Excerpt from

  The Science of
Successful Living

by Raymond Charles Barker



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Subjects covered include: The Necessity of Creative Ideas; The Operative Action of Mind; God and Your Subconscious; Resentment Is Ruin; Why Spiritual Thinking Heals; The Necessity of Flexibility; The Technique of Demonstration.

Foreword

Few people think of life as a creative experiment. Most of us are so busy with routines that we take life for granted. We expect an endless routine of work, a hectic social life each weekend and two weeks' vacation each year. I trust that the readers of this book will derive from it a new interest in life, a zest for doing what needs to be done and a technique to live with joyous enthusiasm.

Looking at life from an inspired viewpoint you can see those things which are on the side of greatness and cease resisting the petty and the unimportant. Life is a process of intelligence. It always acts intelligently. Problems are the result of living life unintelligently.

Work with your world the way it works. To drive a car, you have to drive it the way a car should be driven. You can't drive it as you would a locomotive, an airplane or a boat. Life can be lived fully, provided you live it according to the basic patterns of Life itself.

The creative power in life is mind. That is its primary quality and its most basic function. The universe is the result of a mathematical thinker, thinking mathematically. One authority said that the only real difference between matter and mind was that mind is an area of ideas in fluidic form and matter is an area of ideas temporarily locked up in form.

The universe is actually a mental system. Its primary nature is the process of ideas becoming form. Every fact in your world is also an idea in your mind. To get new things in your world you must have new ideas in your consciousness. Few people do enough abstract thinking to create new ideas in their minds. They continually think about what they already know and have known for years. This explains the monotony of their lives.

To increase the area of man's consciousness has been the aim of all religion and education. The infiltration of new ideas in the mind is essential to healthy living. You exist in an infinite Mind which offers you an ever-expanding variety of ideas. Ideas are seeking to be born in your mind.

Select the idea of some new experience you want and then think it without ceasing. Mind will deliver to you everything you need in order to accomplish your demonstration. This is far from being impossible. The great, the wise and the true have proven this to be so. You have done it and so have your friends. You may not have thought of the process as being either spiritual or psychological. You intuitively knew a new idea. Your thinking in terms of this idea caused something to happen in your experience.

This book has been written for that large section of today's population which is spiritually liberal and psychologically aware. Those bound by traditional beliefs will cast it aside. It is my desire that thousands will be helped and healed by reading these pages.

Power is not in what you do, what you own nor in the health of your body. Power is in the use of your mind and emotions. Your consciousness determines the way life works for you, for it can only work for you by working through you. Ideas have to use the materials which are within you. These materials are your mental attitudes, your fears, your memory and your desires.

Ever since man began his first primitive groping for a belief in God, and thereby developed religion, his spiritual thinking has revealed to him one central idea. Every religion has taught it and every savior has exemplified it. It is, that belief determines your experience. What you are on the inside determines what you experience on the outside. Your faith in good increases your area of good. Your faith in negatives, which is fear, increases your problems.

There is a science of the mind, a way of handling thought and feeling to get the most out of life. This science does not teach that you can be happy, prosperous and healthy all the time. That would be nonsense. However, this science does teach that you can greatly improve your mental attitudes and as a result you will certainly be happier, healthier and have greater ease in finance. These areas of life are determined by the types of ideas functioning in your consciousness, and you can always improve your ways of thinking and feeling.

Spiritual thinkers have realized the importance of directing the mind to great ideas rather than keeping it at the level of daily routines which absorb you with the petty, the tiresome and the disconcerting. Their advice has been to think of the nature of God, the living spirit within you and of those elements of life which are creative, expanding and eternal. If you have done this you have proven to yourself that this technique works. Fixing your attention on a positive goal causes Life to back you up with all its processes and you realize that the universe is for you and never against you. You live with greater ease and are able to give ease to others.

The Infinite Mind created your consciousness to be a positive, creative, active area of influence. Fears, unhappiness, sickness and lack are a misuse of your mind. It was never designed to work with these vicious and destructive emotions. That is why they wreak their havoc upon you. God knew what He was doing when He gave you the capacity to think in large terms, to perceive great truths and to experience love in its highest forms. You are divinely equipped to think what the great have thought, through their books, music, art, theatre and science. In addition, your equipment of consciousness includes your ability to have original ideas arise within you.

No man has ever contemplated the Divine Nature of himself and not been benefited. From within comes the urge to select in life that which is greater than you now know. From this same intuitive source comes the whisper of God saying you need not be sick, unhappy, frustrated and struggling with financial problems. Life is an inlet and an outlet, an ebb and a flow. It is something you receive and give. Ideas enter your mind and actions follow. Thoughts come to your mind and you do something about them. If they are negative you worry, fear and doubt. If they are creative, you are inspired to right and loving action.

You are forever immersed in and a part of a Creative Mind. This Mind is thinking new ideas into your consciousness. Accept them by knowing that they come to you in order to operate through you and bring to pass something greater in your experience than you have had previously. Welcome them as you would a dear friend. Life seeks in every way to inspire your mind. It wants you to have more and more of all good things. It knows no lack, limitation nor impossibility. God never knows defeat.

There is no virtue in pain, poverty or unhappiness. Unhappiness has never improved a living soul. It cannot increase your area of good, it will only diminish it. It warps, destroys and contracts. The Infinite can only release Its ideas into the consciousness that is at peace with itself and enjoying the experience of living.

Happiness is determined by the ideas working in your consciousness, not by your environment, possessions, social activities or your hopes. Happiness knows no time, it is always a present action. Your mentality is always under your personal control. Your mind always displays itself. It makes itself obvious. As you enter a room people glance at you and know your mood. You give to others only what you are. In my book Treat Yourself to Life is this sentence: "Your happiness is in direct ratio to your ability to give yourself to others." *

Givingness is the basis of all living. It is the cause of all friendship, love, family life and social activities. However, the boundaries of your mind determine your

* Treat Yourself to Life, Dodd, Mead & Company, New York.

capacity to give. The ideas that predominate in your thinking are what you share with your world. Greatness offers itself to you. All of love gives of itself in you.

Life has never imprisoned anyone. It cannot, by its own nature, limit you. God offers to you Ideas which will make you free from the false conclusions of your own negative thinking. Take them and rejoice.

You are free to take what you want from life and give what you will to life. You are spiritually free, though for the moment you may be materially in bondage. Lack of income may, for the moment, prevent you from doing what you want.

Poor health, a sense of duty to family or an obligation to business is a passing experience to those who let in the ideas of God. You are free to think anything you want to think.

If you want to treat yourself to life, place your attention on ideas which will cause you to move ahead. These ideas already dwell in you and await your recognition. God in the midst of you is inspiring you at this moment. Say to yourself:

The consistent repetition of ideas is a process of learning. Think back to your school days and you will verify this. In the field of mental attitudes the repetition of ideas is most important. The constant repetition of negatives in your thinking causes your subconscious mind to produce more difficulties in your experience. Possibly you dread the future. You can't see much health, prosperity or happiness ahead of you. If you will watch your thinking and your moods, you will discover the reason for this. Over the past months, perhaps years, you have been mentally convincing yourself each day that the future is dark. From early morning until late at night, without realizing it, you consistently think and speak negatives. Your whole approach to your work and your recreation is the expectancy of trouble. Why wouldn't you feel depressed and be certain that others who are successful have a special claim on heaven.

The Bible teaches that your real inner thinking about yourself becomes a law to your experience. Such teaching is as old as the first wise man who ever lived and appreciated life. The repetition of trouble at the conscious mind level day after day indicates increased trouble ahead. Your religion should have taught you to believe in the goodness of life, its endless opportunities and your ability to achieve what you want, for the living Spirit indwells you.

If you are unhappy or in some form of tragedy, you may not believe this, but when you do believe it, your problems will begin their dissolution. Why should life give you anything better than what you now have, if your thinking remains at a dead level? A chronic invalid cannot gain health while his mental attitude maintains the illness. If you are in a chronic financial problem, why should the creative power prosper you, if your constant attention is on how little you have. Life can only give you what you are mentally conditioned to accept. Consistent belief that you haven't what you want will never cause what you want to happen to you.

There is an exactness to life; there is a science of living. The Creative Mind delivers to you the exact results of your states of mind. This is the law of cause and effect. Both Jesus and Paul taught it. You can only have in your world what you are mentally and emotionally conditioned to have. By changing your conditioning through the repetition of spiritual ideas, you change what you receive from life.

The power and wisdom of God have never planned a negative program for anyone. If you dread something in the future, you need a good swift spiritual shot in the arm. You need to treat yourself by contemplating the nature of God and your place and function in His Mind. The Infinite's program for you is a roadway of positives. It must do this for It could not do otherwise, as It knows only good. The more you affirm that you are spiritual and divine, the more good happens to you.

Your mind is a directing center of life. Your mental conclusions are your only limitations. There are no shut doors and no finalities in this world. To believe that you are at the end of your road is stupid. The pathway is endless and you are a free agent. The action of God is not limited to any group, church denomination or ritual. It is limited only by your capacity to think in terms of what you want, instead of continuing your contemplation of what you do not want.

New ideas are the key to new experiences. Saying that success, true love or perfect health have passed you by only means that you have let it go past. It means you did not have a creative mental attitude to hold it in your experience. You can change every situation in your life for the better once you have decided to do it and seek a spiritual means of doing it. The Mind of God is seeking to find those of Its creation who are willing to release the past, live in the present with new ideas and plan a creative future for themselves.

In 1932 in the depths of the world depression a woman came to see me who was almost destitute. She pled with me to show her a way of changing her consciousness so she could again have prosperity and freedom in money. The only question I asked was "What is the one thing above all others that you would like to do?" Her reply was that she had always wanted to be a pastry specialist. Remember that in 1932 she couldn't have found a job as a regular baker, let alone a specialist in fancy pastries. In those years such delicacies were rarely used.

I said to her, "Then go ahead and do it." She looked at me in complete amazement. I said, "If we together subconsciously accept the idea that you can be this, then every door will open for you to do it." She did not argue: she did not say it was impossible; she agreed with me. I gave her the following treatment:

Both of us believed her desire to be sound, even though the world at that time would never have called it practical. In ways beyond anything the human mind would have thought possible, a noted manufacturer of flours arranged a one week pastry school at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. Out of thousands of applicants, she was one of those chosen. Living four hundred miles from New York, she hitchhiked to the city. Upon completing the course she was considered so unusual that she was offered a job as a pastry specialist in one of the few wealthy clubs able to survive during the depression. She has been constantly employed in that type of work at the finest clubs and hotels ever since, receiving a large salary.

Not once did she allow herself the luxury of fear, doubt or failure. She held fast to her belief that in right ways her good would come to pass because a Mind larger than her own would cause it to happen. Her constant thought was "There is a Power in me, acting through me, and acting for me which causes me to accomplish what I want." She knew that her mind was the place where the Power acted, and she kept it clear. She projected the idea with authority and allowed no one to discourage her. She realized that controlling her mind and emotions was a full time job and she never wavered for a moment.

What this woman did, you can do. God plays no favorites. His Mind and Law are equally available to all. You can always change conditions, when you decide to do it, and follow through with the necessary disciplines of mind. You are mind in action. Even your body can only do and be what your consciousness decides. Every action and condition of your body is the result of subconscious thought action. Body is a field of response, never one of cause. It reacts, but cannot act of itself. Your sickness or health is the result of your subconscious thinking and you can always change this by introducing a new positive train of causative thinking based on a spiritual idea.

Life is the interaction of ideas. It is the play of thought and feeling upon the great screen of experience. Your combined use of thought and feeling, plus the direction you have given these, makes your life what it is today. And, your use and direction of them determines your future. Consciousness is the cause of all experience. In your hands is the responsibility of living. You are a free agent in a Mind that delivers to you the exact reactions of your mental actions.

Life is spiritual activity. In the commonplace is the Spirit. It exhibits intelligence, purpose and plan. As a living soul, you have intelligence, purpose and plan.

An infinite Wisdom caused you to be born in these times. The Mind of God knew exactly what it was doing when you were born. You are a specialized creation of the Almighty. In you God has individualized His mind, power and authority, so that you could create what you want when you want it. But most people cannot believe this. They have been conditioned by their religion to think of themselves as helpless. They never grasp the reins of life and proceed in the direction they would like to go. Either you act with authority upon your world, or your world will give you an average existence.

There is an Intelligence which arranges many things behind the outer scene, a Mind which knows exactly what to do, when to do it, and proceeds to fulfill your ideas. God is tremendous, magnificent and creative and all of It is yours. The more you rejoice hi being a part of It, the more Life can enrich and benefit you. Say to yourself:

I rejoice in life. I rejoice in these times in which I live. I behold the goodness and the richness of life on every hand. I am the full Mind and Love of God in complete expression right now. I find so much in my life that is good. I know my victory over problems is certain for I know that my intelligence is a part of God.

Remember this at the end of a hard and busy day. Your fatigue is natural. You have faced and met problems. You have handled things to the best of your ability. That is all that Life requires of anyone. So be glad to be alive in these days right where you are. If you don't like your present routines, you can change them. There is never despair to one who knows this science. He senses the divinity within humanity and the answer within the question. Problems become exciting experi-ments, and faith is never dimmed.

There is no simple rule for a happier life. Successful living is hard work, but this hard work is simplified when you realize it takes place in your consciousness.

Life is the movement of intelligence through law and order producing what you select to have in your experience. I realize that you cannot keep your mind affirmative twenty-four hours a day. No individual can do this. However, you can take five minutes each morning to quietly and confidently do spiritual thinking.

Contemplate spiritual ideas and believe them possible for you to demonstrate. You have a right to health, peace of mind, a goodly measure of this world's goods and creative self-expression.

In your time of dedication to Truth, know that your life right now is a part of God and contains all the possibilities of full and rich living. Accept yourself as an intelligent loving expression of life. Do not think of your mistakes and failures during this period. They are unimportant to the Divine Wisdom. It knows them not and is not interested in what you might have done.

God is only interested in what you are and where you have chosen to go. You are the image and likeness of the creative power. You are an expanding, unfolding consciousness backed up by the universal Mind. God wants you to be what you want to be. In your quiet thinking select your future, then accept it as normal for you, and then expect it to happen. Give thanks that all the ways and means to bring it to pass are already in action. Rest in the calm assurance that the Intelligence of God is making all things possible.

The above is self-treatment. It is establishing cause and the Law of Being will produce the effect. With this new concept firmly implanted in your mind things begin to happen. Follow through by letting changes come. Don't expect things to remain as they are. This they cannot do, for you have set in motion a powerful idea which acts with exactness in creating a new experience.

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