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The Mental Equivalent

The Mental Equivalent: The Secret of Demonstration (1942), by Emmet Fox

This booklet is the substance of two lectures delivered by Emmet Fox at Unity School of Christianity, Kansas City, Mo. (or Unity, or Unity Headquarters, as you wish).

WE ARE ALL supremely interested in one subject. There is one thing that means more to us than all the other things in the world put together, and that is our search for God and the understanding of His nature. The aim of the metaphysical movement is to teach the practice of the presence of God.

We practice the presence of God by seeing Him everywhere, in all things and in all people, despite any appearances to the contrary. As we look about the world with the eyes of the flesh, we see inharmony, fear, and all sorts of difficulties; but our leader Jesus Christ taught us, saying, “Judge not according to appearance, but judge righteous judgment.” So when we see the appearance of evil we look through it to the truth that lies back of it. As soon as we see this truth, and see it spiritually, the appearance changes, because this is a mental world. Now most people do not know this: they think it is a material world, and that is why humanity has so many problems. After nineteen centuries of formal Christianity the world is passing through desperate difficulties. But we know the Truth; we do not judge by appearances. We know that we live in a mental world, and to know that is the key to life.

If a child could be taught only one thing, it should be taught that this is a mental world. I would let all the other things go and teach him that.

Whatever enters into your life is but the material expression of some belief in your own mind. The kind of body you have, the kind of home you have, the kind of work you do, the kind of people you meet, are all conditioned by and correspond to the mental concepts you are holding. The Bible teaches that from beginning to end. I am putting it in the language of metaphysics; the Bible gives it in the language of religion, but it is the same Truth.

About twenty years ago I coined the phrase “mental equivalent.” And now I want to say that for anything that you want in your life—a healthy body, a satisfactory vocation, friends, opportunities, and above all the understanding of God—you must furnish a mental equivalent. Supply yourself with a mental equivalent, and the thing must come to you. Without a mental equivalent it cannot come. Now as to the things in your life that you would like to be rid of, (everyone has such things in his life). Perhaps bodily difficulties or faults of character are the most important. We all have habits of thought and action, and we all have business, family, and personal conditions we would like to be rid of. If we rid our mind of the mental equivalent of them, they must go.

Everything that you see or feel on the material plane, whether it is your body, your home, your business, or your city, is but the expression in the concrete of a mental equivalent held by you. Everything in your city is the embodiment of mental equivalents held by the citizens. Everything in your country is the embodiment of mental equivalents held by the people of the country; and the state of the world embodies the mental equivalent of the two thousand million people who make up the world.

What about war? That is the physical expression of a mental equivalent held by the human race. The human race has believed in the old bogey of fear. It has believed that you can enrich yourself by taking something belonging to someone else. It has believed in death. It has believed in lack. It has believed that aggression pays and that helping yourself to other people’s things is a good policy. We have all believed this in some degree. The natural result of this has been to precipitate in the outer a picture of war, death, suffering, and so on. Because humanity had the mental equivalent of war the war came.

Today the world is beginning to get the mental equivalent of peace, and that is why peace will come. A new world will come. The new world will be worth living in. In the great new world that is going to come a little later on—and it will come sooner than some people think—there will be peace, harmony, and understanding between man and man and between nation and nation; but always the thing you see in the outer is the precipitation on the physical plane of a mental equivalent held by one or more people.

Now of course I borrowed this expression “mental equivalent” from physics and chemistry. We speak of the mechanical equivalent of heat, for example, and engineers constantly have to work out the equivalent of one kind of energy in another kind of energy. They have to discover how much electricity, they will need to do certain mechanical work, such as driving a compressor. They have to find out how much coal will be needed to produce so much electricity, and so on. In like manner there is a mental equivalent of every object or occurrence on the physical plane.

The secret of successful living is to build up the mental equivalent that you want; and to get rid of, to expunge, the mental equivalent that you do not want.

Suppose you have rheumatism. I have friends in London who have it all the time; in fact, rheumatism used to be called the national British disease. Some people there have it beginning in October and lasting until March; others only have it until Christmas; others do not get it before Christmas and then have it until February. Of two men living in the same town, doing the same work, eating the same food, drinking the same water, why does one have to have rheumatism from October until February and the other does not have it at all or has it at a different time? Why? Because they have furnished the mental equivalent for what they get. Why is a quarrelsome person always in trouble? He makes New York too hot to hold him, so he goes to Chicago. He thinks he will like it in Chicago; but pretty soon he has enemies in Chicago, so he goes down to Kansas City. He has heard there are nice people there. But soon he is in trouble again. Why? He has what we call a quarrelsome disposition. He has the mental equivalent of strife.

There is another man, and wherever he goes there is peace. If there is a quarrelsome family and he visits them, there is peace while he is there. He has the mental equivalent of peace and true divine love.

So the key to life is to build in the mental equivalents of what you want and to expunge the equivalents of what you do not want. How do you do it? You build in the mental equivalents by thinking quietly, constantly, and persistently of the kind of thing you want, and by thinking that has two qualities: clearness or definiteness, and interest. If you want to build anything into your life—if you want to bring health, right activity, your true place, inspiration; if you want to bring right companionship, and above all if you want understanding of God—form a mental equivalent of the thing which you want by thinking about it a great deal, by thinking clearly and with interest. Remember clarity and interest; those are the two poles.

Universal Polarity

The law of polarity is of course a cosmic law. Everything is produced by two other things. Anything that is ever produced anywhere in the universe is produced by two other things. That is the law of polarity. In the organic world we see it as parenthood. In the inorganic world, the world of physics and chemistry, we see it as the protons and electrons. That is how the material universe is built up; it always takes two things to produce a third. And that is the real ultimate meaning back of the Trinity.

There were Trinitarian doctrines before the time of Christ. They had trinities in ancient Egypt and India and in Chaldea and Babylonia—always there is the trinity: father, mother, child: activity, material, production. Go where you like, seek where you will, you find the Trinity.

In the building up of thought the two poles are clarity of thought and warmth of feeling; the knowledge and the feeling. Ninety-nine times in a hundred the reason why metaphysical students do not demonstrate is that they lack the feeling in their treatments. They speak the Truth, oh, yes! “I am divine Spirit. I am one with God.” But they do not feel it. The second pole is missing. When they talk about their troubles they are full of feeling, but when they speak of Truth they are about as cold as a dead fish; and I cannot think of anything chillier than a cold fish unless it is a metaphysician who has lost his contact with God. They say, “I am divine Spirit,” and they say it with no feeling; but when they say, “I have a terrible pain!” it is loaded with feeling, and so the pain they get and the pain they keep.

A man is out of work and he says: “God is my infinite supply. Man is always in his true place.” It is said perfunctorily, with no feeling. But if someone asks him whether he has found work, he says: “I have been out of work two years. I wrote letters. I went after that job, but they were prejudiced against me. They wouldn’t give me a chance.” As soon as he gets on the negative side, the feeling comes in, and he demonstrates that he remains unemployed. To think clearly and with feeling leads to demonstration, because you have then built a mental equivalent.

Think of the conditions you want to produce. If you want to be healthy, happy, prosperous, doing a constructive work, having a continuous understanding of God, you do not picture it necessarily, but you think it, feel it, and get interested in it. What we call “feeling” in connection with thought is really interest. Feeling is not excitement. Did you ever hear of anything coming from excitement except apoplexy? True “feeling” in thought is interest.

You cannot show me any man or woman who is successful in his field, from president down to shoeblack, who is not interested in his work; nor can you show me any man who has his heart in his work who is not successful. The most successful shoeblack you have in town here is vitally interested in his work. He has his heart in it. He is a colored boy, and he loves his work. He did such good work that I gave him an extra tip when he finished polishing my shoes, but no money could really pay him for his work. He was so tickled as he did his work, he loved it so much, that I did not really pay him. He paid himself. He enjoyed it. And he had a line of people waiting for him.

You build a mental equivalent for what you want by getting interested in it. That is the way you create feeling. If you want health, get interested in health. If you want the right place, get interested in service, doing something that is really serving your fellow man.

The reason people do not get ahead in business is that they try to think up schemes to get their fellow men’s money instead of thinking up opportunities for service. The successful man gets interested in what he wants to do, and gets rid of things he is not interested in.

How are you going to expunge the wrong mental equivalents? Suppose you have a mental equivalent of resentment, or unemployment, or criticism, or not understanding God. When somebody talks about God, it does not interest you much, you get sleepy or bored. Perhaps you do not get along with people—not that you quarrel with them, but they quarrel with you—the quarrel happens! What is to be done!

The only way to expunge a wrong mental equivalent is to supply the opposite. Think the right thing. The right thought automatically expunges the wrong thought. If you say: “I am not going to think resentment any more. I don’t believe in it. There is nothing to it. I am not going to think of it any more,” what are you thinking about except resentment? You are still thinking resentment all the time and strengthening the mental equivalent of resentment. Forget it! Think of health and bodily ease and peace and harmony and speak the word for it. Then you are building up a mental equivalent of health. If you want your true place—if your problem is unemployment, no job, the wrong job, or a job you do not like—if you say, “I am not going to think unemployment any more,” you are wrong. That is thinking “unemployment,” is it not? Think “true place.”

If I say to you, “Don’t think of the Statue of Liberty in New York,” you know what you are thinking about. You are not thinking of anything except the Statue of Liberty. There she is, complete with torch in her hand! I said, “Don’t think of her,” but you do.

Now I am going to say that some time ago I visited, near Springfield, Illinois, a perfect reproduction of the village of New Salem as it was in the days of Abraham Lincoln. Even the log cabin is furnished as it was in his day. The National Park Commission has done it all.

Now you have forgotten the Statue of Liberty for a few seconds, haven’t you? You have been thinking of New Salem. I gave you a different idea. That is the key to the management of your mind, the management of your thinking, and therefore the key to the management of your destiny.

Do not dwell on negative things but replace them, supplant them, with the right, constructive things. The law of mind is that you can only get rid of one thought by substituting another. If a carpenter drives a nail into a wooden wall or into a beam, there it is. Now if he takes a second nail and drives it against the first, the first is driven out and falls on the floor and the second one takes the place of the first one. That is what happens in the mind when you substitute one image for another. For everything in life there has to be a mental equivalent.

If you will start in this very day and refuse to think of your mistakes—and of course that includes the mistakes of other people—if you will cease to think of mistakes and hold the right concepts instead, cease to think fear and think of divine love instead, cease to think lack and think prosperity and the presence of God’s abundance instead—and then if you will think as clearly as possible and get interested; you will be building a mental equivalent of happiness and prosperity.

If your thought is very vague, you do not build a mental equivalent. If your thought is lacking in interest, you do not build a mental equivalent. So make your thoughts as clear and definite as possible. Never strain. As soon as you start straining, taking the clenching-the-first attitude, saying, “I am going to get what I want; I am going to get it if it kills me,” all mental building stops.

We have all been told to relax. I have seen people tense up as soon as they were told to relax. They were going to relax if it killed them; and of course they missed the whole point.

Get the thought of what you want as clear as you can. Be definite but not too specific. If you live in an apartment and say, “I want a house in the country or in the suburbs, and I want it to have a porch and a large yard with trees and flowers,” that is all right. But do not say, “I must have a certain house—the one at 257 Ninth Street or 21 Fifth Avenue.”

Suppose you go shopping. Well, you should know what you are shopping for. You should have some definite idea. If you say, “I want something, I don’t know what—I will leave it to God”; if you say, “I want a business, it may be a farm or a shop I want—I will leave it to Divine Mind,” you are foolish. What are you here for? You must have some desires and wishes, because you represent God here. So you must say, “Yes, I want a shop; and I know the kind of shop I want.”

I know a woman who demonstrated a hat shop. She had no capital, but she wanted to go into business. She wanted a hat shop. She loves to make hats. She has a natural flair for it. She can make hats that look well on the homeliest people; and this is the art of millinery, isn’t it? She was a good businesswoman, so she built the mental equivalent of a hat shop. She did not say, “I must be in a certain block on a certain street.” She did not say, “I am going to get a hat shop if it kills me” or “I am going to get a hat shop, and I want Jane Smith’s hat shop.” She built a definite mental equivalent, and that is the right way. If you say, “I want a strong, healthy body,” and build up a mental equivalent for it by constantly thinking of your body as perfect, that is fine. Do not think of details very much. Do not say, “First of all I’m going to get my teeth fixed up with right thought, and I’ll let my bald head wait” or “Maybe I should get my bald head fixed up first, because my teeth can wait.” It is the details that are wrong. The evil of outlining lies in going into small details and in saying, “I want it in my time, in my way, whether God wants it or not.” Apart from that (going too much into small details) you must have definite ideas.

Do not strain to get your ideas clear. They will be clearer the second day or the fifty-second day. If you have a pair of field glasses and you look at something and want the focus clearer, you slowly turn the wheel until the focus is clear.

Getting your mental equivalent may take you a week or a month or a year. Charge it with interest, like an electric charge, or it is dead. Love is the only way. You cannot be interested in a thing unless you love it. If you love it, it is filled with interest, it is filled with energy and life, and it comes true.

There is an interesting story about Napoleon. He thought a big nose was a sign of strong character. He said, “Give me a man with plenty of nose.” If someone came to him and said that a certain officer ought to be promoted, he would say: “Has he got plenty of nose? Give me a man with a big nose.” If an officer was killed, he replaced him with someone with a big nose. You know what happened. The law sent him Wellington, and Wellington destroyed him. Wellington had the largest nose in English history. He said himself it was more of a handle than a nose. Take that as a joke if you like, but it does carry an important lesson.

The doctrine of the mental equivalent is the essence of the metaphysical teaching; the doctrine that you will get whatever you provide the mental equivalent for.

I have known some very, very remarkable cases where people furnished the mental equivalent and out of the blue came things they never could have hoped for in the ordinary way. I know many men and women in London and New York and other places who seemingly had not human chance to attain success; but they got hold of this knowledge of mental equivalents, they quietly and faithfully applied this knowledge; and sometime sooner or later the thing they wanted came to them, without any help from anything outside; and it stayed with them and brought a blessing.

Building a New Mental Equivalent

IT is your bounden duty to demonstrate, and in order to do so successfully you need to know why you should do so. Why should you demonstrate at all? Some people say, “Since God is all, and everything is perfect, why should I seek to demonstrate His law?” Because you have to prove the harmony of being in your own life. That is why. If there were no need to demonstrate, one might just as well go to bed and stay there or, more simply still, stroll around to the nearest undertaker.

Of course we are here on earth to express God, and true expression is what we call demonstration, because it demonstrates the law of Being. It is your duty to be healthy, prosperous, and free. It is your duty to express God to the utmost of your power; and you have no right to relinquish your efforts until you have accomplished this. Until you have excellent health and are visibly regenerating, until you have found your true place and right activity, until you are free from conscious fear, anxiety, and criticism, you are not demonstrating, and you must find out why and correct the error, whatever it is.

Jesus has told us that we always demonstrate our consciousness, and Unity is teaching the same truth today. You always demonstrate what you habitually have in your mind. What sort of mind have you? I am not going to tell you—and do not let anyone else tell you either, because they do not know. People who like you will think your mentality is better than it is; those who do not like you will think it is worse. So do not ask anybody about your mentality; but examine your conditions and see what you are demonstrating. This method is scientific and infallible.

If an automobile engineer is working out a new design for an engine, if he is going to do something different about the valves, for instance, he doesn’t say: “I wonder what Smith thinks about this. I like Smith. If Smith is against this I won’t try it.” Nor does he say, “I won’t try this idea because it comes from France, and I don’t like those people.” He is impersonal and perfectly unemotional about it. He says, “I will test it out, and decide by the results I obtain.”

Then he tries it out, measuring the results carefully, and decides accordingly. He does not laugh, or cry, or get excited, or bang the table; but he tests out the idea scientifically and judges only by results.

That is how you should handle your mentality. That is how you should practice the metaphysical teaching. You demonstrate the state of your mind at any given time. You experience in the outer what you really think in the inner. This is the meaning of the old saying “As within so without.” Note carefully that in the Bible the word “within” always means thought and the word “without” means manifestation or experience. That is why Jesus said that the kingdom of heaven (health, harmony, and freedom) is within. Harmonious thought means harmonious experience. Fear thought or anger thought means suffering or frustration.

This brings me to the most important thing I want to say, namely that if you want to change your life; if you want to be healthier, happier, younger, more prosperous; above all, if you want to get nearer to God—and I know that you do—you must change your thought and keep it changed. That is the secret of controlling your life, and there is no other way. Jesus Himself could not have done it in any other way, because this is a cosmic law. Change your thought and keep it changed. We have all been taught this very thing since the metaphysical movement began. I heard it stated in those very words many times nearly forty years ago in London; but most of us are slow to realize the importance of it. If you want to change some condition in your life, you must change your thought about it and keep it changed. Then the condition will change accordingly. All that anyone else can do for you is to help you change your thought. That is what a metaphysician can do for you, but you yourself must keep it changed. No one else can think for you. “No man can save his brother’s soul or pay his brother’s debt.”

To change your thought and keep it changed is the way to build a new mental equivalent; it is the secret of accomplishment. You already have a mental equivalent for everything that is in your life today; and you must destroy the patterns for the things you do not want, and then they will disappear. You must build a new pattern or mental equivalent for the things you want, and then they will come into your life.

Of course changing your thought for a short time is the easiest thing in the world. Everyone does this when he goes to a metaphysical meeting. The beautiful atmosphere and the positive instruction make people feel optimistic. The teacher reminds the audience of the Truth of Being, and they think, “I believe that, and I am going to practice it.” But five minutes after they have left the meeting they forget about it, perhaps for hours. The trouble with most students is not that they do not change their thought but that they do not keep it changed.

If you want health you must cease to think sickness and fear, and you must get the habit of thinking health and harmony. There can be no sickness without fear. You cannot be adversely affected by anything if you really have no fear concerning it. Everyone has many fears in the subconscious mind that he is not consciously aware of, but they are operating just the same.

A man said: “I entered a town in a foreign country in the east of Europe during a typhoid epidemic. I did not know there was any typhoid. I never thought about it. I didn’t know the language and couldn’t read the papers. They were printed in Greek. Yet I got typhoid and had quite a siege. How do you account for that?”

The explanation is that he believed in typhoid fever. He believed one can catch it from others, and that it makes one very ill, for so many days, and therefore he had a subconscious fear of it. He subconsciously knew there was typhoid around, and as it always does, the subconscious enacted or dramatized his real beliefs and fears, and presented him with a good hearty case of typhoid.

If he had really believed that he was a child of God who could not be hurt by anything, he would not have had typhoid.

Change your thought and keep it changed, not for ten seconds or even ten days but steadily and permanently. Then you will build a new mental equivalent, and a mental equivalent is always demonstrated.

The secret of harmony and success is to concentrate your thought upon harmony and success. That is why I teach that attention is the key to life. What you attend to or concentrate upon you bring into your life, because you are building a mental equivalent.

Many people fail to concentrate successfully because they think that concentration means will power. They actually try to concentrate with their muscles and blood vessels. They frown. They clench their hands. Unwittingly they are thinking of an engineer’s drill or a carpenter’s bit and brace. They suppose that the harder you press the faster you get through. But all this is quite wrong.

Forget the drill and think of a photographic camera. In a camera there is of course no question of pressure. There the secret lies in focus. If you want to photograph something you focus your camera lens quietly, steadily, and persistently on it for the necessary length of time. Suppose I want to photograph a vase of flowers. What do I do? Well, I do not press it violently against the lens of the camera. That would be silly. I place the vase in front of the camera and keep it there. But suppose that after a few moments I snatch away the vase and hold a book in front of the camera, and then snatch that away, and hold up a chair, and then put the flowers back for a few moments, and so forth. You know what will happen to my photograph. It will be a crazy blur. Is not that what people do to their minds when they cannot keep their thoughts concentrated for any length of time? They think health for a few minutes and then they think sickness or fear. They think prosperity and then they think depression. They think about bodily perfection and then they think about old age and their pains and aches. Is it any wonder that man is so apt to demonstrate the “marred image” ?

Note carefully that I did not advocate taking one thought and trying to hold it by will power. That is bad. You must allow a train of relevant thoughts to have free play in your mind, one leading naturally to the next, but they must all be positive, constructive, and harmonious, and appertaining to your desire; and you must think quietly and without effort. Then you will get the mental equivalent of all-round success, and then success itself will follow; success in health, in social relationships, in your work, in your spiritual development.

Maintaining the New Equivalent

IT is always good to make a practical experiment, so I advise you to take a single problem in your life—something you want to get rid of or something you want to obtain—and change your thought about this thing, and keep it changed. Do not be in a hurry to select your problem; take your time.

Do not tell anyone you are doing this. If you tell a friend about it you are thereby strongly affirming the existence of the problem, which is the very thing you are trying to get rid of. If you tell your friend that you are going to work on your rheumatism or on lack, you are making these things very real to your subconscious mind. Also your spiritual energy is leaking away, as electricity does in what we call a “ground.”

Take your problem and change your mind concerning it, and keep it changed for a month, and you will be astonished at the results you will get. If you really do keep your thought changed you will not have to wait a month. If you really change your thought and keep it changed, the demonstration may come in a few hours. But to keep tensely looking for the demonstration is really affirming the existence of the problem, is it not? The secret is to keep your thought changed into the new condition. So keep your thought carefully, quietly expressive of the new condition that you want to produce. Believe what you are thinking, and to prove that you believe it you must act the part.

By changing your mind about your problem in this way and keeping it changed, you are building a new mental equivalent, a mental equivalent of harmony and success, and that mental equivalent, as we know, must be outpictured in your experience.

For a while you will find that your thought will keep slipping back into the old rut. Such is the force of habit. But if you are quietly persistent you will gain the victory. It is always a little difficult to change a habit, but it can be done, and then the new right habit becomes easier than the old wrong habit, and that is how a new mental equivalent is built.

Change your mind and keep it changed.

Do not talk about the negative thing or act as if it were there. Act your part as though the new condition were already in being in the outer. If you will do this, the new condition will presently appear in the outer, because the outer is always but the projection or outpicturing of the inner.

We project our own belief and call it experience, and this gives us the clue to the difference between a true action and a false or unreal action.

What is true action? A true action is one that really changes things, that gets you somewhere. A false action does not. For example, if your car has traction it is moving. That is a true action, and you will presently reach your destination; but if it does not have traction there will be movement, vibration, but you will not get anywhere. You are wearing out the engine and perhaps the tires, but you do not get anywhere. The same thing happens when a soldier is “marking time” as we say. He is tiring himself and wearing out his shoes but not getting anywhere. These are examples of false action.

Suppose you have a difficult letter to write or a sermon or a lecture to prepare. Suppose you sit in front of a sheet of paper and draw curlicues or cut the pencil to pieces or tear your hair. These would be false actions, and many people do just that. Such actions get you nowhere. To decide what you are going to say, to start a current of thought and then write it down, is true action. You will note that the difference is that in the false action you begin from the outside. You had not prepared your thoughts. You tried to begin by writing. With the true action you got your thoughts in order first and then the writing or outer activity followed. A false action means deadlock; a true action is always fruitful.

True activity is always from within outward. False activity tries to work from without inward. One is centrifugal and the other centripetal, if you want to be technical. If you are working from within out, your work is alive and will be productive. If you are working from outside inward, your work is dead, and it will have a bad effect on you.

Artists and literary people speak of “potboilers.” You know what a potboiler is. It is a picture that you paint or a story that you write, not because you are interested but just to keep the monetary returns coming in. It is never good, because it is not the result of inspiration. It is done from the outside and is a false action. It is a common saying among writers that three potboilers will kill any talent; and that is true. The proper way to paint a picture is to see beauty somewhere, in a landscape or in a beautiful face, or wherever you please. You thrill to that beauty, and then you go to the canvas and express your inspiration there. That is art, and that is true action. It inspires other people and it helps and develops you yourself.

If you write a story or a novel because you have observed life, because you have seen certain things happen and studied certain people, and write it all down because you are alive with it, that is a true action and you write a great book. Dickens, George Eliot, Balzac, and all the great authors wrote in that way. But if you say, “I will do fifteen hundred words a day and give my publishers the ‘mixture as before’ and that will secure my income,” your work will be dead. And this policy will kill any talent that you may have.

If you are in business and you are interested in your job and love it, your work is a positive action and must ultimately bring you success. Even if the work is uncongenial but nevertheless you say, “This is my job for the moment; I am going to do it as well as I can, and then something better will open up,” you are working from within outward. Your work is a positive action, and before long something really congenial will come to you.

Most people know that these things are true. They know that they are true for pictures and stories and business life, but they do not realize that they are equally true for the things of the soul. Yet such is the case. If you pray and meditate from the outside just because you think it is a duty or because you will feel guilty if you do not, your prayers will be dead. You will get no demonstration and make no spiritual progress, and you will get no joy. But if you feel that when you are praying and meditating you are visiting with God, and that these moments are the happiest in the twenty-four hours, then you are working from within outward. Your spiritual growth will be fruitful, and you will grow very rapidly in spiritual understanding. When you pray in this way there is no strain and your soul is filled with peace.

The great enemy of prayer is a sense of tension. When you are tense you are always working from the outside inward. Tension in prayer is probably the greatest cause of failure to demonstrate. Remember that the mind always stops working when you are tense. When you think, “I must demonstrate this” or “I must get that in three days,” you are tense; you are using your will power, and you will do more harm than good.

Remember this: The door of the soul opens inward. If you will remember this it will save you years and years of waiting for demonstrations. Write in your notebook, the one you carry in your pocket—not the notebook you keep locked in your desk, because that is a mausoleum—or better still, write it on a card, and place it on your dresser: “The door of the soul opens inward.” And pray to God that you may remember that truth every time you turn to Him in prayer. You know what it means when a door opens inward: the harder you push against it the tighter you close it. When you press or force or hurl yourself against it you only close it on yourself. When you relax and draw back, you give it a chance to open. In all theaters and other public buildings the doors open outward. The law insists upon this because crowds are apt to become panic-stricken and then they push, and if the doors opened inward the people would imprison themselves and be killed. The door of the soul opens inward! That is the law. Relax mentally, draw away from your problem spiritually, and the action of God will open the door for you and you will be free.

There is an old legend of the Middle Ages that is very instructive. It seems that a citizen was arrested by one of the Barons and shut up in a dungeon in his castle. He was taken down dark stairs, down, down, down, by a ferocious-looking jailer who carried a great key a foot long. The door of a cell was opened, and he was thrust into a dark hole. The door shut with a bang, and there he was.

He lay in that dark dungeon for twenty years. Each day the jailer would come, the big door would be opened with a great creaking and groaning, a pitcher of water and a loaf of bread would be thrust in and the door closed again.

Well, after twenty years the prisoner decided that he could not stand it any longer. He wanted to die but he did not want to commit suicide, so he decided that the next day when the jailer came he would attack him. The jailer would then kill him in self-defense, and thus his misery would be at an end. He thought he would examine the door carefully so as to be ready for tomorrow and, going over, he caught the handle and turned it. To his amazement the door opened, and upon investigation he found that there was no lock upon it and never had been, and that for all those twenty years he had not been locked in, except in belief.

At any time in that period he could have opened the door if only he had known it. He thought it was locked, but it was not. He groped along the corridor and felt his way upstairs. At the top of the stairs two soldiers were chatting, and they made no attempt to stop him. He crossed the great yard without attracting attention. There was an armed guard on the drawbridge at the great gate, but they paid no attention to him, and he walked out a free man.

He went home unmolested and lived happily ever after. He could have done this any time through those long years since his arrest if he had known enough, but he did not. He was a captive, not of stone and iron but of false belief. He was not locked in; he only thought he was. Of course this is only a legend, but it is an extremely instructive one.

We are all living in some kind of prison, some of us in one kind, some in another; some in a prison of lack, some in a prison of remorse and resentment, some in a prison of blind, unintelligent fear, some in a prison of sickness. But always the prison is in our thought and not in the nature of things.

There is no truth in our seeming troubles. There is no reality in lack. There is no power in time or conditions to make us old or tired or sick.

The Jesus Christ teaching, and the Unity movement in particular, comes to us and says: “You are not locked in a prison of circumstances. You are not chained in any dungeon. In the name of God, turn the handle, walk out, and be free.”

Build a mental equivalent of freedom, of vibrant physical health, of true prosperity, of increasing understanding and achievement for God. Build it by thinking of it, having faith in it and acting the part, and the old limitation equivalent will gradually fade out, for the door is unlocked and the voice of God in your heart says, “Be free.”

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imagining-1 · 7 years ago

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The Golden Key

“The Golden Key,” from Power Through Constructive Thinking (1940), by Emmet Fox, pp. 137–140.

SCIENTIFIC PRAYER will enable you, sooner or later, to get yourself, or anyone else, out of any difficulty on the face of the earth. It is the Golden Key to harmony and happiness.

To those who have no acquaintance with the mightiest power in existence, this may appear to be a rash claim, but it needs only a fair trial to prove that, without a shadow of doubt, it is a just one. You need take no one’s word for it, and you should not. Simply try it for yourself, and see.

God is omnipotent, and man is His image and likeness, and has dominion over all things. This is the inspired teaching, and it is intended to be taken literally, at its face value. Man means every man, and so the ability to draw on this power is not the special prerogative of the Mystic or the Saint, as is so often supposed, or even of the highly trained practitioner. Whoever you are, wherever you may be, the Golden Key to harmony is in your hand now. This is because in Scientific Prayer it is God who works, and not you, and so your particular limitations or weaknesses are of no account in the process. You are only the channel through which the Divine action takes place, and your treatment will really be just the getting of yourself out of the way. Beginners often get startling results at the first time of trying, for all that is absolutely essential is to have an open mind, and sufficient faith to try the experiment. Apart from that, you may hold any views on religion, or none.

As for the actual method of working, like all fundamental things, it is simplicity itself. All that you have to do is this: Stop thinking about the difficulty, whatever it is, and think about God instead. This is the complete rule, and if only you will do this, the trouble, whatever it is, will presently disappear. It makes no difference what kind of trouble it is. It may be a big thing or a little thing; it may concern health, finance, a law-suit, a quarrel, an accident, or anything else conceivable; but whatever it is, just stop thinking about it, and think of God instead—that is all you have to do.

The thing could not be simpler, could it? God Himself could scarcely have made it simpler, and yet it never fails to work when given a fair trial.

Do not try to form a picture of God, which is, of course, impossible. Work by rehearsing anything or everything that you know about God. God is Wisdom, Truth, inconceivable Love. God is present everywhere; has infinite power; knows everything; and so on. It matters not how well you may think you understand these things; go over them repeatedly.

But you must stop thinking of the trouble, whatever it is. The rule is to think about God, and if you are thinking about your difficulty you are not thinking about God. To be continually glancing over your shoulder, as it were, in order to see how matters are progressing, is fatal, because that is thinking of the trouble, and you must think of God, and of nothing else. Your object is to drive the thought of the difficulty right out of your consciousness, for a few moments at least, substituting for it the thought of God. This is the crux of the whole thing. If you can become so absorbed in this consideration of the spiritual world that you really forget for a while all about the trouble concerning which you began to pray, you will presently find that you are safely and comfortably out of your difficulty—that your demonstration is made.

In order to “Golden Key” a troublesome person or a difficult situation, think, “Now I am going to ‘Golden Key’ John, or Mary, or that threatened danger”; then proceed to drive all thought of John, or Mary, or the danger right out of your mind, replacing it by the thought of God.

By working in this way about a person, you are not seeking to influence his conduct in any way, except that you prevent him from injuring or annoying you, and you do him nothing but good. Thereafter he is certain to be in some degree a better, wiser, and more spiritual person, just because you have “Golden Keyed” him. A pending law-suit or other difficulty would probably fade out harmlessly without coming to a crisis, justice being done to all parties concerned.

If you find that you can do this very quickly, you may repeat the operation several times a day with intervals between. Be sure, however, each time you have done it, that you drop all thought of the matter until the next time. This is important.

We have said that the Golden Key is simple, and so it is, but, of course, it is not always easy to turn. If you are very frightened or worried it may be difficult, at first, to get your thoughts away from material things. But by constantly repeating some statement of absolute Truth that appeals to you, such as There is no power but God, or I am the child of God, filled and surrounded by the perfect peace of God, or God is Love, or God is guiding me now, or, perhaps best and simplest of all, just God is with me—however mechanical or dead it may seem at first—you will soon find that the treatment has begun to “take,” and that your mind is clearing. Do not struggle violently; be quiet but insistent. Each time that you find your attention wandering, just switch it straight back to God.

Do not try to think out in advance what the solution of your difficulty will probably turn out to be. This is technically called “outlining,” and will only delay the demonstration. Leave the question of ways and means strictly to God. You want to get out of your difficulty—that is sufficient. You do your half, and God will never fail to do His.

Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.

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imagining-1 · 7 years ago

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Restricting Your Thoughts

Excerpt from Body, Mind and Spirit (1931), by Elwood Worcester and Samuel McComb, pp. 201–205.

The effort of those who realize the incalculable powers of self-suggestion for good or evil, of whom William James was one of the first, has been directed toward teaching how comparatively easy it is permanently to inhibit debilitating self-suggestions by resisting them for a short time, and how soon good and strengthening self-suggestions, which must be made consciously and with conviction at first, strike their roots into the rich soil of human life and operate spontaneously and automatically to our unending good.

Last spring I was present at a small gathering of men and women interested in medical psychology, to listen to an address by a famous man of science. After he had finished his formal talk, he said, in effect: “Ladies and gentlemen, before I sit down I wish to make a more personal statement which I think you will find of greater value and interest than my lecture. Up to my fiftieth year (he is now about sixty-five) I was an unhappy, ineffective man. None of the works on which my reputation rests was published. I was making my home in an unimportant town in California and was utterly unknown in the scientific world. I lived in a constant sense of gloom and failure. Perhaps my most painful symptom was a blinding headache which recurred usually two days of the week, during which I could do nothing.

“As my fiftieth birthday approached, I began to take stock of my soul and I realized that something was very wrong with me. I had read some of the literature of New Thought, which at the time appeared to be buncombe, and some statements of William James on the directing of attention to what is good and useful and ignoring the rest. One saying of his stuck in my mind, ‘We might have to give up our philosophy of evil, but what is that in comparison with gaining a life of goodness?’ (or words to that effect). Hitherto these doctrines had seemed to me only mystical theories, but realizing that my soul was sick and growing worse and that my life was intolerable, I determined to put them to the proof. In accordance with my teaching and mental habits, I resolved to make a careful, honest experiment which should be as carefully and honestly recorded. I decided to limit the period of conscious effort to one month, as I thought this time long enough to prove its value or its worthlessness to me. During this month I resolved to impose certain restrictions on my thoughts. If I thought of the past, I would try to let my mind dwell only on its happy, pleasing incidents, the bright days of my childhood, the inspiration of my teachers and the slow revelation of my life-work. In thinking of the present, I would deliberately turn my attention to its desirable elements, my home, the opportunities my solitude gave me to work, and so on, and I resolved to make the utmost use of these opportunities and to ignore the fact that they seemed to lead to nothing. In thinking of the future I determined to regard every worthy and possible ambition as within my grasp. Ridiculous as this seemed at the time, in view of what has come to me since, I see that the only defect of my plan was that it aimed too low and did not include enough.

“By this time I felt that I was about to make an important discovery and I began to be conscious of a certain tingling of expectation which I usually experience in my scientific work at such moments. When the day I had assigned arrived, I threw myself into the new task (incomparably the greatest I had ever attempted to perform) with ardour. I did not have to wait a month. At the end of eight days, I knew that the experiment was succeeding. I had not thought of including my headaches in my scheme of effort, as I deemed these beyond the possibility of help from this source. But therein I miscalculated, as they abruptly ceased. In fifteen years I have had but one headache and that was one I deliberately brought on for experimental purposes.

“Apart from this welcome relief, the first change of which I was aware was that whereas for many years I had been profoundly unhappy, I now felt happy and contented. I knew what James meant when he spoke of ‘being consciously right and superior.’ What surprised me more was that I was able to make others happy and that my personality seemed to attract, whereas before it had repelled. Up to this point of my recital I anticipate that you will find nothing strange in these changes and discoveries, except that I made them so late in life. What follows may tax your credulity. Personally I should not have accepted one of these statements sixteen years ago. Yet most of the changes in my outer life are matters of fact which can be verified in Who’s Who. As I stated at the beginning, the burdens I found hardest to bear were my obscurity and isolation, consciousness that the passing years were bringing me no nearer the goal of my ambition, that although my capacity was considerable, my name was unknown and my works unpublished because no publisher would accept them.

“The outward changes of my life resulting from my change of thought have surprised me more than the inward changes, yet they sprang from the latter. There were certain eminent men, for example, whose recognition I deeply craved. The foremost of these wrote me, out of a clear sky, and invited me to become his assistant. My works have all been published, and a foundation has been created to publish all that I may write in the future. The men with whom I have worked have been helpful and co-operative toward me chiefly on account of my changed disposition. Formerly they would not have endured me. One ambition of mine, my election to the presidency of a great foreign scientific society, though in accordance with my highest hope, seemed so utterly beyond my reach that I should have deemed it preposterous to aim at it, yet it came to me. As I look back over all these changes, it seems to me that in some blind way I stumbled on a path of life and set forces to working for me which before were working against me.

“There is one more incident I must record. After several years of peace and improvement it occurred to me that I had not given these theories a sufficient test. Apparently my experiment had succeeded, and I knew too much about the law of probability to ascribe all these changes to chance. Still, as a scientific man, I felt that I ought to test the principles with which I had been working negatively. I therefore began deliberately to revive the emotions of fear and apprehension. Within two hours I felt myself weak, depressed, doubtful, and I was conscious, for the last time, of a splitting headache. I therefore felt that I had done my duty and that I might rest comfortably in the great saying of Paul, ‘All things work together for good to them that love God.’ ”

If it were right for me to mention a great name, that of one of the least credulous or superstitious of mankind, this recital of his would evoke no mockery.

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imagining-1 · 7 years ago

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“Fundamentals” by Neville Goddard

“Fundamentals,” from INTA Bulletin New Thought (Summer 1953)

WITH so vast a subject, it is indeed a difficult task to summarize in a few hundred words what I consider the most basic ideas on which those who seek a true understanding of metaphysics should now concentrate. I shall do what I can in the shape of three fundamentals. These fundamentals are: Self-Observation, Definition of Aim, and Detachment.

The purpose of true metaphysics is to bring about a rebirth or radical psychological change in the individual. Such a change cannot take place until the individual first discovers the self that he would change. This discovery can be made only through an uncritical observation of his reactions to life. The sum total of these reactions defines the individual’s state of consciousness, and it is the individual’s state of consciousness that attracts the situations and circumstances of his life.

So the starting point of true metaphysics, on its practical side, is self-observation in order to discover one’s reactions to life, reactions which form one’s secret self – the cause of the phenomena of life.

With Emerson, I accept the fact that “Man surrounds himself with the true image of himself . . . what we are, that only can we see.”

There is a definite connection between what is outer and what is inner in man, and it is ever our inner states that attract our outer life. Therefore, the individual must always start with himself.

It is one’s self that must be changed.

Man, in his blindness, is quite satisfied with himself, but heartily dislikes the circumstances and situations of his life. He feels this way, not knowing that the cause of his displeasure lies not in the condition nor the person with whom he is displeased, but in the very self he likes so much. Not realizing that “he surrounds himself with the true image of himself” and that “what he is, that only can he see,” he is shocked when he discovers that it has always been his own deceitfulness that made him suspicious of others.

Self-observation would reveal this deceitful one in all of us; and this one must be accepted before there can be any transformation of ourselves.

At this moment, try to notice your inner state. To what thoughts are you consenting? With what feelings are you identified? You must be ever careful where you are within yourself.

Most of its think that we are kind and loving, generous and tolerant, forgiving and noble; but an uncritical observation of our reactions to life will reveal a self that is not at all kind and loving, generous and tolerant, forgiving and noble. And it is this self that we must first accept and then set about to change.

Rebirth depends on inner work on one’s self. No one can be reborn without changing this self. Any time that an entirely new set of reactions enters into a person’s life, a change of consciousness has taken place, a spiritual rebirth has occurred.

Having discovered, through an uncritical observation of your reactions to life, a self that must be changed, you must now formulate an aim. That is, you must define the one you would like to be instead of the one you truly are in secret. With this aim clearly defined, you must, throughout your conscious waking day, notice your every reaction in regard to this aim.

The reason for this is that everyone lives in a definite state of consciousness, which state of consciousness we have already described as the sum total of his reactions to life. Therefore, in defining an aim, you are defining a state of consciousness, which, like all states of consciousness, must have its reactions to life. For example: if a rumor or an idle remark could cause an anxious reaction in one person and no reaction in another, this is positive proof that the two people are living in two different states of consciousness.

If you define your aim as a noble, generous, secure, kindly individual – knowing that all things are states of consciousness – you can easily tell whether you are faithful to your aim in life by watching your reactions to the daily events of life. If you are faithful to your ideal, your reactions will conform to your aim, for you will be identified with your aim and, therefore, will be thinking from your aim. If your reactions are not in harmony with your ideal, it is a sure sign that you are separated from your ideal and are only thinking of it. Assume that you are the loving one you want to be, and notice your reactions throughout the day in regard to that assumption; for your reactions will tell you the state from which you are operating.

This is where the third fundamental – Detachment – enters in. Having discovered that everything is a state consciousness made visible and having defined that particular state which we want to make visible, we now set about the task of entering such a state, for we must move psychologically from where we are to where we desire to be.

The purpose of practicing detachment is to separate us from our present reactions to life and attach us to our aim in life. This inner separation must be developed by practice. At first we seem to have no power to separate ourselves from undesirable inner states, simply because we have always taken every mood, every reaction, as natural and have become identified with them. When we have no idea that our reactions are only states of consciousness from which it is possible to separate ourselves, we go round and round in the same circle of problems – not seeing them as inner states but as outer situations. We practice detachment, or inner separation, that we may escape from the circle of our habitual reactions to life. That is why we must formulate an aim and constantly notice ourselves in regard to that aim.

This teaching begins with self-observation. Secondly it asks, “What do you want?” And then it teaches detachment from all negative states and attachment to your aim. This last state – attachment to your aim – is accomplished by frequently assuming the feeling of your wish fulfilled.

We must practice separating ourselves from our negative moods and thoughts in the midst of all the troubles and disasters of daily life. No one can be different from what he is now unless he begins to separate himself from his present reactions and to identify himself with his aim. Detachment from negative states and assumption of the wish fulfilled must be practiced in the midst of all the blessings and cursings of life.

The way of true metaphysics lies in the midst of all that is going on in life. We must constantly practice self-observation, thinking from our aim, and detachment from negative moods and thoughts if we would be doers of truth instead of mere hearers.

Practice these three fundamentals and you will rise to higher and higher levels of consciousness. Remember, always, it is your state of consciousness that attracts your life.

Start climbing!

Neville

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imagining-1 · 7 years ago

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Neville Goddard Lecture – “Change Your Mental Diet” aka “Trust Imagination”

I’m very glad that you came tonight, for I have a story to tell you and the one who gave it to me is here tonight. But I’ll prepare you for it first.

I’ve been teaching this for years and years and years, and we can hear it and never apply it. Though I repeat night after night, “We are the operant power. It doesn’t operate itself,” we still postpone it. Quite often our training is in conflict with it and we can’t quite bring ourselves to apply it. We are told in the 118th Psalm, “The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. This is the Lord’s doing. It is marvelous in our sight.”

Many years ago, sitting in the silence, thinking of nothing in particular, with my eyes closed in contemplation but not really thinking of any one particular thing, suddenly a stone appeared before my eyes. About that size. A huge quartz. And here this quartz shattered, fragmented itself into many, many pieces, and then quickly reassembled itself, but this time into the human form seated in the lotus posture. As I looked at it, I saw it was myself. I am actually looking at myself. I became so emotionally lifted. As I looked at it, it began to glow. Then it reached the intensity of I would say, well, light of the sun. Then it exploded. And then I awoke in my chair.

The stone that I had rejected was myself. I could not believe that I myself was the cause of the phenomena of my life. I thought, “He did it, she did it, they did it, the world did it, but certainly I am not responsible.” These things happened because others are the causes. And here I am looking at the stone which the builder rejected. “This is marvelous,” said he, “It’s the Lord’s doing and it’s marvelous in our sight.”

When we actually see this world as a world of appearance behind which the reality of imagining lay, we find the truth. All things exist in the human imagination. By that I mean the individual’s imagination. In your own bosom, you bear your heaven and your earth. And all that you behold, though it appears without, it is within in your imagination, of which this world of mortality is but a shadow. Now you and I will call ourselves either Christians or Jews. Both are the same, really. The Jew is the foundation stone. It is the tree. Christianity is its fulfillment. It is the fruit. But the tree is Judaism, and all that it actually contains will come out eventually in a plan, a wonderful plan that was there in the beginning of time, and that we call Christianity.

Blake said, “I know of no other Christianity and no other gospel than the liberty both of body and mind to exercise the divine arts of imagination.” Then he adds, “The Apostles knew no other gospel. And the worship of God is using his gift.” And then he states, “God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is.” Now what is the gift? He also mentions that. The gift, he said, “Man is all imagination, and God is man and exists in us and we in him. The eternal body of man is the imagination, and that is God himself, the divine body Jesus.”

Now as you are seated here, that’s all about you. Your own wonderful human imagination is the God of the universe. That is the one spoken of as the Lord Jesus. That’s the one. Is it really true? Well, you’re called upon to test it. Test it and see if it’s true.

Now I have a letter on me tonight. I really should read it, but I’m not going to. I should read it just as he wrote it, but I’ll tell you the contents of the letter. This gentleman hasn’t been here in years. The last time I saw him was at the Ebell. Well, you know who have been coming since the Ebell how long that has been. He said, “I must tell you this story. It may not make sense, but I must tell it, for it’s the first time I have ever used my training according to the things that I have heard you say. I am a psychologist and I wasted years trying to talk people out of their mental problems, when I could easily have imagined them whole and happy.”

Now here is the story. He said, “A friend of mine, this lady claimed that she was in many ways abnormal. She and her husband adopted a little baby girl and something very strange went wrong with the child. The child was four years old and still could not speak, and the few words it muttered it garbled so that it was simply not intelligible. But in the four years talking to her, there was progress. Then one day she said to me, ‘I do not feel any longer that I am abnormal. So now I say to myself, “I am not abnormal.” ’ ”

He tried to explain to her that that’s not quite the approach. Then he broke the thought and he told me this story. “For instance in my own case, I find a home that I want. I begin to imagine that I’m living in that home. Then doubt sets in, with the result that that doubt materializes into a person, and that person has more money than I have and he buys the home, leaving me out in the cold. I know from that experience that every person in my world only reflects a mood in me. Everyone that I meet, whether I know them or a stranger who buys the home that I wanted, when the doubt sets in, the doubt materializes into a person. I didn’t know him, but he only reflects that mood of doubt in me. So he has more money and he buys the home, and I am out in the cold.

“So I reconstructed a sentence for this lady, and I said, ‘No longer must you say, “I am not abnormal.” You must now begin to say, “I am perfectly normal.” ’ ” She said, “I do not feel that.” He said, “I do not care whether you feel it or not. You must begin to persuade yourself that you are perfectly normal by repeating within yourself ‘I am perfectly normal.’ The day she began it, the child went into a coma. So profound was the sleep that it was difficult to rouse her. She could not be awakened. She asked me to examine the child. I said, ‘No, take her to a medical clinic and have them examine the child.’ ” But as she began from his suggestion to assume “I am perfectly normal,” within 24 hours the child awoke. They made the test in the medical center and found her alert and bright.

She was only the outpictured statement of that mother who adopted her. The mother began to feel “I am abnormal,” so she adopts a little child, a little girl, and the girl for four years couldn’t talk. And when she began, it was so garbled, it made no sense. She only bore witness to that strange, peculiar claim of the mother who adopted her. And when she changed the pattern of speech within her and said, “I am perfectly normal,” the child by the medical clinic found her not only alert but perfectly healthy and returning to a normal state in this world.

The whole vast world is your self pushed out. All that you behold, though it appears without, it is within, in your own wonderful human imagination, of which this world of mortality is but a shadow.

Why? I found him. I found him of whom the prophets spoke. They spoke of Jesus, and the world is taught to believe he’s a man who lived 2,000 years ago and who was crucified 2,000 years ago. But I am telling you he is crucified on humanity, and the one crucified on humanity is man’s own wonderful human imagination. That’s Jesus. And there is no other Jesus. That is Jesus. He is buried in man, he is the dreamer in man, and he is dreaming this dream of life.

What are we feeding him? Well, I’ll tell you what we feed him, because he is capable of anything in this world. And listen to these words from Deuteronomy, the 32nd chapter, the 39th verse of Deuteronomy, and these are the words of the Lord speaking: “I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and there is none that can deliver out of my hands.” There is only one creative power in the world. The one who kills is the one who makes alive. The one who wounds is the one who heals. And there is no other power than this one power. And that one power is your own wonderful human imagination. That is God. There is no other God. He is buried in you. And the day will come, he will awaken within you.

When, I trust it is now, that I could turn you from this world of seeming reality on the outside to a world of imagination, so you actually live in your own wonderful human imagination, if you do and you really turn into a being who believes in the reality of his own imaginal acts, you are then on the verge of rebirth. It does not say when. He tells you no one knows, not even the Son. Only the Father. “Don’t ask me when,” said he. But I will tell you the signs of it: when you actually begin to trust your own wonderful human imagination, when you sit can sit quietly all alone, asking help of no one, and really believe that your imaginal act is a creative fact and that in the interval of time necessary it’s going to externalize itself and become a reality in your world, you are on the verge of rebirth. As you’re told, unless you are born again, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven, even though the kingdom of heaven is within you. The kingdom of God is within you, and God is in his kingdom. Although he is in his kingdom and that kingdom is in you, you can’t enter it unless you turn from this world of materiality, believing it is the cause, believing it is the reality, to live in your own wonderful human imagination. When you do, you’ll find yourself on the very verge of being reborn.

So you’re warned, “Do not ask me when. I will tell you. Not even the Son knows. Only the Father.” But I’ll give you the symptoms of it. When you can trust your own wonderful human imagination. That will be the symptom.

Can I stand here tonight and take any request? It doesn’t cost me anything and it’s a joy, if it’s within what I call the Golden Rule. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Ask nothing of me that you would not ask for yourself. Do not ask me to hear any news in this world that you would not really want done to you. Because first of all I could not do it. I use the Golden Rule. Then if it comes within the framework of the Golden Rule, it’s so easy. What would the feeling be like if it were true that you are what you want to be, that they are what they want to be, that they have what they want to be?

Don’t ask me how it’s going to happen. I do not know. The depth of your own being has ways and means that you, the conscious surface being, know not of. It knows exactly how to do it. So don’t ask how it’s going to be done. So when doubt sets in… As he said in his letter to me, “When the doubt set in, that doubt materialized in the form of a person who also wanted that home and had more money and bought it and left me out in the cold.”

I can tell from the uprising of moods within me that I’m going to meet certain people, and I do. The mood. You can suppress the mood. As Churchill said, “The moods determine the fortunes of people rather than the fortunes determine the mood.” Don’t ignore that great man. He said that the mood actually determines the fortunes. So I will catch a mood. Well, then catch the mood of your wish fulfilled. What would the feeling be like if it were true? Imagine the wish fulfilled. What would it be like? How would I feel if it were true? In spite of all things round about you that deny it, you walk as though it were true. And in a way that you do not know, and you need not know, it will externalize itself within your world and you will actually receive it.

Listen to these words: “With God, all things are possible.” That you will read in the 19th chapter of the Book of Matthew. Now we’ll go to the 9th chapter of the Book of Mark: “All things are possible to him who believes.” He equates God with the believer in man. “All things are possible to him who believes.” That’s Mark. Matthew: “With God, all things are possible.” So he equates the believer in man with God. Well, the believer in me is my own wonderful human imagination. What other thing in man, but his reality, which is imagination that believes, is the dreamer in man? I go to bed at night and I dream. The dreamer and the waking “I” are one and the same being. Can I believe or am I going to allow certain doubts?

Now he is a psychologist trained to talk people out of their mental problems. Put them on the couch, put them on the chair and talk them out of it and spend years, when he could easily, as he confessed, have imagined them whole and perfect and happy. But he said, “I believe that I was through my training compelled to spend these awkward years as anyone who works at a job spends his time in an awkward manner. If you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, then it’s simply a job and you’re doing something that is to you awkward.”

If you like it, like my brother Victor, who has made a fortune, the very smell of a ship, the very smell of the boat, the smell of his store, he loves it. He goes there in the morning. The odor of his store, I can’t stand it. He goes into the grocery store and everything about it, he just loves the odor, all the combinations of the odors of the grocery store. He goes into his department store. All the things of the department store, likes the odor. It affects him. He loves it. Goes to a hotel and the rest is naturally all in service, that affects him. And he loves it. He so loves it, he’s in the mood of success. So fall in love with something that really excites you and feel that you are already what you want to be. I tell you from my own experience and from this man’s experience that it will work.

Now here is a man who heard me years ago. He came home one day. I thought, “Now here is a man teaching people how to live correctly,” and I had two books that are completely out of print. You can’t buy them. But I thought if I could give them to someone doing this kind of work who is serious—he is a trained psychologist—I’ll give them to him. So I gave him these books. I don't think he’s read them. First of all, they’re named after the mountains of Switzerland, Zermatt and Oberland, but it’s all imagination. The man who wrote it, I presume he’s gone now. He was 94 when I last heard from him. But I gave him these books. They were new and completely out of print. You can’t get the books. You might find them in some secondhand, but they were never popular books because they were very voluminous books. But he wrote them in the form of a dialogue, like a Plato. He introduced five characters. One was a scientist, one was a philosopher, one was a mystic, one was something else, and they all discuss. And he had the central one who was the mystic explaining the phenomena and the cause of the phenomena of life.

So you got these volumes and I gave them to him. I asked him the other night because he’s here for the second time in years, and the way he told me about them, I don't really think he really read them with understanding or really read them. Because it’s told like Plato would tell a story, introducing characters, because the one person is speaking as the scientist, as the mystic, as the philosopher, as the atheist. He has them all present and only five characters. But the books are completely on imagination. It’s called The Zermatt Dialogues and The Oberland Dialogues. I went down to the bookstore in Long Beach called Acres of Books looking for them, and old Mr. Smith, he’s gone now. He was then in his eighties. And I was looking all over the philosophical department and the other departments. “Oh,” he said, “you wouldn’t find them there. You will find them under ‘Switzerland,’ the mountains.” He didn’t know the content of the book. “Go over to the place and look under ‘Switzerland,’ ” and there they were. So I found my two books. And I parted with them when I gave them to him in the hope that because he is a psychologist, a trained one, that these will show him that causation is all imagination, that imagining creates reality.

What am I imagining? They came to him, the embodiment of imagination, and they said, “But you haven’t eaten,” and they were concerned because he had been left alone and he had not eaten. And he said, “I have food you know not of.” The food is what are you feeding your imagination morning, noon, and night? You read the morning paper and you react, and you don’t know one character there, any of them, and you react even before you get to the end of the page based upon some biased reporter. But you react. That's what you’ve fed the Lord, for the Lord is your own wonderful human imagination. That’s God, and there is no other God. That is the Jesus of scripture, that is the Jehovah of the Old Testament, and he is housed in you. That’s why you are immortal. So you can drop right now. May I tell you it makes no difference to your immortality. Chop off your head, burn you and turn it into dust, you are an immortal being. You cannot cease to be because God became as you are, that you may be as he is. And so you’re going through these with these strange, peculiar diets, and we simply produce what we feed upon.

You can learn a lesson from the animal world. When we were children, we had ducks, chickens, all kinds of things that you have on a farm. And we were a large family. There were ten children, nine boys and one girl, and we had a father, mother, and grandmother all living in our home. Mother would say to us, “Take two or three ducks and put them away because I want them. In two weeks, I’m going to have a duck dinner.” So you take the three ducks and you put them away. Well, she meant that you would change their diet. Because when I was a boy, fish was plentiful and cheap. You could bring in all kinds of fish. We had no refrigeration, so if it wasn’t sold in the early evening, it rotted, so you simply either use it for strange bait the next day or you fed the animals, that is the ducks.

So we would take the fish. Well, we kept them alive and they fed on ducks… or on fish. And they got fat and they were altogether healthy. But you couldn’t eat that bird until you took it and isolated it and put it in a cage by itself and stuffed it with meal, corn, sour milk, anything of that nature. At the end of 10 days, that bird, having been fed only on say milk or corn or anything you had of that nature, the whole system changed. So when you cooked it, it was like a milk-fed bird. If you didn’t do it, you couldn’t eat it. It’s all fish.

And I would know… I can see it now in my mind’s eye. My mother said, “Neville, get a few ducks and put them away,” and, playing cricket and playing soccer, I forgot it. When I remembered, it was only about five days before, so I took the ducks and put them away, but five days was not enough to purge it completely of the fish. Well, you could smell that thing all over the neighborhood. On Sunday afternoon, we’re going to have ducks, and we knew we couldn’t have ducks because you couldn’t eat it. You look at a duck and you’re eating fish. It repulsed everyone. Of course we got a good spanking for it because we didn’t do what mother commanded us to do at the time that she told us to do it.

Well, that is just like everything else in this world. You feed. As he said, “I have food you know not of.” You feed for a few days, a couple of weeks on a changed mental diet. In this case, in 24 hours when she took the diet that he gave her—“I am perfectly normal”—the child went into a deep, deep sleep from which she could not be awakened without a struggle. Then the clinic said, “Well, she’s not only bright but she’s healthy. She’s completely right.” She was simply the outpictured statement that that girl lived with when she said, “I am abnormal in many ways.”

You take a new diet tonight, just like the duck. It may take you a day, it may take you a week, it may take you two weeks, but if you actually persist in the changed diet, you will outpicture that diet, that change of diet, and your whole vast world will change.

We are the only beings to whom he gave speech. He actually became man. This inner speech is a marvelous gift. And you can’t stop it. You’re doing it morning, noon, and night. You go to bed talking to yourself. You wake in the morning talking to yourself. And whether there's someone present or not, you’re still talking to yourself. You walk the streets, some are obvious when they do it, but most of us are not that obvious but we’re doing it anyway. We are carrying on little mental conversations with ourselves. But what are we carrying on? Arguments? Or are we boldly affirming and asserting that “I AM” and then name what I want to be?

In her case, he gave her what she should say. And she argued with him and she couldn’t say it because “I do not feel that yet.” “Don't wait to feel it!” he said to her, “Do it now—‘I am perfectly normal’—because if you say, ‘I am not abnormal,’ that’s not a creative thing towards your goal. In fact, it may be destructive. You want something positive, not something negative—‘I am not abnormal.’ ‘I am perfectly normal.’ ” Then the child, the outpictured self.

So everyone in your world is your self pushed out. Blame no one. Don’t even blame yourself. Just change the diet. They only reflect what you have been doing and may be still doing. When you see it, you change the diet. And the diet is simply words, all within you. You assume that you are now the man, the woman that you want to be. Walk in that assumption as though it were true. Live in it just as though it is true. And then, who knows? That diet may not take more than 24 hours, I’m quite sure it would not take more than a few weeks, to project itself in a way that you do not know.

How do you know this little duck… I’m speaking from experience. I’m not telling you a story that someone told me. I was the one spanked for not getting those ducks the very day the order was given, and mother was kind of a disciplinarian. She always kept her word. If she promised you a bicycle, if she gave you a bike because you would do something, she kept it. If she promised you a beating if you didn’t do something, she kept that too. She was a great disciplinarian.

During the First World War, I went on a schooner to what is now called the Virgin Islands. Then they were owned by Denmark. Santa Cruz, what is now Saint Thomas, and then Saint John. We bought them during the war, the First World War. That is we in America bought them, but then I was a British subject. And I went down on a schooner to get cattle because we didn’t raise cattle in Barbados and we needed the meat. And they had the dairies. Denmark owned them, so there were dairy people. Bought the cattle, put them aboard the ship, and started back for Barbados. And we were becalmed off Martinique. Martinique has a huge mountainous volcano. We’re out of sight of the island, so they couldn’t rescue us. There’s no radio in those days, no possibility of contacting the mainland. There we are simply drifting, not moving an inch in the course of a day, and the cattle are dying. They’re all dying. We were eight days late coming into Barbados and all the cattle were gone from the bilge and the lack of food, the lack of water. I thought, well now, when I came home, they’d be so happy to see me, because they thought I was gone, because the submarines, the German submarines were shooting at everything in the area, even a little schooner.

So I came in and I came home. They all greeted me with open arms. But that very day, mother said to me, “I don’t want you to go out into the sun. You’ve had enough sun on that schooner for these many days at sea.” I must have been two weeks at sea and no possibility of any shade, burnt to a crisp. “Don't go out.” Well, I had guinea pigs and I had rabbits. I had to go and see how my guinea pigs and rabbits were coming on. But she told me not to go. I think, “It’s my first day home. Certainly mother will not dare hold it against me.” So I went out, disobeying her order. When I came back in, she said, “Did I tell you not to go out?” “Yes, mother.” I thought, “Well now, after all this is my first day home. She thought I was dead. Here I am resurrected.” That didn’t pacify her at all. Took off that shoe and she harangued me and she let me have it. She was the most marvelous disciplinarian. She promised you a watch, you got it. If she promised you anything, you got it, including a whipping.

So I’m telling you a change of diet, and in our case we are the Lord, and the Lord feasts upon words. He is the Word. So what are you saying to yourself in the course of 24 hours? “I am in want, I am this, I am that.” Change it. Completely change it and say within yourself, “I am happily, blissfully married,” if that’s my objective in life. Reason denies it, your senses deny it, “I am blissfully happy,” and sleep as though it were true.

I can tell you that story from my own personal experience. It works that way. When I told the details of how it happened, people saw the means employed—which I certainly didn’t manufacture them, not consciously—and judged me harshly for telling the means. But, as you’re told in scripture, “I have ways and means ye know not of. My ways are past finding out.” All you do is simply go on the new diet.

For when I found the girl to whom I’m now married—I’m blissfully happy with her since the day I met her back in 1936—I was completely involved. I wasn’t divorced, and in those days in New York City, a divorce was out. It only became legal after the very, very, very wealthy Rockefeller got his out’s eye and then brought pressure to bear on the state to pass a decent, modest, normal modern law allowing people who cannot live together to separate and then seek a normal divorce. Prior to that, all divorces were simply collusion. All divorces. You paid someone to find someone, and then they’d sign these little things. You went before the judge and they all knew it was collusion anyway.

Well, here I am completely involved in marriage and I want to marry this girl. I met her. The very first second I saw, I said, “She doesn’t know, but she’s going to be my wife. She doesn’t know it yet.” And simply I slept as though we were blissfully happy. She on that bed and I on my bed. It wasn’t a sex act. It was simply she was there in the room in our lovely home and I was in my bed and she was in her bed. So I didn’t make an emotional thing of that nature. And the girl who was my former wife refused. She even left the state so as not to be given a summons.

One day I got a call from the court telling me to come on down. They needed my advice. I went down to the court wondering, “What am I doing going to the court in the morning?” Then they brought her in, and I pleaded her case before these three judges. And she said to me after I got her off, “That was a very decent thing for you to do, Neville, and I know you want a divorce. Give me the papers.” I didn’t have the papers on me. She and I got into a taxi and rode to my hotel and I gave her the papers. Now that’s supposed to be illegal, so I’m told now. You can’t serve your own papers. I didn’t know that. Gave her the papers and I got my divorce in the City of New York.

So I know it works. It took me one week to do it. That’s all that it took me. One week. I simply went sound asleep in the assumption that my wife was there, and it’s the girl to whom I’m now married and who bore us this glorious daughter. And it’s been since 1936.

So here this heavenly state was denied me because I wasn’t feeding myself the right food. “I have food you know not of,” and the food are words. You repeat them within yourself. What am I saying? As Blake said, “O what have I said? What have I done? O all-powerful Human Words!” If man only realized what he is doing when he’s talking seemingly idly—“Oh. Well, who cares? Who knows?” Who knows? The only one that cares knows, and he is your own wonderful human imagination. That is God. That’s the Jehovah of the Old Testament and the Jesus of the New, and there is no other God. He’s buried in you and he’s dreaming in you, and surely you want to awake. But you will awake the day that you actually move into the life of imagination. When you trust your imagination and live in it, you’re not far from the threshold of rebirth. But I can’t tell you the day or the hour. No one knows but the Father, and the Father is your own wonderful human imagination.

I saw it so clearly. “This is the stone that the builders rejected. But what the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone. It was the Lord’s doing and it is marvelous in our sight.” I rejected the fact that I was the cause of the phenomena of my life. I couldn’t believe it. I thought everyone outside of myself caused it. Then I realized when I saw the vision. Here is a stone. A quartz, and it fragmented into numberless parts. As he said, “The one who bought the home, that’s a fragmented part of my own being. My doubt brought him into being. He materialized my doubt—a man, a person—and he bought the home I wanted because he had more money. I materialized that. It came out of me.” So the whole thing fragmented. Then when it came together and formed itself into a man seated in the lotus posture and I looked at it, I’m looking at myself. Then I realized I am the cause. He is the dreamer in me and one day he is going to awake from this dream. And when he awakes, I am he, and he and I are one. This is the story I am trying to tell the whole vast world, because I know it’s true and the day will come you will know it’s true. There is no other God than your own wonderful human imagination.

I still would invite you… Although I’ve told you to do it yourself, I still invite you, if you feel uneasy about it, to ask of me, for in the end, may I tell you, we are one.

Now let us go into the silence.

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imagining-1 · 7 years ago

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Putting words in someone’s mouth

Excerpt from the Neville Goddard lecture entitled “Our Real Beliefs”

Now here is something, and you listen to it carefully. It’s a long letter, and he’s bringing out certain points that might have escaped you. For here what we’re trying to do is find out all the little facets of the greatest secret in the world, the secret of imagining. For as Fawcett said, “The secret of imagining is the greatest of all problems to the solution of which all should aspire, for supreme power, supreme wisdom, and supreme delight lie in the solution of this far off problem, this great mystery.” And he has thrown some light on it. So if I can recall, it’s a long letter, typewritten, four pages, but I will give you some of the highlights of it.

He said, “When I met my producer three years ago, he was a very subdued and reserved sort of a gentleman. Reserved,” he said, “would be the right word to use to describe him, very reserved, so unlike the volatile enthusiast with whom I formerly worked. He was very reserved. In fact, he couldn’t express the superlative in any way. In fact, his greatest praise was the word ‘good.’ You brought in a script and he would accept the script, and his highest praise was ‘Good.’

“Well, I thought, ‘I’m going to change this.’ So I lay on the bed and I heard him say to me, ‘Great, just great!’ Now I hadn’t started the script. I had just given him a script and he had pronounced the script ‘Good.’ I am now doing this about the next script, and I heard him distinctly. I went over and over in my audio setup as it were, so I heard him inwardly pronounce the new script as ‘Great, just great!’ And while I am lying there the phone rings. I haven’t started the script. The phone is ringing and it’s the producer. He is telling me that the script that he had formerly pronounced ‘Good’ was ‘Great, just great!’ Well, then he threw me a curve, because that’s not what I was expecting. It was about the new script which I hadn’t even started. So he not only threw me this curve, but someone had their lines crossed. So, right there I kept on now working a new, I would say, line for him to use, and I changed it from ‘Great, just great!’ to ‘Terrific!’ So here I am, I only heard one word, ‘It is terrific!’ Well, I submitted the script and that’s exactly the word he used when he said to me, ‘It’s terrific!’ and with the same enthusiasm that matched my imagining.

“Now I said to myself, two months later... Every script I presented within two months, it was either ‘Great, just great!’ or ‘Terrific!’ He didn’t go back to ‘Good’ anymore. I said, now I’m going to experiment again. So this time I’m going to make him say, ‘Absolutely sensational!’ So I heard him say, ‘Absolutely sensational!’ ” Then he said to me, “What the hell, if you’re praising yourself, why not get the best! So I’m doing it to myself anyway, so why be modest about it? I’m doing the whole thing because he’s only echoing it. So I said, ‘Absolutely sensational!’ So I finished the script, took the script into him, and he pronounced it ‘Good.’ ” He said, “I almost fell out of the chair. It was not the role that I had written for him,” and he said, “You know how authors hate ad-libbing.”

You know what that means in the theatrical world. When the author writes a play and some actor thinks he knows more than the author, and he changes the script and he ad-libs, or maybe he forgets his lines and if he is smart enough he can throw a few words in, and he ad-libs. But no matter how smart he thinks he is, he doesn’t flatter the author. The author feels he knows better than any actor what should be there at that moment. And so, he said in his letter, “You know how authors hate ad-libbing. So what could I do? The script had to be cut, so he gave me back the script to cut a certain portion of it. I took the script home, did all the cutting, and then mailed it to him. And I mailed it as a petulant child. I didn’t even revise what he had said. But the very next day he calls and he said to me on the wire, ‘It’s absolutely sensational!’ ”

Now, this is a point I want you to pay strict attention to. He said, “You know, my experience with the producer disturbed me, greatly disturbed me. To hear or to occasionally think about this isn’t so bad.” By that he meant you’ll hear that “All that you behold, though it appears without, it is within, in your imagination, of which this world of mortality is but a shadow.” Well, to hear that and to occasionally think about it isn’t too bad, but when it seeps in and takes hold of you and goes deeper, and you realize that it’s true! That that producer, who is so important in the production of this great series, who is spending such fortunes—he has it to spend it, he allows it, he knows what he’s doing, he’s been successful, been running three years—and yet he had to actually utter the words that this writer is writing for him. And when he met him he was so reserved he never used any superlative and could never bring himself to praise a thing beyond the word “Good.” And he raised him from “Good” to “Great, just great!”, “Terrific!”, “Absolutely sensational!” That’s an enormous accomplishment in anyone’s vocabulary when he began as a most reserved party. So when the individual writer now sees what he did with a man, he said, “You know, it distressed me. It distressed me for the simple reason I had to remake my world only as I remake myself. Only as I could remake myself could I in any way remake the world. And what an undertaking!” But, he said, “I found a solution. I will not now think of myself X number of years into the future. I am painting a portrait of myself. Portraits are not painted by one stroke of the brush. And so, I am taking it easily, and I start with the little things in my life, the little things, and I change them to make them conform to the portrait of the being I am painting of myself.

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imagining-1 · 7 years ago

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The Seven Day Mental Diet

“The Seven Day Mental Diet,” from Power Through Constructive Thinking (1940), by Emmet Fox, pp. 188–198.

THE subject of diet is one of the foremost topics of the present day in public interest. Newspapers and magazines teem with articles on the subject. The counters of the bookshops are filled with volumes unfolding the mysteries of proteins, starches, vitamins, and so forth. Just now the whole world is food-conscious. Experts on the subject are saying that physically you become the thing that you eat—that your whole body is really composed of the food that you have eaten in the past. What you eat today, they say, will be in your blood stream after the lapse of so many hours, and it is your blood stream that builds all the tissues composing your body—and there you are.

Of course, no sensible person has any quarrel with all this. It is perfectly true, as far as it goes, and the only surprising thing is that it has taken the world so long to find it out; but in this essay I am going to deal with the subject of dieting at a level that is infinitely more profound and far-reaching in its effects. I refer of course to mental dieting.

The most important of all factors in your life is the mental diet on which you live. It is the food which you furnish to your mind that determines the whole character of your life. It is the thoughts you allow yourself to think, the subjects that you allow your mind to dwell upon, which make you and your surroundings what they are. As thy days, so shall thy strength be, which, in modern language, may be translated as thy thoughts so shall thy life be. Everything in your life today—the state of your body, whether healthy or sick, the state of your fortune, whether prosperous or impoverished, the state of your home, whether happy or the reverse, the present condition of every phase of your life in fact—is entirely conditioned by the thoughts and feelings which you have entertained in the past, by the habitual tone of your past thinking. And the condition of your life tomorrow, and next week, and next year, will be entirely conditioned by the thoughts and feelings which you choose to entertain from now onward.

In other words, you choose your life, that is to say, you choose all the condition of your life, when you choose the thoughts upon which you allow your mind to dwell. Thought is the real causative force in life, and there is no other. You cannot have one kind of mind and another kind of environment. This means that you cannot change your environment while leaving your mind unchanged, nor—and this is the supreme key to life and the reason for this essay—can you change your mind without your environment changing too.

This then is the real key to life: if you change your mind your conditions must change too—your body must change, your daily work or other activities must change; your home must change; the color-tone of your whole life must change—for whether you be habitually happy and cheerful, or low-spirited and fearful, depends entirely on the quality of the mental food upon which you diet yourself.

Please be very clear about this. If you change your mind your conditions must change too. We are transformed by the renewing of our minds. So now you will see that your mental diet is really the most important thing in your whole life.

This may be called the Great Cosmic Law, and its truth is seen to be perfectly obvious when once it is clearly stated in this way. In fact, I do not know of any thoughtful person who denies its essential truth. The practical difficulty in applying it, however, arises from the fact that our thoughts are so close to us that it is difficult, without a little practice, to stand back as it were and look at them objectively.

Yet that is just what you must learn to do. You must train yourself to choose the subject of your thinking at any given time, and also to choose the emotional tone, or what we call the mood that colors it. Yes, you can choose your moods. Indeed, if you could not you would have no real control over your life at all. Moods habitually entertained produce the characteristic disposition of the person concerned, and it is his disposition that finally makes or mars a person’s happiness.

You cannot be healthy; you cannot be happy; you cannot be prosperous; if you have a bad disposition. If you are sulky, or surly, or cynical, or depressed, or superior, or frightened half out of your wits, your life cannot possibly be worth living. Unless you are determined to cultivate a good disposition, you may as well give up all hope of getting anything worth while out of life, and it is kinder to tell you very plainly that this is the case.

If you are not determined to start in now and carefully select all day the kind of thoughts that you are going to think, you may as well give up all hope of shaping your life into the kind of thing that you want it to be, because this is the only way.

In short, if you want to make your life happy and worth while, which is what God wishes you to make it, you must begin immediately to train yourself in the habit of thought selection and thought control. This will be exceedingly difficult for the first few days, but if you persevere you will find that it will become rapidly easier, and it is actually the most interesting experiment that you could possibly make. In fact, this thought control is the most thrillingly interesting hobby that anyone could take up. You will be amazed at the interesting things that you will learn about yourself, and you will get results almost from the beginning.

Now many people knowing this truth, make sporadic efforts from time to time to control their thoughts, but the thought stream being so close, as I have pointed out, and the impacts from outside so constant and varied, they do not make very much progress. That is not the way to work. Your only chance is definitely to form a new habit of thought which will carry you through when you are preoccupied or off your guard as well as when you are consciously attending to the business. This new thought habit must be definitely acquired, and the foundation of it can be laid within a few days, and the way to do it is this:

Make up your mind to devote one week solely to the task of building a new habit of thought, and during that week let everything else in life be unimportant as compared with that. If you will do so, then that week will be the most significant week in your whole life. It will literally be the turning-point for you. If you will do so, it is safe to say that your whole life will change for the better. In fact, nothing can possibly remain the same. This does not simply mean that you will be able to face your present difficulties in a better spirit; it means that the difficulties will go. This is the scientific way to Alter Your Life, and being in accordance with the Great Law it cannot fail. Now do you realize that by working in this way you do not have to change conditions? What happens is that you apply the Law, and then the conditions change spontaneously. You cannot change conditions directly—you have often tried to do so and failed—but go on the SEVEN DAY MENTAL DIET and conditions must change for you.

This then is your prescription: For seven days you must not allow yourself to dwell for a single moment on any kind of negative thought. You must watch yourself for a whole week as a cat watches a mouse, and you must not under any pretense allow your mind to dwell on any thought that is not positive, constructive, optimistic, kind. This discipline will be so strenuous that you could not maintain it consciously for much more than a week, but I do not ask you to do so. A week will be enough, because by that time the habit of positive thinking will begin to be established. Some extraordinary changes for the better will have come into your life, encouraging you enormously, and then the future will take care of itself. The new way of life will be so attractive and so much easier than the old way that you will find your mentality aligning itself almost automatically.

But the seven days are going to be strenuous. I would not have you enter upon this without counting the cost. Mere physical fasting would be child’s play in comparison, even if you have a very good appetite. The most exhausting form of army gymnastics, combined with thirty mile route-marches, would be much in comparison with this undertaking. But it is only for one week in your life, and it will definitely alter everything for the better. For the rest of your life here, for all eternity, in fact, things will be utterly different and inconceivably better than if you had not carried through this undertaking.

Do not start it lightly. Think about it for a day or two before you begin. Then start in, and the grace of God go with you. You may start it any day in the week, and at any time in the day, first thing in the morning, or after breakfast, or after lunch, it does not matter, but once you do start you must go right through for the seven days. That is essential. The whole idea is to have seven days of unbroken mental discipline in order to get the mind definitely bent in a new direction once and for all.

If you make a false start, or even if you go on well for two or three days and then for any reason “fall off” the diet, the thing to do is to drop the scheme altogether for several days, and then to start again afresh. There must be no jumping on and off, as it were. You remember that Rip Van Winkle in the play would take a solemn vow of teetotalism, and then promptly accept a drink from the first neighbor who offered him one, saying calmly: “I won’t count this one.” Well, on the SEVEN DAY MENTAL DIET this sort of thing simply will not do. You must positively count every lapse, and whether you do or not, Nature will. Where there is a lapse you must go off the diet altogether and then start again.

Now, in order, if possible, to forestall difficulties, I will consider them in a little detail.

First of all, what do I mean by negative thinking? Well, a negative thought is any thought of failure, disappointment, or trouble; any thought of criticism, or spite, or jealousy, or condemnation of others, or self-condemnation; any thought of sickness or accident; or, in short, any kind of limitation or pessimistic thinking. Any thought that is not positive and constructive in character, whether it concerns you yourself or anyone else, is a negative thought. Do not bother too much about the question of classification, however; in practice you will never have any trouble in knowing whether a given thought is positive or negative. Even if your brain tries to deceive you, your heart will whisper the truth.

Second, you must be quite clear that what this scheme calls for is that you shall not entertain, or dwell upon negative things. Note this carefully. It is not the thoughts that come to you that matter, but only such of them as you choose to entertain and dwell upon. It does not matter what thoughts may come to you provided you do not entertain them. It is the entertaining or dwelling upon them that matters. Of course, many negative thoughts will come to you all day long. Some of them will just drift into your mind of their own accord seemingly, and these come to you out of the race mind. Other negative thoughts will be given to you by other people, either in conversation or by their conduct, or you will hear disagreeable news perhaps by letter or telephone, or you will see crimes and disasters announced in the newspaper headings. These things, however, do not matter as long as you do not entertain them. In fact, it is these very things that provide the discipline that is going to transform you during this epoch-making week. The thing to do is, directly the negative thought presents itself—turn it out. Turn away from the newspaper; turn out the thought of the unkind letter, or stupid remark, or what not. When the negative thought floats into your mind, immediately turn it out and think of something else. Best of all, think of God as explained in The Golden Key. A perfect analogy is furnished by the case of a man who is sitting by an open fire when a red hot cinder flies out and falls on his sleeve. If he knocks that cinder off at once, without a moment’s delay to think about it, no harm is done. But if he allows it to rest on him for a single moment, under any pretense, the mischief is done, and it will be a troublesome task to repair that sleeve. So it is with a negative thought.

Now what of those negative thoughts and conditions which it is impossible to avoid at the point where you are today? What of the ordinary troubles that you will have to meet in the office or at home? The answer is, that such things will not affect your diet provided you do not accept them, by fearing them, by believing them, by being indignant or sad about them, or by giving them any power at all. Any negative condition that duty compels you to handle will not affect your diet. Go to the office, or meet the cares at home, without allowing them to affect you (None of these things move me), and all will be well. Suppose that you are lunching with a friend who talks negatively—Do not try to shut him or her up or otherwise snub them. Let them talk, but do not accept what they say, and your diet will not be affected. Suppose that on coming home you are greeted with a lot of negative conversation—Do not preach a sermon, but simply do not accept it. It is your mental consent, remember, that constitutes your diet. Suppose you witness an accident or an act of injustice let us say—instead of reacting by accepting the appearance and responding with pity or indignation, refuse to accept the appearance at its face value; do anything that you can to right matters, give it the right thought, and let it go at that. You will still be on the diet.

Of course, it will be very helpful if you can take steps to avoid meeting during this week anyone who seems particularly likely to arouse the devil in you. People who get on your nerves, or rub you up the wrong way, or bore you, are better avoided while you are on the diet; but if it is not possible to avoid them, then you must take a little extra discipline—that is all.

Suppose that you have a particularly trying ordeal before you next week—well, if you have enough spiritual understanding you will know how to meet that in the spiritual way; but, for our present purpose, I think I would wait and start the diet as soon as the ordeal is over. As I said before, do not take up the diet lightly, but think it over well first.

In closing, I want to tell you that people often find that the starting of this diet seems to stir up all sorts of difficulties. It seems as though everything begins to go wrong at once. This may be disconcerting, but it is really a good sign. It means that things are moving; and is not that the very object we have in view? Suppose your whole world seems to rock on its foundations. Hold on steadily, let it rock, and when the rocking is over, the picture will have reassembled itself into something much nearer to your heart’s desire.

The above point is vitally important and rather subtle. Do you not see that the very dwelling upon these difficulties is in itself a negative thought which has probably thrown you off the diet? The remedy is not, of course, to deny that your world is rocking in appearance, but to refuse to take the appearance for the reality. (Judge not according to appearances but judge righteous judgment.)

Keep your thought positive, optimistic, and kindly while the outer picture is rocking. Keep it so in spite of any appearances, and a glorious victory is certain. Every side of your life will radically alter for the better.

A closing word of caution—Do not tell anyone else that you are on the diet, or that you intend to go on it. Keep this tremendous project strictly to yourself. Remember that your soul should be the Secret Place of the Most High. When you have come through the seven days successfully, and secured your demonstration, allow a reasonable time to elapse to establish the new mentality, and then tell the story to anyone else whom you think is likely to be helped by it.

And, finally, remember that nothing said or done by anyone else can possibly throw you off the diet. Only your own reaction to the other person’s conduct can do that.

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