Secrets Of Mental Supremacy
	A Master of the Difficult Art of Rest <  Previous Contents

And then the ability to rest. The tired child throws himself down on the couch or floor or ground and rests. The tired adult, on the other hand, often fidgets, tosses, fumes, and worries because he can't sleep. Then his sleep, when it comes, is not restful; and he awakens after eight or more hours quite as fatigued as when he went to bed. Few adults have retained from childhood the power to rest. For the power to rest is another one of the lost arts of childhood; and he who would enter the Kingdom of Heaven, the realm of peace, must be a master of the difficult art of rest.

The world is full of men and women whose most ardent ambition is to succeed in some art--music, painting, acting, writing. And out of the multitude who drudge laboriously, unrestingly at their chosen task how few succeed?

But--study the little children. Watch them at play, when they believe themselves unobserved. They are playing "house," "school," "church," and so on. On no stage in the world will you find acting so true, so finished, so perfect an exposition of the actor's conception of his part. From a purely technical standpoint, the dramatic work of the average healthy, intelligent child is beyond criticism--it is simply perfect.

And then the child's moral and spiritual qualities. By nature he is absolutely truthful- truthful both in the sense of seeing the truth and of telling it--until he is seduced into lying by fear and bad example.

Michelet, that deep and tender philosopher, has said: "No consecrated absurdity of mankind would have survived one generation had not the man silenced the objection of the child."

Do you remember the first lies they told you? How strange it seemed for people, people whom perhaps you loved and feared and worshiped with the pure, white hot intensity of the child--how strange for them to do that!

Soon, however, you learned to do it yourself, learned the fatal utility, the convenience of the lie. And so the angel with the flaming sword waved you away from the Eden of Unconquerable Innocence, and only after many years of wandering in waste places, only by being born again, may you re-enter Eden, the Kingdom of Heaven.

And, with the truthfulness of childhood, the simplicity, the kindliness, the democracy, the independence—all of these are among the lost powers of childhood and all of these we must achieve if we would possess the highest powers of body, mind, and spirit.

"Except ye become as a little child" no true power, physical, artistic, intellectual, spiritual, is possible. To him or her who in simplicity accepts the teaching, the kingdom is close at hand; and "a little child shall lead them." The truly great of earth are not the ones most highly polished by conventional educational methods. On the other hand, they are often the lonely and the neglected. They have starved in garrets and dreamed in hovels; from squalid prison cells they have sent forth "thoughts that breathe"; under the silent stars they have conceived thoughts as high as the stars themselves. They are those who "through great tribulation" have been born again, and who, as little children, have entered into the realm of peace, wisdom, love, and power, the mystic Kingdom of Heaven.