How To Live Life And Love It
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MASTER: Let us begin this morning's lesson with the certain knowledge that every living thing really wishes to enjoy Life. Once one really has entered into the true Spirit of Life that one can not help loving to live and is certain to enjoy life.

PUPIL: That is just it. If one could get into the Spirit of Living Life, I am sure one, every one, would enjoy it. But it seems to me that the general run of humanity live in the spirit of death rather than of life. The average person I know is always wishing that he could but at the same time knowing that he can't. That does not seem like really living.

MASTER: Indeed that is not living and people who live in that form of mental action are "the living dead." Let us see if we can not find an easy, logical method of entering into the true Spirit of Life. We know that we must enter into the Spirit of a book, or a picture, or of music, else they are entirely meaningless to us. To really appreciate anything we must share the mental attitude of the creative thought and feeling which brought them into outward form.

PUPIL: Now I am wondering if getting into the spirit of a thing would be getting into the spiritual prototype of the thing we may wish to enjoy. For example, I should very much enjoy a home of my own, a husband and children. Can one really get into the spirit of these good things before one does have them, or before one can see them in form?

MASTER: I am pleased that you mention the spiritual prototype is the spiritual, or mental, purpose of a thing, and is the true place of origin of anything. So you wish a home, husband, children?

PUPIL: Yes, a home in the country, not a large house, one just large enough that we can live in every room of it.

MASTER: The house is to be the home?

PUPIL: Why yes, of course.

MASTER: I asked this, you see, because just a house may not always be a home while a mere tent may be. Your prototype for the home would be PROTECTION, SHELTER, FREEDOM. To begin at the beginning let us get into the FEELING of perfect protection, shelter, freedom. Let us really feel in tune with these qualities of Spirit; and they in their turn will attract unto us the ways and means for the home.

PUPIL: So far I have been jumbling everything together in my thought. Should I not take each thing separately and try to enter into the spiritual origin, or purpose, of that one thing before going on to another?

MASTER: By all means finish planting one thought securely in the mind before trying to introduce another. After you have really tuned into the feeling of PROTECTION, SHELTER, SECURITY, FREEDOM, then begin to mentally build your house and people it with a husband and children. Thus you are making a mental picture of the forms you wish the Creative Energy to take. Be specific and accurate in making your mental picture, remembering that the mental picture you make is the mould into which the unformed Spirit is poured for solidifying into actual, outward form. The house itself may be a bungalow, or a two-story house, or may be of brick, or stone, or wood, or what not. It may have any number of rooms, doors, windows, a fire-place, etc. In other words you must first mentally blueprint your house. When your mental picture is perfectly finished, and your FEELING is that these things ARE yours NOW, and you KNOW that your mind is in perfect tune with the Source of all things, then, and not until then, are you ready to take the next step into the attainment of your desires.

PUPIL: But the matter of the right husband, that seems very difficult for me. First, I am not in the right position to contact men and now I have only two men acquaintances, neither of which I should care to live with in my model home.

MASTER: What you say does not enter into the matter at all. All that the individual does is to place into the Originating Creative Power the QUALITY one wishes to differentiate, just as one plugs into the electric current in the house when one wishes to use it. The light, the heater, the Frigidaire, the fan, the iron, or any other thing one may want to use, all are there. All of the power is already there, too. It is ready and waiting; all that is necessary is your RECOGNITION of it and your taking action to utilize it. Your recognition and your desire cause you to make the right contact; and the power that is there does all the rest. The ways and means of your meeting the one and only husband are not your own concern; they form themselves into line automatically as a result of your turning on the correct switch.

PUPIL: Do you mean that it is not necessary for me to do anything to try to meet people? Do I not have to go to parties, or visit friends? Sometimes when I should be much happier at home I go to such places, and do such things, because there is always a chance of meeting the right one there.

MASTER: All of that is entirely unnecessary. The power you have turned on within yourself is an ATTRACTING Power, remember! To give you an example: One time when we were in Chicago, living at the Medinah Athletic Club, a young lady came to me with much the same attitude that you express and received the same answer I give here. She was a trained nurse, a graduate of St. Luke's. She was tired of living alone, wished a home, a husband, children. After she had had ten or twelve personal interviews and lessons with me I told her, one morning as she was leaving our apartment, that it would not be necessary for her to come to see me again. She felt sure also that the contact had been made. Our apartment was on the forty-second floor; and as she caught the elevator down she said a "great wave of peace and contentment came over her."

In her heart she had the consciousness of love and protection even now. At the thirty-fourth floor the elevator stopped and a young man who was very ill got into the elevator. Almost at once he folded up on the floor, unconscious. The elevator operator knew him since he had an apartment in the building; and the nurse and operator together got the man back to his apartment, into bed, and sent for the house-physician who said that the nurse had done exactly the right thing. In about an hour the man regained consciousness and sent for his own physician who wished to assign a nurse of his own choosing to the case. But the patient insisted on having the nurse who had helped him from the elevator, and kept her in attendance on him until he was fully recovered. Just about six months later patient and nurse were married.

PUPIL: That was certainly a lucky break for her, that she should take just that elevator, at that time. That seems to me like drawing the lucky number on bank-night at the theatre. Of course someone always wins but there is no certainty about it, is there?

MASTER: Really the two positions are not at all parallel; they are not even similar. With the nurse it was not luck at all. Deliberately, consciously, in faith, she had plugged into a circuit of great power within herself, the circuit of Universal Power that we call God, or Life and which did produce a perfect reciprocity of feeling and a certain sense of security, protection, provision, companionship. In other words she deliberately "initiated a train of causation directed to her individual purpose," to quote Troward, just as you would attach the cord to your electric-iron if you wished to press clothes. There was no luck in the matter whatsoever; it was purest science manifesting, as it always will and does, in answer to a strong desire scientifically placed. Whether it is plugging in to a circuit of electric energy or tuning in with the Creative Life Principle the procedure is exactly the same.

PUPIL: I am beginning to see the light. But the case you have just told me about still seems rather spectacular and unusual.

MASTER: That is because you have not trained the objective quality of your mind to know that it can always TRUST the Intelligent Creative Spirit of Life within yourself. You are letting preconceived ideas, and shallow and false ones, take precedent in your mind over pure, scientific Principle. You do not feel that you need to know the principles of electricity before you can use your vacuum-cleaner. All we know about electricity is gleaned from what we see it DO. The same thing applies to Life. The innermost principles of Life will always remain a profound mystery. But one can, and should, live life to the full in the self and love it.

PUPIL: I am wondering if the nurse "lived happily ever after" with her unusually-acquired husband. And did they have the home and the children she so much desired?

MASTER: The couple have lived very happily together for a number of years now and do have a comfortable home and three children. I shall explain more of that later. The secret of living life and loving this: First, your feeling towards the livingness of life in you, as well as in all life everywhere, should be to RECOGNIZE Life as Intelligent and to know that when this Intelligence is working through you it does not change its essential nature. It has always been a RECEPTIVE Power, that is AMENABLE TO SUGGESTION, and it is always RESPONSIVE and CREATIVE. This is the basis of Troward's meaning in his words which I use for my own favorite affirmation, and which, quoted, is this:

"My mind IS a center of DIVINE operation. The divine operation is ALWAYS for EXPANSION and fuller EXPRESSION; and this means the production of something beyond what has gone before, something entirely NEW, not included in past experience though proceeding out of it by an orderly sequence of growth. Therefore since the Divine can not change its inherent nature it must operate in the same manner in me; consequently in my own special world, of which I am the center, it will move forward to produce NEW conditions, always in advance of any that have gone before."

Once you really plug your individual consciousness into the great power of the Universe the above will be your line of thinking. You will involuntarily look to the Life-Principle in you, not only as the only Creative Energy but also as a directive Power. That is you will let God determine, through your conscious mind, the actual forms and courses which the conditions for its manifestations will always take in your own individual world. Do remember always that the Originating Spirit of Life (of YOUR life, too) is forever a FORMING Power. It is for this reason that we should use such great care in the selection of our HABITUAL thoughts and feelings -for create they will, and always.

PUPIL: How may I know, for example, that my true husband is being guided to me, or I to him?

MASTER: By your feeling of CERTAINTY, even though outward conditions show no sign of the fact. Still you are SURE. You feel close. You KNOW you are protected. You feel the influence of love all about you. You have stimulated these special qualities of Life in your individual world by your having persistently looked to God, knowing that He does manifest in you. Your mental attitude of faith and trust and expectancy has attracted all the joys of life. You realize that all that Life has to give is present with you NOW just as all that light has to give is present wherever light is.

PUPIL: Do I understand that if I live as closely as possible in the consciousness of reciprocity of feeling, and know that love is guiding, protecting and providing for me with its abundance, I can attract these qualities of life in the form of a man?

MASTER: Yes. For the house and the home FEEL protection, shelter, perfect harmony. For the husband FEEL love and joy; then LIVE IN THE FEELING OF THESE THINGS. Feeling is one of the strongest elements in Life and is also the most responsive.