THE NEW OLD HEALING

LIFE

LIFE is far more than continued existence. It has breadth as well as length. Simply to live is in itself a wonderful privilege and it should be a constant joy.

To what are you alive? Is it merely to a daily routine, a conventional, worldly round? Is it only to a gratification of the senses, a specialized intellectual activity, or technical beaten path? How much do you really live outside of your chosen profession or occupation? If you are a business man, can you afford to compress most of your limitless vitality into commercial or financial boundaries? If so constricted, but a mere fraction of your potential is really awake and living. Your being includes untold possibilities, but if they are latent, this amounts to present deadness.

Are we alive to love, power, beauty, grandeur, health and harmony? Are we alive to ideals and the higher consciousness and in vital touch with the Unseen? Are we using our rightful share of the universal stream of energy?

13

Life not merely a conscious thread of existence may be rich, powerful and beneficent to-day. We may live not in weeks, months and years, but in wholesome creative thought. We may kindle new energy.

To the boundary which your veritable life reaches, you are in command. That which is beyond, whether dead, atrophied, or even just unused, is beyond your dominion.

New creative material, new accessions of divine inflow, new aspiration and inspiration, are practicable. The world cries out, consciously or unconsciously, for "more life." This is far more valuable than longer life, but both are coöperative. How much do we live? Are we alive to the truth that we are in God, and God in us? Do we take of the water of life freely? These are not abstract queries, but matters of daily evidence and possible experience. We often speak of being alive to a principle or fact. We really mean that it lives

in us.

AFFIRMATIONS

Affirmations, suggestive examples of which are given at intervals in this volume, may properly be termed mental gymnastics. They are intended to

be suggestive rather than formal or technical. As a general rule, each person should affirm his own ideal claims and in his own terms, instead of following any given formula too closely. Spontaneity and a felt fitness are important elements.

The power of the higher life and consciousness can be most effectively acquired by what in New Thought parlance is known as "going into the silence." No amount of intellectual or scholastic attainment can reveal that which comes only through aspiration, inner perception and feeling. Quiet communion with the Divine and Universal at convenient seasons introduces supersensuous experiences and yields an uplift of inspiration and profit. Such delightful outlooks increasingly become subject to command. By a sincere and persistent effort one may abstract himself from material environment and make his spiritual nature receptive, and God will flood every waiting apartment. The still, small voice becomes audible to the inner hearing.

Is the "Holy Spirit" obtainable daily on such easy terms? Perhaps we have believed that it was only sent upon rare and memorable occasions. These special experiences "in the silence" are a matter of times and seasons. It is evident that they are quite different from simple or ideal auto-suggestion which

may be practical at any time, even in a crowded street-car. Each has its firing place and use.

Our thinking is stay in corectional and materialistic rits. This becomes so mad a matter of habit that it holds the consciousness down to a barren and procable level Numerous limitations are absorbed from the surrounding thoughtatmosphere, and we carelessly become their subjects in mind and body. Nothing less than constant suggestions of ideal quality to the subconscious mind can keep us up to the high level of an abiding spiritual optimise

The body manifests the erroneous and false thinking of the past and also the depressions of the race consciousness in general. The accumulated rubbish must be cast out. We need to make spiritual uplift habitual in order to get acquainted with the higher self and increasingly to identify the ego with it. It must be brought into firm but harmonious rule. The trained thought-forces make themselves more and more felt in everyday life.

That about which we think most strongly and continuously, we become or grow like. Remaining always on the lowlands, we shall know of nothing else. Thought is creative. Under the working of a beautiful law, it changes our point of view and makes ideal things realizable.