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The Power of Awareness

Chapter 7

ATTITUDE

EXPERIMENTS RECENTLY conducted by Merle Lawrence (Princeton) and Adelbert Ames (Dartmouth) in the latter's psychology laboratory at Hanover, N.H., prove that what you see when you look at something depends not so much on what is there as on the assumption you make when you look.

Since what we believe to be the "real" physical world is actually only an "assumptive" world, it is not surprising that these experiments prove that what appears to be solid reality is actually the result of "expectations" or "assumptions".

Your assumptions determine not only what you see, but also what you do, for they govern all your conscious and subconscious movements towards the fulfillment of themselves.

Over a century ago, this truth was stated by Emerson as follows:

As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint. They adapt themselves to it as they may, but in proportion as a man has anything in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his signet and form.

Your assumption is the hand of God moulding the firmament into the image of that which you assume.

The assumption of the wish fulfilled is the high tide which lifts you easily off the bar of the senses where you have so long lain stranded.

It lifts the mind into prophecy in the full right sense of the word; and if you have that controlled imagination and absorbed attention which it is possible to attain, you may be sure that all your assumption implies will come to pass.

When William Blake wrote,

What seems to be, is, to those to whom it seems to be,
he was only repeating the eternal truth,

there is nothing unclean of itself;
but to him that esteemeth anything to be unclean,
to him it is unclean.
Romans 14:14

Because there is nothing unclean of itself (or clean of itself), you should assume the best and think only of that which is lovely and of good report [Philippians 4:8].

It is not superior insight, but ignorance of this law of assumption, if you read into the greatness of men some littleness with which you may be familiar – or into some situation or circumstance an unfavorable conviction. Your particular relationship to another influences your assumption with respect to that other and makes you see in him that which you do see. If you can change your opinion of another, then what you now believe of him cannot be absolutely true but is only relatively true. The following is an actual case history illustrating how the law of assumption works:

One day, a costume designer described to me her difficulties in working with a prominent theatrical producer. She was convinced that he unjustly criticized and rejected her best work and that often he was deliberately rude and unfair to her.

Upon hearing her story, I explained that if she found the other rude and unfair, it was a sure sign that she, herself, was wanting and that it was not the producer, but herself that was in need of a new attitude.

I told her that the power of this law of assumption and its practical application could be discovered only through experience, and that only by assuming that the situation was already what she wanted it to be could she prove that she could bring about the change desired.

Her employer was merely bearing witness, telling her by his behavior what her concept of him was.

I suggested that it was quite probable that she was carrying on conversations with him in her mind which were filled with criticism and recriminations.

There was no doubt but that she was mentally arguing with the producer, for others only echo that which we whisper to them in secret.

I asked her if it was not true that she talked to him mentally, and, if so, what those conversations were like.

She confessed that every morning on her way to the theatre she told him just what she thought of him in a way she would never have dared address him in person. The intensity and force of her mental arguments with him automatically established his behavior towards her.

She began to realize that all of us carry on mental conversations, but, unfortunately, on most occasions, these conversations are argumentative... that we have only to observe the passerby on the street to prove this assertion... that so many people are mentally engrossed in conversation and few appear to be happy about it, but the very intensity of their feeling must lead them quickly to the unpleasant incident they themselves have mentally created and therefore must now encounter.

When she realized what she had been doing, she agreed to change her attitude and to live this law faithfully by assuming that her job was highly satisfactory and her relationship with the producer was a very happy one. To do this, she agreed that, before going to sleep at night, on her way to work, and at other intervals during the day, she would imagine that he had congratulated her on her fine designs and that she, in turn, had thanked him for his praise and kindness.

To her great delight, she soon discovered for herself that her own attitude was the cause of all that befell her.

The behavior of her employer miraculously reversed itself. His attitude, echoing as it had always done, that which she had assumed, now reflected her changed concept of him.

What she did was by the power of her imagination.

Her persistent assumption influenced his behavior and determined his attitude toward her.

With the passport of desire on the wings of a controlled imagination, she traveled into the future of her own predetermined experience.

Thus we see it is not facts, but that which we create in our imagination, which shapes our lives, for most of the conflicts of the day are due to the want of a little imagination to cast the beam out of our own eye.

It is the exact and literal-minded who live in a fictitious world.

As this designer, by her controlled imagination, started the subtle change in her employer's mind, so can we, by the control of our own imagination and wisely directed feeling, solve our problems.

By the intensity of her imagination and feeling, the designer cast a kind of enchantment on her producer's mind and caused him to think that his generous praise originated with him.

Often our most elaborate and original thoughts are determined by another.

We should never be certain that it was not some woman treading in the winepress who began that subtle change in men's mind, or that the passion did not begin in the mind of some shepherd boy, lighting up his eyes for a moment before it ran upon its way.
William Butler Yeats

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The Power of Awareness

Chapter 6

ATTENTION

A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. James 1:8

ATTENTION IS forceful in proportion to the narrowness of its focus, that is, when it is obsessed with a single idea or sensation. It is steadied and powerfully focused only by such an adjustment of the mind as permits you to see one thing only, for you steady the attention and increase its power by confining it. The desire which realizes itself is always a desire upon which attention is exclusively concentrated, for an idea is endowed with power only in proportion to the degree of attention fixed on it. Concentrated observation is the attentive attitude directed from1 some specific end. The attentive attitude involves selection, for when you pay attention, it signifies that you have decided to focus your attention on one object or state rather than on another.

Therefore, when you know what you want, you must deliberately focus your attention on the feeling of your wish fulfilled until that feeling fills the mind and crowds all other ideas out of consciousness.

The power of attention is the measure of your inner force.

Concentrated observation of one thing shuts out other things and causes them to disappear.

The great secret of success is to focus the attention on the feeling of the wish fulfilled without permitting any distraction. All progress depends upon an increase of attention. The ideas which impel you to action are those which dominate the consciousness, those which possess the attention. [The idea which excludes all others from the field of attention discharges in action.]

This one thing I do, forgetting those things that are behind, I press toward the mark. [Approx., Philippians 3:13,14]

This means you, this one thing you can do, "forgetting those things that are behind". You can press toward the mark of filling your mind with the feeling of the wish fulfilled.

To the unenlightened man, this will seem to be all fantasy, yet all progress comes from those who do not take the accepted view, nor accept the world as it is. As was stated heretofore, if you can imagine what you please, and if the forms of your thought are as vivid as the forms of nature, you are, by virtue of the power of your imagination, master of your fate.

Your imagination is you yourself, and the world as your imagination sees it is the real world.

When you set out to master the movements of attention, which must be done if you would successfully alter the course of observed events, it is then you realize how little control you exercise over your imagination and how much it is dominated by sensory impressions and by a drifting on the tides of idle moods.

To aid in mastering the control of your attention, practice this exercise:

Night after night, just before you drift off to sleep, strive to hold your attention on the activities of the day in reverse order. Focus your attention on the last thing you did, that is, getting in to bed, and then move it backward in time over the events until you reach the first event of the day, getting out of bed. This is no easy exercise, but just as specific exercises greatly help in developing specific muscles, this will greatly help in developing the "muscle" of your attention.

Your attention must be developed, controlled, and concentrated in order to change your concept of yourself successfully and thereby change your future.

Imagination is able to do anything, but only according to the internal direction of your attention.

If you persist night after night, sooner or later you will awaken in yourself a centre of power and become conscious of your greater self, the real you.

Attention is developed by repeated exercise or habit.

Through habit, an action becomes easier, and so, in course of time, gives rise to a facility or faculty, which can then be put to higher uses.

When you attain control of the internal direction of your attention, you will no longer stand in shallow water, but will launch out into the deep of life.

You will walk in the assumption of the wish fulfilled as on a foundation more solid even than earth.

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The Power of Awareness

Chapter 4

DESIRE

THE CHANGES  which take place in your life as a result of your changed concept of yourself always appear to the unenlightened to be the result, not of a change of your consciousness, but of chance, outer cause, or coincidence.

However, the only fate governing your life is the fate determined by your own concepts, your own assumptions; for an assumption, though false, if persisted in, will harden into fact.

The ideal you seek and hope to attain will not manifest itself, will not be realized by you until you have imagined that you are already that ideal.

There is no escape for you except by a radical psychological transformation of yourself, except by your assumption of the feeling of your wish fulfilled.

Therefore, make results or accomplishments the crucial test of your ability to use your imagination.

Everything depends on your attitude towards yourself.

That which you will not affirm as true of yourself can never be realized by you, for that attitude alone is the necessary condition by which you realize your goal.

All transformation is based upon suggestion, and this can work only where you lay yourself completely open to an influence. You must abandon yourself to your ideal as a woman abandons herself to love, for complete abandonment of self to it is the way to union with your ideal.

You must assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled until your assumption has all the sensory vividness of reality.

You must imagine that you are already experiencing what you desire. That is, you must assume the feeling of the fulfillment of your desire until you are possessed by it and this feeling crowds all other ideas out of your consciousness.

The man who is not prepared for the conscious plunge into the assumption of the wish fulfilled in the faith that it is the only way to the realization of his dream is not yet ready to live consciously by the law of assumption, although there is no doubt that he does live by the law of assumption unconsciously.

But for you, who accept this principle and are ready to live by consciously assuming that your wish is already fulfilled, the adventure of life begins.

To reach a higher level of being, you must assume a higher concept of yourself.

If you will not imagine yourself as other than what you are, then you remain as you are, for if ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins. [John 8:24]

If you do not believe that you are He (the person you want to be), then you remain as you are.

Through the faithful systematic cultivation of the feeling of the wish fulfilled, desire becomes the promise of its own fulfillment.

The assumption of the feeling of the wish fulfilled makes the future dream a present fact.

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The Power of Awareness

Chapter 3

POWER OF ASSUMPTION

MAN'S CHIEF delusion is his conviction that there are causes other than his own state of consciousness.

All that befalls a man – all that is done by him, all that comes from him – happens as a result of his state of consciousness.

A man's consciousness is all that he thinks and desires and loves, all that he believes is true and consents to. That is why a change of consciousness is necessary before you can change your outer world.

Rain falls as a result of a change in the temperature in the higher regions of the atmosphere, so, in like manner, a change of circumstance happens as a result of a change in your state of consciousness.

Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind. [Romans 12:2]

To be transformed, the whole basis of your thoughts must change. But your thoughts cannot change unless you have new ideas, for you think from your ideas.

All transformation begins with an intense, burning desire to be transformed.

The first step in the "renewing of the mind" is desire.

You must want to be different [and intend to be] before you can begin to change yourself.

Then you must make your future dream a present fact. You do this by assuming the feeling of your wish fulfilled. By desiring to be other than what you are, you can create an ideal of the person you want to be and assume that you are already that person. If this assumption is persisted in until it becomes your dominant feeling, the attainment of your ideal is inevitable.

The ideal you hope to achieve is always ready for an incarnation, but unless you yourself offer it human parentage, it is incapable of birth.

Therefore, your attitude should be one in which having desired to express a higher state – you alone accept the task of incarnating this new and greater value of yourself.

In giving birth to your ideal, you must bear in mind that the methods of mental and spiritual knowledge are entirely different.

This is a point that is truly understood by probably not more than one person in a million.

You know a thing mentally by looking at it from the outside, by comparing it with other things, by analyzing it and defining it [by thinking of it]; whereas you can know a thing spiritually only by becoming it [only by thinking from it].

You must be the thing itself and not merely talk about it or look at it.

You must be like the moth in search of his idol, the flame, who spurred with true desire, plunging at once into the sacred fire, folded his wings within, till he became one color and one substance with the flame.

He only knew the flame who in it burned,
and only he could tell who ne'er to tell returned.
["Bird Parliament", by Farid ud-Din Attar, tr. by Edward FitzGerald (1889), apud William Ralph Inge, "Faith: Personal Religion and the Life of Devotion"]

Just as the moth in his desire to know the flame was willing to destroy himself, so must you in becoming a new person be willing to die to your present self.

You must be conscious of being healthy if you are to know what health is. You must be conscious of being secure if you are to know what security is.

Therefore, to incarnate a new and greater value of yourself, you must assume that you already are what you want to be and then live by faith in this assumption – which is not yet incarnate in the body of your life – in confidence that this new value or state of consciousness will become incarnated through your absolute fidelity to the assumption that you are that which you desire to be.

This is what wholeness means, what integrity means. They mean submission of the whole self to the feeling of the wish fulfilled in certainty that that new state of consciousness is the renewing of mind which transforms.

There is no order in Nature corresponding to this willing submission of the self to the ideal beyond the self.

Therefore, it is the height of folly to expect the incarnation of a new and greater concept of self to come about by natural evolutionary process.

That which requires a state of consciousness to produce its effect obviously cannot be effected without such a state of consciousness, and in your ability to assume the feeling of a greater life, to assume a new concept of yourself, you possess what the rest of Nature does not possess – imagination – the instrument by which you create your world.

Your imagination is the instrument, the means, whereby your redemption from slavery, sickness, and poverty is effected.

If you refuse to assume the responsibility of the incarnation of a new and higher concept of yourself, then you reject the means, the only means, whereby your redemption – that is, the attainment of your ideal – can be effected.

Imagination is the only redemptive power in the universe.

However, your nature is such that it is optional to you whether you remain in your present concept of yourself (a hungry being longing for freedom, health, and security) or choose to become the instrument of your own redemption, imagining yourself as that which you want to be, and thereby satisfying your hunger and redeeming yourself.

O, be strong then, and brave,
pure, patient and true;
The work that is yours let no
other hand do.
For the strength for all need is
faithfully given
From the fountain within you –
The Kingdom of Heaven.

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The Power of Awareness

Chapter 2

CONSCIOUSNESS

IT IS only by a change of consciousness, by actually changing your concept of yourself, that you can "build more stately mansions" – the manifestations of higher and higher concepts.

(By manifesting is meant experiencing the results of these concepts in your world.)

It is of vital importance to understand clearly just what consciousness is.

The reason lies in the fact that consciousness is the one and only reality, it is the first and only cause-substance of the phenomena of life.

Nothing has existence for man save through the consciousness he has of it.

Therefore, it is to consciousness you must turn, for it is the only foundation on which the phenomena of life can be explained.

If we accept the idea of a first cause, it would follow that the evolution of that cause could never result in anything foreign to itself. That is, if the first cause-substance is light, all its evolutions, fruits and manifestations would remain light.

The first cause-substance being consciousness, all its evolutions, fruits and phenomena must remain consciousness.

All that could be observed would be a higher or lower form or variation of the same thing. In other words, if your consciousness is the only reality, it must also be the only substance.

Consequently, what appears to you as circumstances, conditions and even material objects is really only the product of your own consciousness.

Nature, then, as a thing or a complex of things external to your mind, must be rejected.

You and your environment cannot be regarded as existing separately. You and your world are one.

Therefore, you must turn from the objective appearance of things to the subjective center of things, your consciousness, if you truly desire to know the cause of the phenomena of life, and how to use this knowledge to realize your fondest dreams.

In the midst of the apparent contradictions, antagonisms and contrasts of your life, there is only one principle at work, only your consciousness operating.

Difference does not consist in variety of substance, but in variety of arrangement of the same cause-substance, your consciousness.

The world moves with motiveless necessity. By this is meant that it has no motive of its own, but is under the necessity of manifesting your concept, the arrangement of your mind, and your mind is always arranged in the image of all you believe and consent to as true.

The rich man, poor man, beggar man or thief are not different minds, but different arrangements of the same mind, in the same sense that a piece of steel, when magnetized, differs not in substance from its demagnetized state, but in the arrangement and order of its molecules. A single electron revolving in a specified orbit constitutes the unit of magnetism. When a piece of steel or anything else is demagnetized, the revolving electrons have not stopped. Therefore, the magnetism has not gone out of existence. There is only a rearrangement of the particles, so that they produce no outside or perceptible effect. When particles are arranged at random, mixed up in all directions, the substance is said to be demagnetized; but when particles are marshaled in ranks so that a number of them face in one direction, the substance is a magnet. Magnetism is not generated; it is displayed.

Health, wealth, beauty and genius are not created; they are only manifested by the arrangement of your mind – that is, by your concept of yourself [and your concept of yourself is all that you accept and consent to as true. What you consent to can only be discovered by an uncritical observation of your reactions to life. Your reactions reveal where you live psychologically; and where you live psychologically determines how you live here in the outer visible world].

The importance of this in your daily life should be immediately apparent.

The basic nature of the primal cause is consciousness.

Therefore, the ultimate substance of all things is consciousness.

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