While thoughts that are calm, pure, and unselfish are so many angelic messengers sent out into the world with health, healing, and blessedness upon their wings, counteracting the evil forces; pouring the oil of joy upon the troubled waters of anxiety and sorrow, and restoring to broken hearts their heritage of immortality.
Think good thoughts, and they will quickly become actualized in your outward life in the form of good conditions. Control your soul-forces, and you will be able to shape your outward life as you will.
The difference between a savior and a sinner is this, that the one has a perfect control of all the forces within him; the other is dominated and controlled by them.
There is absolutely no other way to true power and abiding peace, but by self-control, self-government, self-purification. To be at the mercy of your disposition is to be impotent, unhappy, and of little real use in the world.
The conquest of your petty likes and dislikes, your capricious loves and hates, your fits of anger, suspicion, jealousy, and all the changing moods to which you are more or less helplessly subject, this is the task you have before you if you would weave into the web of life the golden threads of happiness and prosperity.
In so far as you are enslaved by the changing moods within you, will you need to depend upon others and upon outward aids as you walk through life.
If you would walk firmly and securely, and would accomplish any achievement, you must learn to rise above and control all such disturbing and retarding vibrations.
You must daily practice the habit of putting your mind at rest, “going into the silence,” as it is commonly called. This is a method of replacing a troubled thought with one of peace, a thought of weakness with one of strength.
Until you succeed in doing this you cannot hope to direct your mental forces upon the problems and pursuits of life with any appreciable measure of success. It is a process of diverting one’s scattered forces into one powerful channel.
Just as a useless marsh may be converted into a field of golden corn or a fruitful garden by draining and directing the scattered and harmful streams into one wellcut channel, so, he who acquires calmness, and subdues and directs the thoughtcurrents within himself, saves his soul, and fructifies his heart and life.
As you succeed in gaining mastery over your impulses and thoughts you will begin to feel, growing up within you, a new and silent power, and a settled feeling of composure and strength will remain with you.
Your latent powers will begin to unfold themselves, and whereas formerly your efforts were weak and ineffectual, you will now be able to work with that calm confidence which commands success.
And along with this new power and strength, there will be awakened within you that interior Illumination known as “intuition,” and you will walk no longer in darkness and speculation, but in light and certainty.
With the development of this soul-vision, judgment and mental penetration will be incalculably increased, and there will evolve within you that prophetic vision by the aid of which you will be able to sense coming events, and to forecast, with remarkable accuracy, the result of your efforts.
And in just the measure that you alter from within will your outlook upon life alter; and as you alter your mental attitude towards others they will alter in their attitude and conduct toward you.
As you rise above the lower, debilitating, and destructive thought-forces, you will come in contact with the positive, strengthening, and up-building currents generated by strong, pure, and noble minds, your happiness will be immeasurably intensified, and you will begin to realize the joy, strength, and power, which are born only of self-mastery.
And this joy, strength, and power will be continually radiating from you, and without any effort on your part, nay, though you are utterly unconscious of it, strong people will be drawn toward you, influence will be put into your hands, and in accordance with your altered thought-world will outward events shape themselves.
“A man’s foes are they of his own household,” and he who would be useful, strong, and happy, must cease to be a passive receptacle for the negative, beggardly, and impure
streams of thought; and as a wise householder commands his servants and invites his guests, so must he learn to command his desires, and to say, with authority, what thoughts he shall admit into the mansion of his soul.
Even a very partial success in self-mastery adds greatly to one’s power, and he who succeeds in perfecting this divine accomplishment, enters into possession of undreamed- of wisdom and inward strength and peace, and realizes that all the forces of the universe aid and protect his footsteps who is master of his soul.
Would you scale the highest heaven, Would you pierce the lowest hell, Live in dreams of constant beauty, Or in basest thinkings dwell.
For your thoughts are heaven above you, And your thoughts are hell below, Bliss is not, except in thinking, Torment nought but thought can know.
Worlds would vanish but for thinking; Glory is not but in dreams; And the Drama of the ages From the Thought Eternal streams.
Dignity and shame and sorrow, Pain and anguish, love and hate Are but maskings of the mighty Pulsing Thought that governs Fate.
As the colors of the rainbow Makes the one uncolored beam, So the universal changes Make the One Eternal Dream.
And the Dream is all within you, And the Dreamer waiteth long For the Morning to awake him To the living thought and strong.
That shall make the ideal real, Make to vanish dreams of hell In the highest, holiest heaven Where the pure and perfect dwell.
Evil is the thought that thinks it; Good, the thought that makes it so
Light and darkness, sin and pureness Likewise out of thinking grow.
Dwell in thought upon the Grandest, And the Grandest you shall see ; Fix your mind upon the Highest, And the Highest you shall be.
5
The secret of health, success and power
We all remember with what intense delight, as children, we listened to the nevertiring fairy-tale. How eagerly we followed the fluctuating fortunes of the good boy or girl, ever protected, in the hour of crisis, from the evil machinations of the scheming witch, the cruel giant, or the wicked king.
And our little hearts never faltered for the fate of the hero or heroine, nor did we doubt their ultimate triumph over all their enemies, for we knew that the fairies were infallible, and that they would never desert those who had consecrated themselves to the good and the true.
And what unspeakable joy pulsated within us when the Fairy-Queen, bringing all her magic to bear at the critical moment, scattered all the darkness and trouble, and granted them the complete satisfaction of all their hopes, and they were “happy ever after.”
With the accumulating years, and an ever-increasing intimacy with the so-called “realities” of life, our beautiful fairy-world became obliterated, and its wonderful inhabitants were relegated, in the archives of memory, to the shadowy and unreal.
And we thought we were wise and strong in thus leaving for ever the land of childish dreams, but as we re-become little children in the wondrous world of wisdom, we shall return again to the inspiring dreams of childhood and find that they are, after all, realities.
The fairy-folk, so small and nearly always invisible, yet possessed of an all-conquering and magical power, who bestow upon the good, health, wealth, and happiness, along with all the gifts of nature in lavish profusion, start again into reality and become immortalized in the soul-realm of him who, by growth in wisdom, has entered into a knowledge of the power of thought, and the laws which govern the inner world of being.
To him the fairies live again as thought-people, thought-messengers, thoughtpowers working in harmony with the over-ruling