The more common way of being negative while we allow our various
forms of selfishness to positively govern us is, first in bewailing
a weakness seriously, but constantly looking at it and weeping over
it, and in that way suggesting it over and over to our brains so
that we are really hypnotizing ourselves with the fault and
enforcing its expression when we think we are in the effort to
conquer it. Such is our negative attitude.
Now if we are convinced that evil in ourselves has no power unless
we give it power, that is the first step toward making our efforts
positive and so negativing the evil. If we are convinced that evil
in ourselves has not only no power but no importance unless we give
it power, that is a step still farther in advance. The next step is
to refuse to submit to it and refuse to resist it. That means a
positive yielding away from it and a positive attention to doing our
work as well as we can do it, whatever that work may be.
There is one way in which people suffer intensely through being
negative and allowing their temptations to be positive, and that is
in the question of inherited evil. "How can I ever amount to
anything with such inheritances? If you could see my father and what
he is, and know that I am his daughter, you would easily appreciate
why I have no hope for myself," said a young woman, and she was
perfectly sincere in believing that because of her inherited
temptations her life must be worthless. It took time and gentle,
intelligent reasoning to convince her that not only are no inherited
forms of selfishness ours unless by indulging we make them ours, but
that, through knowing our inheritances, we are forewarned and
forearmed, and the strength we gain from positive effort to free
ourselves fully compensates us for what we have suffered in
oppression from them. Such is the loving kindness of our Creator.
This woman of whom I am writing awoke to the true meaning of the
story of the man who asked, before he went with the Lord Jesus
Christ, first to go back and bury his father. The Lord answered,
"Let the dead bury their dead, and come thou and follow me." When we
feel that we must be bound down by our inheritances, we are surely
not letting the dead bury their dead.
And so let us study the whole question more carefully and learn the
necessity of letting all that is sickness and all that is evil be
negative to us and our efforts to conquer it be positive; in that
way the illness and the evil become less than negative,--they
gradually are removed and disappear.
Why, in the mere matter of being tired, if we refuse to let the
impression of the fatigue be positive to us, and insist upon being
positive ourselves in giving attention to the fact that now we are
going to rest, we get rested in half the time,--in much less than
half the time. Some people carry chronic fatigue with them because
of their steady attention to fatigue.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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