“You can always summon help, if you call the (O) eternal constructive forces to build with you,” he told us. “But most people pray for physical or material aid. Physical forces follow physical laws. Forces of eternity affect them to some extent, but do not govern them. Prayer with other people is a sort of lying down on the Infinite and giving up personal effort. The prayer that is most truly and promptly answered is the one that begins and ends with a determination not to yield to weakness, or fear, or the other disintegrating powers. Prayer implies an open mind, and is too often made with a closed one. Not wilfully closed, but fearfully, and therefore not truly open.” “Physical forces, Mother, were too much for my physical resistance,” he said, when she spoke of her effort to hold him here. “No amount of prayer, or influence of the forces of eternal progress, could affect that, beyond the extent to which it was affected. That is the reason it was a long fight. The forces helped all they could. But the physical thing is a minor thing, after all. The eternal thing is all that really counts. And to be able to put you, whom I love so much, in touch with the eternal while still in that preliminary life, is worth all that I—and you—went through to make it possible. To be able to pass on this knowledge to that life of yours is worth anything.” “Isn’t the time coming when we shall be able to control our physical condition better than we do now?” Mrs. Wylie asked. “Yes, the mind—and what we call force in the eternal sense—has great influence over personal physical force. It performs no miracles, but prevents much yielding to what is really the forces of destruction, trying to hamper and delay accomplishment of any constructive kind.... The forces of disintegration are the busy boys, and it takes force and purpose and struggle to keep them out.” “Is our decision to use your first name in the book right?” his father asked.