Suffering is not good for the soul, unless it teaches you how to stop suffering. That is its purpose.
The problem is not in the exterior circumstances but in your own mental attitude toward them, and in the habitual patterns of thought that you have subjectively accepted.
What exists physically exists first in thought and feeling. There is no other rule.
When you consider the soul, however, you usually think of it in such a light – unchanging, a psychic or spiritual citadel. But citadels not only keep out invaders, they also prevent expansion and development. There.
Though this book is entitled The Way Toward Health, we are not speaking of physical health alone, but of mental, spiritual, and emotional health as well.
Close your eyes after having read this chapter to this point, and try to sense within yourself the source of power from which your own breathing and life forces come.
Starting over – changing one’s beliefs, is a bold endeavor.
Your psychologists are not able to think in terms of a soul, and your religious leaders are not able, or refuse, to comprehend it psychologically even to its simplest degree. Metaphysics and psychology have not met, in other words.
When the outer ego is narrow, and poorly represents these subdominant personalities then they rise up in arms, and when conditions are favorable attempt to express themselves through a momentary weakness on the part of the dominant ego. But without even doing this they may momentarily take over or express themselves through a single function, such as speech or motion, while the outer ego is blissfully unaware.
You are each born with the conscious knowledge of what has come before. Your brain is far from an empty slate, waiting for the first imprint of experience; it is already equipped with complete “equations”, telling you who you are and where you have come from. Nor do you wipe that slate clean, symbolically speaking, before you write your life upon it. Instead, you draw upon what has gone before: the experiences of your ancestors, back through time immemorial.
When a civilization does not support creativity it begins to falter. When it distrusts its gifted people, rather than encouraging them, a nation is at least in trouble.
It goes without saying that some people become ill rather than change their activities and their environments. They may also become ill, of course, to force themselves to make such changes. End.
Ideas not only alter the world constantly, they make it constantly.
You can change your personal world. You do change it without knowing it.
A new belief in the present, however, can cause changes in the past on a neuronal level. You must understand that basically time is simultaneous. Present beliefs can indeed alter the past. In some cases of healing, in the spontaneous disappearance of cancer, for instance, or of any other disease, certain alterations are made that affect cellular memory, genetic codes, or neuronal patterns in the past.
If you are ill, remember when you were not. Search your life for proofs of your health.
When you do not know what to do, relax and tell yourself that other portions of yourself do know; they will take over. Give yourself some rest. Remind yourself that in many ways you are a very successful person as you are. Success does not necessarily involve great intellect or great position or great wealth; it has to do with inner integrity. Remember that.
When you think of the purpose of your existence, you think in terms of daily waking life, but you also work at your purpose in these other dream dimensions, and you are then in communication with other portions of your own entity, at work at endeavors quite as valid as those you are about in waking life.
It is not that physical reality is false. It is that the physical picture is simply one of an infinite number of ways of perceiving the various guises through which consciousness expresses itself.
I communicate with your dimension, for example, not by willing myself to your level of reality, but by imagining myself there. All of my deaths would have been adventures had I realized what I know now. On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough.
It is not correct, therefore, to suppose that your actions in this life are caused by a previous existence, or that you are being punished in this life for crimes in a past one. The lives are simultaneous.