THAT there is a successful, powerful life; that it may be lived here; that it may be lived by anyone, we are obliged to concede; and having conceded this we cannot fail to wish to live this life, for rightly lived, it means health, wealth, power, happiness and all round success in life.
Those who read this series of lessons are going to learn how to live it, and they need first to understand a little as to what the power is and whence it comes.
We are just passing from the physical, animal or material stage of development to the mental and spiritual stage. We are ceasing to be physical men and women and becoming mental and spiritual men and women. To make this change is sometimes a matter of considerable difficulty. The majority of people are not as yet making it at all.
They are still entirely material in their beliefs and thought. They do not see the world of Spirit; they put their faith in houses and lands and money and so on, and because they believe in these things they are subject to them. The only powerful life of which they conceive is a life of physical power.
New Thought people, they whose spiritual eyes are becoming opened; who begin to see the inner and finer world penetrating the false appearances of the world of matter; who begin to see Spirit as the cause of matter and of what is called natural phenomena, these are they to whom Jesus referred in speaking to Nicodemus; they have been born of the Spirit and they begin to see the Kingdom of God.
They get glimpses of a powerful life which may be lived in the flesh and here on earth; occasionally they enter upon it and live it for a time, but their great difficulty is lack of understanding as to what the power is and how the life must be lived. This we are going to find out.
The first step is to learn the great truth about the universe which is that all is one.
All things are forms of one Substance; that Substance is conscious and intelligent; it is Spirit. In former articles and in my books I have referred to this Original Substance under various names, as the supreme, the Thinking Stuff, God, All-Mind and so on; but here I shall use the one word, Spirit.
Substance is Spirit; everything is Spirit; there isn't anything but Spirit.
Before you can fully believe this great truth you will have to learn to disbelieve much of what your senses tell you, and it is easy to do this when you understand how unreliable the senses are. The physical man depends upon the senses for everything. To him seeing is believing, and he accepts as real the appearances around him; but in reality he is grossly deceived; he lives in an unreal world, his whole universe is a deception, and not what it seems to him at all.
This man must believe that he lives on a flat world under a solid blue arch; the sun and moon travel over him and his earth is stationary and the stars are small points of life.
These are the appearances of the physical world as given us by the senses, yet no civilized person now really believes in them; we know that the earth is round, that the sky is not solid, that the stars are very much larger than the earth, and that the earth goes round the sun. No well informed person believes what he sees as to these things; he looks through appearances to the reality.
Take another illustration. Nothing appears more real than color and one can hardly doubt that the objects around us are really of the hue they appear; that the grass is green and the robin's breast is red and so on. But there is no color except in consciousness. When an object appears to us to be of a given color, as red, it is not really so.
The "red" object reflects or refuses to absorb and receive the red in the ray of light which strikes it and throws it back to the eye; we see the color it rejects and not the color it is. Where there is no eye to receive the reflection, color has no existence. So it does not do to believe appearances to be true; we must look through them and see the only reality and the only reality of all things is Spirit.
The first step to be taken by those who would lead the Powerful Life is to cease to be misled by appearances, and to perceive truth; to cease to believe in what seems to be and to have faith in what is. They must get to the heart of things, and instead of trying to reason from appearances to realities they must believe realities and disregard appearances.
Spirit is Substance and all Substance is Spirit. There cannot be two Substances. The moment we admit that there are two Substances as Spirit and matter we are absolutely lost. If matter is distinct from Spirit then it has powers and potentialities of its own and may affect us for good or ill.
So, if we believe this, we shall become more and more tied down to matter which we can see and have less and less faith in Spirit which we cannot see or can only feel; and the Powerful Life will become impossible to us. We must see that Spirit is Substance and that it is the only Substance. Nothing exists but Spirit.
Next we must come to understand that Spirit is life, and that it is all the life there is. Nothing lives but Spirit. Every thought of man, every volition of any animal, every unfoldment of leaf or blossom is Spirit, acting in the thing that moves.
Spirit lives in the grass and flowers and trees; in flesh and insect; in animals and men. There is no life but the life of Spirit. "He giveth life to all." "In Him we live and move and have our being." Nothing has individual life or life of its own. It is all the life of Spirit.
Again, all power is Spirit. Every movement in nature or art from the flutter of a leaf to the rushing of the giant current through the dynamo formed by man is Spirit. And in it all and through it all
Spirit is working intelligently to some great purpose or purposes of His own.
That there is intelligence through the power of nature is shown for one thing among many by continuity. Everything works under the same laws, yesterday, today and forever.
But suppose one day the water pipes ran water and the next day gasoline; one day you weighed one hundred and ten pounds and the next day half a ton, the laws of gravity and chemistry working in contrary fashion; then you might suspect that there were two forces in nature or that the one force was an unintelligent one.
If you want to live the Powerful Life of Samson, Napoleon, or of the evangelist, and you do, you are reaching out for more power. This is what we are all seeking. Whether we want merely to become rich or whether we wish to excel in society or to rear our children well or become benefactors of humanity, the only thing we require is power and ability to lead the Powerful life.
At the close of this first chapter I bring you to this fact, which if you can grasp it fully, will give you the foundation on which you must stand in leading the life, and if you go on with the succeeding lessons will certainly enable you to lead it.
We live and move and have our being in the limitless ocean of intelligent Spirit from whom we draw our life and power, physical, mental and spiritual. All power is in this Spirit. And we may
learn to so unify ourselves with Spirit that more and more power shall be ours, in fact we may have all the power that He can trust us with, and it is only then, a matter of making ourselves trustworthy.
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