INTRODUCTION 

(by the author)

 IN this book I design to state in logical and practical form the new philosophy of life and living. To do this I must stick closely to a clear statement of the philosophy itself, without trying to give you too many proofs.

It might take seventy lectures to rea­son you into accepting the new view of life; and still you would be unconvinced. Why? Because reason is an endless labyrinth out of which no man emerges unaided by a higher wisdom than itself. Reason is the original Chinese puzzle, forever unsolved until you get up above reason; up above the labyrinth and look down upon it to see where you are going.

The walls, and walls within walls, of reason’s labyrinth are your prejudices. No man climbs over a prejudice; he merely seeks the first opening around it, and finds himself in another alley of the labyrinth! The only way to know a blind alley before you see it, the only way to know your own prejudice-wall when you see it, is to go up in a balloon and look down.

Once admit that there is a way to get above reason, that there is an intelli­gence above reason, in which reason lives and moves and by which it expands and grows, and you find yourself al­ready mounting and looking over the walls of those blind alleys of reason that lead into more blind alleys. If you keep on looking down on reason you will eventually raze many of its prejudice-walls, that serve no purpose except to cut off the view of life as a whole.

“A narrow mind” is a most express­ive term; it exactly describes the mind whose energy flows between endless prejudice-walls that merely shut off its view of larger things, while it wanders endlessly in mental alleys that lead to more mental alleys, weariness, death.

These prejudice-alleys—common to all mankind—are alleys built through reasoning by the light of the five phys­ical senses only. Not until man finds these inadequate and turns away yearn­ing for a satisfaction never found, does he realize that after all there may be more to life than he has seen, smelt, felt, heard, or tasted.

Then he looks up from his mental alleys and glimpses—PRINCIPLE, in­stead of things; God above and in things, instead of man alone, inade­quate.

“He that cometh unto God must be­lieve that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.” 

Perhaps there may be some who can­not get away from their prejudices long enough to really catch the new view of life. Let us take a hint from Shakespeare, then, and play pretend. “If all the world’s a stage” and we are players, let us choose to lay aside our old parts while we read these pages, and let us take up the new part of the new thought philosophy, forgetting the old and put­ting into the new all the imagination and will and interest at our command.

Let us assume a philosophy if we have it not.

Let us play pretend, like children.

Only as little children can we enter a new heaven and transformed life.

Chapter 1.

THE FOUNDATION OF LIFE.

ALL our Darwins and Huxleys and Haeckels have come at the last to agree that back of all living forms, and back of the first amoeba itself, there is Something that eye and microscope and scalpel cannot cope with; a some­thing that informs everything, animate and inanimate, without which that thing cannot be formed or held together.

This Something the scientist proves and affirms, but refuses to define. The religionist tries to define it, but fails to prove its existence or its nature.

The scientist says, “I cannot see, hear, smell, taste, or feel this Something, therefore I do not know what it is, and nothing is worth counting except what can be known.”

The religionist says, “I see there is a Something that moves at the heart of all nature including man; this Something must be very mighty, therefore I will find out its will and work with it; I will beseech It to enlighten me and lead me.”

So the scientist digs through things and finds God; while the religionist as­pires above things and finds God—one God, the life of all life, and more.
 

What is God, the First Cause, the Life, the Prime Mover in all creation? “God is Love,” says the Good Book. “God is Mind,” “God is Principle,” “God is Life,” “God is Spirit,” “God is Soul.”

Alexander Pope says all creation is “one stupendous Whole, whose body nature is, and God the soul.” And again, “From the soule the bodye forme doth take.”

In plain words, God is the primal sub­stance that fills all space, all time; out of which and by which all things are made.

The nature of God is mind. The mode of motion of universal mind is thought. God thought or spoke the uni­verse into being, and God is still think­ing this universe into greater being; thinking in and through you and me, and through all the lower forms of life as well.

I think it is logical—and maybe safe!—to say that God cannot think except through you and me; that all the thought he has is your thought and mine, the thought of all the forms of life that are or have been, in this world and in all worlds.

God by his thought is proving himself, and he has not proved as yet more than the sum of the thought of all peoples and worlds.

God is thinking out a great inspira­tion of his, and the universe is his or­ganized thought.

God’s thought forms are all tempo­rary, ever changing from better to best. But God himself is absolute, the same yesterday, today, and forever.

But mind is only God’s character. Back of that is something else which is himself, his being, his essence, his ABSOLUTE substance.

In character, God is Mind; in essence, he is Love. Back of thinking lies LOVE, SPIRIT, SOUL; and the thinking that fails to take this universal love-spirit, soul, into every counsel is very narrow, shortsighted, and inadequate thinking indeed.

“God is love” goes back to the abso­lute, eternal, omnipresent TRUTH of all being, the prime mover of all doing.

God is love, and love is twofold, made up of equal parts of will and wisdom. Will is active or positive; wisdom is receptive or negative. Will corre­sponds to the male principle of all cre­ation, wisdom to the female. One expands and projects; the other conserves. In every tiny atom and ion and corpuscle of life these two principles inhere. Without the two of them there would never have been a beginning of creation.

In the ultimate there is but one dual principle of life, male and female, will and wisdom, inherent in every atom and in every organism of life, in every thought of every mind: “Male and female created he them”—not male or female.

Among the forms of life, every mas­culine is feminine within, and every feminine is masculine within. Because of this is the everlasting attraction be­tween the two.

A perfect balance of this dual prin­ciple in any organism would result in separation from its fellows, the hermit life of uselessness to society as a whole.

This is illustrated in mineral life by a slight experiment. Take a bar of mag­netized iron. One end is negative, the other positive. Cut it into pieces. The pieces, each of which has its positive and negative poles, will adhere to each other. But turn the middle piece around, bringing two positives together, and you cannot make them stick.

Magnetize two needles and place them with positive poles together, and they will instantly fly apart. Turn one needle the other end about, and they will cling together. Thus attraction works, always, between positive and negative, male and female, light and dark, will and wisdom.

Will, the male principle of life, is electric, positive in its action. It is the centripetal force that throws off energy, as the sun throws off rays and worlds. Wisdom, the female principle, is mag­netic, attractive, negative, the centrif­ugal force of nature that draws together and binds, as the earth draws the sun’s electric rays, as the matrix draws, holds, conserves the seed. It is the magnetic centrifugal force that balances the sun’s electric, radiating, projecting power.

These two forces are inherent in every atom and ion and corpuscle of the universe; in every thought of the uni­verse.
 

Now go back to the beginning of things and imagine the state of space—full of Love, Mind, God; full of un­formed thought—thought (or corpus­cles; they are one) diffused like vapor; all the corpuscles or thoughts exactly alike, held equidistant from each other by equal action of the electric and mag­netic forces inherent in each; all whirl­ing on their axes and in their orbits, just as worlds whirl today.

Then God, Love, the Will-and-Wisdom One, moved upon the face of the deep to organize these corpuscles into Ideas. God wanted a kaleidoscope for his amusement! He grew a bit tired of the sameness of his thought, as it were; and a wave of relaxation, of cool­ing, went over the face of the deep, which disturbed the equilibrium of electric and magnetic corpuscles. They began to draw together in little nuclei, in little nebulous patches, closer and closer in spots, separating from other congregations of corpuscles, just as de­scribed in the nebular hypothesis of creation.

When the first two corpuscles (or thoughts) approached in space, creation or living organization began. Here we get our first view of the wonderful Seven Principles of Creation, without which nothing was made that was made; the seven principles inherent in every little electric-magnetic, male-and-female corpuscle in all time and space; inherent in every living thing that has yet appeared, including man and the spirits or mahatmas, if there are such; the seven principles by which God cre­ates, the same seven principles by which you and I create and re-create. God thought this universe into being all by himself, until he had completed up to and including man. He thought man out in his own image and likeness, so that man might think with him, work with him, in all creating to come. Man is God’s Idea; and God’s Ideas are work­ing together in and with him—by those same old seven principles—to create greater glories than either God or man has yet dreamed over; greater than God or man could possibly accomplish alone.

You are God’s thought-child, and your ideas are God’s grandchildren, as it were!

This is your genealogy!—don’t get yourself mixed up in earth heredity. As Ella Wheeler Wilcox sings:—

“Back of thy parents and thy grand­parents lies the great eternal Will;

That, too, is thine inheritance; strong, beautiful, divine; sure lever of suc­cess for him who tries.”

And father, sons, and grandsons are all working together on one Big Job—the job of making a new heaven and a new earth, a bigger, brighter, better heaven and earth for the joy of all; a heaven and earth that shall prove the dream God dreamed before he ever be­gan to think at all.