Excerpt from
As a Center of Consciousness You Are Invisible by Raymond Charles Barker Order in Adobe PDF eBook form for $4.95 or click here to order in printed form from Amazon.com Book Contents Chapter
1 - THE
LEAVES MUST FALL Chapter
2 - YOUR
SUCCESS MECHANISM Chapter
3 - YOU
ARE A POTENTIAL Chapter
4 - DISCOVER
YOURSELF Chapter
5 - YOUR
INHERENT WISDOM Chapter
6 - PROFITABLE
THINKING Chapter
7 - LET
NOTHING DETER YOU Chapter
8 - WHY,
WHAT, AND WHERE ARE YOU? Chapter
9 - QUESTIONS
HAVE ANSWERS Chapter
10 - WHAT
IS TRUTH? IMMEASURABLE
MIND Chapter
1 Your
most priceless possession is your mind, and what you are doing with it at
this instant is significant, not what you did with it yesterday or
a number
of years ago. Mind is invisible, but its now activity is visible
to all
who know you.
Years ago there were two famous New Thought lecturers in this country, William Walker Atkinson and David Bush. They were competitors, though they both spoke of uses of the mind. Atkinson gave a series of one-week's free lectures and then had a five-night closed class on "How to Develop a Perfect Memory." He charged a fee for this. Atkinson went to all of the major cities, where he hired a hall similar to our Carnegie Hall in New York City. He always filled it and at the end of the series everyone had "the key to perfect memory." David Bush, aware of his competitor's tactics, followed, about a month later, into each of the cities Atkinson had covered. He would hire the same hall, do the same advertising, give his free classes for a week, and then his paid classes the second week. However, he talked on "How to Develop a Perfect Forgettery." These two men covered all the major cities in the United States for several years and were prosperous. Like all pioneers they had hit upon a truth, but they should have reversed the circuit. David Bush should have gone in first with "Forgettery," to be followed a month later by William Atkinson with his "Memory." They had the cart before the horse, because by the time all of the people had learned to develop perfect memories, their minds were so cluttered with past experiences and past ideas that they had a hard time learning to forget. You and I have found this to be true in our work with Mind. It is particularly hard to forget negatives of the past, because we don't forget anything that hits us with an emotional impact. We may think we have forgotten, but it lies buried until it is released. I am reminded here of a dream I had a few years ago. Its content portrayed a battle that must have been dormant in my subconscious for a long, long time. Some years earlier I had a definite dispute with a man who was condemning me, unjustly I thought. I got him off my pathway. A couple of years later he went on to the next plane of life. I thought little of it and didn't mourn him, because I am not a hypocrite. When he had been gone for ten or twelve years, I had a very unpleasant dream of fighting him physically. He was knocking me around and I was knocking him. When I awoke, right after the dream, I said, "Okay. So he is still in my subconscious mind with that amount of power." Immediately I got up, left my bedroom, went to the desk, put on the light, and sat down. "All right, John," I said. "The image of you in my subconscious mind is not going to do this again. I have finished this fight. Wherever you are on your pathway, I release you. I bless you." Then I said: "Subconscious mind, I want this memory pattern stopped. I don't want to carry it around any more." I didn't know it was down there. I hadn't thought of him for years. But the whole thing came up in the dream world, which is another trapdoor through which the subconscious can appear. There was a distinct feeling of anger in this dream, and I went to work on my spiritual treatment. I went to work on my pattern, not his. He is all right, wherever he is. I worked for a good ten minutes on my subconscious mind. I have not had the dream since, and I probably never will, because I cleared my mind of that violent negative as soon as it exposed itself to me. EMOTIONAL IMPACT It is extremely difficult to forget anything that hits us with an emotional impact. We can forget the trivial, we can forget the casual, but we do not easily forget things that are delivered into our minds under heavy emotion. Emotion is the key to Life. Emotion is the law of living. This is why the ancient teaching that the primary aspect of God is Love may be more important than the aspect of a Divine Mind with any other quality. It is well established psychologically that the only thing that really affects us is emotion; we are emotional people, and emotion is the creative power of the mind. This is why balanced religion has always taught the power of love. One of the reasons why the teaching of Jesus caught on so quickly in the Roman Empire was that he was a symbol of love. He was not a symbol of war or of hate. Being the symbol of love, he interested people much more than did their old gods of hate and of war. Emotions are the cornerstone of life. Yesterday carries into today only through our emotions, because the memory field is a field of emotional memory. This is why you cannot remember a casual incident that happened ten years ago, but you can remember a heartbreak or some equivalent unpleasantness that shook you up emotionally at that time. The remembrance of the evils of the past is a part of the nature of the mind until the mind is cleared through spiritual treatment. Nature arranged this because nature expects its creation to clear its own thought. Man is the creation of God as Mind. You and I have not sought to clear our minds at all times. We have wanted someone else to do it for us. Down through the ages, men and women have devised many ways, many paths, many prayer books, many prayer wheels, many statues, many novenas, many saviors, because they wanted someone else to clear their thought, when, of course, this cannot be done. We have to clear our own thought. You stand isolated like an island. You are you. You are not the savior, the prophet, or the saint. You are you. I am that which I am, and I never can be less. Therefore, if I am that which I am, then no man can clear my thought but myself. No one can change my belief but my own mind. No one can get rid of the past save by deliberately saying to the past, "Be gone. Thou art no longer a part of me," I have to say to that which emotionally crippled me ten years ago, twenty years ago, or three days ago, "Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offense unto me." Emotion binds, emotion retains, emotion holds. What you do not want to remember is held in memory by emotion and not by common sense. You can say to it: I no longer give you, the idea, any more emotional support. I declare that you have operated in me long enough. You have managed me long enough. I now declare that you convert yourself into a positive, healthy emotion. This is turning fear into faith, rejection into acceptance, disease into health, and hate into love. This can be done. TAKE THE HURT OUT OF LIFE You take the hurt out of life by first admitting you have it. You get some understanding of why you have it, and finally you say: "I will now withdraw my need for it. I no longer need to justify the present by the past. I no longer need to justify my present inadequacies merely on the basis of something that happened years or even weeks ago. I am emotionally interested in the new concept of what I am, and I refuse to remember what I was. I am intrigued by what I can become, and I no longer need to remember the hurts that made me what I was." This is tremendously important. Most people do not like what they are. Therefore they revert to the past rather than accept the present. When you accept yourself as Life living this day, as Mind thinking this day, and as Love loving this day, you do not need to go to the past. Jesus said, "No man, having put his hand to the plow, and turning back, is fit for the kingdom of God." A plow moves forward. The person behind the plow has to know where he is going. He has to know where to turn around to come back. He is so busy knowing what is to be done that he does not need to look behind him to see the furrow that is finished. Life is the progressive action of the now, becoming the future. In order to move from here to there, I have to take up the anchors that I put down to keep me where I have been. Many people feel that it is very comfortable to be anchored somewhere. The anchor drags in the past. It deters them. They find that they are not moving forward. Yet they do nothing about it until Wisdom comes to the fore. Then they pull up the anchors—the negatives that are holding them down—and they are able to go full steam ahead. Having made the start, it is possible to become so fascinated with the course ahead that you can completely forget about the point from which you have come. When this happens, you can say to the hurts of yesterday, "I can't remember you, except as an incident." You can say to the future, "I grasp you. I want to go in a creative, progressive action forward, impelled by a Mind that is God, and a Life that is lived, a Love that is great, and a Power that responds to the good." Accept the memories of the great experiences which brought you joy. They need not be erased, because they are valuable, and the emotions that created them will hold them fast. It is only the negative, destructive memories that need to go, and you now know how to get rid of them. GIVE THE PAST NO POWER The past holds power as long as you feel that the past is greater than the present. As long as you nourish the past so as not to have to compete with the present, the past has you enthralled. The way to be rid of the past is to see it as experience and growth and nothing else. But we are so enmeshed in the personalities of the past, the situations of the past, that we slip from the present into the past and we become past people working in the present. There are two very interesting, simple sentences of Scripture, written by the first Isaiah, who wrote the first third of the Book of Isaiah, at a time when the people were in captivity in Babylon. It was a time of great spiritual progress, even though they were very unhappy living, not as slaves, but as a foreign minority in a distant country, and they wanted to go home. Like most of us, these people talked about the past, the good old days, and they kept saying to themselves, "Oh, if only things could be the way they were." They lamented, they wept, and the older generation kept on saying, "Oh, if only we could have things as they were." It is then that Isaiah speaks up, saying, "Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it?" His meaning is clear. If your attention is so fixed upon the old patterns, the old habits, the things that used to be, the people that used to be, then you will not even see the new that I make. "Remember ye not former things," Isaiah said, "neither consider the things of old." Why? Because "I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it?" What Isaiah said hundreds of years ago applies equally well to us today. You and I are the people of that which shall be. We are not the people of that which has been. One of the great advantages of being a part of the New Thought Movement is that we are not a part of that which has been. We are a part of that which is. It is good that we cannot trace our religious lineage back more than a hundred years. It is constructive that we cannot go back and claim that we are New Thought people because of what we were; we are New Thought people because of what we are. That sounds like a paradox, but it is a truth. It is a truth, and we have proven it. Order
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