And the beginning of the path that leads to this glorious realization is the acquisition of a correct understanding of the nature of evil. It is rooted in ignorance, ignorance of the true nature and relationship of things, and so long as we do. The golden Herald of the Light of lights, His beautiful feet on the hilltops.
You are affected by circumstances because you do not have a proper understanding of the nature, usefulness and power of thought.
The very fact that you are complaining shows that you deserve your fate; it shows that you lack that confidence which is the basis of all effort and progress. Make sure, first of all, that you are making the best of what you have. Perhaps you are living in a small cottage and surrounded by unhealthy and evil influences.
Then make sure that you make the most of the little free time you have left. It's useless to long for more time if you're already wasting what little you have. You may be in the employ of a tyrannical master or mistress, and you may feel that you are being treated harshly.
Do not complain that you are a slave, but raise yourself, with noble behavior, above the plane of slavery. Before you complain that you are a slave to someone else, make sure you are not a slave to yourself. And perhaps you, yesterday (in a previous existence) were rich and oppressive, and that now you are simply paying off your debt to the Great Law.
If you are truly as selfless as you think you are, you will show it by sacrificing yourself for others now. Do you say you are lonely and unloved and have "not a friend in the world".
When this is fully accomplished, you can then concentrate your whole mind upon the solution of your difficulty, and what was to you complicated and insurmountable in your hour of anxiety will be made clear and easy, and you will see, with that clear vision and perfect judgment which belongs only to a calm and untroubled mind, the right way to pursue and the right end to accomplish. You may have to try day after day before you can calm your mind completely, but if you persevere you will definitely succeed. When, no doubt, you are again engaged in the business of the day, and worries again creep in and begin to dominate you, you will begin to think that the course is a wrong or foolish one, but do not heed such suggestions.
Control your spiritual forces and you will be able to shape your outer life as you wish. As you come to master your impulses and thoughts, you will begin to feel, growing within you, a new and silent power, and a quiet sense of calmness and power will remain with you. Your latent powers will begin to reveal themselves, and whereas before your efforts were feeble and ineffective, you will now be able to work with that calm confidence which commands success.
And along with this new strength and power there will awaken in you that inner illumination known as 'intuition', and you will no longer walk in darkness and speculation, but in light and certainty. With the development of this soul vision, judgment and mental penetration will increase inestimably, and there will arise in you that prophetic vision with the help of which you will be able to sense coming events and predict with remarkable accuracy what will happen. will happen. result of your efforts. As you rise above the lower, debilitating and destructive forces of thought, you will come into contact with the positive, strengthening and constructive currents generated by strong, pure and noble minds. Your happiness will be intensified beyond measure. and you will come to realize the joy, strength, and power that comes only from self-control.
Think happy thoughts; think loving thoughts; let the elixir of benevolence run through your veins, and you will need no other medicine. Put away your jealousy, your suspicion, your worries, your hatred, your selfish pleasures, and you will put away your dyspepsia, your gall, your nervousness and sore joints. If you will continue to cling to these debilitating and demoralizing habits of mind, do not complain when your body is worn down by disease.
Centered in such faith, you will be possessed of such spiritual strength as will crush, like so many glass toys, all the evil forces thrown against you, and you will achieve success as the mere pursuit of worldly gain can never know or even dream of. If you become obsessed with this belief, you don't have to worry about your success or failure and success will come. You need not worry about results, but will work joyfully and peacefully, knowing that the right thoughts and the right efforts will inevitably produce the right results.
And when Benjamin Disraeli broke down in his first parliamentary speech, and brought upon himself the ridicule of the House, it was an exhibition of germ power when he exclaimed, "The day will come when you will consider it a. Then that young man, whom I knew, passed through constant reverses and misfortunes, was ridiculed by his friends, and told to desist from further efforts, and he replied, "The time is not far distant when you will wonder about my good fortune. and success," he showed that he was possessed of that quiet and irresistible force which carried him over innumerable difficulties, and crowned his life with success. Self-purified health will be thine; faith-protecting, success will be yours; self-rule, power will be yours, and everything you do will be prosperous, for if you cease to be a disjointed unit, self-enslaved, you will be in harmony with the Great Law, and no longer against work not, but with, the Universal Life, the Eternal Good.
Most people will admit that selfishness is the cause of all the unhappiness in the world, but they fall under the soul-killing delusion that it is someone else's selfishness, and not their own. Sink into self and all its satisfactions, and you sink into hell; rise above yourself in that state of consciousness which is the utter denial and forgetting of yourself, and you enter heaven. As long as you persist in the search for your own personal happiness, so long will happiness elude you, and you will sow the seeds of misery.
To the extent that you can lose yourself in the service of others, to that extent happiness will come to you and you will reap a harvest of happiness. Hold on to yourself, and you hold on to grief, let go of yourself and enter into peace. Look back over your life and you will find that the moments of greatest happiness were those in which you uttered some word, or performed some act, of compassion or self-denying love.
Sacrifice the personal and ephemeral and you will immediately rise to the impersonal and permanent. Relinquish this narrow confined self that wants to subjugate all things to its own petty interests, and you will enter the company of angels, the very heart and essence of universal Love. Lose yourself in the welfare of others; forget yourself in all that you do; this is the secret of abundant happiness.
I care not what men may say of the "laws of competition," for I know not the immutable law which will one day destroy them all, and which destroys them even now in the hearts and lives of the just? men. In all circumstances do what you think is right and trust the Law; trust in the divine power that is imminent in the universe and it will never leave you and you will always be protected. With such confidence, all your losses will turn into gains and all the curses that threaten will turn into blessings.
Don't believe the world when it tells you that you should always pay attention to "number one" first and then others. To do this is not to think of others at all, but only of your own comfort. For those who practice it, the day will come when they will be forsaken by all, and when they cry out in their loneliness and anguish, there will be no one to hear them and help them.
To regard oneself before all others is to convulse and distort and obstruct every noble and divine impulse. Let your soul expand, let your heart reach out to others in loving and generous warmth, and great and lasting will be your joy, and all prosperity will come to you. Those who have wandered from the highway of righteousness protect themselves from competition; those who always pursue justice need not worry about such a defense.