| Book Excerpts:
THE WORLD A REFLEX OF MENTAL
STATES
What you are, so is your world.
Everything in the universe is
resolved into your own inward
experience. It matters little what
is without, for it is all a
reflection of your own state of
consciousness.
It matters everything what you are
within, for everything without will
be mirrored and colored
accordingly.
All that you positively know is
contained in your own experience;
all that you ever will know must
pass through the gateway of
experience, and so become part of
yourself.
Your own thoughts, desires, and
aspirations comprise your world,
and, to you, all that there is in
the universe of beauty and joy and
bliss, or of ugliness and sorrow and
pain, is contained within yourself.
By your own thoughts you make or
mar your life, your world, your
universe, As you build within by the
power of thought, so will your
outward life and circumstances shape
themselves accordingly.
Whatsoever you harbor in the
inmost chambers of your heart will,
sooner or later by the inevitable
law of reaction, shape itself in
your outward life.
The soul that is impure, sordid and
selfish, is gravitating with
unerring precision toward misfortune
and catastrophe; the soul that is
pure, unselfish, and noble is
gravitating with equal precision
toward happiness and prosperity.
Every soul attracts its own, and
nothing can possibly come to it that
does not belong to it. To realize
this is to recognize the
universality of Divine Law.
The incidents of every human life,
which both make and mar, are drawn
to it by the quality and power of
its own inner thought-life. Every
soul is a complex combination of
gathered experiences and thoughts,
and the body is but an improvised
vehicle for its manifestation.
What, therefore, your thoughts are,
that is your real self; and the
world around, both animate and
inanimate, wears the aspect with
which your thoughts clothe it.
"All that we are is the result of
what we have thought.
It is founded on our thoughts; it is
made up of our thoughts." Thus said
Buddha, and it therefore follows
that if a man is happy, it is
because he dwells in happy thoughts;
if miserable, because he dwells in
despondent and debilitating
thoughts,
Whether one be fearful or fearless,
foolish or wise, troubled or serene,
within that soul lies the cause of
its own state or states, and never
without. And now I seem to hear a
chorus of voices exclaim, "But do
you really mean to say that outward
circumstances do not affect our
minds?" I do not say that, but I say
this, and know it to be an
infallible truth, that
circumstances can only affect you in
so far as you allow them to do so.
You are swayed by circumstances
because you have not a right
understanding of the nature, use,
and power of thought.
You believe (and upon this little
word belief hang all our sorrows and
joys) that outward things have the
power to make or mar your life; by
so doing you submit to those outward
things, confess that you are their
slave, and they your unconditional
master; by so doing, you invest them
with a power which they do not, of
themselves, possess, and you
succumb, in reality, not to the mere
circumstances, but to the gloom or
gladness, the fear or hope, the
strength or weakness, which your
thought-sphere has thrown around
them.
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