LESSON V
AFFIRMATIONS
Helen Wilmans
A
Home Course in Mental
Science
Benedict Lust, N.D. M.D.,
Publisher
New York, 1921.
[87] Having arrived at the fifth
lesson in the course, I start with
the assumption that you have, to a
certain degree, mastered the
foregoing lessons, and made careful
application of the ideas embodied in
them. So let us say that we have
taken our denials home and studied
them. There is no evil. What a
feeling of lightness comes over me
now that I am beginning to realize
that wonderful truth--that there is
nothing in all the world that has the
right to fasten a feeling of guilt
upon me! Moreover, I stand champion
for humanity in this particular. I
deny that the race has fallen, or
that it ever fell. Oh! beloved race,
let the glory of the truth--there is
no evil--encompass you and lift you
consciously into the light! Let it
remove the bandage from all other
eyes as it has mine. In proportion as
my sense of guilt is lifted by the
denial of evil, is life brightened
for me. And then I am one with the
Law of Life, and, therefore,
imperishable. To know that there is
no matter, but that all we look upon
is the immortal mind of the universe
in many different forms of
recognition gives me a feeling of
strength that nothing else ever had
the power to impart. Repeating these
denials over and over again, we at
last come to perceive something of
the truth we utter. The mind is
divested, partly, at least, of its
error, and made clean and white like
the new tablet whereon to write the
next basic truth in the science of
mental healing, or mind
culture.
But until we have cleansed ourselves
as much as possible of a belief in
sin, cast out our mistaken ideas of
disease, pain and death as conditions
having vital mastery over us, we are
not ready to evoke the great truth
which stands at the very portals of
our existence waiting recognition. As
the student in mathematics who has
mistaken the statement of his problem
and carried his example in a
multiplicity of figures to a wrong
conclusion, must erase his error from
the board before he can place thereon
the correct conclusion, so the
student of Mental Science must make
his mind clear and free from its most
apparent errors before he can
profitably write the truth
there.
I am a garden plot in the rich soil
of which the weeds have grown and
stifled the nobler growths that are
striving to come up. I have given the
weeds encouragement. I have dug about
their roots and watered them because
I believed in them. I did not know
them to be weeds. I believed them to
be productive of the bread of life;
and I believed this in spite of the
fact that they yielded death. But now
I know their true character, and I
have been trying to pull them up.
That my denials have destroyed some
of them I cannot doubt. And every one
of them, thus destroyed, leaves more
room for the growth of that long
neglected tree in the midst of the
garden--that tree of belief the name
of which is “All Good,”
and the leaves of which are for the
healing of nations. And now my duty
is clear. It is strong and gives me
strength. It is no longer denial. It
[88] is affirmation. There is
character in affirmation. There is
strength in it. Health breezes are
blowing through it.
We have denied the existence of evil,
but these denials were of a
preparatory nature. They were the
clearing away of the rubbish that
better things might appear. Denials
are comparatively negative.
Affirmation is positive. And so, it
is with no uncertain sound that we
proclaim from the house-tops,
“All is good; all is
life.”
But do you think I am going to sit
down and wait for this good to
manifest itself through me? No; it is
for me to make it manifest by
proclaiming the individual power to
recognize it. I am not even going to
pray for the power that will enable
me to manifest it, because the power
to do this is in myself, and not
outside of myself in any degree
whatever. I, together with everything
in the universe must recognize the
good for myself; because recognition
of good is the only way by which it
can become manifest in the objective
world; and the power to recognize is
an individual power, and is the means
of individual growth; individual
progress.
I manifest the Law in externals, or
in objectivity, by recognizing the
infinite good latent in the Law, and
also by recognizing and affirming my
power--as an intelligent and an ever
growing creature--to recognize still
more of it, and to keep on doing this
forever.
Being one with the Law, we are
ourselves a part of the power that is
supposed to work us. The Law simply
exists and is the containment of all
possibilities; but it does not
create. Creation is making
manifest--making visible and audible
the powers latent in the Law--and
this is the work of intelligence, and
is performed on the objective side of
life. It is performed by the clod,
the blade of grass, the animal, and
above all, by man.
Man is his own creator; and he
creates by his power to recognize the
good that exists and is
ubiquitous.
Therefore, one of the student’s
most important affirmations--after
the great and absolute affirmation,
all is good--is the personal
affirmation relating to himself;
namely, if everything is good, then I
am good, and I have the intelligence
to recognize the fact.
Yes, I affirm that I am good. And
what does the word ‘good’
mean in my case? Let me see.
The good is the desirable. The most
desirable of all things is a
knowledge of truth, since truth alone
is manifested life. Then for me to
desire this knowledge is to desire
all I need. And since desire relates
me to the thing desired, and since
all things desirable exist in latency
in the Law, it, therefore, follows
that the thing which I desire is
already mine by the simple
recognition.
Therefore, I affirm that I do
recognize the good as a whole, and
also in particulars, as these
particulars are related to my
desires. I recognize that health is
good, and strength and beauty and
opulence, and I also recognize that
they are mine because they are
related to me through my
desire.
And so I affirm my power to trust my
desire, to hold fast by my desire,
and to deny the power of doubt to
cloud my desire until a fuller
recognition of my own power comes to
me, bringing me realization of the
fact that what I affirm to be mine is
really mine; and mine now, at this
very moment.
By these affirmations, we gradually
grow into a knowledge of our own
creativeness, and see that we are
self-made, and can go on remaking
ourselves after the new model
presented each day by the growth of
our ideals.
We have been considering ourselves a
lot of automatons--made by someone
outside of ourselves--and, if not
worked by wires in the hands of this
someone outside of ourselves, we have
assuredly not been equipped with the
power to direct our own actions
aright, since our maker has passed
sentence of condemnation upon
us.
We see now that this is not true. We
see that we ourselves are the power
that made us, and that moves us to
action. Being all mind as to our
externals, [89] that which we see or
recognize, we are. Everything exists
that can ever be desired. To
recognize its existence and to know
it exists in answer to our desires,
makes it ours. Therefore, we affirm
that we have it.
Health, then, is mine. This is one of
the affirmations. The negative form
of this expression would be, there is
no disease. But this negative form is
simply a denial. The affirmative form
(health is mine) makes a personal
application of this truth, and it
begins to show forth on our
persons.
The first thing for us to make
manifest out of the universe of
all-good, is health. With health
comes length of days, and then
everything that makes length of days
desirable. For, in the all-good,
there is opulence, and we may have it
for the taking. We have believed in
evil, and living in that belief we
have carried about with us, not only
a private poor-house, but a private
hospital also, and we have lived in
sickness and poverty of our own
creating. We live in what our minds
yield us. The mind that yields a
beggar’s hut, lives in one; the
mind that yields a palace, occupies a
palace. Since I learned this, I am
beginning to control my financial
condition, and my surroundings have
constantly improved. The truth, which
is beginning to be incarnated in me,
is already making me free--free from
pain and poverty and fear. Never has
a life brightened as mine has done
since I came into this science. This
is not the result of will power or
mesmeric control over men and things.
It is the result of Being. In
proportion as I am, my own comes to
me by the Law of Attraction, which is
the Law of Life.
I see the eternalness of good--what I
call good being simply Life, or
Being; the entire absence of disease
and death as active principles in
nature.
I recognize the boundlessness of
Life. Stop and analyze the word Life.
Get as complete a conception of it as
you can before continuing with this
lesson. Eliminate from it every plea
of disease and death, and see what a
tremendous thing it is. See how it
stands for every imaginable and
unimaginable good, to the entire
exclusion of all that is
undesirable--such as disease and
poverty and sorrow and death. Is it
any wonder that I call it the
all-good?
Then affirm this: “I begin to
see the eternalness of good; I begin
to recognize its boundlessness; I
know that it fills all space; I am
consciously or understandingly in it,
and I am manifesting it in this body,
which is becoming more and more a
mental statement of it in proportion
as my affirmations become more and
more realistic to my
perceptions.”
By your realizing this truth, that
all is Life, and, therefore, good,
you are enabled to speak the word
that becomes the flesh and blood of a
regenerated existence. In other
words, you are able by a supreme
belief in Being, in the allness of
Life, or good, and by this supreme
belief identifying yourself with it,
to speak for what you want, and to
get it too; and that without wronging
another, because there is no monopoly
in the knowledge of truth; and each
mind can make its own opulence
apparent in the degree of its power
to recognize the truth that all is
Life, and, therefore, good; thus
casting out every belief in evil;
every belief in disease, sin, sorrow
and death, and leaving Life only,
good only, to fill your entire
personality.
And of this everlasting good, or
Life, such qualities as are
recognized as best and most desirable
can be affirmed by the student; and
affirmed as being already in
possession.
Thus, “I am healthy, I am
strong; I am intellectual, I have the
power of an infinite understanding, I
am great, I am beautiful, I am
opulent.” Any, or all of these
affirmations are in order.
And remember that everything that is,
is now; that in infinite Being, in
the eternal Life Principle, there is
no increase and no decay. All exists,
and exists in absolute perfectness at
one time equally as much as at any
other time; and that that which makes
any part of this Life, this
perfectness apparent [90] is
individual recognition. Therefore,
make all your affirmations in the
present time, “I am that which
I desire to be, and I am it
now.” The external Principle of
Life is best expressed in the simple
word “Being,” which means
yesterday, today and forever; or one
eternal now.
All is good, and all good is mine. I
have health now, because the power
dwells within me to compel the
perfect action of every function of
my body; and all I need to do is to
recognize this truth in order to send
the negative forces (weakness,
disease, pain, etc.) flying, and to
utilize my unlimited power. Why, I
tell you that you who read these
lines have nothing to fear, for no
sickness, no tyranny, no negative
conditions, no fetter or slavery of
any kind whatever can hold or even
detain for one moment the growing
soul of man after he has entered the
domain of the Law of Attraction--the
Principle of Life, the all-good of
limitless Being--by the knowledge of
the fact that he is one with all this
infinite power; that he has this
infinite power within himself, at his
daily and hourly command, to set
aside any hindrance in the shape of
the negative forces which may rise
either within or without him.
And what is required to find this
power? A living recognition of it. A
firm, unshaken belief that it is
within you; that it is your all in
all. But this you cannot attain in a
day or a week. It only comes with the
daily striving after truth; the
earnest thought and effort to secure
truth; and constant living in, and
practice of, the highest truth you
know. In this way you gradually draw
near to the grand results Mental
Science promises and reveals; and
every twenty-four hours leaves you in
possession of an increased
understanding. But the increase may
be so small as to be immeasurable
from day to day, and only discernible
at longer periods of comparison. For
so it is that we journey up the
heights of understanding; ever
enjoying the new manifestations of
the eternal revealed to our wondering
eyes at each advancing step.
The brain, as the most positive part
of the organization, takes the lead;
and because I know that this
organization is all mind, I am sure
that if thought--the positive leads,
the most negative parts will follow.
I am sure that my thought--the
positive part of the magnet me--will
infuse enough of its intelligence
into the less intelligent part to
show forth the fact that pain and
sickness are not positive forces,
having inherent power to conquer me,
but are negative, amenable to supreme
forces--love, life, intelligence,
faith, justice, courage, health,
etc.
There will always be negative and
positive in the magnet me; but all
the time the positive part of the
magnet will be getting more positive,
and the negative part will keep pace
with it. It will become
proportionately less negative. This
is our process of growth through
eternity.
At the present time our reasoning
powers recognize dimly the fact that
all is good, and our beliefs respond
in part. But presently our reasoning
powers will revel unconditionally in
the fullest knowledge of this great
truth, and our less intelligent (or
more negative) parts will be
sufficiently permeated with the
belief to cease to feel pain or to
acknowledge disease. And from this
point we will advance still farther
in the glory of the knowledge of
absolute good; and our bodies will
become a pleasure to us, whereas
now--under our present beliefs--they
are our most constant torments.
It is all a matter of progression or
growth. While we believed in evil,
our growth was retarded. We were
living like the animals and dying
like them. But now our belief is
changed and our progress toward
infinite happiness is more direct and
satisfactory. It is only a question
of time. Let us be patient, but at
the same time leave no stone unturned
that will quicken our pace.
We have spent days in denying the
[91] existence of evil, and we are
now ready to affirm the existence of
good. All is good. No harm can come
to me. I am not afraid.
All is good, but the manifestation of
good depends upon man; and it is the
manifestation of good that I call
creation. Man manifests through his
power to recognize. He, therefore,
creates in the sense of making
visible. Nothing remains for man to
do but to make good manifest. Now,
the first and principal thing toward
the manifestation of good is to
believe in it--“believe in good
if you would be saved.” We make
manifest that which we believe in,
and nothing else. We believe in evil;
and though evil is not a
self-existent force like good, yet
the belief in evil has overshadowed
us so that we have made almost
nothing manifest and so the might of
our splendid lives has been nearly
nullified. Good, or Life, is a
self-existent force. To believe in
good is to be met face to face by
good at every step. We have no
conception of our immense
capabilities, and cannot have until a
belief in good shall have given a few
of the astonishing results that are
sure to follow such a belief. Even
believing in evil, as we have done,
and having taken the consequences of
that belief, man still shadows forth
the fact that he is a wonderful
creature. Let him believe in good, in
that which is desirable, and before
the belief is fairly knit into the
fiber of his brain, he will begin to
see himself master of time and fate,
and the thing which had seemed
impossible of achievement will yield
to his touch immediately. For in this
mighty universe of absolute good he
who holds the key,
“belief,” opens the door
and takes what he will.
Belief is a thing of cultivation; and
the Bible makes it apparent that the
one thing we are to overcome is
unbelief--unbelief in good.
Therefore, knowing the grounds of our
belief, feeling them to be solid, we
must proceed to teach ourselves how
to believe even as we teach children
their lessons. It will be line upon
line and precept upon precept. We
have spent several days in making
these denials. If we have made them
faithfully we know that we are not
sinners, for the simple reason that
there is no sin. We also know that
our neighbors are not sinners, even
though their offenses seem to loom up
mountain high. They, too, are only
ignorant of good. Bearing this in
mind, we feel a sympathetic
tenderness for them we never felt
before. Moreover, our own consciences
are less morbid in their activity. A
constant denial of evil has stopped
their accusations by lifting the
sense of guilt, and thereby we are at
rest and comparatively free from what
is called the temptation to sin. The
denial of sin destroys our belief of
sin as something with a sense of
guilt attached, and proves its
character in this respect. These
mistakes called sins have, by the
very penalty which society attaches
to them, been made a temptation to
us--a sort of “I dare you to
come this way.” Humanity will
not take a dare. It climbs every
fence stretched before it. It will
find out what is on the other side;
and it does well; for there is no
greater evidence of man’s
inherent greatness than the fact that
he will not be fenced in. Take down
the fences. Let the student declare
at once and forever that, knowing the
higher law, he will be governed by it
henceforth without compulsion. Do not
let your conscience--miseducated by
constant contact with the
negatives--made fearful and cowardly
by a belief in evil--frighten you any
longer, but rise up in the majesty of
truth, and cast the whole burden of
guilt and shame from you by a
recognition and avowal of the fact
that all is good. This will bring
forth the manhood of men and the
womanhood of women and the Godhood of
good from within them.
All is good. Keep repeating it to
yourself, and get a comprehension of
it as soon as may be. Ask yourself of
what good consists. Good consists of
all there is. No matter how poor or
mean or small some things look to
your [92] uneducated perceptions, or
how negative and helpless the
condition, it is something which is
indispensable in its place in the
economy of the whole, and which with
many other things and conditions,
great and small, strong and weak,
developed and undeveloped, fills in
and helps to make complete the grand
whole. No substance, or thing, or
condition, but has its use as a
laboratory for evolving, finishing
and refining of universal good.
Everything which appears to be wrong
or sinful in you is but the error of
your negative life, the mistake of
your ignorance, and is pledged to
beat, bruise, push and maltreat you
until you are thrust into a higher
and better condition.
We are voids which should be filled
with knowledge of absolute truth; but
until we are thus filled, darkness
possesses us, and the faint movements
of light which break the darkness
into fantastic shapes, are our
beliefs. Our beliefs--those beliefs
by which our lives are guided--have
no better claim to respect than this.
And yet, see how we cling to
them.
There is nothing which will let the
light into our lives and banish the
darkness but knowledge of the great
truth--all is good. As the darkness
goes, our beliefs will go. We will
begin to see things as they are. We
will begin to know; and knowledge
wipes out beliefs. And since we live
among beliefs, where was yet there is
no positive knowledge, we must
introduce another belief which
promises more than any former belief.
As all our beliefs have failed to
save us from error, sickness, and
death, we can try this new belief
with the full conviction that we will
be none the worse for it, in any
event. We have nothing to lose, but
much to gain. This belief (it is only
a belief to the student as yet) is
based upon the one idea that all the
races of the world have agreed upon.
“God is good,” exclaims
the Mohammedan; “All is
good,” says the Persian; and in
every language under the sun this
expression has its equivalent. When
the people of all the world have
united upon a thought, it may be
depended that it is one of those
intuitional thoughts born with the
race, and, therefore, true.
All is good--all is Life. Let this
truth take hold upon you; dwell upon
it constantly; work over again every
problem of your life by it. If the
newspapers bring you constant reports
of evil, hold fast to the fact in
your mind that all is good, and be
willing to wait until a riper
knowledge makes clear to you why all
is good. For, having received this
wonderful truth, everything within
you, and outside of you, adjusts
itself in parallel lines with it,
just as a great magnet placed among
steel filings will compel every atom
to adjust itself in conformity with
its polarity.
Dear student, do you not see that it
is impossible for me to educate you
in a knowledge of this science? I can
only show you the way to educate
yourself; and your progress must
depend on your faithful effort to
carry out the line I am laying down.
Try and believe with all your
strength that all is good. Assert it
mentally and keep asserting it.
Belief, having travelled so long in
the wrong direction, must be turned
around and held with its face toward
the light--even forcibly, if
necessary, long enough to become
accustomed to the dazzling and pure
white flame. It will become
accustomed to it, and it will rejoice
in it, and move forward to meet it
jubilantly.
It is sometimes necessary to break
through one’s environments with
brute force, and without the sanction
of the reasoning powers. It was in
this way that I freed myself from the
superstitions of a false and foolish
religion, into a belief of which I
was born, and in the prison house
[Northwoods note: Wilmans refers here
to her Catholic boarding school] of
which I was held by a circle of other
believers, through whom no single ray
of truth could penetrate.
As personal experiences--though they
seem egotistical--are of immense use
in pointing a lesson, I will now
present an account of the struggle
that took me out of the church.
[93] Is the student aware that by far
the greatest number of insane people
in the world have been driven insane
by the horrors of the Christian
religion? I have seen statistics for
the statement that four persons out
of every five who fill our insane
asylums are there on account of their
religious beliefs. If this is true,
then war, pestilence, famine,
intemperance and hydrophobia all put
together are less harmful than
religion.
The quintessence of insanity is in a
religion that embraces the idea of a
vengeful God and a condition of
endless punishment--no matter whether
that condition be a burning hell or a
burning conscience. And there is no
one, not a loving soul on earth, who
can enter into a living vital
realization of such a belief and
remain sane. I have a right to know
this; for I was on the extreme verge
of sanity when I discarded my
religion.
I took it all in such dead earnest, I
could not forget it for one instant.
I had been steeped in it from my
birth.
I knew nothing different. I was
surrounded by the absolutely unbroken
influence of the church; and no idea
had ever reached me through my
reading, or the influence of others,
to awaken a doubt in my mind as to
the truthfulness of the whole fearful
scheme, from the horror of which I
could never free myself for a single
moment after I reached an age where I
began to think.
But my tremendous awakening came with
the birth of my baby daughter. As the
child grew, my terrors grew.
The preachers always put up at our
house; I was so “conscientious
a Christian,” I worked so hard,
and I begged so much money for them;
I was the best cook on the circuit,
and I baked myself over the kitchen
stove to pander to their appetites
until I was ready to expire with the
effort.
But all the time I was begging to
know more of the plan of salvation. I
wanted positive assurance that my
baby would be saved. I demanded an
absolute guarantee of this. Half-way
promises only served to make me wild.
Eventually, I did become wild and
desperate at their indifference. I
began to wonder how men, whose
business was the saving of souls,
could eat, and sleep, and laugh, and
recount anecdotes, and be genial and
jovial, and fond of money and
pleasure, and strive for the good
things of earth quite as much as
other men, while my baby and a world
of other babies were in jeopardy of
hell-fire. The questions I put to
them, and the whole tenor of my talk,
rendered me a perfect blister to
them. Finally I accused them of the
deadly sin of indifference; and at
last one Sunday afternoon, when the
presiding elder and four or five
other preachers were present I became
violent. I passed from under my own
power of self-control. I was
realizing--in a manner beyond the
possibility of description--the
awfulness of hell and the
helplessness of man; how only so few
would avail themselves of God’s
plan of salvation, and how many
would, of necessity, be doomed to the
tortures of an endless punishment;
and there were the preachers smoking
cigars and laughing and talking over
the small topics of neighborhood
gossip. I asked them how they could
find room in their brains for a happy
thought.
“Take it easy, sister,”
said the elder; “make your own
calling and election sure and leave
the rest with God.”
I remember the very words I used in
answering him. I said, “I can
never be happy in heaven if even a
dog has to endure the tortures of an
endless hell. Oh! what shall I
do?”
He began some more of his platitudes,
but I did not listen; I became wild
with passion and ordered them all out
of the house. And they went, too, and
did not stop to say good-bye.
And when they were gone I sat down
and waited and waited for contrition
to come; for before, when I had
spoken an unkind word, I repented it
quickly and bitterly. But no
repentance came this time, but in its
place such lightness, such happiness,
such glorious relief [94] as I had
never experienced in all my
life.
I was free from the bondage of a
life-long fear. And I had come free
through the effort of irrational
brute force; because I did not know
at that time that I was right. I did
not know but I was sinking into the
depths of irretrievable damnation.
And it was only after I had burst my
bonds in this unreasoning way that
the light broke in upon me.
But how rapidly it did break into my
mind! It was as if my mind had been
growing under a fearful pressure, as
a blade of grass grows under a
rock--curling round upon itself in
its efforts to reach the light when
suddenly the rock is rolled away and
the poor, tortured thing straightens
up in the splendid sunshine and
achieves in an hour an altitude that
requires weeks of ordinary growth to
reach.
From that moment, the whole world
assumed a different meaning to me.
The books that I had read and that
had helped rivet my bonds became
arrant nonsense.
I was a changed woman from that hour.
I felt within myself the religion of
a truer humanity than had entered the
conception of any of the various
creeds. I looked out with glowing
love upon the race; with an honest
pride in its endeavor to actualize
its ideal; and with a divine
restfulness in its power eventually
to save itself from the curse of its
own ignorance, which, even then, I
saw to be the only curse under which
it labored.
I have given this personal experience
because I am sure that there are some
students who are as helplessly hemmed
in by early education and present
environment as I was; and who will
never free themselves except by the
tremendous and apparently irrational
effort that I made. I had come to a
place in my experience where I had to
choose between going to hell (as I
supposed) or going insane; and some
desperate and reckless impulse within
me--which turned out to be the
beautiful spirit of freedom--made me
prefer the former. And who can reckon
the surprise I felt when I found
heaven instead--a heaven that has
been enlarging to my comprehension
ever since?
If you would learn truth, you must
first discard prejudice, even if you
tear its old rags from you with brute
force, and if their absence leaves
you utterly naked. It is a daring
deed that truth always rewards by
clothing you anew in her own
beautiful garments.
LESSON
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES
* * * * *
A Home Course in Mental
Science
Table
of Contents
