The Hidden Power, and Other Papers upon Mental ScienceTroward, T. (Thomas)
Religion
The Hidden Power, and Other Papers upon Mental Science
Troward, T. (Thomas)
New Thought
The Master summed up his teaching in the aphorism that knowledge of the
Truth would make us free. Here is no announcement of anything we have to
do, or of anything that has to be done for us, in order to gain our
liberty, neither is it a statement of anything _future_. Truth _is_ what
is. He did not say, you must wait till something becomes true which is
not true _now_. He said: "Know what _is_ Truth now, and you will find
that the Truth concerning yourself is Liberty." If the knowledge of
Truth makes us free it can only be because in truth we are free already,
only we do not know it.
Our liberty consists in our reproducing on the scale of the individual
the same creative power of Thought which first brought the world into
existence, "so that the things which are seen were not made of things
which do appear." Let us, then, confidently claim our birthright as
"sons and daughters of the Almighty," and by habitually thinking the
good, the beautiful, and the true, surround ourselves with conditions
corresponding to our thoughts, and by our teaching and example help
others to do the same.
XI
YOURSELF
I want to talk to you about the livingness there is in being yourself.
It has at least the merit of simplicity, for it must surely be easier to
be oneself than to be something or somebody else. Yet that is what so
many are constantly trying to do; the self that is their own is not good
enough for them, and so they are always trying to go one better than
what God has made them, with endless strain and struggle as the
consequence. Of course, they are right to put before them an ideal
infinitely grander than anything they have yet attained--the only
possible way of progress is by following an ideal that is always a stage
ahead of us--but the mistake is in not seeing that its attainment is a
matter of growth, and that growth must be the expansion of something
that already exists in us, and therefore implies our being what we are
and where we are as its starting point. This growth is a continuous
process, and we cannot do next month's growth without first doing this
month's; but we are always wanting to jump into some ideal of the
future, not seeing that we can reach it only by steadily going on from
where we are now.
These considerations should make us more confident and more comfortable.
We are employing a force which is much greater than we believe ourselves
to be, yet it is not separate from us and needing to be persuaded or
compelled, or inveigled into doing what we want; it is the substratum of
our own being which is continually passing up into manifestation on the
visible plane and becoming that personal self to which we often limit
our attention without considering whence it proceeds. But in truth the
outer self is the surface growth of that individuality which lies
concealed far down in the deeps below, and which is none other than the
Spirit-of-Life which underlies all forms of manifestation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account