[199] I ask the student to go
within himself for wisdom. I ask him
to direct his glance downward into
the roots of his being. No doubt the
subjective mind of which I speak may
be properly called the roots of his
being. But he is not to live in these
roots. They are simply to serve his
purpose by contributing their
strength to his objective mind, as
the roots of the tree feed the body,
and the entire external manifestation
of the tree. I have shown the student
what these roots are so that he may
gain a conception of his own
deathless importance. I do not want
him ever to say again, “I am a
poor, weak creature.” Rooted in
the very beginning of organic life,
with the thread of his existence
unbroken and built of experiences
that embrace every particle of
knowledge our old earth had the power
to yield, he is already--even as he
stands today--a very great creature
indeed. Built on the solid foundation
of his own desires, actualized in his
individual mentality, he is an
indestructible monument whose force
is equal to that of all the combined
forces of the world.
In this analysis of man we see why
he has been called a microcosm. He is
the world with all her powers
classified and arranged in compact
working form, and with her grossness
and weakness and deadness
eliminated.
Now, while man is a compendium of
the world, he is not a compendium of
the universe. He is the bound record
of just as many experiences as his
life has embraced, and no more; and
his experiences have been those
yielded him by the earth. If he were
a compendium of the universe, he
would be grown; he would have no more
growing to do; nothing more to gain;
he would have passed from finite to
infinite--a condition never to be
reached by organized forms, since the
condition is formless. The glory of
our lives and our perpetual happiness
lies in the fact that we can go on
growing forever and never be grown.
Remember we grow by the acquisition
of new truth, because we are purely
mental creatures; and we can never
learn all.
To me already, at this early stage
of my growth, the most intense
happiness I can have is the
perception of a new truth. Many a
time as I have been writing the
barrier that would pin my thoughts to
the subject in hand has dropped away
from the moment, revealing things
impossible to be written or spoken;
visions of human growth
indescribable, and before which I
tremble and would faint but for the
fact that I voluntarily shut them out
in self-protection.
Swedenborg speaks of the angels
who were suddenly lifted from their
own heaven--the heaven adapted to
their own capacities--into one very
much higher, and he goes on to tell
how the effect of the unnameable
grandeur for which their state of
progression has not prepared them
overpowers and stultifies them, so
that they have to be taken back again
instantly to where they belong. This
illustrates the fact that I am
speaking [200] of. We cannot bear too
great a revelation of light at one
time. We must grow to it by degrees
through our slowly unfolding power to
recognize its greatness. We must make
it ours before we can bear it. It is
this overwhelming body of truth to
which our perceptions are gradually
unfolding that Emerson refers to as
the “over-soul” that
kills. It kills unless our
perceptions open to it and take it
in, but in this case it is the power
that makes us alive.
I have said that notwithstanding
the greatness of the subjective mind,
man was not to live in it. It is
necessary that he should be conscious
of it, but he is not to submerge his
objective mind in it and rest there,
any more than the tree should be
satisfied to know that its roots were
large and strong and far-reaching,
and so remain content in this
knowledge without the necessity of
putting forth leaves, flowers, and
fruits. The whole effort of life is
to bring forth all the latent power
there is and make it manifest on the
objective plane.
That this is the very reverse of
the world’s ideas at present I
know only too well. All theology
teaches the nothingness of the
objective life, and the greatness of
some imaginary condition indefinable
and obscure and out of mortal
sight.
Every religion in the world has
cut man in two, making his spirit one
thing and his body another thing; and
they have taught that his body was an
unimportant factor in his
organization so far as any good to
himself was concerned. And indeed
they have gone farther and declared
it was a detriment to him; a
millstone upon the neck of his spirit
that endangered its eternal welfare
continually. Therefore it has been a
main point in all religions of every
age and nation to crucify the body,
to deny it, and to spend every effort
in saving the soul.
But I say boldly that the spirit
and body are one, and that no spirit
was ever yet saved apart from its
body. It has retired from external
observation to wait its chance to
again externalize itself in another
body, because the external life is
the only life of use there is or ever
will be. Therefore reincarnation
seems to be one of the inevitable
necessities attendant upon our
complete conquest over everything.
And nothing less than absolute
conquest is true salvation.
To conquer disease and all
weakness, and to start out on a
journey of splendid progression
through self-development, is the
thing to do, and it is the thing that
the race will have to come to. To
manifest or make visible in the
external world the possibilities of
spirit latent in all things is the
desirable thing. To resign these
bodies, to withdraw from them
expecting to find heaven in an
eternity on some unseen plane where
further effort is unnecessary, is as
if one should crawl into a hole and
pull the hole in after him. To create
is to make visible on the external
plane, right here in this life. Every
particle of creation is making
visible. Man is a creator. Through
the laboratory of his own body he
translates invisible spirit into
visible spirit; which is perceptible
substance. He brings it forward into
the world of effects where it becomes
the vitalizing agent of his own
spoken word--the word that he speaks
into a thousand different uses, all
of which are meant to subserve his
constantly accumulating desires.
Man is a substantial entity. His
body is more solid than thought, and
it is in the process of becoming more
still, instead of more vapory, like
thought, or spirit. Growth, or
development externally, is going to
make a man’s body infinitely
more compact than it is now. Its
compactness will become greater than
that of any other organized
substance, and its elasticity will
keep pace with its compactness, until
it will become positive to all other
things, and indestructible by them.
But this thought is not to be
developed here, and I shall pass
on.
[201] The subject of lesson ten
was, “The Power Behind the
Throne.” The subject of this
lesson is, “The Power Above the
Throne.” I have spoken of the
threefold laboratory of man’s
bodily organism. First, of his
digestive system, which consists of
stomach and its dependencies. Second,
of his vital system, which is his
sex, or reproductive system. And
third, of his brain, the laboratory
in which his thought-life, or
spirit-life, is evolved. The brain,
taken as a whole, shows the same
threefold nature. The base of the
brain seems to be more intimately
related to the digestive system. It
is the primitive or lower brain. When
man lived from this brain exclusively
he was an animal, and his shape was
very different from his present
shape. But in the nature of evolution
this animal brain projected another
and higher brain from itself; a brain
that represented all the power of the
lower, or animal brain, and the
greatly added power of the vital or
reproductive system. From this second
brain there was projected the social
idea. In proportion as this second
brain increased in size and fineness
of structure, man took cognizance,
not only of his own wants, but of the
wants of other men. This led to
combinations for self-protection,
and, indeed, to our present social
and political systems.
But we see the entire animal
nature embodied in our present
system, although concealed in a
measure, and its worst features held
in check by the still higher brain in
process of evolvement at this
time.
This higher brain is only now
being born of the two lower brains
that preceded it. (Of course, the
brain is all one, but there are
distinctly marked steps in it, and it
is these steps that I speak of as the
three brains.) As the second, or
social brain, grew out of the first,
or purely selfish brain, so now the
third, or idealistic brain, is
growing out of the other two.
The body feeds the brain, and the
brain gradually modifies the
body--makes it over, as it
were--keeps making it over all the
time; for the body is negative to the
brain. It is the brain’s
faithful servant. Up to this time the
brain has not known that it possessed
this power. It used the power all the
same, however, and was the
unconscious agent in every change the
body passed through from the nomad up
to man.
Now the brain not only kept
changing and improving the body
continually all along up through the
progressive ages, but the mere fact
of its growth and improvement kept
changing and improving its
surrounding conditions. There has
always been a mighty power residing
in the brain. It has been a magnet
from the first, and with every bit of
its added growth has related it to
things and conditions more desirable
for it, and shown it the possibility
of getting the possessions. And this
fact has widened every avenue of life
and developed the earth and its
resources to the degree where we now
see it. The earth and the resources
have simply waited upon man’s
unfolding knowledge of his own latent
powers in order to serve him. The
fact of resistance it seems to
present to his efforts is not real
resistance. It is a challenge to his
faith in his own ability to conquer,
and it aids in his development.
The brain grows by what it
conquers. It is a case where the
strength of the conquered passes into
the conqueror. If there were nothing
for the brain to conquer, it would
never grow. If the brain did not grow
there would be no further improvement
in the body. And as before remarked,
it is not the body alone that is
shaped by the brain, but society,
governments, and religions have been
shaped by the same influence.
Whatever the status of the average
human brain, that status will be
precisely correlated by the social,
religious, and governmental [202]
conditions of the people; and this on
the unconscious plane of development
no less than on the conscious
plane.
Take man on the purely animal
plane of his development, when he
lived from the intelligence yielded
him by the lower brain, and he was an
animal; and all his methods were of
an animal character; and he had no
society, no religion, and no
government. As the animal brain was
improved, and the next higher brain
was built, our present social system
began to develop and gradually came
up to its present standing.
Man’s surroundings always keep
pace with the unfolding faculties of
his brain. His faculties always
command from the external world those
conditions that correlate their own
power.
But man never stands still. No
sooner is one faculty built than
another is unfolded out of it. Ages
and ages pass and the slow
improvement goes on. The animal brain
carried us into the social brain
where we now are, and from which all
our institutions exist. But this
brain has been steadily sending up
its aspirations for something better
than it has known. And these
aspirations (desires) have been
growing into substantial reality and
building themselves up structurally
into the third brain--the brain that
I call the ideal brain. Now, all of
this effort has been the result of
the individual desire for freedom, or
happiness (there is very little
difference in these two words, from
my standpoint).
The ideal brain is the result of
the individual’s desire for
freedom. This ideal brain is at last
becoming recognized, and its claims
are beginning to be sanctioned by the
social brain. This is a very great
thing indeed, for there were hundreds
of years during its incipient
unfoldment in which the social brain
branded it (the ideal brain) as a
traitor to established thought as
expressed in the established
religions and social condition of the
times. It was called an insane thing;
a traitor to the true interests of
the whole world, an innovator; an
image-breaker and heretic.
And no wonder, for it was the
originator of bolder conceptions of
the powers vested in man, and the
privileges of the whole race, than
the timid and conservative social
brain could contemplate with any kind
of equanimity. To sanction the
whisperings of this ideal brain was
actually to weaken man’s
dependence upon the beliefs that have
ruled the ages with an iron rod from
the moment of man’s emergence
from his animalhood. And why? Behold
within itself the seeds of a
salvation through the Law of Growth.
And this frightened the man. It
frightened him so much that he began
to beg the government to interpose
its authority by putting his personal
God in the constitution, and doing
every possible thing to bolster up
his power. And some governments did
it; but there was a land so big that
the individual brain was more
unconfined; had room for expansion
and expression, so that an atmosphere
of comparative freedom pervaded it
from center to circumference, and
somehow this widespread sense of
freedom became an influence. And it
was in this land that the brain grew
faster, and its suggestions began to
be respected.
It was then that a strange and a
yet very natural thing happened. Now,
when a power of any kind has been
dammed up for a time and its overflow
prevented, the barriers will burst,
and flood is the result. This is what
happened to the long continued
confinement of the ideal faculties.
The time came when they burst their
boundary line and swept over the
world in the most unmistakable way.
This flood came in the name of
Christian Science. It was a very
resolute reaction against the power
that had held it in the subjective so
many centuries, and it was full of
the intention [203] to overwhelm this
power. It even denied the existence
of the power that had confined it,
and it made the unequivocal statement
that it alone possessed power.
Indeed, it claimed that it alone
existed. It tried to wipe out both
sections of the lower brain by a
denial of their existence. In doing
this it made the evidences of the
senses nothing! It made the earth and
the long years of man’s growth
nothing. It refused to see anything
but its own power, and it imagined as
a power it stood entirely alone in
the universe, without foundation and
without feeders.
Christian Science has thus become
simply the blind, ungovernable
assertion of the ideal faculties. In
leaping forth from its subjective
condition, where the doubting and
sluggish lower intelligence had kept
it back so long, it did what might
have been expected.
Instead of finding its central
position of supreme power where it
could govern and control the lower
intelligence, it, in its sudden
release from confinement, swung past
the center to a position that it
could not maintain, because in the
very nature of Law such a position
was impossible to hold. In natural
growth no link may be ignored. And
this is so because individual growth
is made up of successive links. To
ignore any one of these links is
fatal to the whole growth. To take a
position in the top brain
irrespective of the lower brain is to
cut off the experiences of the lower
brain and to swing loose in space
without compass or rudder. And this
position may and will lead to the
wildest extravagances in belief and
conduct. To live in the upper brains,
as the Christian Scientists attempt
to do, is to become utterly
psychologized; which means that the
man believes certain things--all the
things indeed--suggested by the ideal
brain without understanding why he
believes them; without being able to
give a valid reason for his belief.
And it is absolutely essential to the
long continuance of a belief, and to
its healthy growth and firm
establishment, that we should be able
to give a cool, logical reason for
believing it. In other words, the
long established faculties of the
lower brain have a right to demand a
reason for the claims of the ideal
brain, and if the reason is not
forthcoming, one of two things
happen--either the long established
lower brain rejects the claims of the
ideal brain, or the ideal brain
rejects the experiences of the lower
brain, and the magnet man is broken.
In this case nothing in the way of
man’s practical salvation has
been accomplished.
Every experience the man has ever
had has been recorded in his brain;
nothing has been lost. It is all
necessary to him. If a single link
had been left out, or had failed of
being recorded in his organization,
he would have been lost right then
and there. But no such disaster as
this has happened to a single
individual in all the universe. No
such disaster could happen, because
every step in man’s career has
been taken in the line of the Law of
Attraction. And the Law is unerring
in results.
Now, a psychological condition is
not a condition of untruth. It is a
condition possible of rational
attainment by the slow climb of the
sturdy lower intelligence. But when
it is so attained it is no longer a
psychological condition, because it
can give an account of itself. Its
assertions seem no longer wild and
visionary, because the every-day
reasoning powers have confirmed them.
To be psychologized is to believe
certain things without any logical
reason for so doing. As long as the
student can believe these things he
can perform the actions suggested by
the beliefs. But the moment his
every-day life intelligence demands a
reason for the things he does, that
moment he loses his power to
actualize his beliefs, until he has
searched diligently among the
experiences, of which his whole past
career is a record, [204] to find a
foundation for his belief. Then when
this foundation is discovered he has
solid ground under him, and he may do
precisely the same work and he will
not be psychologized at all.
Now, Christian Science is a
psychological wave that has passed
over the country doing many wonderful
things without being able to give a
logical reason for what it did.
Mental Science has demanded an
explanation of the things it did.
Mental Science is that
explanation.
Christian Science felt that there
was a great power above its own head,
and shut its eyes in blind trust in
that power, and floated up to it and
began to use it. Mental Science
perceived that Christian Science had
completely cut itself off from the
foundation of its existence in its
absolute denial of all that lay
beneath it, and it went resolutely to
work to build a logical stairway from
the ground up to the place where
Christian Science was manipulating
truths that were as mysterious to
itself as to the rest of the world.
In doing this it furnished a
connecting link between the every-day
brain of the present generation and
the ideal brain which alone yields
the power to do the works that the
world has seen done in all of this
marvelous healing.
Mental Science has come not to
disprove the works of Christian
Science, but to explain them. It is a
plain, unadorned staircase leading up
from the world’s every-day
brain, or its present status of
thought, to the ideal brain which
furnishes a status of thought
infinitely higher, more powerful, and
more free than either section of the
lower brain, or than both sections
put together.
Every time the brain puts forth a
higher bud, as it were, this bud
contains all the characteristics, all
the power of the brain from which it
sprung, and much more. It is the
upward pouring, or sprouting of
qualities and forces too fine and too
potent to be recognized on the lower
plane from which it ascended.
Consequently it had to ascend. Under
the Law of Attraction it could not do
otherwise. That which is more alive,
most vital, ascends in obedience to
the law of gravitation. The law of
gravitation is the negative pole to
the Law of Attraction.
The ideal brain has been built
into organic structure by those
thoughts which were denied expression
by the every-day brain that has given
birth to the conditions and religions
which now surround us. We have said
of these wonderful thoughts,
“O, nonsense; they are too good
to be true. They are the mere
effusions of an overly fervid
imagination. They are the stuff of
which to build ‘castles in
Spain’ by people who are too
indolent to do anything else.”
And so this matter-of-fact brain
which serves our present conditions
has denied them a hearing, and they
have ascended and built themselves a
house above that of the ordinary
brain, and now they intend to have a
hearing. They are not going to kick
out the two lower stories of their
structure as Christian Science tried
to do, for they prefer to keep the
entire building intact from cellar to
dome, knowing that the lower serves
the higher quite as much as the
higher can serve the lower; knowing
that every department in the grand
building is necessary to every other
department.
But note this fact. It is always
the higher that rules. The higher
serves the lower by ruling it, better
than by ministering to its demands.
The lower serves the higher better by
waiting on it; by acting as servitor
and minister to it. So there is a
constant interchange of duties by
these three departments of one
brain.
But now let us find out something
about the ideal brain. The animal
brain was the essence of brute force.
At this time it is an organized
“push.” [205] The brain
next above, from which the majority
of people are now living, is a bolder
thing than the lower brain, and is
capable of really vast undertakings.
And yet it is not so bold a thing as
it ought to be. And this is because
of its ignorance of its own power. It
projects great works, but it says,
“I will do these things if
circumstances are propitious.”
It is full of “ifs,”
which proves that it has not reached
any condition of very marked freedom.
Indeed, it scarcely knows that
freedom is possible to it, and if one
should assure it a condition of
absolute freedom it would instantly
take fright and begin to wonder what
it could do with itself if it had to
shape its own ends, instead of
trusting to that series of
environments it calls providence to
shape them for it. This brain has its
dreams of freedom, but it fears it
nearly as much as it desires it. It
knows that freedom holds all
happiness in latency, and yet the
very idea seems to carry with it a
sense of almost overpowering
responsibility.
And what does this freedom mean,
that anyone should be afraid of it?
When I look abroad upon the enslaved
conditions of the race, I feel like
answering this question by asking,
“What does freedom not
mean?”
Freedom means a release from fear.
This answer is sweeping; and yet it
would take a volume if I should
attempt to specify. Man fears
everything under the sun. His life
from the cradle to the grave is
through an unbroken jungle of fears,
each of which adds its mite in
retarding his advancement. Indeed, it
is to escape from this wilderness of
fears that encompass and penetrate
every department of the man’s
mind that the naturally implanted
desire of self-preservation--the deep
inner fountain of existence, pressing
upward and beyond--seeks to build
itself a dwelling-place higher up
above and away from this torment.
But why should he fear? And what
is there to fear? In reality he has
nothing to fear. It is his ignorance
that causes him to fear; his
ignorance of himself; his ignorance
of the power invested in him by
virtue of his having lived all below
him, and having conquered it, and
engrafted his conquest upon himself
as evidence of his prowess. He does
not know himself. And so he is afraid
to assert himself and his own power.
On the contrary, he seeks to deny
that he is anything but a
dependent.
And this brings me to a
description of the ideal brain, and
to an explanation of what it
means.
It has been built by the
spirit’s supreme desire for
that freedom denied it by man’s
ignorance of his own power; by the
fear that dominates him to such a
degree that he could not listen to
the voice of his desires, and so
crowded them back from every
opportunity and from every attempt at
externalization. But desire will
always find a way to express itself.
So it went higher and built itself a
dome in the human brain where it
lives, and from which as a solid,
structural basis of action it can
project its own ideas into the world
of effects, and clothe and make them
visible and audible among the
multitude of world’s uses. The
very first message out of this
magnificent dome has special
reference to the man’s creative
power. It says, “No man is free
except as he learns his power to
create.” It says, “The
knowledge of a man’s own
creativeness is the only guarantee to
freedom that ever was or ever will
be.” It says, “There can
be no freedom one hair’s
breadth short of man’s
knowledge that he possesses this
creative power absolutely unlimited
and fetterless.”
Again it says, “There is no
conquest over man’s fears but
the knowledge that he is creative,
and that he need not create
fear.” If a man creates he will
create not that which enslaves him,
but that which liberates. Man has
been living in the negative pole of
his being where he believed himself
created instead of evolved by the
natural process of growth. His
transportation from the negative to
the positive pole of his being
depends on his discovery that he
[206] himself is a creator and
dependent upon nothing but the
constant growth of his own
intelligence. When he has learned
this he passes forever from out of
the reign of fear and becomes a free
citizen of the universe.
When he has learned this mighty
fact, by which I mean when the
everyday brain--from which we live in
this world--has accepted the fact, he
no longer seeks salvation outside of
himself. He knows that he is saved.
His splendid life has been conjoined
with the splendid ideal whose
promises had once looked too
beautiful to be true. He knows that
nature never lies, that her every
promise is the sure prophecy of the
power that can fulfill it, and he
begins to learn to trust it. To trust
it [is] to trust himself.
Self-trust is the beginning of
strength. To know that one may put
sure dependence in his own powers is
the beginning of rest. Anxiety goes;
fear no longer holds him; faith,
hope, hold absolute certainties
before his eyes as the goal of his
ambition. O, the repose that comes to
him! That high repose which rests on
the summit of understanding, and that
feels its position unassailable. No
more slippery resting-places on the
side of the mount that he had to
climb to get where he is, but
implicit security on the top. His
former resting-places were simply
pauses made from sheer exhaustion.
They were full of that muscular
tension which is really caused by the
fear of falling, and for this reason
they were not resting-places at all,
but simply breathing-places where he
might hold on a moment while waiting
for his strength to return.
Mental restfulness comes with the
knowledge that makes the ideal real.
And what is mental restfulness? It is
bodily restfulness, for the mind and
the body are one. And what is bodily
restfulness? Is it going to sleep?
No, it is waking up. It is finding
that nothing can tire us. It is
finding that with the fear of being
tired, and the fear of disease, and
the fear of poverty, and old age, and
death eliminated, as they surely are
when the knowledge of man’s
creativeness comes, that these things
themselves are eliminated. Fear,
which is the root of all disease of
every kind whatever, entirely
vanishes when a man knows he is
dependent on nobody and no power
outside of himself; when he finds
that he alone has the right and the
ability to make the statement of
being himself.
In the next lesson we shall hear
the statement of his own being as he
has corrected it by the light poured
into his life from the ideal
faculties, which at last he has
learned to recognize and respect.
