord (eternal life).”

DENIALS AND AFFIRMATIONS

“Thou shalt also decree a thing, and it shall be established unto thee.”

All the good that is meant to appear in a person’s life already exists as an accomplished fact in divine mind. It is released through that person’s recognition, or spoken word. So one must be careful to decree that only the Divine Idea comes into being. Too often, through “idle words,” people decree failure or misfortune for themselves.

It is therefore extremely important to word one’s demands correctly, as explained in an earlier chapter.

If you want a home, a friend, a position, or any other good thing, ask for the “divine selection.”

For example: “Infinite Spirit, open the way for my right home, my right friend, my right position. I give thanks it now manifests under grace in a perfect way.”

The last part of this statement is the most important. I knew a woman who demanded a thousand dollars. Her daughter was injured, and they received a thousand dollars in compensation for the injury. The money came, but it did not come “in a perfect way.”

The demand should have been worded like this: “Infinite Spirit, I give thanks that the one thousand dollars, which is mine by divine right, is now released, and reaches me under grace, in a perfect way.”

As a person’s financial consciousness grows, he should demand that the enormous sums of money that are his by divine right reach him under grace, in perfect ways.

No one can release more than he believes is possible, because each of us is bound by the limited expectations of the subconscious. To receive in a larger way, a person must enlarge those expectations.

People so often limit themselves in their demands. One student demanded six hundred dollars by a certain date. He did receive it. Afterward, however, he learned that he had come very close to receiving a thousand dollars. He was given just six hundred because that was what his spoken word had asked for.

“They limited the Holy One of Israel.” Wealth is a matter of consciousness, and a French legend illustrates this. A poor man was walking along a road when he met a traveler, who stopped him and said: “My good friend, I see you are poor. Take this gold nugget, sell it, and you will be rich all your days.”

The man was overjoyed at his good fortune and took the nugget home. He immediately found work and became so prosperous that he never sold the nugget. Years passed, and he became a very rich man.

One day he met a poor man on the road. He stopped him and said: “My good friend, I will give you this gold nugget. If you sell it, it will make you rich for life.” The beggar took the nugget, had it valued, and found that it was only brass. The first man had become rich by feeling rich, because he believed the nugget was gold.

Every person has a gold nugget within. It is his consciousness of gold, of abundance, that brings riches into his life. In making demands, one begins at the journey’s end. That is, one declares that the good has already been received. “Before ye call I shall answer.”

Affirming continually establishes the belief in the subconscious.

With perfect faith, it would not be necessary to make an affirmation more than once! One should not plead or beg, but give thanks again and again for what has already been received.

“The desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose.” Rejoicing while still in the desert, which here means a state of consciousness, opens the way for release.

The Lord’s Prayer takes the form of command and demand: “Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” It ends in praise: “For thine is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory, forever. Amen.” Scripture also says, “Concerning the works of my hands, command ye me.” Prayer, then, is command and demand, praise and thanksgiving.

The student’s work is to make himself believe that “with God all things are possible.”

This is easy enough to say in the abstract, but harder when one faces an actual problem. One woman needed to demonstrate a large sum of money within a set time. She knew she had to do something to reach a realization, because realization is manifestation. So she asked for a “lead.”

She was walking through a department store when she saw a very beautiful pink enamel paper cutter. She felt a “pull” toward it. The thought came to her: “I don’t have a paper cutter good enough to open letters containing large checks.”

So she bought the paper cutter, though the reasoning mind would have called it an extravagance. When she held it in her hand, she had a flash of a picture of herself opening an envelope containing a large check. In a few weeks she received the money. The pink paper cutter was her bridge of active faith.

Many stories are told of the power of the subconscious when it is directed in faith.

A man was spending the night at a farmhouse. The windows of his room had been nailed shut. In the middle of the night he felt he was suffocating, and he made his way in the dark to the window. He could not open it, so he smashed the pane with his fist, breathed in deep drafts of fresh air, and had a wonderful night’s sleep.

The next morning he found that he had smashed the glass of a bookcase. The window had stayed closed the entire night. He had supplied himself with oxygen simply by his thought of oxygen.

Once a student sets out to demonstrate, he should never turn back. “Let not that man who wavers think that he shall receive anything of the Lord.”

A Black student once made this wonderful statement: “When I ask the Father for anything, I put my foot down and say: Father, I’ll take nothing less than I’ve asked for, but more!”

So one should never compromise. “Having done all—Stand.” This is sometimes the hardest moment in demonstrating. The temptation comes to give up, to turn back, to compromise.

“He also serves who only stands and waits.”

Demonstrations often come at the eleventh hour, because that is when a person lets go. He stops reasoning, and Infinite Intelligence has a chance to work.

“Man’s dreary desires are answered drearily, and his impatient desires, long delayed or violently fulfilled.”

A woman once asked me why she was always losing or breaking her glasses.

We found that she often said, to herself and to others, in irritation, “I wish I could get rid of my glasses.” So her impatient desire was violently fulfilled. She should have demanded perfect eyesight. What she registered in the subconscious was only the impatient wish to be rid of her glasses, so they kept being broken or lost.

Two attitudes of mind cause loss. One is depreciation, as in the case of the woman who did not appreciate her husband. The other is fear of loss, which creates a picture of loss in the subconscious.

When a student is able to let go of his problem, or “cast his burden,” the result will appear instantly.

A woman was out on a very stormy day, and her umbrella was blown inside out. She was about to visit some people she had never met, and she did not want to make her first appearance with a wrecked umbrella. She could not throw it away, because it did not belong to her.

In desperation she exclaimed: “Oh, God, you take charge of this umbrella, I don’t know what to do.”

A moment later, a voice behind her said: “Lady, do you want your umbrella mended?” There stood an umbrella mender.

She replied, “Indeed, I do.”

The man mended the umbrella while she went into the house to pay her call. When she came back, she had a good umbrella. There is always an umbrella mender close at hand on one’s path, once the umbrella, or the situation, is placed in God’s hands.

A denial should always be followed by an affirmation.

Late one night I was called on the phone to treat a man I had never seen. He was apparently very ill. I made this statement: “I deny this appearance of disease. It is unreal, therefore cannot register in his consciousness; this man is a perfect idea in Divine Mind, pure substance expressing perfection.”

In Divine Mind there is no time or space. So the word reaches its destination instantly and does not “return void.” I have treated patients in Europe and found that the result was instantaneous.

I am often asked the difference between visualizing and visioning. Visualizing is a mental process governed by the reasoning, or conscious, mind. Visioning is a spiritual process governed by intuition, or the superconscious mind. The student should train his mind to receive these flashes of inspiration, and to work out the “divine pictures” through definite leads.

When a person can say, “I desire only that which God desires for me,” his false desires fade from his consciousness. A new set of blueprints is then given to him by the Master Architect, the God within.

God’s plan for each person goes beyond the limits of the reasoning mind. It is always the square of life, containing health, wealth, love, and perfect self-expression. Many people are building themselves a bungalow in imagination when they should be building a palace.

If a student tries to force a demonstration through the reasoning mind, he brings it to a standstill. “I will hasten it,” saith the Lord. He should act only through intuition, or definite leads. “Rest in the Lord and wait patiently. Trust also in him, and he will bring it to pass.”

I have seen the law work in the most astonishing way. A student told me she had to have a hundred dollars by the next day. It was a debt of vital importance that had to be paid. I “spoke the word,” declaring that Spirit was “never too late” and that the supply was at hand.

That evening she phoned to tell me of the miracle. The thought had come to her to go to her safe-deposit box at the bank and look over some papers. She went through them, and at the bottom of the box lay a new hundred-dollar bill.

She was astounded. She said she knew she had never put it there, because she had gone through those papers many times. It may have been a materialization, just as Jesus Christ materialized the loaves and fishes.

People will reach the stage where their “word is made flesh,” or materialized, instantly. “The fields, ripe with the harvest,” will appear immediately, as in all the miracles of Jesus Christ.

The name Jesus Christ alone carries tremendous power. It stands for Truth Made Manifest. He said, “Whatsoever ye ask the Father, in my name, he will give it to you.”

The power of this name raises the student into the fourth dimension. There he is freed from all astral and psychic influences, and he becomes “unconditioned and absolute, as God Himself is unconditioned and absolute.”

I have seen many healings accomplished by using the words, “In the name of Jesus Christ.”

Christ was both person and principle. The Christ within each person is that person’s Redeemer and Salvation.

The Christ within is one’s own fourth-dimensional self, the man made in God’s image and likeness. This is the self that has never failed, never known sickness or sorrow, was never born, and has never died. It is the “resurrection and the life” of each person!

“No man cometh to the Father save by the Son” means that God, the Universal, working on the plane of the particular, becomes the Christ in man. The Holy Ghost means God-in-action. So every day, people are manifesting the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

People should make an art of thinking. The Master Thinker is an artist. He is careful to paint only the divine designs on the canvas of his mind, and he paints them with masterly strokes of power and decision. He has perfect faith that no power can mar their perfection, and that they will appear in his life as the ideal made real.

Through right thinking, all power is given to man to bring his heaven onto his earth. This is the goal of the “Game of Life.”

The simple rules are fearless faith, nonresistance, and love!

May each reader now be freed from whatever has held him in bondage through the ages, standing between him and what is rightfully his own. May he “know the Truth which makes him free”: free to fulfill his destiny, and to bring into manifestation the “Divine Design of his life, Health, Wealth, Love and Perfect Self-Expression.” “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

(For Prosperity)

God is my unfailing supply, and large sums of money come to me quickly, under grace, in perfect ways.

(For Right Conditions)

Every plan my Father in heaven has not planned shall be dissolved and dissipated, and the Divine Idea now comes to pass.

(For Right Conditions)

Only that which is true of God is true of me, for I and the Father are ONE.

(For Faith)

As I am one with God, I am one with my good, for God is both the Giver and the Gift. I cannot separate the Giver from the gift.

(For Right Conditions)

Divine Love now dissolves and dissipates every wrong condition in my mind, body, and affairs. Divine Love is the most powerful chemical in the universe, and it dissolves everything that is not of itself!

(For Health)

Divine Love floods my consciousness with health, and every cell in my body is filled with light.

(For the Eyesight)

My eyes are God’s eyes; I see with the eyes of spirit. I see clearly the open way; there are no obstacles on my path. I see clearly the perfect plan.

(For Guidance)

I am divinely sensitive to my intuitive leads, and I give instant obedience to Thy will.

(For the Hearing)

My ears are God’s ears; I hear with the ears of spirit. I am nonresistant and willing to be led. I hear glad tidings of great joy.

(For Right Work)

I have a perfect work
In a perfect way;
I give a perfect service
For perfect pay.

(For Freedom from all Bondage)

I cast this burden on the Christ within, and I go free!

End of The Game of Life and How to Play It. Choose another edition.