We scatter seeds with a careless hand,
And dream we ne’er shall see them more;
But for a thousand years
Their fruit appears,
In weeds that mar the land,
Or healthful store. —John Keble.You never can tell what your thoughts will do
In bringing you hate or love,
For thoughts are things, and their airy wings
Are swift as a carrier dove.
They follow the law of the universe
Each thing must create its kind—
And they speed o’er the track to bring you back,
Whatever went out from your mind. —Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
“When we once realize that by driving away pessimistic, angry and bitter thoughts we drive away sickness and misfortune to a great extent, and that by seeking the kinder and happier frame of mind we seek at the same time success and health and good luck, we will find a new impetus in the control of our mental forces.”
By analyzing the light of a star, although millions of miles away, we can tell what metals are burning in its incandescent atmosphere. Each metal casts a bar across the spectrum, when the light is passed through a prism, which is characteristic of its own quality.
An experienced mental chemist could analyze a person’s character, even if a stranger, and tell what discordant thought or vicious ideal is casting its fatal shadow upon his personality.
Things have just the power over us with which we endow them. That which strikes terror to one person’s heart and paralyzes his efficiency may not cause another even to wince. I know a few persons who have so trained their thought that they allow nothing to shake them from their center.
One, for example, has lost all his property, all his family, and he is left alone in the world a poor and homeless old man. Yet no one can ever detect a tremor of complaint or a weakness anywhere in his nature, simply because he has so completely learned the science of right thinking that he can shut out of his mind or neutralize with its mental antidote anything which would cause him pain or injury. He neutralizes discord with harmony, error with truth.
He has become such an adept at mental chemistry that the very moment he is touched with the poison of hatred and jealousy, he antidotes it with love, the spirit of good-will. The shafts of malice and envy cannot get near him. He looks upon these things as no part of the truth of his being.
When you are suffering from fear or worry, you may be sure you have endowed something with this power over you, otherwise it could not have gained such a hold. The very fact that you fear it shows that you have established between it and yourself a relation which you could break if you only knew how to apply your mental chemistry. Whenever you are unhappy, distressed, “blue,” worried, it is due to some mental poison, which ought to be as easy to antidote as it is to destroy fire with water.
We are just beginning to see the wonderful scientific truth in the philosophy which tells us to love our enemies, because if we hate them we merely add more fuel to passion’s fire, while love puts it out. The love thought neutralizes hatred, jealousy, and makes friends of our enemies. There is nothing in love which can make an enemy. The injunction to love our enemies is, therefore, as scientific as the advice to put out fire by water.
How quickly and effectively the purity thought destroys and neutralizes the impure thought, the sensual suggestion! Who has not seen the marvelous transformation which pure, unselfish love has wrought in a foul, beastly nature in a comparatively short time?
The things that come from others correspond with what we send to them. What we are trying to see in them we find there. If we are trying to see good, to find what is noble, clean, and true, their affinities spring out to meet our own. But if, on the other hand, we look for the bad, we are likely to find it. If we have a mean, jealous, envious, contemptible thought towards others, if we are looking for the brute in them, the brute will come out to meet us. We radiate to others our own estimate of them, our own thought of them. Every person we meet gives us a little different estimate of ourselves.
What you allow to live in your heart, harbor in your mind, dwell upon in your thoughts, are seeds which will develop in your life and produce things like themselves. Hate seed in the heart cannot produce a love flower in the life. A sinister thought will produce a sinister harvest. The revenge seed will produce a bloody harvest.
Whatever goes from you to others calls out from them the same kind of qualities to meet your own. If the God within you—the ineffable spirit of love, of charity—speaks to a man, although he may be a criminal, the God will come out of him to meet it; but if you fling out diabolical, satanic forces,—hatred, jealousy, envy, they will arouse and call out the devil from the victim of your thought radiation. Good will come out to meet good, evil in response to evil; hatred comes out to meet hatred, love to meet love, because they are affinities. Thought obeys a law as inexorable as that of mathematics. No love can return in exchange for a hatred thought; but if your thought is freighted with love, love will come back to meet its own. To have friends we must show ourselves friendly. To be loved, we must love.
Even the brute natures respond to the quality of our thought. An animal tamer can lead a wild beast with a string by the use of kindness and gentleness, when ten men by only using force might not be able to make it move. There is something within us which leaps forth to meet kindness and gentleness, and there is also something of the brute within us which leaps forth to meet the brute impulse.
“If a man purposely does me wrong,” a Buddhist says, “I will return him my ungrudging love; the more evil comes from him, the more good shall go from me.”
The time will come when one will no more allow discordant thoughts in his mind than he would scatter thistle seeds over his garden.
Everybody who sees your present character, your moral harvest, knows what you put into the soil of your youth. They do not need to go back and inquire about your childhood; the crop tells the story; you are simply reaping what you have sown. You do not expect to get the fragrant breath of the rose from sowing thistle seeds. How can you expect to sow the thistles of revenge and brutality and reap a harvest of kindness and happiness?
On the other hand, if we sow the charitable, magnanimous, encouraging, uplifting thought, we shall reap the golden harvest of harmony and beauty and joy. If we sow the thoughts of abundance, of plenty, we shall tend to reap prosperity; while if we sow the mean, pinched, stingy failure thoughts, we shall reap a poverty harvest.
When we see a sour, repulsive face, we know that it is a harvest of selfish, vicious sowing. And when we see a serene, confident face, we know that it has come from the sowing of harmonious, helpful, unselfish thought seeds.
Many people seem to think that we are huddled together in a world of chance, buffeted about by a cruel destiny; but the fact is that we are in a current which runs Heavenward in a world of absolute law and order, where nothing happens by chance nothing without a cause, a sufficient cause, where the minutest detail of our lives obeys a law as unerring as that which holds the heavenly bodies in their courses with such perfect adjustment that they do not vary a fraction of a second in a century in their orbits of untold millions of miles.
Wherever we see discord, we know that it is a harvest from discordant sowing. Nothing else is possible. Discord of every kind, whether it is expressed in suffering, in disease, in poverty, in failure, in happiness, simply means that one is out of harmony with his better self, that he does not harmonize with his divinity.
The man who is always complaining of his lot and whining and blaming other people for his misfortunes is not a real man. He is only an apology of the man God intended him to be. Sometime, somewhere, we shall learn to protect ourselves from our thought enemies, killing emotion enemies, just as we protect our homes from thieves. We shall learn to shut out from the mind, or antidote with their opposites all discordant thoughts, because of the dread of the pain and suffering, the humiliation, the mortification they cause us, and the fatal harvest they produce.
Is there anything more scientific, when the body is the product of the mind, than that a morbid mind filled with sick thoughts should produce a morbid, sick body? Can we expect the functions to act normally when the thoughts, the body builders, are abnormal?
Physical discord always means mental discord, for if there had always been perfect harmony in the mind, the body would be in harmony. So, if you can keep the mind in perfect harmony, the body must ultimately correspond, because the physical is merely an outpicturing of the mental.
We shall some time learn that only the good is true; that harmony is the reality; that discord is merely the absence of it. There is only one Creator, and He made all that is made; hence everything must be in His likeness, perfect; nothing that is real can be unlike Him, and, therefore, only the good, the harmonious, the pure, the clean, the true can be real. All else must be false, a seeming, a delusion. God could not create anything unlike himself.
God is principle and principle cannot change. Whatever is wrong in the world cannot come from Him, from perfection, from right, from good, and must therefore be accounted for in some other way.
Savages and primitive peoples have great faith in the fact that the Creator put into certain barks, plants, and minerals remedies for every physical ill. But we are beginning to learn that man carries the great panacea for all his ills within himself; that the antidotes for the worst poisons, the poisons of hatred, jealousy, anger, and selfishness, exist in the form of love, charity, and good-will essences, in his own mind.
The cheerful, hopeful thought is itself a powerful remedy for a score of ills, such as the “blues,” melancholia, and discouragement. Optimism alone is an antidote for some of the worst mental diseases.
Hold to optimistic ideals, and you will drive out pessimism, the great breeder of disease, failure, and misery. Stand guard at the door of your mind; keep out all the enemies of your happiness and achievement, and you will be astonished at your increased power and entire change of life within a short time.
The habit of holding the thought of health, the thought of strength, vigor, and robustness as a present reality, as an everlasting fact, is a wonderful tonic and will soon give a consciousness of increasing power. We shall feel that we are being buttressed and supported by almighty Principle, because our thoughts and sentiments are surcharged with life and truth, and are creative.
All thoughts which suggest weakness, failure, unhappiness, or poverty, are destructive, negative, tearing-down thoughts. They are our enemies. Brand them whenever they try to gain an entrance into your mind. Avoid them as you would thieves, for they are thieves, thieves of our comfort, thieves of harmony, of power, of happiness, of success.
Every true, beautiful, and helpful thought is a suggestion which, if held in the mind, tends to reproduce itself there—clarifies the ideals and uplifts the life. While these inspiring and helpful suggestions fill the mind their opposites can not get in their deadly work, because the two cannot possibly live together. They are natural enemies.
We tend to grow more and more like that which we cherish, harbor, and constantly long for, and to lose or become unlike that which we hate, despise, and habitually deny. The latter gradually loses its grip upon our lives, releases its hold upon character, and finally vanishes.
The persistent denial of the theory that we are poor, miserable worms of the dust, victims of limitation, of weakness, tending towards depravity, and the stout affirmation of the dominance of truth and beauty will bring out marvelous beauties of character. That which is constantly and persistently denied will ultimately fade out of the consciousness and go out of the life.
A tremendous power permeates the life and solidifies the character from holding perpetually the life-thought, the truth-thought, the optimistic-thought, and the beauty-thought. The one who has the secret takes hold of the very fundamental principles of the universe, gets down to the verity of things, and lives in reality itself. A sense of security, of power, of calmness and repose comes to those who are conscious of being enveloped in the very center of truth and reality which can never come to those who live on the surface of things.
It is impossible to estimate the value of the quality of our everyday habits of thought. It makes all the difference in the world whether these habits are healthful or morbid, and whether they lead to soundness or to rottenness. The quality of the thought fixes the quality of the ideal. The ideal cannot be high if the thought is low. It is worth everything to face life with the right outlook, a healthful, cheerful, optimistic outlook, with hope that has sunshine in it. People who radiate successful, joyful, helpful thoughts, who scatter sunshine wherever they go, are the helpers of the world, the lighteners of burdens, who ease the jolts of life, soothe the wounded, and give solace to the discouraged.
Learn to radiate joy, not stingily, not meanly, but generously. Fling out your gladness without reserve. Shed it in the home, on the street, on the car, in the store, everywhere, as the rose sheds its beauty and gives out its fragrance. When we learn that love thoughts heal, that they carry balm to wounds; that thoughts of harmony, of beauty, and of truth always uplift and ennoble; that the opposite carry death and destruction and blight everywhere, we shall know the secret of right living.
Some people harbor for years a bitter hatred or a great jealousy toward others. Although he may not be aware of it, such a mental attitude unfits the possessor for expressing the maximum of his ability, and destroys his happiness. And not only this; but he radiates his inimical atmosphere, thus prejudicing people against him, arousing antagonism, and constantly handicapping himself all along the line.
The mind must be kept free from bitterness, jealousy, hatred, envy, and uncharitable thoughts; free from everything which trammels it, or there must be a penalty paid in impaired efficiency and inferior work as well as loss of peace of mind.
No one can do his best work while he harbors revengeful or even unfriendly thoughts toward others. Our faculties only give up their best when working in perfect harmony. There must be goodwill in the heart or we cannot do good work with head or hand.
Hatred, revenge, and jealousy are rank poisons, as fatal to all that is noblest in us as arsenic is fatal to the physical life.
A kindly attitude, a feeling of good will toward others, is our best protection against bitter hatred or injurious thoughts of any kind, for they cannot penetrate the love shield, the good-will shield.
How easily, beautifully, and sweetly some people go through life, with very little to jar them or to disturb their equanimity! They have no discord in their lives because their natures are harmonious. They seem to love everybody, and everybody loves them. They have no enemies, because they do not arouse antagonism, hence they have little suffering or trouble.
Others, with ugly, crabbed, cross-grained dispositions, are always in hot water. They are always misunderstood; people are constantly hurting them. They generate discord because they are discordant themselves.
No one can carry secret hatreds and grudges, jealousies, and revengeful feelings, without seriously impairing his own reputation. Many people wonder why they are not popular, why they are disliked generally, why they stand for so little in their community, when it is really because of their bitter, revengeful, discordant radiations which kill personal magnetism.
On the other hand, those who send out kindly, loving, helpful, sympathetic thoughts, those who feel friendly toward everybody, and who carry no bitterness, hatred, or jealousy in their hearts, are attractive, helpful, and sunny.
The coming man will realize that every discordant thought, every effort to take an unfair advantage of another, to get that which does not justly belong to him, will cause him injury out of all proportion to the benefit received. He will find that things are so arranged in this world that no departure from justice, equity, honesty, and unselfishness is worthwhile. The time will come when every human being will want to do right and be just and true if only because it will bring joy and peace and prosperity.
Man will reach the millennium when he has learned to hold the right attitude of mind towards his fellow men. The time will come when it will be found infinitely easier to do right than to do wrong, when people will eagerly follow the Golden Rule, because it will produce harmony and universal well-being.
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