thoughts of poverty and limitation dwell in your mind, and worry and fear, limitation and poverty will be your constant companions day and night.
Your mental concept is all that matters. Its relation to matter is that of idea and form. There has got to be an idea before it can take form. As Dr. Terry Walter says:
“The impressions that enter the subconscious form indelible pictures, which are never forgotten, and whose power can change the body, mind, manner, and morals; can, in fact, revolutionize a personality.
“All during our waking hours the conscious mind, through the five senses, acts as constant feeder to the subconscious; the senses are the temporal source of supply for the content of the soul mind; therefore it is most important that we know and realize definitely and explicitly that every time we think a thought or feel an emotion, we are adding to the content of this powerful mind, good or bad, as the case may be. Life will be richer or poorer for the thoughts and deeds of today.”
Your thoughts supply you with limitless energy, which will take whatever form your mind demands. The thoughts are the mold, which crystallizes this energy into good, or ill according to the form you impress upon it. You are free to choose which. But whichever you choose, the result is sure. Thoughts of wealth, of power, of success, can bring only results commensurate with your idea of them. Thoughts of poverty and lack can bring only limitation and trouble.
“A radical doctrine,” you’ll say, and think me wildly optimistic. Because the world has been taught for so long to think that some must be rich and some poor, that trials and tribulations are our lot. That this is at best a vale of tears.
The history of the race shows that what is considered to be the learning of one age is ignorance to the next age.
Dr. Edwin E. Slosson, Editor of Science Service, speaking of the popular tendency to fight against new ideas merely because they were new, said: “All through the history of science, we find that new ideas have to force their way into the common mind in disguise, as though they were burglars instead of benefactors of the race.”
And Emerson wrote: “The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.”
In the ages to come man will look back upon the poverty and wretchedness of so many millions today, and think how foolish we were not to take advantage of the abundance all about us. Look at Nature; how profuse she is in everything. Do you suppose the Mind that imaged that profuseness ever intended you to be limited, to have to scrimp and save in order to eke out a bare existence?
There are hundreds of millions of stars in the heavens. Do you suppose the Mind, which could bring into being worlds without number in such prodigality intended to stint you of the few things necessary to your happiness?
What is money but a mere idea of mind, a token of exchange? The paper money you have in your pockets is supposed to represent so much gold or silver currency. There are billions upon billions of this paper money in circulation, yet all the gold in the world amounts to only about $8,000,000,000. Wealth is in ideas, not in money or property. You can control those ideas through mind.
Reduced to the ultimate — to the atom or to the electron — everything in this world is an idea of mind. All of it has been brought together through mind. If we can change the things we want back into mental images, we can multiply them as often as we like, possessing all that we like.
“To Him That Hath” —
Take as an example the science of numbers. Suppose all numbers were of metal — that it was against the law to write figures for ourselves. Every time you wanted to do a sum in arithmetic you’d have to provide yourself with a supply of numbers, arrange them in their proper order, work out your problems with them. If your problems were too abstruse you might run out of numbers, have to borrow some from your neighbor or from the bank.
“How ridiculous,” you say. “Figures are not things; they are mere ideas, and we can add them or divide them or multiply them or subtract them as often as we like. Anybody can have all the figures he wants.”
To be sure he can. And when you get to look upon money in the same way, you will have all the money you want.
“To him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” To him that hath the right idea everything shall be given, and from him who hath not that right idea shall be taken away everything he hath.
Thought externalizes itself. What we are depends entirely upon the images we hold before our mind’s eye. Every time we think, we start a chain of causes, which will create conditions similar to the thoughts, which originated it. Every thought we hold in our consciousness for any length of time becomes impressed upon our subconscious mind and creates a pattern, which the mind weaves into our life or environment.
All power is from within and is therefore under our own control. When you can direct your thought processes, you can consciously apply them to any condition, for all that comes to us from the world without is what we’ve already imaged in the world within.
Do you want more money? Sit you down now quietly and realize that money is merely an idea. That your mind is possessed of unlimited ideas. That being part of Universal Mind, there is no such thing as limitation or lack. That somewhere, somehow, the deas that shall bring you all the money you need for any right purpose are available for you. That you have but to put it up to your subconscious mind to find these ideas.
Realize that — believe it — and your need will be met. “What things so ever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive it and ye shall have it.” Don’t forget that “believe that ye receive it.” This it is that images the thing you want on your subconscious mind. And this it is that brings it to you. Once you can image the belief clearly on your subconscious mind, “whatsoever it is that ye ask for... ye shall have it.”
For the source of all good, of everything you wish for, is the Universal Mind, and you can reach it only through the subconscious.
And Universal Mind will be to you whatever you believe it to be — the kind and loving Father whom Jesus pictured, always looking out for the well-being of his children — or the dread Judge that so many dogmatists would have us think.
When a man realizes that his mind is part of Universal Mind, when he realizes that he has only to take any right aspiration to this Universal Mind to see it realized, he loses all sense of worry and fear. He learns to dominate instead of to cringe. He rises to meet every situation, secure in the knowledge that everything necessary to the solution of any problem is in Mind, and that he has but to take his problem to Universal Mind to have it correctly answered.
For if you take a drop of water from the ocean, you know that it has the same properties as all the rest of the water in the ocean, the same percentage of sodium chloride. The only difference between it and the ocean is in volume. If you take a spark of electricity, you know that it has the same properties as the thunderbolt, the same power that moves trains or runs giant machines in factories. Again the only difference is in volume. It is the same with your mind and Universal Mind. The only difference between them is in volume. Your mind has the same properties as the Universal Mind, the same creative genius, the same power over all the earth, the same access to all knowledge. Know this, believe it, use it, and “yours is the earth and the fullness thereof.” In the exact proportion that you believe yourself to be part of Universal Mind, sharing in its all-power, in that proportion can you demonstrate the mastery over your own body and over the world about you?
All growth, all supply
