Foundations of Unity
Series I Vol. 2
Edited for home study
Containing material originally published in the books “God Is the Answer,” by Dana Gatlin, and “What Are You?” by Imelda Octavia Shanklin.
UMITM
Unity Village, Missouri
Contents
Lesson I...................................... 5
Trust in God
Lesson II ....................................11
The Circle of God’s Love
Lesson III....................................19
Out of the Rut
Lesson IV.....................................25
There Is a Place
Lesson V .....................................33
Have No Fear
Lesson VI.....................................45
You Are What You Think
Lesson VII....................................53
One Thing I Do Now Spiritual Diary...............................61
Lesson I
Trust in God
Do you feel poor, sick, unhappy, discouraged? Then the most helpful thing you can do is to change the character of your thoughts. Shift your center of attention, find a new interest, something promising and compelling, something that will galvanize your mind and lift it out of its dreary rut. Change your way of thinking about yourself and your difficulties.
“But how can I?” you may answer. “That is the way things are! There is nothing pleasant in my life to think about. Everything is constantly getting more snarled and hopeless. I am at the end of my rope!”
Very well, then, give up the rope. Give up your last inch of frail, battered, unsatisfactory mortal “rope.” Dare! Swing out in your thoughts and feelings. Swing out—on God.
Daring! Right where you are, you dare to trust in God! You are God’s child. You are daring to claim Him as your Father. You are daring to claim
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the unshakable truth of all His glorious promises. God is. God can help you! God will. No one can describe the surge of new strength, courage, interest, and expectancy that this mere change in thought habits will arouse. Dare to swing out on the promises of God. Dare to claim His life and strength and power. Dare to cast aside limited beliefs, in order to rely on God and to lean on Him only. Dare to perceive and acknowledge Him in the face of apparent adversities; dare to trust Him through and above every situation in the world.
We cannot see God. We cannot touch Him. Therefore it is often difficult to establish and maintain our trust in Him amid the adverse conditions in our life that we can both touch and see. But this we must do, it is the one thing we must do. Trust. This all important word is defined as “a reliance or practical resting of the mind on the integrity, veracity, justice, or other sound principle of another person, or upon his friendship, or upon his promises as involving these; faith.” We can easily see how important and potent is the essential element of trust, which in itself is never tangible but which brings about very tangible results.
Each person’s faith is something that must be quickened within him individually, and we can understand how our personal situation may have filled our mind with confusion and tormenting doubts. Yet is all this a proof that God cannot? For ourselves we claim and say that God can! In any and all circumstances we should keep on saying, “God can.” For me He has proved that He can: in proportion as we maintain and develop our trust, as we let our consciousness be filled with His ever-present love and wisdom, as we keep our faith
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centered in the invisible but infallible, undefeatable power of Spirit. God who lives in the midst of us—with whom all things are possible—against whom nothing unlike Himself can stand. We now know there is never any need to be frightened again.
We glimpse the tremendous truth that God is omnipresent and omnipotent in every situation, waiting only for our mortal mind to perceive and claim Him, and we know that our faith in Him, proportionately as we are faithful, enables us to surmount and solve every human “problem.” In God is our trust. To cling to that trust, to increase our understanding of it, and to be true to that understanding can become our first and most important business in life.
“I believe; help thou mine unbelief.” A soothed spirit, a feeling of relief, of reassurance, of new expectancy will be your first intuitive intimation that you have contacted Him, that God has actually heard and is answering your prayer; God in you—God in His whole creation. Just what does God mean to you? God our heavenly Father is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent. This means that God knows; God is everywhere; God can. But what chance do we give His almighty power when we submerge it under limited, sorry impressions received from the world? God gave us our mind as an individual part of His one great Mind, but He left us free agents as regards how we should use it. When we cram and clutter it with the ills and adverse appearances we see around us, we not only feel very unhappy at the time but are also inviting further miseries.
When we turn to God for help sincerely seeking
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to know Him, God not only gives us poignantly felt glimpses of Himself—the divine touch of comfort and the flash of illumination that we most need—but He opens the human mind to awareness of its own responsibility and power. We receive understanding of how Divine Mind works in and for mankind, increasing our knowledge and our ability to help ourselves.
We should not burden ourselves with thoughts of grievance, hardship, weakness, sickness, failure, and lack. Every time we think an adverse thought we plant it deeper in our consciousness; by our own recognition of it and belief in it we strengthen its hold on us. We ourselves pave the way for it to become an actuality in our life. The saddest part is that in so doing we are misusing and subverting the only creative power there is, that vital, dynamic substance in us “from which all things are made,” that one and only power, that God-given power which lies innate in every man, that power which God Himself uses: “God said . . . and it was so.” God didn’t plant sickness for us, or poverty, misery, failure, and fear. God never thought of them, does not think of them now, and never will. As long as we persist in such thoughts, God Himself cannot help us. Even when we pray to God to help us, beseechingly, frantically, He cannot do so as long as we keep our mind filled with our troubles. We cannot, dare not, carry our man-made negations to God.
Fortunately we can drop the negations. The power of thought is one of man’s greatest gifts from God. It is one of our greatest blessings that the mind can at any time change its thought, and can think only one thought at a time. Instead of
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thinking limited thoughts we can lift up our mind and think God’s thoughts after Him. If we remember that if we keep fifty-one percent of our thinking constructive, we are on the upswing.
Dare to lift your mind up to God. Behold the Truth of God, His flawless and undeviating perfection, and have the courage to claim it as your own. If your body seems weak and sick, have the courage to ignore this appearance. Let it go so that you may receive direct from God! Dare to throw away every cloud and shadow of unbelief. Dare to turn to God and claim His glorious wholeness.
PRACTICE:
(In this and the following lessons begin to use Truth in a practical way by affirming some or all of the statements provided.)
“I am not going to be sick, I am going to be well. I am well right now. I am healed with the wholeness of God. ”
“/ am not going to be poor, I am not poor now. God, everywhere-present substance, is making Himself visible in all my affairs. ”
Dare to thrill to the upspringing sense of power within you as you make your new claim, and choose to identify yourself with all the good that exists in the realm of God. Try to live one perfect day in your mental domain, one day in which you lift your mind up to God and think His thoughts after Him. Say to yourself:
“J am choosing God. Today I will be true to God. Today I will vision His perfection. I will use constructively the power of my word. Today I will let my every thought and feeling carry a blessing. Today I will discount all my troubles and every
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adversity. God rules my entire world, and nothing unlike Him can stand against Him.
“Today I will be cheerful, generous, tolerant, patient, kind. God is my constant companion, and fills my environment. My sense of gratitude flows out and fills my whole world.
“Today, realizing I am God's child, I will give thanks for His protection, guidance, and enveloping love and wisdom. I will count my every blessing and give thanks for the countless unseen blessings that are waiting to come into visibility. ‘God said . . . and it was so.'
“Today out of my trust, gratitude, and loyalty to God I will see only His Truth and beauty back of every situation. God's ways are ‘ways of pleasantness. ' God thoughts melt all the hard places out of my mind, my heart, and my world. Today I will find something to do whereby I can make life brighter and pleasanter for others.
“Today I will rejoice to know that I am a free, all-forgiving child of God. I gladly give up all the thoughts of weakness that have bound and hampered me; all the discontents, resentments, and frictions. I gladly give up all the hard ways. Human ways are often hard and difficult, but one way always is ‘easy’—the way of Christ, leading to the glorious Truth of God.
“Today I will remember God. I will turn to Him and be true to Him. ‘He leadeth me!' In God is my trust. ”
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Lesson II
The Circle of God's Love
“He drew a circle that shut me out—
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in!”
Edwin Markham
As you think of God’s presence and power, your thought of that presence and power travels out from you in ever-widening circles. What place is there where God is not? What can your thought touch on anywhere, of whatever nature, that is stronger than God? In the circle of God’s love there is nothing to hate, nothing to fear.
If there is any condition in your life that causes you dread or worry, that seems antagonistic, that seems more than you can cope with, that arouses uneasiness, a sense of friction, or insurgent uprisings in your mind, pause and remember. Remind yourself:
I walk in the circle of God’s love.
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I live in the midst of His love.
In my life and in my thoughts I am a medium of God’s strength, wisdom, harmony, and power.
I go with the currents of God’s mighty love: never against.
I glorify God by letting nothing but Him have power over me.
We are helped as soon as we perceive that all our conflict is really mental. Our most insistent and insidious enemies are our own reactions to human situations. God wants to give us His guidance, but our thoughts are too noisy, too confused with doubts, too anxious, or too selfish and stubborn to be able to hear Him. In effect God says one thing only, over and over: “Let there be love.” But this command, even if we catch a note of it, we often misinterpret and willfully disobey.
God’s will is good will toward us, and God’s will is for us to love. Our personal will often prompts us to fear, shrink from, resent, or combat certain conditions, circumstances, people. We do not want to love them, or do not see how we can. We draw back into our inner anxieties. Through and under all circumstances God says one thing: “Let there be love.”
God will help us if we sincerely seek Him and let Him. He knows the way out of all human dilemmas. He is the answer.
Sometimes in the turmoil of our disorders it seems difficult to find Him, to feel sure of Him, to understand how He works, and to unify ourselves with His great loving power.
A certain woman, after her first marvelous healing through prayer, was often distressed by undesirable situations in her world and by uncontrol-
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lable doubts, indecisions, and embroilments within herself. Her understanding of God, His laws, and His ways had increased—or had it? Sometimes she felt more inadequate, baffled, and torn than when she had first turned to Him.
One day, utterly discouraged, she tried to realize the Father’s infolding love and wisdom. But her mind and heart were too full of other things; disappointments, fears, grievances, failings of her own and of other persons. Suddenly it was as if someone spoke to her: “Lift yourself up!”
The woman was startled and abashed. “Sometimes I don’t seem able to feel Your presence, Father,” she answered. “The discord around me is too strong. I know that my worst enemies are the negative thoughts stored in my own heart and mind, but when they rise against me I don’t know how to deal with them.”
“You don’t have to deal with them,” He said. “Forget them; remember Me.”
She was engrossed with a long list of ills and unanswered prayers that she wished to bring to His attention. But as she started formulating them He interposed, “Forget them! ‘Be still, and know that I am God.’ ”
A dim sense of reassurance and peace began stealing over her, as if against her human will. Then her human self tried to resume its questionings:
“But Father-----”
“Don’t resist! Don’t you understand how you are resisting your good?”
“But Father-----”
“Don’t argue! Trust Me. Trust!”
“How can I?” She pleaded. “These conditions are hard and difficult. These people-”
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“Be still!” And then: “These ugly things you are so insistent about are figments of the human mind. Why do you let them destroy you? Forget them.” “But I can’t, Father. I don’t seem able—don’t
know how------”
“Peace!” commanded the Father. “There is nothing but good. Let all contentions be silenced. Let these torturing false images be dissolved out of existence in your world. I will dissolve them, for I am the solution. The sole solution.”
In deep hush He spoke again: “There is nothing
but My power-----and My power is love. Let! Let
Me!”
As a sense of His meaning spread into her tormented thoughts she felt a wave of transcendent glory—peace. Yet the inadequate, craven feelings persisted: “While I am here alone with You, Father, I feel strengthened and reassured. But as soon as I go forth into the world again, into the difficult situations that I dread—”
“You cannot go where I am not. Wherever you go, you can take with you the remembrance of Me. Where I am there is no dissension, no conflict, no disorder, no hate. Wherever you move, you move in the circle of My love. You must carry this thought always with you. It is your most imperative duty, your greatest blessing.” God did not “speak” to the woman audibly—she suddenly knew him, and within the circle of God’s love, she felt assured of His eternal Presence within her.
The flood of glory that poured through her then was such as she had never experienced before. She experienced guidance, wisdom, forgiveness, steadfastness, strength: not hers but the Lord’s. Wherever she moved, she moved in the circle of God’s
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love! She became a conveyer of His blessing!
Thank God for the day when you discover there is no enemy, no conflict, excepting that which rages in your own mind. Thank God for the moment when you realize that your most unruly thought can be brought into line. God can and will help you rule these inner tumults of confusion and strife. Your thoughts, reactions, and innermost feelings may seem to rise up against your will, but consider: Is this situation stronger than the invisible but mighty tide of omnipotent love? Your own turbulent thoughts and instincts are embattled only because they are trying to buck His mighty tide. Any moment you can bring them into line by commanding them to cease resisting and go along peacefully with the current of healing love.
Spiritual mastery is the most important battle you will ever win. It is a difficult battle from the mortal sense. Only with God’s help can you win it. “Let Me!” says God. God allows no conflict, and He wins by silencing and dissolving every rebellion and contention within your own soul. It is only after this inner victory and in proportion as we are steadfast that we can attain an abiding peace and poise within, a sense of His love and wisdom infallibly controlling and directing His entire creation.
Think the Truth that Jesus taught. It is not a philosophy of life, not a creed, but a way of living. Our conscious connection with God is the important thing. But our knowledge of God and of the Truth that Jesus proved is of little value to us unless it helps us solve our daily problems. When we catch a new glint of understanding, we must apply it and use it in every area of our workaday world if we wish God to work through us and bless us.
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The trouble is that we are all humanly out to “get” something, if only what we term our “rights.” We are not willing to become a means of expression for the Father through which His glorious all-providing good may flow to bless us and our world. Every inner inharmony arises from the fact that we are personally striving to “get the best of” some situation or some person. We are really striving to exert our personal will over the condition. Our self-concern, our self-importance, our almost unconquerable desire for self-justification cause more dissension and stress than any other element in the human make-up.
It requires faith and considerable practice to change our mental attitude. It helps me both in reducing my instinct to “get” and my personal sense of effort or conflict to think of myself as a channel through which God’s powerful essence of love and wisdom is continually passing. It is conveying itself through my receptive mentality to be transmitted into every area of my visible world. My realization of this makes it easier for me in the spirit of sincerity, conviction, and authority to pronounce spontaneous, heartfelt blessings on adverse situations.
Try it. Bless your distressing circumstance with a realization of God’s presence and power. Bless with thoughts of peace and joy the persons who have affronted you. Bless the conditions that have frightened you. Bless the needs that you have seemed unable to meet, the strangers you pass on the street. Bless even the drudgeries that you have previously hated. You are a channel for God. Respect and honor Him by utilizing your full ability willingly and cheerfully. Feel an interest in
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how well the smallest job may be done. This goes for the upkeep of your personal appearance and your home too. You will be surprised at the improved results both in yourself and in those around you. You will feel better inside too. This is God’s way of saying to you, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” It is God who gives the increase, as soon as you enter the circle of His prospering love.
You live in the love of God. Everywhere you go you carry God’s love with you. There is no escaping it. Sustaining you, soothing you, protecting you—yes, even from your own willful, embroiled human thoughts. Guiding you, strengthening you, blessing you, and through you blessing your whole world with His love and peace. You carry His realm of peace with you wherever you may travel. Wherever you go, whatever you do, you live, move, and have your being in the circle of God’s love.
Here is an ancient French prayer attributed to St. Frances of Assissi that expresses the creed of one who has found the Christ way of love and loving service:
“Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace. Where there is hate, may I bring love; where offense, may I bring pardon; May I bring union in place of discord; Truth, replacing error; faith, where once there was doubt; hope, for despair; light, where there was darkness; joy to replace sadness. Make me not to so crave to be loved as to love. Help me to learn that in giving I may receive; in forgetting self, I may find life eternal.”
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PRACTICE:
Love warms me with its spirit of forgiveness. My heart is warm with love toward everybody and everything, and in divine order my mind, my life, my affairs, and my whole world are transformed.
I put my faith in His presence and power. Father, I thank Thee that Thou hast broken through the resistance in my consciousness. In the boundless circle of Thy love Thy glorious will is done.
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Lesson III
Out of the Rut
Are you in a rut? Mentally, physically, or by force of material circumstances, do you feel that you are and wish that some lucky event or benevolent person would come along and pull you out? But these things don’t seem to happen to you. Do you wish you could pull yourself out, up to greater efficiency, happiness, and success, but don’t see how? Well, you can. There’s a way you can pull yourself out of any kind of rut that exists in this workaday world.
You may think that your limited surroundings or certain conditions are at fault. But no outer condition need have any influence on your happiness and achievement. Within yourself you have the capacity to be stronger, bigger, surer than you have ever been before. The day you make this startling, invigorating discovery the transformation of your life begins. You can now feel only gratitude for the problems that turned you to God, for all your life theretofore you have felt dependent
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on outer props and circumstances for your help.
Remember God is living energy to quicken, increase, and guide our own energy. Spirit lifts up, sustains, and establishes our own spirit.
We can get in a rut even when we pray. We ask God to work miracles for us. But instead of being expectant, we are unhopeful or refusing that God can help us. But God is able to give us every good gift, to enrich our life and to aid us in every earthly enterprise. When we won’t recognize and take the gift, then we must do without it.
Often we are held back by our doubts and often we make too much of an effort to trust God. We seem unable to take God—good—for granted, to take Him spontaneously and naturally, as we take our heartbeats and the air we breathe. It seems difficult to accept Him with certitude and unquestioning, natural joy. If you were positive that some great good was about to come into your life, what would be your inner feeling, your mood? This inner attitude or state of feeling is analogous to that greater, transcendent mood of absolute assurance and joy that colors your entire being when you feel yourself to be a part, a living expression, of God, of all good. This is what you must strive for.
Do you want to be more successful? Are you in the rut of nonsuccess, and do you want to lift yourself out? There is a way.
Come out of the rut! Cease believing in what isn’t good, in what is weak, inadequate, futile, in what doesn’t measure up to God, for God can do anything. Come out of the rut of sickness, difficulty, inharmony, insufficiency, failure! Our mind, which thinks so ceaselessly and insistently, is the
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most marvelous instrument imaginable, but it is up to us to control it and to choose the kind of thoughts we think, to train ourselves into courage, real efficiency, and stability. This is God’s will for us. Even more difficult to control are our moods, emotions, and attitudes, which are so intangible and undefinable but which are such potent factors in determining our experience of life. Yet we can reduce these to simplicity. When a child is going on a picnic, he acts happy because he feels happy. He feels happy because he is facing a definite, pleasurable experience. This is the way we should feel within, innately and spontaneously, at every moment and in every undertaking of our life, because we are facing God, good.
God, good, in you, with you, for you—in, with, for everybody, everything. Everything you think, do, see, or feel is simply a part of God, of good. Why should you feel hopeless or unhappy? God isn’t hopeless or unhappy, is He? Why should you or anybody else be sick? Almighty Spirit is not sick. Why should you be angry, impatient, short-tempered? For this is a state where your feelings are concerned, and you can’t be any of these ugly, undesirable things if you are engrossed with the glorious sensation of being a part of God. Why should you be suspicious, hesitant, doubtful, shrinking? Why, you can’t be if you are intimately interwoven with the very nature of immanent, omnipotent good; if your moods and feelings are of the very same substance that constitutes God. Why should you feel anxious, uneasy, or inadequate, or fear that you might fail? Does God fear for the success of His Infinite creativity? Does He shrink, tremble, grow paralyzed, or faint? No!
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Fearlessly let go of them: all the little bothers, the irritations, the jealousies, the dislikes. Do not give them any room in your mind. Let go of your disappointments, your sense of inadequacy, of discouragement, of failure. It does you no good to harbor such feelings. You only weaken yourself more and more. You will be astonished at what an invigorating effect it will have on you to let them go. The actual griefs, the bitter sorrows, the tragedies, the irreparable sense of human loss: let these go too. It does you no good to cling to these and brood over them; it does nobody any good. Let them go and let God help you build something happy and worthwhile into your life.
In any situation try to contemplate God’s relationship to you and His attitude toward the situation. Then, boldly take over this same attitude as much as you can; definitely identify yourself with good. Do this in your difficulties and you will find them vanishing from out of your consciousness. You are no longer disturbed by them; they have lost their power over you. Presently you will find that they have disappeared or have taken on an improved form in your outer experience. Within your own hidden, vital nature God is renewing and rebuilding you, equipping you with the wisdom and strength to master every emergency. This is the way to live Truth. When Truth is lived, demonstrations take care of themselves.
I can freely and effectively bless my body or any case of sickness in another by quickening my realization of God as free-flowing life and all good. His mighty presence becomes a part of my self. He fills me with His life, His power, His perfection of good.
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Our daily experience is woven of our thoughts, beliefs, and feelings toward ourselves and toward our world. We are humanly hampered by our sense of present limitations and by the shadows of old doubts and fears. Our human instincts are often so deeply buried in us that it is difficult to bring them out into the open, to take control of them, and definitely to banish them if they need banishing. But it can be done.
Release your problem when you turn to God. Dare to say to yourself, “I have no troubles.” Dare to feel that way. Remember God, good: “I have no troubles!” If you feel tired, handicapped, or discouraged, He that is in you is greater than he that is in the world. I AM! “Lo, I am with you always.” A tingling new impulse from within will enliven you into new activity. It will stir you, engross you, and make you forget your sense of trouble.
This new impetus is distinctly a thing of the mind, the spirit. It is not so much a matter of mere determination as of uplifted mood, changed in color and feeling, carrying its own sense of inevitable follow-through. By its intangible strength this changed attitude carries you over the previous mental impasse, over the physical obstacles, which for the moment you forget. The new outlook in your mind buoys you up, revitalizes you. You give yourself over to it, your new mood of happy conviction activates you: “God in the midst of me is mighty! I cannot fail!”
It is the same situation perhaps, but there are new life, new purpose, new opportunities, new outlooks; a new spirit of optimism and purpose, practiced faithfully but never mechanically—livingly.
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Every day lift yourself up in your own mind, mood, imagination, inner conviction. Every day do something with a sense of freedom and spontaneity, something you’ve wanted to do or felt you should do, but have shirked because of inertia or fear. Start right now. Make a program for yourself. Every day try to do something to make life pleasanter for others, not from a sense of duty or in hope of a reward, but because of the pleasure of being able to do it. Then behold how these active, happy inner states increase and grow, to bless you and transform you, to transform and bless your world.
PRACTICE:
The all-wise, all-loving, all-adjusting power of Christ is now lifted up in me, filling me with enduring health and strength. I trust in God and am not afraid. ”
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Lesson IV
There Is a Place
You should feel grateful today, this moment, every moment of every day. For there is a place accessible to you where you may find tremendous, life-transforming help, whatever your apparent limitation, lack, or need. It is a place where you find your health and are sure of it, where you find ever-increasing happiness, confidence, ability, poise, and peace.
The negative situations and conditions that have caused you such turmoil and uncertainty are all based on fear. Insidiously interwoven into the human mind, human fear pertaining to all kinds of things and possibilities in the external world is the basis of every conceivable human ill. Human fear brings about physical sickness, injustice, weakness, poor performance, failure. There is but one way to counteract human fear and to do away with it utterly. Drop from your attention the things or conditions that have caused your dread. You cannot do this alone; the only way to do it is to
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become God conscious. There is a place in you where you can become aware of the living, active God, where you can give Him full credence and trust. This is the marvelous place from which miracles emerge, from which great things come forth and happen, in which amazing changes take place, in which you are made into a different person, in which your whole life is transformed.
God is with you!
Just how often do you think of that? What does the presence of almighty God really signify to you as you eat and think and plan and play and carry on the various enterprises of every day? Are you really interwoven with the invisible fabric of almighty God when you yield to the assaults from the external world? No! You have forgotten God, what He is, and what He indubitably can do for you.
Yet any moment you so decide, you can turn within to your divine self and learn to abide in this wonderful place where you will be rebuilt and renewed. New strength, new courage, new confidence, new energy, new purpose—right where you are, under whatever circumstances, you can switch your attention to God, who is the ever-present, omnipotent Spirit of good. You can name and claim Him; in any situation you can practice giving your full credence to the supreme presence and power of the Almighty. You can practice abiding, fully expecting—knowing—that God is rightly and powerfully acting in and for you, and will adequately, victoriously, reveal Himself in your visible world in plenty of time. But you must yield yourself fully to the sense of His good now actively at work in you. This is the place of true prayer: a
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supreme and indestructible consciousness of God, of His love and your trust, and of divine cooperation, which you can carry with you wherever you go, into the humblest task or the highest undertaking.
It is not a question of being self-conscious or merely world conscious, but God conscious. God is with you. Any moment, increasingly every moment, you can feel this marvelous realization becoming more spontaneous, alive, and vivid within you. It suffuses your whole being, permeating your whole consciousness, filling you with the sense of God. His unseen but infallible action cares for, protects, adjusts, and directs you and your whole world. No wonder you begin to feel better. Your human bonds, irritations, and fears, whatever they may be, have lost their power over you. God Himself is present and in charge. Let Him have full sway. In the electrifying sense of His nearness, you are willing to relinquish all human shortcomings.
God Himself is washing your life clean and pure and bright for you. He is extending before you paths that are inspired of Him, paths that are sure, undefeatable, happy, and blessed. They cannot be other than blessed any moment of any day, no matter what your mind or hands may find to do; for at the very foundation of your being God is with you. Your sense of His presence and directive power, in all that you say and do and function with and are, grows and spreads through your whole being. His presence is in the midst of every thought and deed and aspiration, every physical functioning and external enterprise.
God is with you. And God is good. More and more you can feel His presence charging your own
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innermost being, coloring and changing it from doubt and weakness into glorious certainty and strength. You are willing to give up your anxious concentration on ways and means, on specified results, for God’s results are bound to be good. The ills of your environment become less provocative to you as you loose yourself from the necessity of grappling with them personally. Your sole responsibility is to remember that God is ceaselessly with you. Your responsibility to God is to give yourself over to Him so completely that you feel vibrant with His ceaselessly active, infallible good.
This place where you come to feel intimately God's loving, powerful presence has no tangible location. You can take Him with you and unerringly find Him in any spot, condition, circumstance, or venture. Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is within you.” We usually say that knowing God is a matter of consciousness. But the term consciousness may seem too abstract to have a vital meaning for many of us. Yet our consciousness is simply something of which we are aware. In the complexities of life there is much that we are continuously, changingly aware of, in various areas and fringes of our consciousness. Our thought stream is constantly being altered and colored by things that are happening to us, by various impressions we are constantly receiving and registering, often without our being definitely aware of the shifting and change. Our thought stream is so close to us that it is often difficult for us to analyze it, to name definitely its contents, or to exert control over it. But the thought stream can be controlled through vigilance and persistence, through refusing to give attention or allegiance to any power less than God.
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If we decide to let God rule our consciousness for us, He will help us in this task and bring it to a successful conclusion.
This is the place where the most important victory of our life will be won. Our practice of the loving, infallible presence of God must be kept up until it becomes an established truth to us, not just something that we think about once in a while, and frantically call on when we think ourselves in danger. If we have really “found” God and trust Him absolutely, we know that there is nothing to fear. For we know that God is with us, in charge of every situation, bringing forth good only, every good outcome we can conceive or desire. This blessed knowledge and all that it connotes has come to fill every aspect of our conscious mind. We are the human receptacles, instruments, agents of the Almighty; we have become fit, perfected, protected channels in all that we think, aspire to, and do. This has become our habit of thought and feeling. We don’t have to pump up the thought of God to rescue or to aid us. It springs to our aid and simply wipes out the fear of ill before the negative thought has had a chance to register or to make any impression. So deeply is our God consciousness established that there is a blending of the divine and human with all our instincts and intuitions, resulting in absolute trust and dependence on God. We draw on Him as simply and spontaneously as our lungs draw breaths from the air. We cannot doubt or dread or fear; this has become an impossibility because we are magnified in God. We cannot worry, be suspicious, or feel anger or hate. Through the practice and establishment of God’s presence we find that our attitude has changed, not
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only toward the Almighty but toward ourselves and our capabilities and toward the things and circumstances that combine to make up our external world.
This altered attitude of confidence, absolute assurance, joy, enjoyment, and expectancy of good can be put into the humblest task. You will respond with a new and unguessed sense of freedom as you shake off the old dreads and inhibitions. God is with you. God Himself, protecting, sustaining, leading you. Not only for yourself but for every associate and situation you can feel His actively beneficent presence. Why be unforgiving, suspicious, or mean? It is better, a million times better, to thrill with the upsurge of strength and conviction: The omnipresence of God fills my whole world with good.
God works for us from within outward, and we cannot always calculate how His beneficence will be manifested, except that it is dependent on full self-surrender to Him and absolute trust. During an intense spasm of physical pain a certain woman was trying to keep her attention on God. Prayer had helped her to endure previous attacks, and she had to a certain extent lost her fear that in the midst of one of them she might die. She was straining to remember that God was her life, her physical perfection, her invincible strength, but the contortions of her whole organism seemed to become more violent. Suddenly she ceased all personal trying. “You gave me my life,” she thought, “and put it in this body, Father, and if You want to take it away I am not afraid. It is Your life—do what You will with it. I know whatever You do will be good.” She felt first a soothing sense of peace in
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her full surrender. Then gradually she felt the terrific physical disturbances amazingly unknotting and smoothing themselves out. Her organism seemed to relax and adjust itself as if under the ministrations of a great, loving, infinitely skillful hand. It must have been that insidious and perhaps unsuspected fears were touched and erased away. “I must not ever forget this,” thought the grateful woman. “O Father, teach me how to trust You more and more!”
Later she carried the lesson of this experience into other phases of her life. God would work in every area of her life if she would let Him. She must yield herself to His power and let Him erase whatever obstructions there might be, discouragements, bitterness, anxieties, and petty concern for self. She had to learn human forgiveness and the true meaning of trust and love. Her health improved steadily. A partial paralysis was cleared away as if certain parts of her organism had been freed at the same time that her mind was liberated from constricting fears. She tried not to entertain any thought that had previously caused antagonism or dread. She simply dropped it, remembering the presence and power of God and putting every phase of her life in His keeping. It was not always humanly easy, but she must not forget.
Her health improved, her opportunities increased and her ability to meet them; her environment became happier, her attitude toward her associates, toward her work, and toward life was more friendly and optimistic, and one day she realized that her whole nature had changed. More resourceful, kinder, more tolerant and patient, more cheerful and courageous, more dependable,
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more confident of success and more successful, she had become a different person. In all her dealings, enterprises, situations, and in every smallest task she learned to include God by dropping the mere personal attitude. It was first a formulated prayer that helped her, then it grew into the very fiber of the being, whence it came forth spontaneously:
“I am a creation of the Most High and am now open to His fullest blessing!”
And veritably in her manifest world she walked with blessings; the most assured and dependable blessings in this changing world, for they came from the Most High.
You build up your consciousness of God’s presence not only by meditation and prayer, not only by changing your thought habits and controlling your wayward emotions. You build by means of the things you do all day long and through the attitude in which you do them; not strainingly, dubiously, or rebelliously, but freely, confidently, gladly. By your uplifted and gladly expectant attitude toward yourself, your God, and your world, you yourself are altered and your outer experience is bound to change.
Remember every moment of every day that in every fiber of your being, in every contact and venture and situation, permeating, protecting, guiding, and blessing, God is with you!
PRACTICE:
“/ am lifted up to the Christ consciousness. I am one with all love (good) everywhere, I am at peace with the world. I am free. I am free. ”
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Lesson V
Have No Fear
What would be about the greatest boon you could possibly imagine? Would it not be to be absolutely without fear? It has been said that fear, deeply imbedded and of long standing in the minds of men, is at the bottom of most of the ills to which human flesh is heir. Fear among nations causes war. Fear among individuals causes hatred and violence. Fear causes us to live in a world of confusion and uncertainty, of desperate striving, of ceaseless battle against that which threatens to pull us down; until finally fear damages the very cells of the body itself.
No one really wants fear in his life. But how can one get rid of it? In the first place and in the ultimate analysis it is for his very life that man fears. And wedged into his life span is the full category of other fears, big ones and small ones, marring his chance for happiness and contentment. What are you afraid of? Are you sick and afraid that you will not get well? Are you afraid of the
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future, of the challenges and insecurities of life? Are you afraid that the welfare of your loved ones is in jeopardy? Are you afraid you cannot find a job or that you lack ability to fill the one you have? Are you afraid of the world’s opinion or of the moods and tempers of other persons? Are you afraid that you will not get your just deserts—or perhaps that you will get them? Are you afraid of long, sleepless nights, and even more afraid of the daybreak that brings with it the necessity of carrying some decision through?
A thousand and one fears are so interwoven in the fabric of our life that it would seem impossible to overcome them. Fear is a very human trait, but where God is there can be no fear. Then the one sure antidote for human fear is to remember our connection with God. “Be still, and know that I am God.” How many of us have the simple directness and courage of Jesus? How many of us have the faith to remember God and what God stands for in relation to His creation; to put God first and keep Him first in the face of every adverse experience; to put ourselves and everything that concerns us in the Father’s keeping, and keep them there in an absolute fullness of personal surrender, confidence, and trust? “Not my will, but thine, be done,” prayed Jesus, knowing the omnipotence, omnipresence, and loving-kindness of the Father. “I speak not from myself: but the Father abiding in me doeth his works,” said Jesus, as He was teaching His disciples concerning the Father.
What a wonderful feeling of relief and freedom begins to steal over us once we have caught even the faintest perception of the presence and willingness of almighty God. God Himself is helping us;
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God, who is stronger than any of our difficulties, against whom nothing else can stand. How it eases us just to hand over to Him our problems, all the snarls and perplexities that have been too much for us. We can feel our taut, strained nerves gratefully relax. God is here. He will see us through, He will tell us what to do.
We should be thankful that our mind is so constituted as to make it impossible for us to concentrate more than one thought at a time. While we are concentrating on God’s presence and power we cannot simultaneously entertain thoughts of our personal inadequacies, hardships, and fears. But we ourselves must direct our thoughts toward God and establish them there. Whether we do this is entirely up to us. Even God cannot do this for us.
What we think about—the nature and trend of our thoughts—colors and directs the trend of our life. What we react to and the way we react constitute for us the emotional structure in which we daily and hourly live. What we believe in by virtue solely of our belief is true for us. Whatever we think may or can hurt us can hurt us by virtue of our mere belief that it may or can! Through our own belief that it can we give it that power. If we really believe that a thing cannot injure or affect us, if we really believe that a higher power is working for us against which nothing adverse can stand—as long as we believe thus with respect to our individual vulnerability nothing in the world can touch or affect us.
In what are you putting the strength of your belief? Are you putting the strength of your belief in the undesirable things or possibilities that are
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making you miserable and unhappy, or in a higher Power, a power transcendent of every negative appearance, a power intangible yet unfailing, inviolable? This power is infallible, illimitable, omnipotent! Just what does God mean to you?
The best prayer for any of us is the one that serves best to soothe, assure, and strengthen the human side of us. In our human need and anxiety we turn to the Father. “Father, of my own efforts I have failed. I now turn to Thee. Not by my might, Father; not by my personal might, but by Thy grace. Take care of this. Father. ” And the sense of peace that comes after this giving over is the first proof that God has heard and is answering our prayer.
You are more peaceful. Have you ever stopped to think exactly what has happened? In your mind and heart, which were formerly filled with doubt and fear, room has been made for peace. There is less room for fear. Powerful, restful, joyful, healthful, plentiful, trustful, all these are good-sounding words. They are words we should all like to feel are descriptive of us, of our inner self. And as our mind and heart becomes more and more filled with God, with a consciousness of His peace and plenty and joy and power, less and less room is left for the dreads and uncertainties by which we have been previously tormented.
Whatever serves best to aid and fortify your human efforts is your best prayer: “Lo, I am with you always.” “The battle is the Lords.” “Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord.” Give yourself over to the glorious comfort to be found in these assurances, the feeling that it is not your human strength that is now being tested but the
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strength and power of almighty God. Yield yourself. Taste and experience to the full the joy of your human release. “It is not I, but God.” Whatever your problem, your fear, your nagging anxiety, just hand it over. Comfort yourself with this divine assurance: “God is here. God is working in and for me. Nothing can stand against God.” Know that—feel it. The last thing before you go to sleep at night, relax and thrill to the joyous realization of it. Put everything else aside, every evidence to the contrary, every uncertainty or doubt. Wake up with it, or if you waken with a feeling of anxiety, push through it and call to that thought of divine assurance and support which previously has given you peace. Call to it—call it forth.
Claim God’s mighty help, do not delay or shrink from it. God is reliable. Feed your mind with thoughts of the reliability of God. Let your mind be trustful, hopeful. You cannot go too far in picturing or conceiving the reliability of God. God does not care how high you build your conception of Him or how much and how far you depend on Him. He wants you to depend on Him; He wants to express Himself through you, wants you to be more and more a perfect expression of Him. He wants you to be filled to the utmost with His own life and love and wisdom and power. He wants these to flow harmoniously through you. He wants you to be healthy, happy, and abundantly supplied. He wants you to be undaunted and free. He wants you to partake of His own divine, assurance and strength. He wants to bless you.
Do not let your human doubts or timidities hold you back. Do not let the opinion of anyone in the world hold you back. Make your first claim on
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God in whatever terms best satisfy your individual need. Let your courage manifest itself in daring to approach and claim God, the power that works within you and that is stronger than any force that can threaten or assail you from without. Claim God, ally yourself with Him. Identify yourself with those of His blessings of which you feel the most vital need. Life, love, peace, joy, plenty—of these God has an inexhaustible abundance.
Send the message to your mind, to its farthest corners, again and again. The last thing before you go to sleep, the first thing when you waken, a dozen times daily, a thousand times if need be. As you perform your daily tasks, as you go forth to meet a problem, build a sense of your alliance with almighty God into your deepest consciousness. Live in the mighty omnipresence of God.
God is here. Even though results do not come instantly, be steadfast. Though outward conditions and circumstances appear unchanged, let your own changed, thrilling sense of God cooperation uphold you. God cannot fail. “I speak not from myself: but the Father abiding in me doeth his works.” Be inwardly confident and serene. “The battle is the Lord’s.” In the face of any unwelcomed situation or trial say to yourself, “This doesn’t matter; it doesn’t disturb me. Nothing can disturb the peace of mind of God’s creation.” Even if calamity should threaten—and especially then—refill yourself with peace and trust. Say to yourself, “God rules, and He is working everything out just right.” You may not see just how He will work it out, may not see just how the salvation can come to pass, but if you have filled your heart and mind with trust, you know that it surely will. You are kept
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calm and steady by the strength of your confidence, your inner conviction. You are filled with your confidence in God instead of nervous, panicky fears. When you are filled with trust in God, you trust Him to disclose all the hows and whys in their proper time. You trust Him to reveal to you in plenty of time what you of your own part must humanly do. And God will!
Most of us are slaves to our human conception of time, we drive ourselves desperately, we fret and stew in case our deliverance arrive too late. It is when we lift up our eyes and put our reliance in God first and solely that we finally perceive that there are no desperate urgencies in Spirit. In God’s realm of order, beauty, and harmony there are no urgencies of any nature. Live in a continuous state of divine reassurance: As H. Emily Cady says in Lessons in Truth, “I am Spirit. . . . Nothing can hurt me or make me sick or afraid, for Spirit is God. . . . God works in me to will and to do whatsoever He wishes me to do, and He cannot fail.”
God cannot fail. God does not change. No, it is you who must change, so as to open your heart and your mind and make room for Him, and be filled to the brim with His good.
But even when we desire to receive Him, to cast off everything else and open ourselves to Him fully, it is our own mind that presents the worst difficulties. The human mind with its intricacies and long-time habits and deep-rooted sense beliefs can play us such unwanted and sorry tricks. We want to believe; we want to live and have our being in the full freedom of our glorious belief, but hidden doubts in our mind keep cropping up and thrusting themselves in the way.
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Charles Fillmore has written, “The intellect grasps Truth first. The next step is the bringing forth, in the subconsciousness, of substance and life.” We cannot fight the intellect but we can give it into the keeping of God. We can first soothe, pacify, and assure it; then we can deliberately, patiently, lovingly do our part in building up our consciousness to a fuller realization of God until He fills us. This task is not always easy. It requires patience on our part, but it can be done.
God will surely help us, but we have our own part in the matter. He created us free agents, masters of our own mind. It has been said that we are human magnets and attract to ourselves that to which we are mentally attuned. It is easy to see what a valuable lesson there is for us in this. Sometimes we get so saturated with our fears and despondencies that we often attract only what is negative—more troubles and miseries. We certainly do not want to do this, and it should be a great comfort, encouragement, and incentive to us to know that it is a condition we can remedy. We can choose to tune in with what is positive, constructive, and happy, with what is uplifting; we can identify ourselves with all great, unseen forces instead of those that are lesser. Sometimes it may seem difficult to control our thoughts and emotions but it can be done. God Himself will help us do it, for in every constructive, uplifting undertaking we are after all really seeking to identify ourselves more closely with God. Surely it is more pleasant to ally our mental world with what is good and desirable than with what is undesirable.
Do not say you cannot do this. You can! You can identify yourself with health instead of sick-
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ness, with love instead of hate, with good cheer instead of pessimism, with good fortune instead of misfortune. Jesus bade, “Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be fearful.” These words clearly indicate that we alone are responsible for the conditions in our heart. If you so choose, you can fill your heart with cheer, joy, hope, trust, and peace, instead of dismal fear. Persevere. Do not wait for an outer “demonstration” before you start rejoicing. In the realization that you are now mentally unified with every good and happy thing and in your increasing certitude that everything is working out well for you, give thanks and rejoice. Soon your mental load will lift, and you will begin to feel better. And when you feel better, when you become peaceful and poised; you do your work better; you act differently, and other persons act differently toward you. If you are faithful in your inner practice, nothing is surer than that outer benefits will result.
God—good—outweighs everything else, is present in everything here and now, whatever the appearance. Believe in the good; call to it, “Come forth!” Call to the good, the beautiful thing of God that you desire. A certain woman who undertook to heal herself of “heart trouble” and various other troubles through prayer, noticed how she was weighed down with fear. Her fears were so many and so deep-rooted that she did not see how she could cope with them. At first she did not try, she simply surrendered them to God. The pain of her heart attacks led her to use as an assuring prayer: “Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be fearful.” “Lo, I am with you always.” She virtually lived with this prayer. One day she noticed the
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significance of the word fearful—“full of fear.” She started envisaging her heart filled with all the things that she would like to have instead of fear-faith, trust, peace, beauty, joy, and power. Her “heart trouble” soon became so much better that she practically forgot about it in the other delightful occupations that had come to her hand to do. It was about this time that she noticed that her other troubles were vanishing and that her fear had vanished too.
Fears having to do with the human self, preoccupation with this self, cause most of our troubles. It is said that some emotional disorders are caused from various kinds of straining, self-interested anxiety. A truly generous, loving, trusting, magnanimous mind seldom goes “smash.” The life of a person who frees himself from human concern and does not fear for his life usually remains stable. An inspiring Truth story is that of a woman who had been given up to die. She asked that her bed be rolled to a window and she lay looking up at the stars. A tremendous sense of the life and power controlling the universe came upon her, and she felt that she would soon be one with it. As she surrendered herself to the one illimitable power, the power itself came and flowed into her body with a renewal of life and strength, and she was instantaneously healed. Such healings can occur when we release ourselves and everything that humanly concerns us to God.
God is here now—in everything. Though your body cries out with pain, though the people around you seem irritable, events discouraging, nevertheless draw them, together with yourself, into the invisible but everywhere present realm of
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God’s love. When we pray, “God is my all; I know no fear,” we gradually realize more and more deeply that God is not only our “all” but also the spiritually potential, powerful “all” of everybody else. God is all. We cannot shut Him out of anybody or anything. God rules supreme, but He rules in the realm of Spirit, which is everywhere existent. Even in the situation that may seem so adverse, in the people we have dreaded and disliked, in the very conditions that have caused us panic and distress we find God, and His illimitable blessings are there also.
So do not waste time in fear and doubt but lift up your heart and your mind. Rejoice, give thanks, be generous in your outlook, be warmhearted and kind toward all people, let your every thought be a blessing. God will come forth out of the invisible and fill your mind and your body and heal you of all disorders. You will recognize him in your environment and in all your undertakings and affairs. Your whole world will be restored. You may not understand by just what process the transformation has been worked, but that makes no difference. “The Father abiding in me doeth his works.” When you are filled with God, with His thoughts, His ways, His works, and His blessings, there will be no room left for fear. You will be without fear.
PRACTICE:
“I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.”
“There is but one Presence and one Power in the universe, God, the good omnipotent.’'’
“God is here. God in the midst of me is mighty. God rules. In every smallest thing I am relying on
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God. Father, I thank Thee for Thy unseen Presence, and for Thy protection, peace and power which fills my entire world. ”
“J am unified with God. By my faith I am unified with His life and power and all the good there is. ”
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Lesson VI
You Are What You Think
Your mind is your world.
Your thoughts are the tools with which you carve your life story on the substance of the universe. When you rule your mind you rule your world. When you choose your thoughts you choose results. The visible part of your life pours out of your mind, shaped and stamped by your thoughts, as surely as the coins of nations are shaped and stamped by the mechanisms used to convert ore into currency.
Mind is the source of feeling. You sometimes say, “I feel depressed; I feel as if something unpleasant were about to occur, but I do not know why I should feel so.” The feeling of depression comes from your having subconsciously contacted something, which, if brought to the surface of consciousness, would cause you unhappiness.
Include others in your assurances of the protecting Presence. Your lasting individual good is enhanced by enhancement of the good of all. Train
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your mind to react sanely to the frustrations of the human consciousness. Disorder exists for you while you acknowledge it. It ceases when you cease to support it by your acknowledgment. Do not let yourself be thrown into a panic by the feeling that something unpleasant may occur. Your feeling of impending danger is, in itself, danger. Your feeling of God-given safety is, in itself, safety.
Everything originates in mind. Begin now to train your impulses and your feelings. Whatever your ideals may have been in the past, the impulses and the feelings generated by them will be supplanted by the offspring of more magnificient ideals, as these are adopted and cherished by you.
The process works both ways. Anything now in your life can be resolved into its mental form; as a mental form it can be reduced, and finally erased. Dismissal by erasure is the one sure method of winning freedom from the undesirable. To attempt to repress is foolish; the thing continues to grow, and it becomes malformed. It does not stay hidden, but comes forth, ugly and forbidding. Then you say, “I do not know why this thing came into my life. I never invited it.” You consciously did not invite it, but you shaped it, and what the mind shapes will come into the manifest. Your salvation lies in erasing the causes of things unwholesome in your life. Your life is what you think: Think properly, and life will become positive for you.
A thing that is in process of forming can be more quickly erased than a thing that has become concrete. But not always do you avail yourself of this advantage. You may be so engaged by the form-giving thought that you defer beginning the
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erasing process. What you think concerning others takes shape in your life. Never entertain for others a thought which you would not want objectified in yourself. You are what your thoughts assemble.
You say “my mind”; another says “my mind”; every person in the world says “my mind.” But there is only one mind. That mind is the Mind of God, in which individual minds have intelligence and identity. What you call your mind is the use that you make of the Mind of God. You are intelligent to the degree in which you give the Mind of God action in you. When you receive a new idea you receive out of the Mind of God. Increase of intelligence in your mind is further disclosure of the Mind of God in you. You could not think, could not be, but for the Mind of God, as it presses upon you for manifestation.
You are governed by your feeling more fully than you realize. You are swayed by likes and by dislikes. You should yield only to the truth of life that underlies all situations. When your mind swerves your life swerves; you become unstable, and manifestation varies. Then you say that chance or fate has overpowered you. But the statement is not true. You are being directed by your impulses; it is your life’s business to direct your impulses, and so control all the issues of your life.
Power is ability to produce change. Mind is passive power; thought is active power. After you have identified yourself as the Mind of God, you begin to let God’s mind manifest in you, to the exclusion of ignorance. You understand that His mind is composed of perfect, changeless ideas, and you cease to translate His ideas into imperfect, fluctuating thoughts. You know that you are what
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you think, and this knowledge encourages you to give way to the Mind of God.
The Mind of God pushes on your mind for expression. As you let His mind supplant what you call your mind, your thoughts change for the better. All thought is power; better thoughts than you have been using will make for you better conditions than you have been experiencing.
The changes that your mind is capable of producing range from the ultramundane to the ultra-ethereal. These changes may bring you from human bickerings into the “communion of saints” and intimacy with God. They may work wonders in your outer life, fashioning substance into myriad forms of beauty and utility for your enjoyment. But of this one thing be assured: Intentionally or unintentionally on your part, your thoughts are changing your affairs, your body, your relationships to the world. They are changing the texture of the mental fabric which you call your mind. In this line of action your power is such that all ignorance may be banished, and your mind come to know itself.
You have as much power as anyone that ever has been on this planet or that ever will be. You are using your power, but in what way? You think, but how do you think? Perhaps you merely suppose that you think. Are you a mental parrot, imitating in tone and in gesture the words, the phrases, and the declarations of others, or are you thinking by the power of your own mind to produce a lovelier ideal? If you never have shaped a thought, for the sake of your own progress begin now to shape one. If need be, take a vacation, leap your mental ruts, and blaze your own mental trail.
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One thought of your own, worked out even with labor, is better for you, more interesting and of more value in your life than a hundred of the most brilliant thoughts that someone else has voiced. Be yourself; exercise your mind, then watch yourself grow mentally. This practice continued until it becomes a habit will make clear to you the value of directing your thoughts, for its effects will convince you that your mental acts are responsible for the changes that come in your affairs.
God does not promise and then withhold. If ever you have felt assured, proceeded on your way, and then been hurt, puzzled, halted, the assurance on which you acted came from your own consciousness. God does not punish you.
Pray that you may no longer desire to desire your own will. That prayer will erase from your consciousness the wish to control yourself in your relation to God. You ask me, “Would you not control your own life?” Only to the point where I am able to surrender it to God. I know that He in me is wiser than I of myself ever can become; I know that His love will take better care of me than I can specify. So instead of wanting to control my life I want God to control it. And I know that, surrender as fully as I can, there still will be left in me enough of the personal to sustain physical identity.
In training your mind, do not ask it to contradict common sense. An intelligent orchardist does not plant a persimmon tree, then solemnly in “treatment” address it, “I affirm that you shall produce oranges.” He does not plant an apple tree and then affirm, to convince himself, that the tree shall bear apples. Being intelligent, he plants an
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orange tree when he wishes to grow oranges; he knows that he will receive apples from an apple tree. He understands that mind has forms of expression and he knows that in all cases the form indicates the fruit to be borne. He works with the trend of mind, not against it.
If you work with the trend of mind your life will be fruitful. In you one particular form of expression is nearer to the surface than all others. That form must express first, then, after it, all others in the order of their precedence. Do not try to disarrange the order of manifestation. Do not ask your plum tree to produce peaches. To insure order, you must think coherently. To produce finished results, you must think to a conclusion.
Do not let your thoughts riot. In any chosen line of meditation or study, put all the force of order into your thinking. If your thoughts become disorderly, handle them firmly. Say to the thoughts that come stampeding forward, “Stand back; get into line. You may express when your time comes, but not before.” This training will cause your thoughts to respond to your demand, and you will find logic becoming prominent in your thinking. You will begin to see that [with God] you are in command of your life, and that you will become what you cause your mind to do and to be.
You do not have to wait on time or on inspiration, in any work. You can do as well at one time as you can at another. Time always is yours; inspiration is continuous. Work by the rule of ever-read-iness, and you will become able to command ideas that remind you of your identity. Stability and regularity will become your aim when you understand that your mental habits are also your life
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habits.
If you are criticized, examine the criticism honestly, to see how much of it is justified. If you find that you are criticized for a thing which accords with your convictions, you will understand that the criticism is unavoidable. If you are unjustly criticized, accused falsely, you can afford to be lenient, not having done the thing for which you are criticized. Never let criticism induce in you a feeling of martyrdom.
Your mind will do for you anything that you ask of it. It will reveal to you hourly the thing that you need to know for that hour. It can be made so responsive that it will act for you at any given time, in any prescribed way.
In training your mind, there are three facts for you to accept. These facts must be dwelt on until the one needed becomes your instant response to any unfavorable appearance for which it is the corrective. The facts are in amendment and elucidation of teachings that you may have already accepted. The facts, broadly stated:
1.	You have been taught that God lives in you. The teaching is true; but it does not tell you why you live. You live because of the facts named here: God is life. Life lives; it lives itself. The life of God lives itself as you; it lives you.
2.	You have been taught that the Mind of God is the only mind there is. The teaching is true, but it has not been given the expansion that would make it comprehensible to you. The expansion that makes the statement comprehensible is: God is mind. The Mind of God thinks; It thinks Itself. The Mind of God thinks Itself as you; It thinks you.
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3.	You have been taught that your thoughts make your life. The teaching is but a partial truth.
With God, you can unform and reform; you can bring new shapes of good from the treasury of your mind. The world is yours. Heaven is yours. All power is yours—with God.
PRACTICE:
I am what I think. I think life. The life of God is released in me, and I am alive forevermore.
I am what I think. I think with the Mind of God. The Mind of God is released in me, and I am wise with His wisdom.
I am what I think. I think power. The power of God is released in me, and I am daily changed into a likeness truer to Him.
I am what I think. I think love. The love of God is released in me, and I am sustained and comforted.
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Lesson VII
One Thing I Do Now
Are you afraid of something? Are you afraid that you will not be able to find a job, or to hold the one you have? Are you afraid that you won’t be able to pay the rent, to meet the note coming due at the bank, or even to buy food to eat tomorrow? Do you feel the grip of terror at your heart, knowing not which way to turn, knowing not what to do next? There is one thing to do. There is really just one important thing to do. Trust God.
Have you quarreled with a friend? Is there an inharmonious condition in your home? Are you rankling under a slight or an injustice? In your hurt and frustration do you feel so confused, so much disoriented, and so unhappy that you are not certain just what to do? There is one thing to do that is all-important. Remember God.
Are you ill, in physical pain? Has the doctor given you an alarming report? Have medicines failed to relieve you, have your symptoms increased, are you fearful about the outcome?—so
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fearful that you do not know what would be best for you to do? There is one thing you should do quickly. Do it as quickly as you can; do it over and over; try to live in a state of doing it. Do it from the bottom of your heart, with the full strength of your body and mind. Then it is time to turn wholeheartedly to God.
Are you in some minor quandary, beset by some major decision? It makes no difference what the trouble may be or what its nature, how big or how small. Remember quickly. Remember this and this alone. Know that it is the principal thing to know, the one vital thing, that it is true, and that it will somehow cover everything—that it will suffice. Remember this:
God is here. God understands. God cares. God knows how to help. God can. God does!
Have you something to do, and you are not sure that you know how to do it? Has your confidence in yourself, in your strength or wisdom or ability, been somehow weakened, perhaps shattered? Has your courage ebbed, your energy dwindled, and is your enthusiasm low? Is your mind tired, your heart a weight in your chest because there is something very important you must do and you have lost faith in your ability to do it? Then this is the time of times to have faith in God!
God is here. You can’t see Him or touch Him, but He is here. God knows. God cares. God knows how to help. God can. God does!
Sometimes this basic thought is all that the perplexed or anxious mind can hold onto for a while. But it is enough—God. Just God: illimitable, infallible, omnipotent. “Omnipotent”—think of what that really means. Think of what those other
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words mean: infallible, illimitable. Just what does God mean to you? Formulate the highest and most sweeping conception of God that you can, and try to harmonize yourself with this conception. Just God.
One thing: God! acting His mightiest in you and for you. Recognize Him, trust Him; forgetting all else, just remember God.
Oh, the indescribable, blessed relief of remembering God; of just throwing all else away. Do not try to bring distressing details to His attention—just throw them away. God knows. He does. He will know just what to do. He will tell you what to do. God is in charge, and there is absolutely nothing to worry about or to fear. God Himself has taken charge. God cannot fail. Nothing can thwart God, nothing can stand against Him.
Just to throw everything else away and throw yourself on God is such blessed relief! There is nothing else in the world like the blessed comfort, the balm, and the growing assurance which grows and pours in like a strong, mighty tide: “God will take care of it, He will help me. I am unified with God, and one with God is a majority. He will tell me what to do, the answer will come. All is well, for my trust is in God.”
“ ‘With God all things are possible.’ It is not I, ‘but the Father abiding in me doeth his works.’ God Himself sets the stars in their courses, feeds the sparrows, and controls the universe. God who loves me, who knows, who cares, and who does, leads me. He is my shepherd, and I shall not want. He guides my way. He brings me by paths I have not known. He makes darkness light before me and crooked places straight. God, loving, almighty
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Father, I place myself and all that pertains to me in Thy care.”
Yes, the answer will come. Do not doubt it. In the moment when you have thrown everything else away and have simply thrown yourself on Him, you do not doubt it. Hold to this realization. Every time the old harrowing indecisions start creeping back, remember quickly. Remember God. This is enough. At your first flash of remembrance your sense of trouble will begin dimming and falling away. You will feel calm and strengthened by just remembering the peace and strength of almighty God, by letting His peace and strength flow into and through you. You will feel the dawn of a new personal strength and courage. Each time you turn to Him more strength and courage will come. The answer will come. As surely as the sun rises, God will help you when, forgetting all else, you remember Him and turn to Him and throw yourself on Him in faith, believing.
“One thing I do.” As we turn to God more and more, and seek to know Him better, and seek to do as He tells us and to think His thoughts after Him, we find that this phrase is a sort of magic formula. Did you ever think to yourself how wonderful it would be if you were happy—just happy? Surely if life is worth living, if a single day of life is worth living, it should be filled with happiness. It is a glorious realization when we really grasp the fact that happiness does not depend on outer things, on external conditions, or on any trend of events. We are so accustomed to believing that happiness does depend on such things that it is difficult to shake off the belief, but if we can once free ourselves from it, we are gloriously free. Happiness—pure
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joy—is from within. It is a free inalienable, untouchable gift of God. It does not depend on this or that. It does not have to be created. It is, as God is. It exists, together with peace, love, wisdom, and the other spiritual gifts, in that realm of eternal, boundless light and life that lies back of the world of appearances. It exists there, free and boundless, waiting to be recognized, claimed, called forth.
When you awake in the morning, what a thrill of gratitude comes from remembering this, realizing its truth. God’s joy is prepared for you, awaiting you, to be accepted in your heart. Know that it is there, contingent on nothing, on no outer happening whatever. It is there, full and free, boundless, just waiting to pour itself forth as spontaneously as the song of a bird. It is there, without any effort of your human contrivance to create it. It is there— happiness and joy—God’s free gift to His children.
Merely by remembering, by thinking of God’s joy, of this wonderful spiritual essence within you, you can feel it stir, and can feel it begin to flow through you. Happiness, and joy, dependent on no outer circumstance, are God’s own gifts. Now and forever, they are your very own, and nothing can ever take them away from you.
Later in the day human cares and problems may arise and the sense of that marvelous inflow may be dimmed, lost. But recall yourself quickly; remember; call it back. “ ‘One thing I do.’ This is God’s day. He wants me to partake of His abounding joy. Today I will recognize and partake and be happy within—today this ‘one thing I do.’ ” Over and over you may have to remind yourself, but if you are faithful, if you persevere, you will be amazed at the results. You will feel better. You
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will cease making demands on people and their behavior for your happiness. Contrary conditions will not have the power to upset you so much; you can always turn again to God’s joy, your invisible treasure. You will discover in a dozen pleasant ways that “the joy of Jehovah is your strength.” And there will be many wonderful results in your life to surprise you.
A woman whose health was broken, whose affairs were in disorder, and whose courage was spent, was led to play a kind of game with words. At first she used it as a game to occupy her time and mind. She took a thesaurus and wrote down all the synonyms of courage that she could find. These synonyms led her to other words with related but variant meanings. These led to still others, and the first thing she knew she had several pages filled with lists of words, words expressing different degrees and shades of meaning of strength, power, joy, light, kindness, resolve, health, harmony, beneficence, and peace. All the words were uplifting, helpful, and constructive, although many of them seemed far removed from the word with which she had originally started. But meanwhile an inner process had been going on. She had become so interested in her “game” that she never knew just when or how she had refound her own courage, but she had. She must have done so, for she found herself quickened and very eager to tackle her problems from a new, hopeful, and entirely optimistic angle. She found herself regaining her strength and faith almost magically and, best of all, she found herself feeling actually lighthearted and happy even before her material problems had been straightened out, and these, too,
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soon became disentangled. “The joy of Johovah is your strength.” Courage!
“One thing I do.” Choose a good thing, and begin to do it. Above everything else, proclaim to yourself, “I trust God.” Trust Him. Rely on Him! Resolve to yourself, “I am happy. I am cheerful. I am peaceful. I am kind,” Definitely pick out the line of your experiment, and set to. Give yourself over to it. If you forget, if you find yourself pulled away by the tugs of old mental habit, by undesirable tendencies in your daily living, do not be disheartened. Simply return and begin again. Simply remember: “One thing I do.” Be faithful. Practice being faithful to this one thing with every bit of your mind and with your whole heart.
You will be rewarded.
God knows how. God can. God does!
PRACTICE:
“Today I am going to be happy. Today will be a happy day for me. One thing I will do today. I will let this be God’s day, I will consecrate it to Him, in it I will be happy. ”
Through God all things are possible.
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