The Primal Cause

This city, with all its houses, palaces, steam engines, cathedrals and huge, immeasurable traffic and tumult, what is it but a Thought, but millions of Thoughts made into one-a huge immeasurable Spirit of a Thought, embodied in brick, in iron, smoke, dust, Palaces, Parliaments, coaches, docks and the rest of it! Not a brick was made but some man had to think of the making of that brick. Carlyle

For thousands of years the riddle of the universe has been the question of causation. Did the egg come first, or the chicken?

“The globe, says an Eastern proverb, rests upon the howdah of an elephant. The elephant stands upon a tortoise, swimming in a sea of milk” But then what? And what is life? As the Persian poet puts it-

What without asking, hither hurried whence, And without asking whiter hurried hence?”

It has been said that every man, consciously or unconsciously, is either a materialist or an idealist.

Certainly throughout the ages the schools of philosophy as well as individuals have argued and quarreled but always human thought through one or the other of these channels has rolled down the hill of speculation into the ocean of doubt.

The materialist, roughly speaking declares that nothing exists but matter and the forces inherent therein.

The idealist declares that all is mind or energy and that matter is necessarily unreal.

The time has come when people have become dissatisfied with these unceasing theories which get them nowhere.

And today, as the appreciation of a Primal Cause becomes more clearly defined the spiritual instinct asserts itself determinedly.

Give me a base of support said Archimedes and with a lever I will move the world. And the base of support is that all started with MIND.

In the beginning was nothing-a fire mist. Before anything could come of it there had to be an idea, a model on which to build.

Universal Mind supplied that idea that model. Therefore the primal cause is mind.

Everything must start with an idea. Every event, every condition, every thing is first and idea in the mind of someone.

Before you start to build a house you draw up a plan of it. You make an exact blue-print of that plan and your house takes shape in accordance with your blue-print.

Every material object takes form in the same way.

Mind draws the plan. Thought forms the blue-print, well drawn or badly done as your thought are clear or vague.

It all goes back to the one cause. The creative principle of the universe is mind, and thought is the eternal energy.

But just as the effect you get from electricity depends upon the mechanism to which the power is attached, so the effects you get from mind depend upon the way you use it.

We are all of us dynamos. The power is there-unlimited power. But we’ve got to connect it up to something-set it some task-give it work to do-else are we no better off then the animals.

The Seven Wonders of the World were built by men with few of the opportunities or facilities that are available to you.

They conceived these gigantic projects first in their own minds, pictured them so vividly that their subconscious minds came to their aid and enabled them to overcome obstacles that most of us would regard as insurmountable. Imagine building the Pyramids of Gizeh, enormous stone upon enormous stone, with nothing but bare hands. Imagine the labor, the sear, the hear-breaking toil of erecting the Colossus of Rhodes, between whose legs a ship could pass!

Yet men built these wonders, in a day when tools were of the crudest and machinery was undreamed of, by using the unlimited power of Mind.

Mind is creative but it must have a model on which to work. It must have thoughts to supply the power.

There are in Universal Mind ideas for millions of wonders greater far than the Seven Wonder of the World.

And those ideas are just as available to you as they were to the artisans of old, as they were to Michael Angelo when he built St. Peter’s in Rome, as they were to the architect who conceived the Woolworth Building or the engineer who planned the Hell Gate Bridge.

Every condition, every experience of life is the result of our mental attitude.

We can do only what we think we can do.

We can be only what we think we can be.

We can have only what we think we can have.

What we do, what we are, what we have, all depend upon what we think.

We can never express anything that we do not first have in mind.

The secret of all power, all success, all riches is in first thinking powerful thoughts successful thoughts, thoughts of wealth, of supply. We must build them in our own mind first.

William James, the famous psychologist, said that the greatest discovery in a hundred years was the discovery of the power of the subconscious mind.

It is the greatest discovery of all time.

It is the discovery that man has within himself the power to control his surroundings , that he is not at the mercy of chance or luck, that he is the arbiter of his own fortunes, that he can carve out his own destiny. He is the master of all the force round about him.

As James Allen puts it: “Dream lofty dreams and as you dream, so shall you become. Your vision is the promise of what you shall one day is; your Ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil.”

For matter is in the ultimate but a product of thought.

Even the most material scientists admit that matter is not what it appears to be.

According to physics, matter (be it the human body or a log of wood-it makes no difference which) is made up of an aggregation of distinct minute particles called atoms.

Considered individually, these atoms are so small threat they can be seen only with the aid of a powerful microscope, if at all.

Until recently these atoms were supposed to be the ultimate theory regarding matter.

We ourselves - and all the material world around us - were supposed to consist of these infinitesimal particles of matter, so small that they could not be seen or weighed or smelled or touched individually - but still particles of matter and indestructible.

Now, however, these atoms have been further analyzed and physics tells us that they are not indestructible at all - that they are mere positive and negative buttons of force or energy called protons and electrons without hardness, without density, without solidity, without even positive actuality.

In short, they are vortices in the ether - whirling bits of energy - dynamic, never static, pulsating with life, but the life is spiritual! As one eminent British scientist put it - “Science now explains matter by explaining it away!”

And that, mind you, is what the solid table in front of you is made of, is what your house, your body, the whole world is made of - whirling bits of energy!

To quote the New York Herald Tribune: “We used to believe that the universe was composed of an unknown number of different kinds of matter, one kind for each chemical element. The discovery of a new element had all the interest of the unexpected. It might turn out to be anything, to have any imaginable set of properties.

That romantic prospect no longer exists. We know now that instead of many ultimate kinds of matter there are only two kinds.

Both of these are really kinds of electricity.

One is negative electricity, being in fact the tiny particle called the electron.

The other kind of electricity is positive electricity. Its ultimate particles are called protons.

From these protons and electrons all of the chemical elements are built up. Iron and lead and oxygen and gold and all the others differ from one another merely in the number and arrangement of the electrons and protons which they contain.

That is the modern idea of the nature of matter.

Matter is really nothing but electricity.”

Can you wonder then that scientists believe the time will come when mankind through mind can control all this energy, can be absolute master of the winds and the waves, can literally follow the Master’s precept -”If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.”

For Modern Science is coming more and more to the belief that what we call matter is a force subject wholly to the control of mind.

How tenuous matter really is, is illustrated by the fact that a single violin string, tuned to the proper pitch, could start a vibration that would shake down the Brooklyn Bridge!

Oceans and mountains, rocks and iron, all can be reduced to a point little short of the purely spiritual.

Your body is 85% water, 15% ash and phosphorus. And they in turn can be dissipated into gas and vapor. Where do we go from there?

Is not the answer that, to a great degree at least, and perhaps altogether, this world round about us is one of our mind’s own creating?

And that we can put into it and get from it, pretty much what we wish?

You see this illustrated every day. A panorama is spread before you. To you it is a beautiful picture; to another it appears a mere collection of rocks and trees.

A girl comes out to meet you. To you she is the embodiment of loveliness; to another all that grace and beauty may look drab and homely. A moonlit garden, with its fragrant odors and dew drenched grass, may mean all that is charming to you, while to another it brings only thoughts of asthma or fever or rheumatism.

A color may be green to you that to another is red. A prospect may be inviting for you that to another is rugged and hard.

To quote Applied Psychology by Warren Hilton: “The same stimulus acting on different organs of sense will produce different sensations.

A blow upon the eye will cause you to ‘see stars’; a similar blow upon the ear will cause you to hear an explosive sound.

In other words, the vibratory effect of a touch on eye or ear is the same as that of light or sound vibrations.

The notion you may form of any object in the outer world depends solely upon what part of your brain happens to be connected with that particular nerve end that receives an impression from the object.

You see the sun without being able to hear it because the only nerve ends tuned to vibrate in harmony with the ether waves set in action by the sun are nerve ends that are connected with the brain center devoted to sight.

If, says Professor James, we could splice the outer extremities of our optic nerves to our ears and those of our auditory nerves to our eyes, we could hear the lightning and see the thunder, see the symphony and hear the conductor’s movements.

In other words, the kind off impressions we receive from the world about us, the sort of mental pictures we form concerning it, in fact, the character of the outer world, the nature of the environment in which our lives are cast - all these things depend for each one of us imply upon his individual mental make-up.”

It all comes back to the old fable of the three blind men and the elephant.

To the one who caught hold of his leg, the elephant was like a tree.

To the one who felt of his side, the elephant was like a wall.

To the one who seized his tail, the elephant was like a rope.

The world is to each one of us the world of his individual perceptions.

You are like a radio receiving station. Each moment thousands of impressions are reaching you. You can tune in on whatever ones you like - on joy or sorrow, on success or failure, on optimism or fear.

You can select the particular impressions that will best serve you, you can hear only what you want to hear, you can shut out all disagreeable thoughts and sounds and experiences, or you can tune in on discouragement and failure and despair.

Yours is the choice. You have within you a force against which the whole world is powerless.

By using it, you can make what you will of life and of your surroundings.

But you will say, objects themselves do not change. It is merely the difference in the way you look at them.

Perhaps. But to a great extent, we find what we look for, just as, when we turn the dial on the radio, we tune in on whatever kind of entertainment or instruction we may wish to hear.

And who can say that is not our thoughts that put it there?

Who can prove that our surroundings in waking hours are not as much the creature of our minds as are out dreams?

You’ve had dreams many a time where every object seemed just as real as when you were awake. You’ve felt of the object, you’ve pinched yourself, yet still you were convinced that you were actually living those dreams.

May not your waking existence be largely the creation of your own mind, just as your dream pictures are?

Many scientists believe that it is and that in proportion as you try to put into your surroundings the good things you desire, rather than the evil ones you fear, you will find those good things.

Certain it is that you can do this with your own body. Just as certain that many people are doing it with the good things of life.

They have risen above the conception of life in which matter is the master.

Just as the most powerful forces in nature are the invisible ones - heat, light, air, electricity - so the most powerful forces of man are his invisible forces, his thought forces.

And just as electricity can fuse stone and iron, so can your thought forces control your body, so can they make or mar your destiny.