You Are Essential!

 

“I and the Father are one.” John 10:30

   A major stumbling block that affects most people is their confusion of that which is a constant with that which is a variable—that which is essential with that which is merely incidental.

   That which is essential is the center, source, and acting agent of your life, while that which is incidental is that which is created, formed, or acted upon by the center. You are the center of your life and the acting agent within it. Therefore, you are absolutely essential. Without you, your world, and the “aliveness” within it is nonexistent.

   What you deal with or face in life is not essential: it is merely Incidental. When you mentally conceive of what faces you—problems, puzzles, concerns, and worries—as essential, you relinquish your rightful role as the captain of your own ship. Then you relegate yourself to become the oarsman who attempts to row the 3,000-ton vessel, that is your life, to shore all by yourself.

   In everything you do there will always be two factors that confront you, and two major choices that you must make. In every case, you must decide and fix upon that which is essential and that which is incidental—that which is the constant center and source of action, and that which is the variable circumstance that is acted upon.

   Whichever of the two you choose to be essential, the other will automatically become the incidental. The variable, the incidental, is always presents. So, too, is the essential always present. Confusing the two, however, takes all the “aliveness” out of life.—its joy, hope, and steady equilibrium.

   Think into your Oneness with the All-Originating Spirit of God with intention. If you persist in your thought and intention, then one great and glorious day in your life, you will no longer believe that you are essential: you will know it!

   You are the center of your own universe: there is no way that you can get around that fact of life and reality of Spirit. The source of energy in your universe comes from you. Even the power you attempt to delegate to your environment is a manifestation of your own thought.

   Once you live into your Oneness with the All-Originating Spirit of God, you will begin to realize that the Eternal Life that flows through you is yours to externalize in any way you choose, so long as your motives are pure. It is from this place of power that you can control your world.

   Lean on your own Being as united and in Oneness with the All-Originating Spirit of God. This is your place of power, of creativity, of love, joy, and peace.

The Intelligence and Responsiveness of Universal Spirit

 Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight. Proverbs 3:5-6

   To deny that there is intelligent order throughout all Nature is to be utterly foolish. You know this because it has taken the most highly trained human minds to describe the steps taken by the Universal Intelligence (the All-Originating Spirit of God) which is always farther in advance of the brightest human minds. The more deeply investigate the world all around you, the clearer it must become to you that all of science is the translation into words and symbols of an order that already exists. If all that you and all the other great minds among us can do is merely describe the existing order, then this alone is proof that there is a higher Intelligence which has the power to orchestrate this great sequence of order and interrelation of all things.

   You must eventually face the reality that it is Living Spirit in the heart of every atom that gives it outward form and definition. It is also Living Spirit that becomes in the atom the intrinsic polarities that constitute the particular atom’s characteristic nature.

   What I am discussing here is neither random nor accidental. Every single attraction and repulsion is intentional, acting with force to collect the atoms into molecules, the molecules into tissues, the tissues into organs, and the organs into individuals. These facts are proved from physical science, and they provide a Great Law in Spiritual Science: in any collective body, the intelligence of the whole is superior to that of the sum of its parts.

   Since Spirit is at the root of all things, then thoughtful observation discloses that its operation is guided by a Superior Intelligence which adapts means to ends, and flawlessly harmonizes the entire universe of manifested being. But the All-Originating Spirit of God is not only Intelligent—It is also Responsive.

   You can rely on the fact that the Spirit is not only Intelligent, but also Responsive based on the fact that the mere sum of the Intelligence of Spirit in lower degrees of manifestation—i.e., as shown in created life-forms below the All-Originating Spirit—does not equal the Intelligence of the whole. The degree of spiritual intelligence that a living organism has is determined by the wholeness of the organism through which it finds expression.

   The more highly organized being has a degree of Spirit which has greater thinking capacity than less organized degrees of Spirit. Consequently, the highly organized being is capable of exercising control over all lower forms or less fully integrated degrees of Spirit. This leads to the conclusion that the inside “Holy of Holies” of Intelligent Spirit is both Intelligent and Responsive.

   Intelligent Spirit is the Power that knows Itself and knows that Spirit is all there is. Accordingly, Its lower powers recognize Its higher powers, and by the Law of Attraction they must respond to the higher degrees of themselves. This general principle then makes clear that the All-Originating Spirit of God, under whatever external manifestation It may appear, is necessarily both Intelligent and Responsive.

   This leads to the obvious conclusion that all degrees of Spirit contain elements of personality, even if it is not yet expressed as the individual personality that you find in yourself. Accordingly, Spirit is always personal in its nature, even though it may not have reached the stage where it is manifested as personal.

   You recognize your “personalness” because you have developed far enough to recognize yourself as having and being a personality.

Inside, Outside and the Unanalyzable

 "Stop Judging by mere appearances, but instead judge correctly." John 7:24

   There is enough indication from the outside of some things that give a fair sense of their inside. But this can never be the whole story. This outside-only approach is what the mentally lazy, who cannot think for themselves, use to argue that all that can be known about the thing has already been made known. They also add insult to injury when they state that any further investigation of the thing will somehow destroy Truth.

   Their fallacious argument—based solely on sophistry and close-mindedness—reveals their utter ignorance of the very nature of Truth. Truth can never be destroyed! In addition, they reveal their ignorance of the Law of Growth, which everywhere—whether in macrocosmic space of microcosmic place—always pushes forward into unlimited forms of expression that are always expanding and never reaching an ending anywhere.

   What people of the above mental ilk fear is the All-Originating Spirit of God which is “over all, and through all, and in all.”

   You must understand that the central Principle at the root of all things is Life—not just life as you recognize it in a particular manifested form, but Life as the “unity of the Spirit” which has not yet passed into diversity.

   This idea of the “unity of the Spirit” is not just a biblical one, but also the root of the scientific conception of Spirit. Without such a conception there is no common principle that can unite the numberless forms of manifestation that Spirit assumes.

   This conception of Life affirms that it is the sum-total of all its distributive powers, being none of them in particular, but being all of them in potentiality.

   I readily admit that this is a difficult concept to grasp intellectually, but it is the center from which growth takes place by expansion in every direction. This is the place where you come face-to-face with the unanalyzable.

   The unanalyzable—what you cannot dissect and break down into constituent parts—is not the unknowable. You can know the unanalyzable by perception, rather than knowledge. The internal essence or “Holy of Holies” of all things is Absolute Spirit—Spirit that has not been differentiated into any specific mode. It is Universal Life which permeates all things and is at the core of all appearances.

   The knowledge of Absolute Spirit is your entrance into the secret place of Living Spirit and access to the secret of power. Living Spirit—what you call God and I call the All-Originating Spirit of God—is Pure Essence, Pure Energy, and Pure Being that knows Itself, but cannot dissect Itself because It is not composed of parts. It is Unity. It is One.

   In the same way that science works with the Law of Conservation of Energy—that energy cannot be created, destroyed, added to, or subtracted from—you must work relentlessly to push the unanalyzable a step further back, but always realize that the ultimate unanalyzable will always be beyond your grasp. Thus, to expand into your fullest capacity, you must decide to work with what you cannot analyze—i.e., your conception of Absolute Life—and not deny its existence and “aliveness.”

   By so doing, you are acknowledging that the undifferentiated Unity of Living Spirit (the All-Originating Spirit of God) is the central Truth, the reality in Itself, and not as It may be perceived. Accordingly, It is the Central Truth of every system, whether the system is the entire universe or a singular organism.

   Thus, the “Science of Spirit” is as scientific as the Science of Matter. They begin with the same premise: a Living Energy that defies definition or explanation. Its difference lies in Its adherents’ contemplating this Living Energy as Responsive Intelligence—Intelligence that responds to human reciprocals who were created in Its very image and likeness.

A Recipe for Self-Love

 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they my rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. Genesis 1:26

   You need to be confident that there is clear, unchallenged archaeological and anthropological evidence first brought to light by British anthropologist Dr. L.S.B. Leakey and followed by African scholar Cheikh Anta Diop, that the oldest fossil remains of a human being were found in sub-Saharan East Africa. Further, more recent DNA research has revealed that the first woman who lived on this planet carried the universal gene that is common to every racial grouping on earth. This woman—even geneticists call her Eve—was a Black-skinned, black-haired woman.

   In the first five verses of Genesis chapter 1, God creates the heaven and the earth, causes light to shine on the primordial darkness, separates light from darkness and gives each a name. And thus ends the first creative day. There is no biblical or scientific evidence to suggest that what is described in verses 1 through 5 happened in a 24-hour span of time. In fact, it could not have happened in 24 hours because there was no sun or moon yet created, and therefore no way to measure a 24-hour period.

   The first day could have been millions or billions of years long. But, if you want to believe that the first day was 24 hours long, then praise the Lord and pass the donuts! If you do not believe that the first day was 24 hours long, then praise the Lord and pass the donuts! What you believe about this has nothing to do with your personal expansion today.

   In all of God’s creative work from verse 1 through 25, He merely speaks “Let there be” and whatever He says comes to be. It is not until verse 26 above, that God speaks different creative words. God does not say, “Let there be humankind.” Rather, He says, “Let us make humankind.”

   In essence, the All-Originating Spirit of God is saying to you, “You were too important to me to leave to the impersonal ‘Let there be’ commands. I Personally had to make you to be like Myself—creative in and of yourself and free from antecedent limiting conditions.”

   Genesis, chapter 1, is not about humankind—it is about the character of the All-Originating Spirit of God. Only humankind is created in the image and likeness of the All-Originating Spirit of God. Thus, your identity rests in the personality, character traits, and identity of God. You cannot know who you are without understanding who the All-Originating Spirit of God is.

   The key that will open the door to your unlimited potential for personal expansion will appear when you accept the fact that you are—in your individualized, personal microcosm—precisely what the All-Originating Spirit of God is in Unindividualized, Universal Macrocosm.

How to Overcome Obstacles

  I will give you every place where you set your foot, as I promised Moses.

Joshua 1:3

    You probably are familiar with the Bible story of how Joshua captured the city of Jericho. What you may not be familiar with is how embracing the spiritual principles embedded in this story will help you overcome every single obstacle that stands between you and the life you have imagined for yourself and your family.

   Before going to war against Jericho, Joshua was told by God that every place Joshua walked upon had already been given to him. So, armed with this knowledge, Joshua and his army went up to Jericho, only to find high, thick walls which looked impossible to get beyond. However, Joshua ignored what his eyes saw before him and relied on God’s promise that Jericho was already his to conquer.

   Joshua spent no time trying to figure out how he and his army were going to get inside the city. Instead, he focused on God’s promise to him and followed his intuition to march around the city. He ignored the question of how he would get past the walls. Rather, he focused his energies on his God-inspired intuition that told him to march around the city, blow trumpets on the seventh march around the walls, and then shout. By doing this, “Joshua fit de battle of Jericho and de walls came a tumblin’ down.”

   This story is a metaphor for your present psychological state. The city of Jericho represents your desire, or definite objective. The walls of Jericho symbolize the obstacles between you and the realization of your dream, your definite objective. Joshua’s feet, as they were walking on Jericho’s soil, represent your understanding that you have the ability to place yourself anywhere you desire to be by fixing your imagination in the place you wish to be. In other words, you can live now, psychologically, in the state represented by your definite objective.

   So, here is how to apply this story and its principles to your life. First, define exactly what it is that you want. Do not make this determination based on “how” you can achieve it. Just pretend that “how” is not your concern.

   Second, take your mind completely off the obstacles that separate you from your definite objective and focus solely on the objective itself. Third, close your eyes and feel that you are already in possession of your desired objective. Stay within this psychological space you have created for yourself as long as you can. When your mind drifts, bring it back to your objective and tell yourself that you have already achieved it. Feel what you would feel like when you achieve your objective and feel the personal satisfaction you would feel once your objective has been realized. When you can no longer concentrate in this way, open your eyes, and go about your ordinary business for the day.

    Take the story of Joshua and the walls of Jericho personally because the All-Originating Spirit of God has made you the same promise: “ I will give you every place where you set your foot, as I promised Moses. Joshua 1:3

Exceed Others' Expectations Regardless of Compensation

 Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom. Ecclesiastes 9:10

    The second success principle that you must develop in order to expand and evolve into your best self is to be willing to exceed others’ expectations regardless of compensation. It is easier for you to learn from your past failures than it is to do more than you are paid to do. Accordingly, the idea that you must produce above and beyond the boundaries of requirement and payment received will not sit well with you unless you are determined to succeed.

   This is so for several reasons. When you work as an employee for someone else, you are indoctrinated into the system of selling your time for money. You expect to make the most money in the least amount of time possible. Your “time for money” mindset is not an Entrepreneurial Mindset because it misses the crucial point: entrepreneurial success—the only road to financial wealth—has nothing to do with exchanging your time for someone else’s money, but everything to do with your creation of value that will benefit others.

   Another reason why you may not want to embrace the principle that requires that you exceed others’ expectations regardless of compensation is that somehow you believe that you are entitled to success just because you showed up for work this morning—late, as usual. One seeking expansion and evolution (one having an Entrepreneurial Mindset) must work longer days, months and years than one who has an employee mindset.

  A third reason you may not want to exceed others’ expectations regardless of compensation is that you have not been programmed to go the extra mile, or distance yourself from those around you by the quality, quantity, and excellence of your product or service. The expanded, ever-evolving entrepreneur must strive to do the work, sell the product, or provide the service with ever-increasing skill and effectiveness. In short, only proactive, forward-looking, and resourceful people will attain the success they claim to be seeking.

   When you exceed others’ expectations regardless of compensation, you set yourself apart from most people. In fact, you place yourself in a position where you have few—if any—competitors. Having such a posture permits you to own what you do and take great pride in it. Under these circumstances, the product or service you provide others has personal meaning to you. Also, you seek to upgrade your own performance and look for ways to improve the entire process of producing whatever it is in which you are engaged. Your productive and attitudinal change in mindset is unmistakably noticeable to your clients and customers. It sets you apart because you know you are adding value to others. You are no longer selling your time for money: you are creating value above and beyond any dollar amount you receive; and that value accrues to the self-image you have of yourself in your unconscious.

   You love and appreciate yourself as a person of inestimable worth who is no longer alienated from the product or service you provide. This selfless behavior of yours, over a consistent period of time, begins to earn for you a reputation that attracts wealth to you and retains wealth for you.

Learn from Your Past Failures

Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will. Romans 12:2

   In order to achieve personal growth, expansion, and evolution (true success) in and through any given endeavor, you must lay the foundation of completing a sold track record of accomplishment along the way. Small progress in small things leads to greater progress in larger things. By building incremental progress into whatever you are doing now, you lay down a history and pattern of personal growth that will follow you into the future. However, it does not follow that your failures in small things will lead to your failures in larger things. In fact, the truth is quite the opposite.

   The personal success that comes to you because of your forward growth and development is not related to luck or good fortune. It is the result of a process. The process of success includes learning and practicing seven proven success principles. The first of these principles is one of the most important lessons that you must learn early in your quest to succeed in whatever area you have chosen. You will not know the success you were meant to achieve if you do not learn from your past failures.

   Part of completing a solid track record of personal growth is learning from the failures that will inevitably come to you along the road to your ultimate success. Life is so organized that progress cannot be made without facing and overcoming personal failures. Evolutionary progress always requires new learning. Thus, you cannot learn something new by doing the old thing you did yesterday. When you try something new today, you will almost always fail again and again, until you find out why the new thing you are trying today does not work. This is the reason for learning from your past failures. The old dictum is true: “Nature, unaided, fails.”

   To learn from your past failures, you must understand that part of the process of becoming successful (personally expanding and evolving) is moving through failures without being discouraged or disheartened to the point of quitting, thereby giving up on the dream you have imagined your life will become.

   To learn from your past failures is to embrace the teaching that you must be self-confident enough to take risks, but wise enough to assess the risks, consider the rewards, and then proceed with boldness. If you have done your homework properly, then when you fail you can pinpoint where you went wrong. You may have begun with the wrong assumptions, insufficient facts, or dependence on an unreliable source. Wherever you went wrong, whatever you have miscalculated in the environment, or whoever you misjudged, overvalued or undervalued will become the lesson plan you use to learn, grow and add to your store of wisdom. 

   To learn from your past failures is never to lose your boldness and self-assured status on the one hand, and always to gain humility and even more fearlessness on the other.  

On Growing in the Spirit

 Christ is the culmination of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes. Romans 10:4

   Your personal acknowledgement that the All-Originating Spirit of God lives within you, and that you have a personal relation to it, gives you a new basis of Affirmation. You are the starting point of a specifically-designed-for-you creative process that will lead you to your next level of personal growth and development.

   As enormous as this Thought is, you must remember that it is only a starting point. It transcends your previous range of ideas, and presents you with a new set of ideas at a higher level. But, just as when you graduated from high school as a senior, your next level of college put you back in freshman status, so also your growing beyond where you became a senior at one stage of your development, brings you back to the beginning of the next stage of development as a freshman.

   Because the Spirit is always the same, you may expect a repetition of the creative process within you, but at a higher level. That process will require you to engage in involution—actually becoming what you desire and staying in Unity with it regardless of what you are able to see, hear, touch, taste or smell. This is what Neville Goddard called living as if your wish were already fulfilled. At this point you should look for a repetition of the universal process from its new starting point in your mind. You should expect to see your Thoughts being externalized in concrete form.

   Jesus, as portrayed in the Gospels, is set before you as the  external manifestation of the Divine Ideal. The more clearly you realize the nature of the creative process on the spiritual plane, the more your objections to and unbelief about the Gospel narrative about Jesus will fade away. If you deny the Gospel narrative about Jesus as an impossibility, then you deny the power of the Spirit in yourself.  You cannot succeed at affirming a principle and denying it at the same time. If you affirm the externalizing power of the Spirit in your own life—the countless times you have created something from nothing just by your mere Thought—then you cannot logically limit the Spirit’s action by saying that under highly specialized conditions it could not produce highly specialized effects.

   If the Spirit can create at all, then you cannot logically limit the extent or method of its action. Since the basis of your own expectation of individual expansion must be premised on the limitless creative power of the Spirit, to reject the Jesus of the Gospels as an impossibility is to cut away the ground from under your own feet. It is one thing for you to say, “I do not understand why the Spirit would work in that way”—that is merely an honest statement of your present stage of knowledge. Even if you go to the length of saying, “I am not convinced that it happened the way it is written,” that is a true statement of your intellectual difficulty.

   But certainly, those you profess to rely on the Spirit to produce external results cannot say that it does not possess that power, or possesses it only in a limited degree. That position is logically destructive. What you should do is suspend judgment and follow the light as far as you can see it. Sooner or later, it will become clearer to you. When you realize how completely the Law of Your Own Being receives its completeness—its fulfillment of culmination—in Jesus as far as you know that law, then you can conceive that there are yet deeper phases of that law that you can only faintly surmise by intuition. You may have had an experience or two when just the fringe of the veil was lifted and you got a momentary glimpse of the powers and mysteries beyond your present conception. But even there, Law reigns supreme.

   Therefore, taking Jesus as your basis and starting point, you start with the Law already fulfilled, whether in those things familiar to you, or in those realms that are beyond your thought. You need have no fear of evil. Your new starting point with Jesus is the place you will quietly grow into the evolution which fulfills the Law of Your Own Being.

The Meaning of Alpha and Omega

I am the Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.

Revelation 22:13

    What does Alpha and Omega mean in relation to you? It means the entire series of causation from the first originating movement to the final completed result. Whether you consider it on the Universal scale of creating a universe or on your own individual scale of building a house: everything has its origin in an idea—a Thought—and it has its completion in the manifestation of that idea (Thought) in form. Many intermediate stages are necessary, but the Alpha and Omega of the series are the Thought and the Thing. This is evidence that, in essence, the Thing already existed in the Thought. Omega is already potential in Alpha.

   In relation to your life, this means that if there is an Alpha, the Omega must already be in it. The end always has its locus in the beginning. So, in terms of you, it means that where you start today counts. Each new day is a fresh starting point—a new Alpha. The Omega that was in your Alpha of yesterday will not be present in today’s Alpha, if you have changed your Alpha course since yesterday.

   The manifestations of this truth for you are enormous. If you have been on the wrong track for years, you can get on the right track today. More than that, you can avoid the Omega that was in your past Alpha of thinking and behavior. On the other hand, if you leave the right track and choose the wrong track today, the Omega of good that you had been building up over time will be replaced by the Omega of bad inherent in the Alpha you chose today.

   The Alpha and Omega in your life function according to how you work with the Law of Cause and Effect. It is as basic a Law as “What you plant, you will harvest,” and “As a man thinks, so is he.”

   You must lay hold of this general principle that the Thing already exists in the Thought. The meaning of a general principle is that it can be applied anywhere and everywhere. You are the most important person you must deal with now and in the future. So, you must begin to see the Alpha and Omega in terms of your own potential.

   In the apostle John’s vision in the book of Revelation, the one who spoke the words in the above Scripture is described as “like a son of man”—i.e., however transcendent the appearance in the vision, it is essentially human and suggests the presence of the Universal Principle at the individual human level. But the figure in the apocalyptic vision is not of a human being as you would ordinarily know and recognize her or him. The figure is that of Omega as it exists enshrined in Alpha. It is the Ideal You, in your future evolved state as it exists in the Divine Mind which was manifested in objective form to John’s eyes. It was presented as the Alpha and Omega of that Ideal in all the majesty of the Divine glory.

   If you can grasp the truth that the Thing is already existent in the Thought, then you should find it a short leap of faith from there for you to see that this transcendent Ideal You already exists in the All-Originating Spirit of God’s Mind. If on the plane of the Absolute there is no space-time continuum, but only an everlasting now, then it follows that your evolved and Glorified Self is a present fact in the Divine Mind.

   But if it is true that the Thing exists in the Thought, it must equally be true that the Thought finds form in the Thing. Since Things exist under conditions of time and space—while Thought does not—Things are necessarily subject to the Law of Growth. While the essence of the Thing in the Thought is perfect from the beginning, the expression of the Thought in the Thing is a matter of growth.        

In the Beginning

 

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Genesis 1:1

    Before there was anything anywhere at all, there was the Word. So, the beginning referred to in the above passage of Scripture is not the beginning of time as we know it, or the Word, but rather the story of the beginning of the universe which we now inhabit. The Word is the voice of God who is with God and existed as God before the universe was created. The Word brought into being all that was brought into being by the sound emanating from the Word—“Let there be”—after the Spirit of God hovered or was in motion (Genesis 1:2-3).

   Only after the Word “spoke”—generated sound—did anything come into being that was not in being before the Word “spoke.” So, a discussion of what modern science has found to be the relationship between sound and first cause is appropriate.

   Modern science acknowledges that every chemical atom is made up of particles of only one substance—the Original or Primary Substance—that seems to occupy all space-time. The specific identity of a given atom, whether it turns out to be iron, phosphorous, hydrogen, or some other substance, depends solely on how many particles of negatively charged electricity revolve around a center of positively charged electricity, and the rate of speed at which they move.

   Modern science also acknowledges that all material substance, inanimate matter as well as animate or living matter, has no inherent qualities or characteristics that distinguish one part of this Original or Primary Substance from any other part of it. The electronic theory explains how all matter is evolved from one homogeneous Original or Primary Substance. But this does not explain how motion originated to create or produce something different from the Original or Primary Substance from which the negatively and positively charged electricity particles came.

   Science is also clear that if anything is in motion, its movement has been caused by someone or something. At the beginning of creation, the Word used sound to set all things in motion. Sound is transmitted through waves, and sound is the cause of the effect of the waves generated by it. So, we can say that in the beginning the Word produced the sound that caused waves that set everything in motion. Thus, science and the Bible agree that the Law of Cause and Effect requires that every effect is the result—and only the result—of the cause that produced it.

Accept the Power of Your Thought

 So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will  know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”  John 8:32

   If your thought can produce one thing, it can produce all things. Nothing can stop you from thinking. You can think what you please, and if to think is to form, you can form whatever you please. Since it is true that to think is to form, then you must accept that your limitations and expansions come from your Thought alone.

   You believe erroneously that conditions outside yourself have power over you, and so you think power into them. In essence, you are creating and worshiping idols of your own creation.

   A careful study of philosophy and religion, as a whole, will lead you to the truth that “in the beginning” there was no other Creative Power than Spirit, and the only mode of activity that you can attribute to Spirit is Thought.

   Thus, Thought is at the root of all things. If it was true “in the beginning,” it must still be true. Since all things originate in Thought, all things must be modes of Thought.

   Accordingly, it is not possible that Spirit could or would ever relinquish Its creation to some power which is not Itself—i.e., Its Thought Power. Consequently, all the forms and circumstances that surround you are manifestations of the creative power of Thought.

   You might argue that this is God’s Thought and not your Thought. But this goes against the self-evident axiomatic truth that “in the beginning” nothing could have had an origin other than Thought. It is also true that nothing has any origin except in the Divine Mind, and you are a mode of Divine Thought. You are self-conscious, therefore you are the Divine Thought evolved into individual consciousness. When you are sufficiently enlightened, you will realize that this is your origin. 

Your Thought Creates Your World

   To think is to be consciously aware, even if you are not aware of yourself or your surroundings. If you were waking up from a coma in a dark room where you had been completely immobilized from head to toe, and had no memory of your name, family or station in life, you would be aware only that you exist. To be aware of your existence is to contemplate yourself as a distinct entity and to express that contemplation in the only form available to you: the form of thought. In order to think, you must be conscious. You cannot think when you are unconscious—your unconscious mind takes over and ruminates on what you thought when you were conscious.

   Since thinking is a conscious act, and everything that you will ever create comes from your thought, then raising or heightening your level of consciousness (awareness) should be your highest priority in life.

   The way to begin to do this is to discover who you are at your core. This means that you must look deep within yourself to discover your true identity. The barrier that stands in your path of self-discovery is your own self-image paradigm—that mental idea, picture or conception of yourself that you did not create, but that you have been taught to rely on by those who came before you and defined who you are to yourself. The truth is that you are not the conception you have of yourself, whether you view that conception as good, bad, or indifferent. It is a false idol, a non-entity. You exist, but your conception of yourself does not exist in reality. It is merely a place-holder that was given you by those who came before you. It is now your responsibility to create who you are at your core from the inside out.

   At this point, the creative process requires that you see yourself from a God Mindset—i.e., from a spiritual perspective which is not limited by your past experiences, prejudices, beliefs, or negative states of consciousness induced by yourself or others. This perspective allows you to see yourself not as a blank canvass, but as one already prepared and primed by the Master’s Spiritual Gesso and ready for the Master’s Paint. From this spiritual perspective, you are empowered to assume that you are free from every influence that defined you previously by using your imagination to create that very feeling of being free from former influences.

   The next step is to decide whom you desire to be, so that you can create that person within yourself. Imagine what you desire your Ideal Self to be: the attributes, ways of being, character traits, world view. Then, because only you are the Master, paint that picture of your desired Ideal Self in your mind and claim it as yourself-in-being right now and not in the future. Keep that painting of yourself that you have created in your mind, despite the temptation to give up and abandon it by negative thoughts that will assail you. 

   Make a habit of returning often in the day to the portrait of your Ideal Self and claim to yourself that you are already that Ideal Self in childhood, who is growing up rapidly. Your thought about yourself transcends time and space. You are now what you think yourself and believe yourself to be. You are just growing and living into the Ideal Self that you have created for yourself. So be patient with yourself, as you would be toward any 9-month-old child attempting to take her first steps in life. 

Accept the Power of Your Thought!

So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will  know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”  John 8:32

   If your thought can produce one thing, it can produce all things. Nothing can stop you from thinking. You can think what you please, and if to think is to form, you can form whatever you please. Since it is true that to think is to form, then you must accept that your limitations and expansions come from your Thought alone.

   You believe erroneously that conditions outside yourself have power over you, and so you think power into them. In essence, you are creating and worshiping idols of your own creation.

   A careful study of philosophy and religion, as a whole, will lead you to the truth that “in the beginning” there was no other Creative Power than Spirit, and the only mode of activity that you can attribute to Spirit is Thought.

   Thus, Thought is at the root of all things. If it was true “in the beginning,” it must still be true. Since all things originate in Thought, all things must be modes of Thought.

   Accordingly, it is not possible that Spirit could or would ever relinquish Its creation to some power which is not Itself—i.e., Its Thought Power. Consequently, all the forms and circumstances that surround you are manifestations of the creative power of Thought.

   You might argue that this is God’s Thought and not your Thought. But this goes against the self-evident axiomatic truth that “in the beginning” nothing could have had an origin other than Thought. It is also true that nothing has any origin except in the Divine Mind, and you are a mode of Divine Thought. You are self-conscious, therefore you are the Divine Thought evolved into individual consciousness. When you are sufficiently enlightened, you will realize that this is your origin. 

The Law of Mental Reflection

because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death.  Romans 8:2

   The Law of Mental Reflection is always at work within you, producing its logical effects—positively and negatively—depending on how you see and reflect on images in your mind. To the extent that you reflect the Pure Spirit of Life, you live; when you reflect the material form as a power in itself, instead of as a moldable vehicle of the Spirit, you bring yourself under a law of limitation which ends in death.

   In both cases, it is the same law of Mind. In the former case it is used positively, and in the latter case negatively. 

   The creative process requires that the substance of all things you desire must first exist as images in your mind before they can come into manifestation in the material world of the space-time continuum. Thus, another way of defining sin in concrete manifestation is your contemplation of the limited and negative—that which is not Life-in-itself—and forming yourself into its image and likeness.

   Once you grasp the great fundamental law that your Mind—your spiritual creative power—attracts conditions which mirror its own contemplation of its dominant thought, then you can understand why Jesus announced forgiveness of sins as a complement to physical healing.

   You can also see that death and all lesser evils entered the world through sin—sin being the cause and the other evils being the effect. If you begin to understand that death and sickness of the body result from an imperfect realization of Life by your Mind, then when your Mind realizes its connection to and union with the All-Originating Spirit of God, healing of your body will be its natural complement.

   When your inverted conception of your relationship to the Spirit of Life is removed and replaced by the right conception, you will reflect the true image and likeness of your Creator. 

How to Receive Forgiveness and Love

 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8:38-39

   In order to receive fully the Forgiveness and Love that you desire, you must be mentally assured that your erroneous thoughts that gave rise to your past and present actions will not be held against you. Further, given the lapse in time between now and the future when your negative mindset is in its transformation to right thinking, you must have that same assurance.

   Your assurance must come from an honest examination of the source of the offer of Forgiveness and Love. If you, alone in your microcosmic individual self, established the offer, then you have a legitimate basis for concern. You could never be sure whether your offer would be accepted, or whether the law of Karma would forever dog your steps.

   It is precisely this misconception of pacifying the Universal Almighty by an initiative begun by the localized individual that has historically led to the errant notions of penances, sacrifices, and various religious rites and ceremonies that could not expiate sin or give any assurance that what was offered was accepted or acceptable.

   However, the offer has not come from your localized individual self, but from your Better Half—your Universal Macrocosmic Self, in whose image and likeness you were created. The location of the initiative makes clear that your acceptance of the offer provided is all that is required of you. No more has been added. This is the basis of your confidence that nothing you have done, are doing, or will ever do, will separate you from the Forgiveness and Love of the All-Originating Spirit of God your Father, and Jesus, your Savior.

You Need Forgiveness and Love!

 For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!   Romans 5:10

    You can access Forgiveness and Love the moment you acknowledge your need for them. They have already been provided for, and offered to you by your Better Half—the All-Originating Spirit of God. However, you must be mentally and emotionally prepared to receive them.

   If you allow your negative paradigm of unbelief to keep you from accepting what has been freely offered to you, then for you, the sin issue—your inverted approach to living—remains  unresolved. As you think, so you are, and if you fail to change your thought paradigm, so you will remain.

   That is why you must repent—not feel sorry, but change the way you think. The path to changing the way you think lies with your desire to change your negative mindset of unbelief.

   Everything in life starts from desire. When you desire to change your mindset of unbelief, you set off a chain of vibratory activity in the ether that attracts that which you desire to you, and you to it. Your desire to change your mindset will become your intention to change your mindset.

   Your focused intention will be the catalyst that midwifes the birth of your positively changed mindset from the womb of your negatively charged paradigm.

   Once you are able to receive Forgiveness and Love, and see your responsibility to offer both to others, your Life will become a continuous circle and cycle of giving and receiving. You will grasp the Eternal Principle that you must not break the giving and receiving cycle. You will offer to others every spiritual gift that has been given to you.

   If you fail to give Forgiveness and Love to others, it will be because you never received Forgiveness and Love yourself. You can only give to others what you yourself have received.

Christ IN You!

 For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and in Christ you have been brought to fullness. He is the head over every power and authority.  Colossians 2:9-10

   The result of your realization that your Self includes the Infinite as well as yourself is that all the resources of the Infinite are at your disposal. You can draw on them without limitation, except for the required self-limitation you impose, based on the Law of Kindness. So long as kindness leads you to respect others, you are free and all limitations are removed.

   You are also no longer ignorant, for since your self includes the Infinite, you can draw from there all needed knowledge. In addition, you will feel its guidance, and eventually your mentality will learn to put this also into the form of words. By combining Thought and experience, theory and practice, you will by degrees come more and more into the knowledge of the Law of your own Being.

   You will find that there is no place in it for fear, because it is the Law of Perfect Liberty. Once you know what your Whole Self really is, you will walk erect as a free woman or man who radiates Light and Life all around you. Your very presence will carry a living influence because you realize yourself to be an Affirmative Whole, and not a mere negative disintegration of parts.

   One day you will know that your Whole Self includes the Greater Person which is behind of and causes the phenomenal Person, and this Greater Person is the true human principle within you. This Greater Person in you is universal in its sympathies, but not less individually yourself.

   Thus, the Greater Person in you, being both universal and individual, can be trusted as a sure guide. It is that “Thinker” which is behind your conscious mind, and which, if you accept it as your center, and realize that it is not a separate entity but yourself, will handle your every situation with aplomb.

The Mystery of Lawlessness

 For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way.  2 Thessalonians 2:7

   The Bible speaks of the mystery of iniquity (lawlessness)—the mystery of spiritual power being used in an inverted manner from a diabolical vantage point.

   There are powers and principalities in the invisible world around you which are using inverted methods on an enormous scale. These methods are done through the mental constitution that you have. These powers cannot usurp your thought processes, but if you are amenable to their suggestion, they can use the law of  your mind to carry out their lawless schemes.

   That is why it is urgent that you know the law of your own mind and realize its continual amenability and susceptibility to suggestion.

   The standard to raise against the incursion of these negative elements must be so fundamental, unchangeable, automatic, and having sufficient suggestion in itself that it is impressed upon your subconscious mind so deeply that no negative counter-suggestion can ever take its place.

   This standard is none other than the mystery of Christ Jesus, the Son of God. The mystery of Jesus is the mystery of godliness in opposition to the mystery of iniquity or lawlessness.

   The mystery of the Divine and the mystery of the diabolical are seeking to work through you by the law of your own mental constitution—i.e., by the law of subconscious mind acting and reacting upon your conscious mind and your body in the context of your circumstances.

   The mystery of Jesus is what is known as the Jesus Principle that was demonstrated in the physical person of Jesus. Embracing this principle puts you directly in touch with the personal in the All-Originating Spirit of God.

   When you embrace the Jesus Principle as your personal standard arsenal against the incursion of the mystery of lawlessness that is seeking to invade your mind, that principle is continuously impressed in your unconscious mind, even when you are not consciously thinking about it. Your unconscious mind then takes in and reasons deductively in its own way about things which are out of your conscious mind’s awareness.

   This process guards against any malicious suggestion that may attempt to make incursion in your mind by way of the law of your own mind. Thus, the Jesus Principle is established within your mind and becomes One with your mind. That is why you can boldly assert that you have the mind of Christ.

   But the fountainhead of this Divine spiritual antivirus and antispyware is your intention that it should be so by your decision to think, speak and do good as you personally embrace the Jesus Principle.

   I have discussed the mystery of iniquity (lawlessness) and the mystery of Christ (law-abidingness) in the context of the Jesus Principle so that you understand what is ultimately at stake here. The issue is one of what role you decide to play in the transformation, expansion and evolution of yourself and all of humankind. This is not an intellectual titillation: it is a call to action—your action. It is an invitation to you to consider becoming a leader of Black People of the I AM.

   Leadership in this specific context is deciding that you will live, give and personally manifest by example how the collective mental creative power of our people can be harnessed to overcome wrongs, establish justice, and create a material economic environment in which every Black Person of the I AM can thrive.

What Are You Going to Do Now?

 It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age and who have fallen away, to be brought back to repentance. To their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.  Hebrews 6:4-6

    You now realize that the Life-Spirit you seek is at the core of your own Being. It is not above, below, or outside of you. With this understanding, you are on a new journey—a journey toward the infinite possibilities that await your coming.

   You are now part of a Living, Vibrant, New Order where old things are passing away, and new beginnings are taking their place. Learn to live in this new place, no matter how strange it seems. Becoming accustomed to your freedom will take time.

   So, what are you to do with this new awareness of your creative power? Are you to seek to invert it by using it to manipulate others, or to get people to do what you want? The answer is an emphatic “no.”

   Any attempt to invert your creative power to do good and channel it to unscrupulous and destructive ends will end in your own destruction. The same power of the Universal I AM within you will turn against you and destroy your localized individuality. Understand clearly that the knowledge you are gaining is subject to your living by a higher standard than those who lack this knowledge.

   There is a standard you must meet, and that standard is the Universal Law of Love. Put simply, that law requires that you do harm to no one, do good to all, and forgive yourself and others for wrongs committed against you.

   Thus, to hate yourself, do harm to yourself, or otherwise negate your own value, or refuse to forgive yourself is as great a sin as thinking, saying and doing the same to others.

 Your Oneness with the All-Originating Spirit of God precludes you from consistently violating the Law of Love. If you habitually violate this universal law, and find no space to repent (change your mind), you are indeed crucifying the Son of God (Who includes Yourself!) afresh and bringing shame and denigration of the Name in which your own name is ensconced. Yours is not a thoughtless game of life to be played, but a thoughtful existence to live into. If you do not have the stomach to live such an existence, perhaps it would be better for you to return to your old life now.

Desire: Your Moving Force

 In that day you will no longer ask me anything. Very truly I tell you, my Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. John 16:23

   Desire is the force behind all things. It is the moving principle of the universe and the innermost center of all Life. Your challenge is to acquire the knowledge that will guide your desires to their true objects of satisfaction. To do this, you need only to engage in the habit of right thinking. Right thinking that is aimed at satisfying your noblest desires is the whole end of acquiring knowledge. Any knowledge applied otherwise is only a partial knowledge, which is nothing more than ignorance which has granted itself a college degree.

   Therefore, desire is the sum-total of the “aliveness” of Life because all movement, whether at the physical or spiritual level, comes from and through it. In essence, desire is the mind seeking to manifest itself in some form which as yet exists only in its Thought. It is the principle of creation because all creation has its origin in the desire to bring something into existence which does not yet exist.

   On whatever scale you exercise your creative ability, the motive power will always be desire. Desire is the cause and its fulfillment is the effect. There is no greater nor more comprehensive definition of the Law of Cause and Effect than the fact that without desire, there can be no fulfillment. Without cause, there can be no effect. Thus, desire is first cause and motive for everything that has ever been created.

   As you understand the relationship between desire and cause and effect, you will be quite clear in your own mind about the reason the All-Originating Spirit of God created humankind. It was His desire to do so. Since you are created in the image and likeness of the All-Originating Spirit of God, you must harness your desires to create the new heaven and the new earth where truth, justice, and love reside for ever and ever.

   The ultimate desire of every human being is to enjoy life to its fullest possibilities. Thus, your true desire—however you may have disguised it—is to “have life and to have it more abundantly.” This desire of yours is innate because of your generic relation to the Spirit of Life through your having been created in the image and likeness of All-Originating Spirit.

   When you seek to fulfill your innate desire in the right way, you are righteous. When you seek to fulfill that desire in the wrong way, you are sinful—i.e., you are behaving in the inversion of righteousness, which is sin.

   The bedrock and foundation of sin is seeking externally—from outside yourself—what you can only attain through growing from within yourself. Sin, the inversion of righteousness, is a fact of life that is in your past, your present, and, more than likely, your future. So, the issues you must resolve are: 1) how you must deal with sin; and 2) under what circumstances you can remove it from your life.

   You must acknowledge that you have been trying to live by an inverted conception of the principle of Life, whether this wrong conception has manifested in crude and gross forms, or shown itself more subtly in your intellectual life.

   In either case, you cannot continue to ignore the fact that you are conscious of not having a completely guilt-free relationship with the Spiritual Source of Life. The good thing that this conscious awareness instinctively brings you is understanding that mere knowledge will not solve the problem. You know you need something more, and that “something more” is Forgiveness and Love. You need Forgiveness because that is the only cure for your inverted behavior. You need Love because it does not condemn you, but heals and restores you.

The Principle of Guidance

 But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come.  John 16:3

    The Principle of Guidance ranks first among the hierarchy of spiritual principles. This is not so because it is more essential than any other power, but because it is first in order of sequence, because it gives value to all the other powers by placing them in their proper relation to one another.

   When you look to the Infinite Mind part of yourself as a Superior Intelligence from which you may receive guidance, you are not looking to an external source. On the contrary, you are looking at the innermost spring of your own Being. You are also looking with a confidence in its action which enables you to move forward to the execution of your plans with firmness and assurance that are the very guarantees of your success.

   The action of the spiritual principles within you follows the order which you impose upon them by your Thought. Therefore, the order of your realization will reproduce the order of your desire.

   The awakening to consciousness of your mysterious internal powers will sooner or later take place, and will result in your using them whether you understand the law of their development or not.

   Your internal powers are natural powers as much as your external ones. You can direct how they are used by knowing their laws. Thus, it is extremely important that you have some sound principle of guidance in the best use of these higher powers as they begin to manifest themselves.

   If you want to safely and profitably possess the great inheritance of power that is opening out before you, you must realize Superior Intelligence within yourself. This will become an unfailing principle of guidance, if you will only recognize it, embrace it, and cling in faith to it.

   One path to actually begin to feel that you are being guided by Supreme Intelligence is to memorize and repeat hourly the following: “My mind is a center of Divine operation. The Divine operation is always for expansion and fuller expression; and this means the production of something that has not gone before, something entirely new, not included in past experience, though proceeding out from it in an orderly sequence of growth. Therefore, since the Divine cannot change its inherent nature, it must operate in the same way in me. Consequently, in my own special world, of which I AM the center, it will move forward to produce new conditions, always in advance of any that have gone before.”

 

Thought and Feeling: Necessary Siamese Twins

 “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.  John 15:5

  In your time of ignorance and imperfect realization of your own power of Thought, you created negative forms and thought life into them. You created forms of death, sickness, sorrow, trouble and limitation and then you thought life into them. These forms became your circumstances.

   However nonexistent these forms were in themselves, to you they became realities that shadowed your otherwise clear path and caused you difficulties that limited your ability to be, do, and have more of the abundant life.

   Now that you know better, you must stop giving the negative an affirmative force which does not belong to it. Think: the negative is not-being, the absence of all that constitutes being. Left to itself, it remains in its own nothingness. The negative only assumes form and activity when you give these to it by your own Thought.

   This is the quintessential reason why you must control your Thought. It is the only instrument you have that works with the greatest certainty of the outcome—whether limitation, if you think limitation, or expansion, if you think expansion.

   Your Thought, transmuted into feeling, is the only magnet that can attract the conditions and circumstances you desire. Thought is a created thing, but Thought translated into feeling is a greater and more powerful thing.

   Your greatest challenge is to think unrestricted by your current circumstances. This does not mean ignoring your situation, but it does mean exercising your Thought beyond the bounds and limitations of your present circumstances.

   Think from your center where there are no boundaries or limitations. Think from Unity and Oneness with the All-Originating Spirit of God, and from the light—the mystery of Jesus—within you.

   You have the power to determine what your circumstances will be by simply speaking and affirming your desire. Once you have done this, you can rest assured that whatever must happen to make your desire manifest will happen. As the scripture says: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit says the LORD.” (Zechariah 4:6)

   When you give Thought to your desired circumstances, do not limit your Thought to specifics, but think more broadly. For example, rather than think about a specific house in a specific location that you want, think of houses in general that have the amenities and external locations that appeal to you.

   Think life in all its fullness, together with the perfect blend of conditions which include health, wealth, and a multitude of other good things.

   Think illumination, harmony, prosperity, joy, peace, happiness and love. Think the things and not this or that specific condition of them. By Universal Law, these things will form themselves into the shapes which best suit you.

 

On Feeling and Thought

 “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.  John 15:54

    When you thoroughly realize the true nature of your relation to Affirmative Power, you will possess the key to the great secret. You can feel its presence in the innumerable life forms that you see all around you. You can feel it as the very fountain of life in yourself.

   Then one day the truth will finally dawn on you: the revelation that you can wield this Affirmative Power of life by the simple process of Thought. Once you fully realize this, you will begin to recognize how important it is for you to regulate and control your Thought.

   You ask yourself what this Thought process is and you discover that it is thinking Affirmative Force into forms which are the product of your own Thought. You mentally conceive the form and then you think life into it.

   This is always the nature of the creative process, no matter what the scale. It is the same process at the Universal Macrocosmic Mind Level and the individual microcosmic mind level.

   You are free to picture the mental machinery by which this is done in any way that satisfies your intellect. For it is the satisfaction of your intellect that will give you confidence in your own mental action, without which you can do nothing.

   However, the actual physical manifestation of your Thought is the result of something more than your mere intellectual understanding. That “something more” is your emotional conception of yourself. The great law is true: You cannot outperform your image of yourself—what you feel yourself to be at your core. Whom you feel yourself to be is the self which takes on the forms you create. This is why your Thought must be grounded in not only your intellect, but also in your emotions. You must feel the truth of what your intellect knows is true.

   If you do not feel at an emotional level, the truth of the knowledge you have acquired at the level of your intellect, then you will not be able to produce in yourself the condition which you desire to externalize.

   You cannot think into manifestation a different life than you actually realize in yourself. You cannot give what you do not have. Neither can you stop creating forms by your mental activity and think life into them. As you think, so you are, and so is the fruit you produce in your life. Thus, you cannot sit still and create nothing. Your mental machinery will  keep on creating forms, but it is up to you to determine what kind, quality, and feeling of form it will be.