MAN'S DESTINY IS ALWAYS IN HIS OWN HANDS

MAN'S DESTINY IS ALWAYS IN HIS OWN HANDS: AND HE MAY SHAPE HIS FUTURE AS HE PLEASES.

THERE is only one attracting power; it is the Life Principle. It is the same in essence in the horse-shoe magnet and in the mother's yearning for her child. It is this same thing that brings lovers together in marriage, and partners in business. It is a hidden motor to every movement that ever was made, unintelligent movements no less than intelligent ones. It is this that draws the moisture out of the earth on which the tree feeds, and the substance out of the sun's rays with which it colours itself in beauty.

The Principle of Attraction accounts for all things and is responsible for all things. Being perfect, it is, therefore, unchangeable. It is the spirit of vitality in man, and in the flowers and beasts, and it has but one voice—the voice of desire, and the voice speaks for just one thing; it speaks for happiness.

The methods by which man pursues happiness may be just or unjust. The desire which is the Principle of Attraction has nothing to do with his methods. The desire exists, and this is all. The desire is the vitalising spirit in the man; it is his true, pure, unsinning self. The methods by which he attempts to actualise his desires have, in the main, proved to be mistakes; and these mistakes, forming his personality, are expressed not only in his individual character, but in his body. The greatest mistake man has ever made is to attribute his mistakes to the Divine Spirit of desire within him, when nothing was wrong but his limited intelligence. It is because he has made this vital mistake that he has spent ages in crucifying his desires, instead of cultivating his intelligence, concerning their gratification. What he now needs to do is to learn the immense importance of his desires, and to seek just and humane methods of gratifying them.

In proportion as he sees the strength and importance of his own desires, he will see the strength and importance of his neighbour's desires; and as desire is pure love drawn from the infinite Principle of Attraction, he will hold his neighbour's desires as sacredly as he holds his own; and so justice will be enthroned among men. Justice, that factor which harmonises all influences and in the end produces heaven on earth, can never be born of anything but man's recognition of the noble character of desire; for when man recognises desire he recognises love, and love is the Principle of Attraction in individual manifestation. So when man recognises desire within himself and understands its origin and meaning, he will have found his own moving spirit, and he will see its relation to the infinite Life Principle. He will also see that every step of his growth, from his first inception, has been by the greater and still greater recognition of this living spirit of vitality within him; and that his farther growth, all through eternity, will depend upon the still increasing power of his intelligence to recognise more, and yet more, of the vital Love Principle within him as expressed by desire.

If this and similar statements have made their proper impression upon the reader, he or she will perceive how it is that man, as to his personality, is simply intelligence or mind; and how the whole visible universe is mind in different degrees of unfoldment; and he/she will also see from this fact how it is that man's destiny is entirely in his own hands, and always has been, though he did not know it. He or she may see, too, how from this point he/she may begin to do their own growing.

Since man as to his personality, and this is the visible part of himself, is altogether intelligence or mind, it therefore follows that the more truth he possesses the more he shows forth; the truth being that the Principle of Attraction is the one diseaseless and deathless thing, and that this Principle of Attraction is the true self within him—his untrue or false self being the mistaken estimate he has placed upon his true self.

As man's intelligence is expressed in thought, which shapes itself into beliefs, his body or his personality is made up of his beliefs. A man shows forth his beliefs in his person. Knowing this to be so, Jesus spoke that wonderfully condensed sentence, the most comprehensive sentence ever yet spoken, "As a man believes, so is he." When he believes error he shows forth error, or incarnates error in his personality (his body). As error cannot endure, it therefore follows that unless the man corrects his erroneous beliefs his personality (body) will fall away from him. All sickness and weakness and deformity are the effects resultant from our beliefs, and end in the complete dissolution of the body, unless saving knowledge comes in time to arrest them.

It is an undeniable fact that, in spite of the improved condition of the world, its better sanitary influence and better food, its fewer hours of labour and its greater spread of books, diseases are multiplying all the time, and that lives seem to perish more easily and with less apparent cause than ever before. This is because the new light is dawning more and more clearly, and the old consolidated beliefs of a hundred ages are losing their hold upon the people, before the new knowledge has come in such power as will save them.

Because of this fact the most intelligent of the world's physicians have lost faith in medicine and stand aghast at their own helplessness. Many of them have retired from practice from motives of pure conscientiousness.

To repeat my ideas of desire—for I can never make this point too strong—the basis of all growth is desire. Indeed, the Principle of Attraction itself, that one and only principle on which every external manifestation of life depends, is desire; and desire is love in expression or externalisation; love seeking and attracting that which is related to it.

All growth of the individual, therefore, is effected through desire, and desire is the motor power of every effort; and external life means effort, and has no other object but effort exerted in the direction of happiness. The secret of the steel magnet is desire, and, no doubt, the entire universal system of planets is regulated and sustained in equipoise through this great factor alone.

The words desire and love are almost synonymous. Both are love; but, while love seems to be quiescent, desire appears to be the reaching forth or the yearning of love, or love in motion, reaching out after an object.

Man, in his growth, has nothing to do with the Life Principle, or the one vitality. That is to say, no effort of his can add to it or take from it. It exists independent of him. It simply IS. His prerogative is confined exclusively to the recognition of it; to the getting of a large enough perception of its greatness, or a big enough estimate of it, and of his connection with it.

It is so mighty a power that human intelligence has but the faintest fraction of an idea concerning it, and yet this majestic power is within the individual in indescribable greatness. It is the force within a man that actuates every movement he makes.

To connect the belief of sin, disease and death with this ever-flowing, eternal potency is an absurdity, and yet our minds, in ignorance of this mighty truth, have done this thing, and in this way have given to the external world our weak, wretched personalities, that are standing libels on our real selves, the great and undying possibilities within us.

This Principle of Attraction and love which manifests itself in numberless desires in the man is the real man. It is the universal spirit of life focused to expression; an up-springing jet from that one unquenchable force which men have called God. The infusing Life Principle within a man is a power all his own, which has been drawn to coherence or personal comprehension out from the same source that sends the world spinning through space in obedience to its unerring law, and it is as great, as unconquerable, as its source.

This mighty creature, then, is the real man; is the true individual; he is the Principle of Attraction individualised. Jesus saw this whole truth, and when they asked him, "Art thou God?" hoping he would condemn himself by his answer, he could not deny it, even though he knew they were ignorant of his meaning, and would probably murder him for the truth he spoke.

For my part, I think I can say, without boasting, that I am rapidly growing to the point in intelligence where I can understand such a man, for instance, as Mohammed, a man who lived comparatively alone with himself, and who studied himself until he gained a perception of his own greatness; gained a constantly growing perception of the power within him, until, looking at it in some supreme moment, he could not restrain his convictions of truth, but cried in exaltation, "Surely I am God."

There are days when it is as easy for me to believe this of myself, and of every living soul, as it is to believe ourselves men and women. Mohammed's mistake was in believing the stupendous fact of himself only, whereas he should have seen that all are gods in the same sense that he was.

Jesus said as much when he quoted Psalm 82:6 saying, "Is it not written in your law, 'I said, Ye are gods?' If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken; why say ye of him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God?".

The difference of seeing for ourselves alone, and of seeing for ourselves and all others equally, is the difference between injustice and justice, or between hell and heaven. To see within others the same sinless spirit of life that we see within ourselves is to abrogate those lines of inequality we have considered as race fixtures, and to liberate every living soul to the freedom of the infinite possibility of growth. This wipes out hell in every one of its varied forms, and establishes the harmony of an acknowledged and deeply understood fraternal equality. Your desire for happiness is as sacred as my desire, and my desire is as sacred as yours. When we shall learn the binding claim of desire through knowing that it is the voice of infinite wisdom within us, it will become the most loving pleasure of our lives to help each other to actualise it.

I have made much of the word "recognition," and no wonder; for the word means nothing less than the Principle of Attraction in external expression. It means vitality as showing forth in nature. Recognition and all of its kindred words, such as intelligence, mind, thought, are synonymous, and the mental word which harmonises with them is light. Intelligence, mind, recognition—this is all there is of nature. It is all there is of man so far as his visible life is concerned, and his visible life is the only matter of vital importance to him, because it is that side of him from which the activities he delights in are projected; the side from which all his happiness comes; the side that makes room for his effort.

What does it matter that the Life Principle exists, unless there are creatures to recognise and make use of it? Recognition of the Life Principle is as important as the Life Principle itself. Man is God's necessity quite as much as God is man's necessity; which is to say, that without expression of itself the Life Principle cannot exist. Let us, then, stop belittling ourselves, since in doing this we belittle the eternal Principle of Life.

It has often been said that a man's estimate of God was a measure of his own size, and this is true. It explains many things in the popular theologies that are, otherwise, inexplicable; for instance, the little, revengeful and jealous character so many men attach to their personal God, making Him not much larger than the heathen idol whose worship they condemn so loudly.

"God and man are one," which means that man is one with the Principle of Attraction that animates all nature, all things. On the invisible side of life that one is the Principle of Attraction; on the visible side it is nature, with man as its head; and visible man is the great fact that concerns us now. The Principle of Attraction forever is. We can do nothing for it; but we, on the visible side, are growing creatures, and we grow by a recognition of the infallible character of the Principle of Attraction. There is no more limit to growing than there is a limit to the omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence of the Life Principle itself. Therefore, it is man you have to deal with in this external life, which will always be external to us, and which is of infinite importance. Let us not, therefore, belittle it, or belittle him and his desires connected with it.

Each individual "I" is forever the centre of the universe to himself. All things exist for the "I," even the Life Principle. Without the "I" the Life Principle would exist in vain. Man and the Life Principle are forever reciprocal in interchange. Life exists, the one unquenchable fire of divine passion. Man recognises this passion, and by reason of recognition becomes its unquenchable expression, forever growing in brightness, in illuminating power, as he recognises it more and more. Man in his weakness has all of these ages been looking for a God upon whom to lean; but man himself is the only god there is. Upon this point my whole theory hangs; and this website is the cudgel taken up in defence of the long-abused race. It is the race's champion against its own accusations.

A knowledge of one's own self-existence—this is strength. Strength is the first and most desirable attribute of man, because every noble quality is strength's overplus. No man can be wise who is not first strong. Wisdom expresses itself in strength. No man can be generous who is not strong. No man can live nobly and worthily until he has acquired that measure of intellectual strength, where he can stand alone in his individuality and give freely without asking anything in return. All giving that is not from an overplus of strength is selfish giving; it is giving for a motive. The motives that prompt this kind of giving are various. One person gives for a greater return; it is a business investment. Another gives for the love of approbation; another to satisfy the claims of his conscience. All give with an ignoble motive except he whose giving is the overplus of strength. The giver may not realise this, but the very nature of the case makes it true.

Weakness leans and begs perpetually; its every act holds self in reserve—but strength flows outward; it overflows—and it can only overflow in love; pure, unadulterated love. Being full, it asks nothing in return for what it gives. It simply seeks to make others as strong and loving as it is. This is the point toward which humanity is now tending by a better recognition of its individuality; for there is nothing in the world that gives a man strength but the knowledge of his own power.

There is brute strength which dies with the brute; there is intellectual strength, which is the vitalising spirit of the man; the real true man—and this is the strength that cannot die. This is the strength I am now writing of, whose overplus is love.

In order to be in much greater health and strength and beauty than we have ever realised, nothing is necessary but a better knowledge of ourselves. The reader will have learned from the foregoing pages that man is not simply a physical creature, subject to what is called the "laws of causation," but that he is purely a mental statement, or a mental estimate, of a certain amount of power which he has imbibed from the Principle of Attraction through his intellectual faculties. Moreover, man has himself made this statement or estimate of himself, and has the power to correct the errors he has made as rapidly as he discovers them. The errors in his statement show forth in weaknesses, diseases, poverty, old age and death.

Since I have explained man's relation to the Principle of Attraction; since I have shown that he is one with that unalterable and undying power; that he himself is all mind and records in his body as much as he can understand of the Principle of Attraction—it must be seen that he makes a great mistake in calling himself a weak and feeble creature, "a worm of the dust," and other expressions like this. I have shown that man is purely a mental creature, and since he is so, a belief in weakness will make him weak, because his beliefs are his external conditions. Therefore, let every student of these truths begin to reason on the foolish old charges against themselves, which he or she has all their life been taught to believe would be pleasing to God; let them discard all feeling of humility, that attribute so lauded by the creeds, and learn to believe that the universe needs men and women, and not things.

Humility is the most accursed of all the so-called virtues. It is usually born of sycophancy, and it blights every man and woman who assumes its hypocritical garb. Sycophancy is the child of fear, and until people are fearless they will never attain that freedom which means perfect health and strength. Humility has nothing to do with aspiration. Aspiration is the man's true means of growth, and aspiration is bold. It claims its own and gets it, while humility, like some slimy moisture, clings to the man and poisons his very nature. Humility, if men and women were conscious of its character, would be an insult to the Life Principle.

In a study like this repetitions are essential; so I say again the reason that each individual "I" seems to themselves to be the centre of all things, is because of the omnipresence of the Life Principle. There being no circumference, each "I" is the spoken word of the infinite and omnipotent, and its own recognition of itself renders it the centre from its own point of view. This thought will bear immense elaboration; but much must be left to the developing thought of the reader.

The spiritual interpretation of each individual "I" is eternal life; therefore, the individual that understandingly proclaims the "I" proclaims the universal life also, and announces the fact that he or she is one with it. The person who denies the "I" denies the Life Principle.

Let the reader discard at once and forever the soul-crushing humility he or she has been taught to cultivate as a priceless virtue, and begin to extol themselves. Let he or she not extol themselves in the spirit of vanity, based on the groundless and ignorant assumption of their own superiority over other people, but let them, after perceiving the great truth of their being, and realising their oneness with the Principle of Attraction within them, begin at once to declare their own strength and worth. Let them not hesitate to declare their own Godhood, not in the spirit of boasting, but in the understanding of truth.

In this declaration, if made understandingly, a grand sense of justice takes possession of the man or woman; they perceive that what they declare for themselves they cannot help declaring for their neighbours, and even for their worst enemy. This declaration of the man or woman's individual Godhood is the one unerring peacemaker. It is the beginning of the harmony that means heaven on earth. It is the only way to realise the all-important and all-inclusive commandment, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself."

Every good thing in the Bible is condensed in these few words, and the whole of it is made attainable through the knowledge that the Life Principle is in us and is we, and that we are in it and are it. "You are the temple of the living God "—the Life Principle made manifest, made visible and audible—the spoken word. Is not the word one with the speaker? Then put away all foolish humility and stand forth in the self-confessed dignity of Godhood.

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THE STUDY OF MAN

A FEW men have cherished life-long visions of cheating death, though without that belief in their hopes that would prompt them to search for a continuance of life in a way likely to lead to the desired result. There have been many Ponce de Leons in the world. History is strewed thick with them. Writers have embodied their hopes, half disguised, in many writings. Bulwer-Lytton, Hawthorne and others I can recall. Elixirs have been concocted as life protractors, and have sold readily until found to be failures. There has been more than one Brown Sequard who deceived others by being honestly deceived himself.

But before all these comparatively modern searchers for the fountain of perpetual youth, there existed in the long past many men, who believed with all their minds that the time would come when the race would conquer death. The thought was the goal to all their hopes. They did not seem to expect this conquest to happen in their time, but they believed that the race was gradually growing toward a period when it could be done.

Has the Bible student observed that the Old Testament does not treat of the soul of man? If it does, I have not found it out, either from my own reading or from my talk with other Bible students. From one end of it to the other it seems to consider man in the light of a bodily creature, as if his life were purely external, and related to the external world alone; in other words, as if man had no soul, but looked forward to the time when he would conquer death in the body. If this is true, it seems astonishing, in the light of present knowledge, that these prophets of the old time should have so correctly predicted the course that future events would take. But they were natural men; they were at one with the law of growth—the Principle of Attraction—as it manifested itself in them. They were simply a part of Nature, like the trees and animals; and it was Nature itself that shone through their sayings, and prophesied its own power when men should have ripened to an understanding of them.

This is the true explanation concerning the power of those old seers to predict coming events. They were in the direct line of growth, and the growth principle made utterance through them. They did not talk of their souls; at least, it is my belief that they did not. They seemed to be unconscious of their souls, even if they possessed them. They did not project their thoughts and hopes into another sphere beyond and outside of the present world; the full force of their entire being was centred in the world in which they lived; and what was the result?

Why this—they lived hundreds of years here in strength and health.

I know how the claim to longevity as related of these men in the Old Testament is now scouted and rejected by persons who consider themselves thinkers; but if these thinkers would think farther on the subject, they would see no folly in accepting the statement as recorded.

For my part, I perceive the probability that these accounts are true; and I perceive it—not because the Bible has recorded it, but because the study of evolution shows the possibility of it, and, indeed, confirms the fact that this strange phenomenon was one of the natural periods of growth through which the race would necessarily pass.

It begins to be seen that there are two distinctly marked periods in the history of man. One of these periods I call the period of his unconscious growth, and the other period that of his conscious growth.

Man has ascended from the forms of life that lie below him, and, though he stands at the head of them, he is nevertheless composed of the same material that they are, and partakes of their nature.

The animals and plants all belong to the unconscious plane of life; and man, so long as he remains in his condition of animalhood, belongs to this plane also. It is only recently that man is beginning to emerge from this plane, and step forth into the plane of conscious existence, where his deviation from his previous condition of animalhood is showing forth in an increased intelligence, so marked as to change the entire basis of his life from physical to mental.

The difference between conscious life, and life on the unconscious plane, is in the use of the reasoning powers. On the unconscious plane men do not reason to any great extent. It is this fact that gives us the right to call them unconscious; and the word "unconscious," as I use it, only relates to their power, or lack of power, to examine the operation of their own minds as the law of growth operates in them.

In one sense all life is conscious; but in the sense I speak of there is a growth which proceeds without being observed by the person or persons in whom it is going on. This is what I call growth on the unconscious plane. A man grows; he lives his allotted number of years and dies; he may have been a thinker on many subjects, and may have brought forth great truths, but until he turns his attention to himself—to the study of man, to the law of growth as it proceeds in his own body, he will not have ascended to what I call the conscious plane of life. This conscious plane is that plane where the man no longer lives the vegetable life of his predecessors, but uses his reasoning powers to the extent of their development, and from the animal stage of life on to the thinking, reasoning stage; and this ascent may not only be called an ascent from unconscious to conscious life, but from a condition of ignorance to one of intelligence; from animal to human; from physical to mental.

Life on the unconscious plane, the plane where man is ignorant of himself and his powers, may fitly be called the vegetable plane. It is true that even on this plane a man has advanced a long way above the vegetable, but he is still under what he calls the law of heredity, which holds him in the path his fathers trod, and which he accepts as an inevitable necessity, just as the vegetable does. This feature of growth marks the unconscious plane—the unreasoning or ignorant plane; the plane where men accept things as they find them, without examining themselves to discover whether they have not the power within themselves to project entirely new conditions, which shall forever obliterate the old ones.

On the unconscious or comparatively unthinking plane, man is stationary and helpless as compared with man when he has ascended to the conscious or reasoning plane. On the former plane he accepts his condition as final, or nearly so. It is true that he sees some chance of improvement now and then, and tries to develop this chance. In this way there has been a slow but sure upward movement, from the unconscious or ignorant plane to the conscious or intelligent plane; so that, as the ages have passed, the race has kept slowly becoming more intelligent, until there comes to be among its numbers a few who perceive that the source of all power lies embodied in man himself, and that the great study by which race advancement may be quickened a hundred-fold is the study of man.

The study of man has begun, and as it proceeds the change from unconscious to conscious life proceeds. The condition of the animal man is no longer such a compact and formidable state of ignorance as it once was; it is being broken into by the new thought of the few independent thinkers, who are investigating themselves and their wonderful powers, and whose freshly acquired knowledge is filtering down among the masses, where it promises to make great changes in the thoughts and beliefs of the unconscious multitude.

The conscious life into which we are entering by the simple unfoldment of our reasoning faculties is called the mental life. And all nature, everything, is on its way upward from the unconscious or animal plane to the conscious or mental plane.

In strict truth, the animal or unconscious plane is mental also, the same as the conscious plane; but it is a more ignorant form of mentality than the high, reasoning, or conscious plane. The word "mental" is as applicable to one plane as the other. All the expressions of life from low to high are mental, as I have constantly endeavoured to prove to the reader; and the difference I am attempting to explain exists only in the quality of the mentality, as manifested by different creatures on different planes of development.

The transposition from what is called the physical forms of life to the mental forms of life is in the different degrees of intelligence that the creatures on the different planes are capable of showing forth. It is on this account that Mental Science makes the statement that "all is mind"; mind in a state of unconsciousness with regard to itself, and mind with sufficient knowledge to be conscious of itself and the faculties it possesses. Therefore, the difference between conscious life and unconscious life is a difference in the degrees of intelligence manifested between different classes of beings.

Man in his early stages of growth makes a closer approach to the conscious state than the animals below him in development. Thus the human being, even in his most savage state, is more conscious of himself and his power than the monkeys or other animals.

All is mind, of which every creature and plant from the lowest form of life up to the most gifted human being is a mental expression, and the form that each creature or plant shows forth marks the degree of its mentality.

Each creature or plant, no matter how small and inferior, has aspirations or desires that reach higher than its present conditions. These aspirations or desires ascend higher than the environment of its life will permit it to realise in the undeveloped state of its intelligence; so the mere fact of the existence of these aspirations or desires calls for a higher grade of creatures in which to become embodied. They form a basis of life, as it were, or serve as a demand upon nature for the next higher type, which shall show forth more intelligence than the former one; and thus the chain of being is preserved, even though the forms of being are always changing. And so evolution proceeds.

I will repeat this idea, which I consider very important, as showing the march of mind as expressed in desire.

Every sane desire of every creature is finally attained. If this attainment fails to show forth in the creature itself, it goes on to development in some other ego. In the scale of evolution it is the ungratified desire of the lower creature that produces another grade of creature higher than itself—so mighty is desire, and so unerring is the fulfilment.

It is the desire for food in the first jelly-like forms of life that prompts their development on a higher plane. These little forms of translucent jelly, having neither hands nor feet nor mouth nor eyes, are nevertheless attracted to some tiny bit of food floating in the water, about which they put forth parts of themselves until the object is enveloped within their bodies. After the nutriment in the food has been absorbed, the body unfolds and lets the residue pass out. Here is the beginning of hands and feet and eyes and ears and a brain and a digestive system. This development was by desire; desire for food. The desire for food being gratified led to a thousand other desires; the number and greatness of desires kept increasing, and the higher grades of life increased in consequence until man came. The increase of desires in the creature added link after link to the chain of being from the atom to the man.

And what is man but a bundle of desires? His desires are much more numerous and far-reaching than those of any of his predecessors. And as he is the culmination of all the desires of all his predecessors, not one single desire of which has failed to be gratified, he has a perfect right to believe that his own desires, great as they are getting to be, will be gratified also.

It is evident that desire is the mainspring of all growth. It is also evident that no desire can exist that cannot be met by the object desired; and thus a new marriage is formed; new desires are begotten, and growth proceeds.

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