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by
Emmet Fox
opinions. But if you have taken a vow or made a promise concerning your soul, for tomorrow, you are no longer uncommitted; and unless you are uncommitted, the action of the Holy Spirit cannot take place.
What is the sin against the Holy Ghost? The sin against the Holy Ghost is any action on your part which prevents the activity of the Holy Ghost from taking place in your soul; anything which shuts you off from the ever-fresh energizing action of God that is spiritual life itself.
You should always pray as you feel led to do by the action of the Holy Spirit in your soul at the moment. It is the spontaneous prayer, the thought that is “given” to you at the moment, that carries power.
This section further teaches us that we must not undertake to bring about particular events or conditions, or particular solutions to our problems—what is technically called “outlining.” When you find yourself in difficulties, you should pray for harmony and freedom, and expect to get it; but you should not seek to select the exact arrangement that will come about, or the course that things will take. If you make up your mind very firmly that you are going to get a particular thing, you may, if you have a certain type of mentality, bring it about; but this exercise of will power is almost
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If, when someone is behaving badly, instead of thinking of the trouble, you will immediately switch your attention off from the human to the Divine, and concentrate upon God, or upon the Real Spiritual Self of the person in question, you will find—if you really do this—that his conduct will immediately change. This is the secret of handling difficult people, and Jesus understood it thoroughly. If people are troublesome, you have only to change your thought about them, and then they will change too, because your own concept is what you see.
the secret of spiritual treatment is not to wrestle with the error, which only gives it further life and power, but to destroy it by withdrawing from it just that very energy of belief that gives it its body.
With a new difficulty of any kind, it is the reception that you give it mentally, and the attitude that you adopt towards it in your own thought, that completely determine its effect upon you. That is what matters. What matters to you, truly, is not people or things or conditions in themselves, but the thoughts and beliefs that you hold concerning them. It is not the conduct of others, but your own thoughts that make or mar you. You write your own history for tomorrow and for next year by the thoughts that you entertain today. You mold your own life destiny day by day, entirely by the manner
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Loving your enemies in this scientific way is also the key to bodily health, without which it is impossible to possess it. The secret of physical well-being lies in the realization of Divine Life and Divine Love. All physical improvement follows upon this; it does not precede it. Today much is made of the influence of the glands on our bodily health, but our glands themselves are, all of them, governed entirely by our emotions, and thus the way to adjust and regulate the glands is by the cultivation of right feeling.
He is commanding us to be perfect, even as God Himself is perfect; and, as we know that Jesus will not command the impossible, he has here given his authority to the doctrine that it is possible for man to become Divinely perfect.
Those who may be discouraged by a sense of their own unworthiness, or lack of understanding, and feel themselves to be indeed “a great way off,” should recollect that all the Great Spiritual Teachers have agreed that there is such a thing as “taking the Kingdom of Heaven by storm.”
Man is the ruler of a kingdom, although in most cases he knows it not. That kingdom is nothing less than the world of his own life and experience.
the King’s Palace, the office of government, so to say, is nothing less than your own consciousness—your own mentality.
This is your very own private cabinet, and the business transacted there is the swirl of thoughts that continually pass across your mind. The “Secret Place of the Most High,” the Psalmist calls it, and it is secret because no one but yourself knows what goes on therein. There is privacy, and there is dominion. You have the power to think what thoughts you like.
You can choose which thoughts you will accept and which you will reject. You are master there. Whatever thoughts you do elect to dwell upon will presently be expressed in the outer physical ...
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If you do not wish certain consequences to come to you, your business is to abstain from thinking them in the first place, or from thinking the kind of thoughts that will ultimate in them.
It is very significant that Jesus should call your consciousness the “Secret Place.”
change of policy in the Secret Place.
Jesus here also lays stress upon the need for keeping our prayers “alive.”
We do not have to create good, for it already exists eternally in the fact of the Omnipresence of God.
Nevertheless, we have to bring it into manifestation through our own personal realization of Truth.
the owner of a prosperity consciousness cannot be impoverished; nor, for the matter of that, can the owner of a poverty consciousness be permanently enriched.
If you are looking to outer, passing, mutable things for either happiness or security, you are not putting God first. If you are putting God first in your life, you will not find yourself laboring under undue anxiety about anything, for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
Whatever you give your attention to, is the thing that governs your life.
Whatever you steadfastly direct your attention to, will come into your life and dominate it. If you do not direct your attention consistently to anything in particular—and many people do not—then nothing in particular will come into your life except uncertainty and suspense; you will be like a drifting log. If you direct your attention to the outer world of manifestation, which is in its nature continually shifting and changing, you are bound to have unhappiness, poverty, and ill-health; whereas, if you direct your attention to God; if the Glory of God comes first with you, and to express His
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The lesson is that you are to adapt yourself as completely to your element as they do to theirs. Your true element is the Presence of God.
When man accepts the Truth that in God he lives and moves and has his being, as completely and unquestioningly as the birds and the flowers accept the truth of their condition, he will demonstrate as easily and as thoroughly as they do.
Do not wait until the time comes, but work on it now; that is, work on your own consciousness concerning it, and in the present tense. Do not try, as it were, to throw your treatment forward. This cannot be done successfully. The event may be a future one, but the very fact that you are thinking of it at all means that it is present in consciousness; and as the thought is a present one, it can and must be dealt with in the present tense.
The thoughts of yesterday or of last year do not matter now, because if you can get the present thought right it will make everything else right here and now. The best way to prepare for tomorrow is to make today’s consciousness serene and harmonious. All other good things will follow upon that.
Never go delving into your mind to look for troubles to pray or treat about.
We are to dwell upon Life, and not death, and to concentrate upon making our demonstration here and now.
There is no such thing as undemonstrated understanding.
the realization of the Presence of God is a thing that no one else can have for us.
daily bread. The reason for this is very fundamental—our contact with God must be a living one.
When we seek to live upon yesterday’s realization, we are actually seeking to live in the past, and to live in the past is death.
The best way to prepare for tomorrow is to make today all that it should be.
Sin is a sense of separation from God, and is the major tragedy of human experience.
We try to live apart from God. We try to do without Him. We act as though we had life of our own; as separate minds; as though we could have plans and purposes and interests separate from His.
