Mastery of Self for Wealth Power Success, Frank Channing Haddock [paper ebook reader .TXT] 📗

be valued or condemned because of the kind of activities involved or vibrations induced, but always and solely with reference to the state of balance or harmony represented in the field of the personal self. The limit of permitted work should be determined by that question alone; work should always be offset, so to speak, by recreation. The limit of recreation permitted should be determined by the same question. It should always be offset by work. In other words, the value of either work or play consists in change of activities restoring balance in the personal field.

But work and recreation are not essentially different in their true nature. In both cases we have activities and vibrations. In all cases some portion of the body is involved. In all cases some features of the mind are active. Action in either case is called work or recreation according to the idea entertained regarding it. If the idea is that of TASK, the thing is work. If the idea is RELAXATION, the thing is recreation. I have taken the task-idea into recreation, and soon wearied. I have taken the recreation-idea into work, and have been obliged to call self to account under that law of balance or harmony. A boy, for example, is sawing wood alone: this is work. Neighboring boys join him, and soon invest the whole place with imagination, all busy sawing, splitting,—playing. It is the idea—that is, the real thought, which determines the names we give the two general sets of activities. Nature will check work-vibrations and restore recreation-vibrations, FOR A TIME, until harmony of the field is comparatively restored, if only suggestion use the magic word.

You are now invited to maintain, IN ALL YOUR WORK, THE IDEA OF HARMONY WITH THE UNIVERSAL FORCES OF NATURE, and the inspiration of the idea that your WORK IS GOOD and is building your self to better.

You are invited also to maintain, IN ALL YOUR RECREATION, THE IDEA OF HARMONY WITH THE UNIVERSAL FORCES and the inspiration of the thought that YOUR RECREATION IS GOOD and is building your self to better.

5. PURITY IN THE SEX-LIFE CHARGES THE PERSONAL FIELD WITH THE MAGNETIC POWER OF THE UNIVERSAL FORCES. In this respect the individual should be as a god. The human body is designed for Temple-Presence of the Infinite White Life. Epicurus regarded it as a husk, but Aristotle defined the soul as the “perfect expression of the body,” meaning, not that the soul is a product of physiological conditions, but that it is the TRUTH of body, the idea, purpose, in which only do the bodily conditions gain their real meaning. To this great Greek the chief of human virtues was HIGH-MINDEDNESS, a crowning Self-Respect. This attitude of the self toward the house in which it lives recognizes the perfect interaction of self and body, the one being influenced by the other, and so it insists that no injury shall come to the body from the inner sex-life, or from the sex-life to the inner self, but that both shall be maintained in harmony with the absolute whiteness of Eternal Being.

You are invited, then, to maintain purity under the law of liberty, and to adopt this thought as a permanent law: MY PERSONAL DIGNITY STOOPS NOT TO PHYSICAL DEGRADATION.

6. THE LIBERTY OF CONSCIOUS HARMONY WITH THE UNIVERSAL FORCES EMBRACES THE INTELLIGENT USE OF THE SCIENCE OF MEDICINE. The science of medicine is fairly indicated for our present purpose in the following quotation—from Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes:

“What is the honest truth about the medical art? That by far the largest number of diseases which physicians are called upon to treat will get well at any rate, even in spite of reasonably bad treatment. That of the other fraction, a certain number will certainly die, whatever is done. That there remains a small number of cases where the life of the patient depends on the skill of the physician. That drugs now and then save life; that they often shorten disease and remove symptoms; but that they are second in importance to food, air, temperature, and the other hygienic influences. Throw out opium; throw out wine, and the vapors which produce the miracle of anesthesia, and I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind.”

“It is a mistake to suppose that the normal state of health is represented by a straight horizontal line, Independently of the well-known causes which raise or depress the standard of vitality, there seems to be—I think I may venture to say there is—a rhythmic undulation in the flow of the vital force. The ‘dynamo’ which furnishes the working powers of consciousness and action has its annual, its monthly, its diurnal waves, even its temporary ripples, in the current it furnishes. There are greater and lesser curves in the movement of every day’s life,—a series of ascending and descending movements, a periodicity depending on the very nature of the force at work in the living organism.”

There is also in our life a periodicity of the deeper self—a curve of the soul’s condition, which varies from time to time. When the curve is downward in both the physical and the spiritual case, drugs are of no more value than stones. When the curve is upward in both cases, drugs may be totally gratuitous, and they may actually retard the combined movements. When the health-curve is downward, the psychic curve may follow suit, but it need not necessarily do so. When the psychic curve is downward, the health-curve tends in the same direction. When the health-curve is upward, the psychic curve usually follows. When the psychic curve is upward, we have the best condition for the cure of disease. But Nature always does the curing. The physician never cures any disease; he merely assists Nature.

It is the function of medical science to arrest downward curves by any tried methods, to take advantage of upward curves, and to know what the curves are in any given case. I call my physician because I may want him when I cannot help myself in these important respects. I will have in my hands the greatest number of the best forces when I am subject to abnormal conditions. I believe that is common sense, and I know it is perfectly permissible to the most exalted faith in the Soul of our Universe.

I am ready to concede that in a sublime state of ultimate evolution there is nothing which a drug or a doctor can do except surgery that may not better be accomplished by the power of harmonic WHITE-LIFE THOUGHT claiming health. But in such a future state disease will long since have vanished. Nevertheless, we do now certainly know a great law of mental power over the body. I do not concede any limits, except as above indicated, to the operation of that law if we could get it fully under control. Its scope, even as matters are, is immense. The law is real, and it belongs to no particular age or body of people. It is as long as time and as wide as earth. Any human being may claim the benefit in total disregard of any philosophy or form of religious belief, provided the WHITE LIFE and the health-claim are with him, under the sole limitations imposed by thousands of years of wrong thought-life in ancestry and similar error in personal past decreasing ability to affirm and realize in a way to secure the full benefits of the law. It is for every human being, nevertheless, to strive for the inner harmony, to invoke the law of spiritual mastery over the body, and to put forth all possessed and obtainable power of thought and realization for health, in good cheer, with valiant heart, and inspired by the truth that, whatever betide, nought can really harm the abiding self. “Be not faithless; but believing.”

And so I think that our great Nature-Universe bids us hear these words from the Infinite White Life: “Sons and daughters of the All-Good, the power of thought and harmony are surely for you. If you realize your highest liberty and its greatest efficiency as you now are, you will use, not deny, those instrumentalities which are provided in my ministers, Science and Faith. Must you be a slave either to the material or to the immaterial? Can you not employ both for your welfare? May not the king call in whomsoever he will? All things are yours.”

Let us not fall into the old-time religious error of assuming that some particular philosophy or faith which we have discovered embraces all truth and value. Let us not label this or that with our little words, and say: “This is law—this only.” The law of thought-power in the physical realm is older than any present civilization. The law of harmony as the supreme health-restorer and health-builder is not a law created by the Infinite during the last twenty-five years. I uncover my heart to every soul who is trying for the best things and believes he has found a true way; but I must not believe that this world has been left in stark ignorance of the most fundamental law of our earth-life—that health in its triune wholeness comes of the WHITE LIFE and the realizing claim—to await the birth and word of any man or woman in these times. It is a little too late. Therefore I say to you who may read these pages: “Stand free! Use every means and all methods, material and spiritual (for the material is but a phase of the spiritual), for health and happiness.”

7. THE SECRET OF THOUGHT IN RELATION TO HEALTH IS THE CLAIM OF THE WHITE LIFE CONSCIOUSLY PUT FORTH FOR PHYSICAL WELL-BEING. In explanation of this principle, let us try to obtain certain true conceptions concerning the material and pyschic nature of man.

All existences come to being through the activity of one Infinite and Eternal Reality.

The medium in which all material existences exhibit is the universal ether of science, vibrations in this medium constituting light, heat, electricity, magnetism, etc., etc.

So far as we can think, the ether is a manifest, perhaps a primary manifest, of Infinite and Eternal Reality.

It is coming to be scientific to hold that matter reduces in its last analysis to electricity and is a complex form of vibrations of the ether within the ether. Matter is not merely pervaded by the ether; it is a state of the ether.

Matter, then, is a manifest of Infinite and Eternal Reality.

Life is a phase of the activity of matter. If we think of matter in its grossest form, nearest to us in the process of evolution, life may be regarded as an entity different from that matter. We do somehow feel that matter and life are distinct realities. But if we think of matter as a complex form of etheric vibrations, nothing forbids our saying that life also is a form of vibration of the ether within the ether. With this view in mind, we shall think of matter and life as comparatively simultaneous manifests of the ether, life, however, appearing only when the state of etheric vibrations resulting in matter has reached a stage in which vibrations resulting in life can be possible. We should then say that life is a product of etheric vibrations emerging through those that have resulted in matter; that is, life is a product of material activities. This view cannot justly be called materialism because Life is, then, also a manifest of Infinite and Eternal Reality.

We do not scientifically know any sort of mind that is not exhibited through matter. The human mind always exhibits through a human body. What we call mind is a complex of states of consciousness engaged in various activities. Consciousness