Mind

CHANGE YOUR THINKING AND CHANGE  THE WORLD 

If there is a problem in your life that you would solve, do not set your will to work on it. You will conquer this problem in the end, not by fighting it, but by understanding it. The reason it exists in the first place is because of lack of understanding. You must allow yourself to be convinced of this simple premise, that all problems reside in ignorance, that they represent a block in the understanding of the person who has them. As long as that block exists, so long will the problem remain. There is absolutely no possibility of ever solving a problem without gaining insight into its nature. Life is a constant movement by which simplicity is resolved into complexity and complexity is resolved into simplicity, and the alchemy that causes the natural growth of things is simply widened consciousness. The most complex problem in the world yields to understanding, and once it has been solved it becomes simple. 
To achieve the ascendancy of mind over matter you must accept the basic premise of there being one animating presence residing in all persons and all things. Behind all form is a basic unity, an essential oneness that is never destroyed despite all differentiation. When we are able, through higher consciousness and increased insight, to penetrate the many masks behind which the all-encompassing one mind and one life is hidden, then we achieve effectiveness in all our works and actions through understanding the dynamic law of becoming that exists within each form. All this is by way of saying that there is nothing in the world that we cannot influence by first influencing ourselves, for everything in the end is colored by the quality of our consciousness. We can change our consciousness and thus change what we see, and the tool by which we can effect this change is imagination. We can learn to visualize in our minds only those things that we wish admitted into our lives, and when we have truly learned to do this, physical counterparts of those ideas will soon appear in our environment. 
You can be anything you want to be if you will only trust your imagination. Picture your heart’s desire; never let the picture distort or tarnish; keep it fresh and clear and bright. It will enter your life quietly and unobtrusively, without sound of trumpets or clashing cymbals, for it will be following a law that exists throughout the universe, that everything basically is idea and must first begin in the mind of the beholder

 

ACTIVE MIND 

When a man learns to let his mind alone, it begins to function in a spontaneous manner that is natural to it. It rids itself of inhibition and restriction, and the person’s effectiveness and energy are greatly increased. There are large rewards to be gained from learning how to function unconsciously. It is through painful awareness of self that all our imperfections spring. We are able to stifle the nagging voice of self-consciousness through immersing it in the great sea of being that is the Secret Self. There it merges and is lost as a drop of water merges and is lost in the ocean. We become natural men instead of artificial ones, and all our actions and all our thoughts take on a spontaneity that springs directly out of the Divine. Unthinkable ingenuity and creative power lie within universal mind, and to the degree that you learn to trust your life and being to it, that much of its power is yours. 
The most remarkable thing about man is his mind. The mystery that surrounds another person is the fact that he thinks, that his thoughts are invisible and therefore strictly his own. Within the boundaries of his own being, he lives in a world that no one truly penetrates. It is populated by shapes and structures, events and persons known only to him, with a significance that is rooted in symbol. And this world in his mind has greater meaning for him than the materialistic world in which he moves. He retires from the material world when he goes to bed, but even in sleep the world in his mind is still with him. This mental world has even greater meaning in sleep. Now his thoughts, though still couched in materialistic terms, take on symbolistic significance, and the things he dreams come to him as disguised meanings, playing out upon the screen of consciousness the conflicts that exist in his subconscious. 
A man is with his mind twenty-four hours of every day, and he never ceases to think. He is influenced a thousand times more by the thoughts that cross his consciousness than he ever is by the situations he encounters in the sensual world. He is truly a mental creature, and those animal qualities he possesses are residual only, left over from an evolution whose great thrust, in the first place, was its effort to produce mind. Just as consciousness has evolved out of matter, to eventually control matter, so will it one day be free of matter, for the very nature of being presupposes a greater existence than any that is likely to occur as long as it is bound to the flesh. The cycle of birth, growth, decay, and death is bound to a physical world with its necessary constant production of different forms in an effort to find the most effective one. Such a cycle, however, no longer is mandatory for the mind, which has settled on an absolute form and no longer is changing in kind, only in degree. Evolution has brought us to the point where a mental being might best serve advancement by being free of the cycle of birth and death. Such a step is undoubtedly part of the evolutionary plan; it may be set for a time somewhere in the future or may be upon us now. Meantime the fact has become apparent that the pathway to man’s salvation lies in emphasis on mental existence and gradual turning away from physical bondage