We have seen, through metapsychic studies, that latent powers exist which, because of their manifestations, have been considered very extraordinary mysteries — that is, surpassing in extent and power everything regarded as belonging to the category of ordinary conscious faculties. To believe in the possibility of a supernatural event is to ignore the power and diversity of the creative forces, whose immutable laws are being revealed to us daily, more and more clearly, through the knowledge already acquired and applied by observation, study, and judgment. For this same reason, in our age one cannot believe that anything happens by chance, contrary to the laws that govern the universe.
Even in our own day, what is scientifically unknown has been called Occultism, and occultists are those men who, through patient observation, minute experiments, and logical reasoning, have mastered nature by understanding it, adapting it and perfecting it for their needs with a lever called Will. That the most important factor is the will was already known by the Orientals thousands and thousands of years ago.
In the West, Schopenhauer was the first who, with a brilliant intuition, perceived this truth. But his particular character — perhaps due to unexplained atavism or driven by moral blows that we men suffer without speaking of them — led Schopenhauer to build his system upon pessimism. Later it was the Yankees who found in the will the basis of optimism. But both the North Americans and the Schopenhauerians are ignorant of the true Path of Mentalism, for both consider the human being as a separate entity. They do not see in him a reflection of the Great All. They do not consider the close relationship that exists between the Microcosm and the Macrocosm.
Man is not the source. All forces, all attitudes, all manifestations of man are not truly his own, except relatively. If man thinks, it is because there is a Universal Mind. If man wills, it is because there is a Cosmic Will. If man loves, it is because Universal Love exists and manifests itself in him. If he hates, it is because forces of hatred circulate through the universe. All these mental currents have in man their accumulator, their instrument, where they operate.
The human body — that is, the being in his material part — has always been a subject of attention and study for artists and men of science. Therefore, we shall not pause to make an extensive study of man's immaterial body. We shall limit ourselves to comparing it with a machine, and we shall state that it has the necessary gears for its functioning, and that it operates with admirable perfection, so that the general functioning becomes poor and ceases completely if one of its parts wears out or is destroyed.
Three superimposed factories. This human machine produces and elaborates different modes of force. To acquire a clear idea of the organism from the point of view we are going to treat, it is necessary to imagine it as composed of three superimposed factories, connected with one another by electrical wires and tubes.
In the belly, with food in the form of chyle, are elaborated the parts that wear out or are destroyed in the organism, providing the elements so that the chest may elaborate and oxygenate the blood, which in turn will provide the necessary material for producing the nervous force that is elaborated in the cerebellum, in the solar plexus, and in other parts. In the belly, then, matter is elaborated; in the chest, life; and in the head, intelligence. This ternary reminds us of the scientific explanation set forth in the book Rosa Cruz.
In the belly are the domains of sensation and instinct; in the chest, the domains of feeling and passion; in the head, in its lower posterior part, the domain of intelligence and passive inspiration; and above all is the brain, with its servants, the five senses, the organs of expression, and the gates of entry for everything that circulates through the organism: the sublimating and tonifying centre of all organic forces, and the domains of will and active intelligence.
The powerful forces elaborated by the human organism are therefore these: that of the belly, desire; that of the chest, feeling; that of the cerebellum, imagination or thinking force; and finally that of the brain, reason, intelligence, memory, judgment, and reflection. The union of these forces is what forms the mental quality of man.
The manifestations of these forces are: for desire, habit, obsession, the tenacious and irresistible impulse that leads to vice; for feeling, caprice, obstinacy, tenacity, which lead to absurdity; from imagination, various free manifestations such as altruism, envy, anger, and so forth; and from reason, one alone — Will — with which the preceding forces may become confused and from which they continually seek help.
Spirit and matter. We occultists, according to the point of view from which we approach our studies, are obliged to divide the human personality into two, three, seven, eight, or nine principles, which are fundamentally the same, as we did when treating the atom in my work Rosa Cruz and considering it as a ternary of matter, force, and consciousness. When dealing with mentalism, it is convenient to consider it under only two principles: Spirit and Matter.
Human will is a reflection and part of the universal will. It springs from a Great Reservoir; it is born of the eternal deity; it is, in short, a part of the transcendental infinite. The brain is the organ of thought, but in it mental substance is found in a chaotic state. It must be disciplined; it must be directed; and for this we have the will. Yet this will, in turn, also lacks discipline, though to a lesser degree than mental substance. It, the will, has no other factor by which to discipline itself than the universal will; and for this, initiatic societies have various methods, of which we shall speak later, and which consist in a gradual mastery of oneself. By this, one attains not only discipline, but also a relative increase of volition, so that the will is no longer a condition of matter.
The brain does not think. Claude Bernard says: "Matter, whatever it may be, is always devoid of spontaneity and engenders nothing; it does no more than express through its properties the idea of the one who created the machine that functions. Thus the organised matter of the brain, which manifests phenomena of sensitivity and intelligence proper to the living being, has no more consciousness of thought and of the phenomena it manifests than the brute matter of an inert machine — a clock, for example — has consciousness of the movements it manifests or of the hour it indicates; just as paper has no consciousness of the ideas to which the printed characters impressed upon it refer."
To say that the brain assists thought is equivalent to saying that the clock assists the hour or the idea of time, or that thought is generated by a cerebral function. In this gestation, judgment or reasoning contributes, as do consciousness or any other of man's higher faculties, or sensations and even instinct. When a thought is born, the cerebral faculty vibrates and communicates to it that sensation which is its life, and which it preserves for a longer or shorter time while it fades away. Not only has this function given it life, but it also impresses upon it a certain form, a force of direction, and a destiny by which it must produce a determined result.
All the events of daily life are nothing but the work of thought, which, governed by special laws, produces special results — results that we are going to study tonight. We must therefore first study somewhat the mental act. What is it?
Thought is a vibration. In speaking further of thought, we shall limit ourselves to stating that it is a vibration, or a set of vibrations, emanating from the universal mind, received and modulated by the brain, which propagates itself in waves through space in the same way that sound propagates and light diffuses, and which sometimes takes very definite forms.
The occultists and men of letters who read me know the geometric figures of Chladni, studied in acoustics in certain physics cabinets, and produced by a vibrating plate of copper or glass. The edges of this plate are slightly bent upward. When a violin bow is drawn across one of the edges, the sand is thrown into the air by the vibration, and when it falls again upon the plate, it takes regular geometric forms that vary according to the edge over which the bow is passed and according to the musical note. Chladni's figures give us an approximate idea of the forms of thought, concerning which the celebrated occultist Mrs. Besant has made such curious studies.
Well then, space is filled with these forms, which, though not everyone sees them for lack of preparation, are sometimes observed on windows when the cold of winter covers the glass with those fern-like figures that clairvoyants and Initiates see whenever they wish.
The aura. Furthermore, after practicing for some time, the Rosicrucians see all persons enveloped in an aura, a fluidic covering that takes on colour according to the mentality and advancement of individuals. For the Rosicrucian who sees the aura, there is no danger of being deceived, for he can control his fellow men by seeing their thoughts and inclinations. This aura is composed of radioactive substances that form a kind of atmosphere around the atom; and this atom we have described as composed of matter, energy, and consciousness. All ether is composed of similar atoms with their radiations and influence.
Did thought draw from this its raw material in order to form itself? The subtlest matter, the highest of this radiant, subtle substance, is of an exceedingly rapid vibration, where the first basis of everything good, just, and perfect is stirred. This constitutes God, and God in the universe. This divine part nests within us and forms our supreme Self, our God within us — the Divine Ego. The God-Ego impels the will; it forms, therefore, the basis of our thoughts. A great initiate says: "God is Love-Will, and as such, He is eternal. The universe is a thought sustained by that God Love-Will." Thus first came the Will, afterward came thought, and always the first dominates the second.
In speaking of matter, we have said that of space we can know nothing, and that our knowledge begins when Chaos is transformed into Cosmos. Now we must add that God, in the universe, in space — we can know nothing of Him until He manifests Himself within us.
For our studies, we must begin from the known in order to come to understand the unknown. We must base ourselves on the Microcosm-man in order to draw, by analogy, conclusions concerning the Macrocosm-God. God manifests Himself, after Love, through the universal Will, of which our individual will is only a part, a spark, of which we are a kind of accumulator. For the universal Will, when one knows how to invoke it, nothing is impossible; everything can be achieved through it. The universal Will can relieve our poverty and misery, console our afflictions and setbacks, and cure all our ills, provided that it is just and that we know how to evoke it properly.
Monsieur Bezeat, who was in Barcelona, evoked the universal Will aloud, and thus achieved his marvellous cures. The portrait of the Mahatma that I usually send as a gift to the sick is nothing but an amulet charged with universal Will; and from hundreds I have received testimonies of what it has accomplished. There is no doubt that we think with the brain, but it is not the brain that thinks.
The arbiter of destiny. The mind is a receiver of the universal vital force, dynamised and transformed into nervous force. The vital force, decomposing and adapting itself to the multiple functions to which the will subjects it, is the arbiter of man's destiny. The great plexuses and nerves serve as accumulators of the fluids in the organism, and as conductors for transmitting them throughout the physical body; and their radiation forms the aura, which carries within itself the property according to how we impregnate it, or allow it to be impregnated, by the environment. It follows that everything that happens to us is the work of our Self, and no one has the right to complain.
Optimism is continuous thought; and by virtue of its law, the optimist triumphs. Pessimism is thought of equal form and force, and by the same virtue creates its neurasthenia, manufactures its misery, and forms our misfortune. I address myself especially to you, young men and women, so that you may dream of possible conquests through individual effort, until now so badly directed and still worse developed. To you, married women, young wives who suffer imprudences and see yourselves humiliated by the infidelity of the one who swore to love you. To you husbands, who cannot sweetly master the caprices of your wives. And to all of you who believe yourselves born under an unlucky star: it is not strange that discouragement follows your failure in the painful struggle of the home and in the harsh battle for existence, in the acquisition of well-being. Your sufferings arise from a conflict between the intensity of hope, so sure at your age, and the hardness of the trial that success demands before it can be called triumph.
It is to you that one must repeat: educate your character, develop your mental force; for if you do not conquer, you must think that the fortune sought through positions, placements, work, business, and in general all kinds of advancement, depends solely and exclusively upon secret inner motives that you do not know how to manage, and which our hesitation deprives of their triumphant power.
The odic force. In my book Rosa Cruz, I speak of the odic force discovered by Baron von Reichenbach, which is a force, a subtle emanation spread by our organism. In dealing with phantoms, I demonstrate that it is externalised through the will. Occultists have called these radiations "aura," which is the external part of the etheric substance that envelops the atoms and penetrates them; for in it, in the aura, thoughts are formed, constituting a kind of mental body, which projects outward a vibrating portion of itself and takes a determined form according to the very nature of its vibration.
If a person flies into a rage, his fluidic body is violently agitated and his habits become disorganised. Moreover, every thought has its own colour: a thought of anger is red and pointed in form; selfishness is of a deeper colour and its form is a kind of flame; devotion is light blue and conical in form. Thus fear, ambition, and joy externalised by a thought have a defined colour and form, and we have three general principles that govern the production of all thought-forms:
1. The causality of thoughts determines the colour.
2. The nature of thoughts determines the form.
3. The precision of thoughts outlines the contours.
Thought may be weak or strong. It is weak when the cerebral function that gave rise to it acts with vibrations of little force; and thus it will have an indefinite form, little or no force, lack direction, and perhaps have no destiny or achieve no objective.
Rigorous thoughts, born in the heat of an excited faculty and an intense cerebral function, possess strong vitality, perfectly defined form, precise direction, and will necessarily reach their destination and accomplish their objective. Thought externalises itself, moves away from the person who elaborated it, in order to join itself with others; for as the isolated thought of a single person is weak and acts according to the strength of the generator, if we associate our thought with that of ten, one thousand, or two thousand persons, whirlwinds of mental forces of great power are formed.
A sea of mental forms. We live, dear readers, bathed in a sea of mental forms, where analogous vibrations and forms seek and attract one another. Thought emanates from man as light and heat emanate from the sun, as light and heat from a lamp, as the perfume of a flower invades the atmosphere; and just as the luminous rays of a star that disappeared many years ago remain latent, continue shining, and continue being light for our eyes, so thought can affect us after the brain that produced it has disappeared. Sites and places are saturated with the thoughts of the absent and the dead.
Some psychophysiologists deny the externalisation of thought and assert that this is not possible except through speech, gesture, and writing, because nervous vibration neither occurs nor propagates except in nervous tissue. Thought, according to them, cannot externalise itself, since the nervous system ends at the periphery of the body.
A multitude of experiences within everyone's reach prove the reality of the propagation of thought over astonishing distances, and the phenomena of telepathy also demonstrate it. Until a few years ago, the transmission of a message without the aid of a telegraph wire joining the point of departure with the point of arrival was considered impossible; Hertzian waves have proved that electricity, like light, propagates through space without a material vehicle, and the latest experiments in telepathy have made clear that thought has the same faculty of being transmitted without an ordinarily visible vehicle.
From what has been set forth thus far, it follows that the force of thought has as its raw material subtle universal forces, which, transformed first into nervous or odic forces, give it power and form. Electricity is known as a great physical force, and the human species — or rather civilised man — makes use of it for his benefit, causing it to perform multiple uses through many objects useful to him.
As every great force is invisible except through its effects, so we must make use of thinking force, even though for the present it escapes the observation of our sight; for it has already been analysed and also recorded upon the salts of plants on photographic plates.
Thought is emitted by the will, by speech, by gesture, and by writing; and it goes on to engender new thoughts in other brains, grouping itself with those that are similar to it; or else it forms an atmosphere of mentality in infinite ways, affecting other brains or showing its action upon them.
The merchant's enthusiasm. The enthusiasm of a merchant engenders thoughts of prosperity for his business, and he sees it increase day by day to the point of needing help. The thought of this merchant strikes a distant subject and suggests to him the idea of seeking better employment. Everyone thinks: some with great force, others with moderate force, and most — those who believe in bad luck — hardly think at all.
From the thoughts of all, an atmosphere of mentality has been formed, in which there are nuclei of greater intensity and density, those of the strong, with identical needs and aspirations. Famous painters say that the motives of their great productions first arose from their imagination, that is, in their thought; there are some who see the painting and copy it onto the canvas. If today we do not have Murillos, Velázquezes, and Rembrandts, it is because modern painters do not know how to discipline their thoughts; they do not know how to give consistency to those that made the motive arise.
But thought-forms circulate through space like birds, except that instead of being guided in their flight by the need to feed or driven by generative desire, they are attracted and repelled by analogous or contrary mental currents.
There are persons of vivid imagination capable of producing the most beautiful pictures and motives. If any painter who possesses technique but lacks imaginative energy could develop double sight, he could become famous by copying these productions of others. Mentalism solves another curious problem in relation to criminology.
A novelist can conceive a fictitious drama or form in his mind a horrible crime. Some circumstance removes that picture from the brain of the writer and strikes the brain of an evil man, and the latter may commit the most horrible crime in complete irresponsibility. Something similar to what happens with painters occurs with musicians. Wagner confesses that he heard his best symphonies from the Invisible.
In the ether float the most sublime harmonies, which can be heard with the inner hearing; and I am certain that the musician who learned to concentrate within himself could offer us divine productions. All could rise to the height of a Chopin, of a Liszt, and once again elevate the most divine art of the gods.
Build it twice. Everything we do is formed first in the astral world and afterward realised in the material. Thus, for example, a lawyer who lacks clients may withdraw for half an hour every morning and form in his imagination the picture of lawsuits arriving to him. It is necessary to think plastically. The more real he sees his office full of work, the more intense the desire that it be realised, the sooner he will see himself crowned with success. Do it, dear readers; apply it to any matter of your life, and you will see that the result is infallible.
The Americans of Wall Street, if you have had occasion to know them, are only mediocrities as regards real knowledge; but they are tenacious in their projects, to the point that they pursue them tenaciously with the mind during meals and fall asleep thinking of the realisation of their businesses. Well then, these men are unconscious magicians. Business comes to them from all sides, and the one of greater thinking force obtains results in matters where others fail.
Sick in will. Here we are almost all sick in will; and I say almost all, for our methods of instruction take no account of Mentalism, which is essential. Today in schools one teaches by routine, and the why of education and pedagogy is ignored. Most persons launch thoughts that have little impulse-force and remain near the place where they were born, unless another wave of similar thoughts attracts them, following the law that governs thinking force: "Similar thoughts attract one another; contrary thoughts repel one another."
Thus, when you are convinced that every thought-form produces vibrations that spread in all directions to unite with analogous thoughts emitted by others, and that afterward return to the personal emanating centre, to unite with it — that is, with the impeller — for a certain time, it is not difficult to understand that the optimist, with his thoughts fixed on success, security, and joy, recruits an army of mental forms that accompany him in the struggle for life, winning for him laurels of success and glory.
On the contrary, the man who doubts everything, the timid man, the passionate man, the fearful man, is the victim of pessimism, which provokes, through its negative forms, a terrible enemy that will intimidate him more and more, leading him to failure and ruin in everything he undertakes. For this reason, the study of Occultism is of such importance, even for those who do not believe in the invisible world and who believe that evoking the dead is a tale, that there is nothing but matter, and that man is an intellectual animal.
Will. No one denies that the Napoleons, with their enormous success, were nothing but the result of a will. There is no doubt: the secret of success lies in man himself, in his inner personality; in a word, in his personal magnetism. The power of trained will brings fortune, health, success; the concentrated desire to make others happy attracts love, confidence, gratitude, and awakens the latent powers of man, which, properly developed and joined to an ordered ethical development, give us true will and put us in a position to be the arbiters of our own destinies.
The object of all secret societies is to provide disciples with the means of developing willpower, for Will is the basis of everything, as I have said in my esoteric works. Magic, which is the most beautiful and most difficult science that exists, is nothing but the externalisation of the force of Will, and with it one acts upon everything that surrounds us. To achieve the object proposed by Mentalism, since we have seen that personal will is only a part of the universal will, it is necessary to place oneself in analogy — that is, to imitate the great laws of Nature.
Draw near to Divinity. One of the most exalted laws is the tendency toward harmony. See it: despite apparent inequality, everything tends toward harmony in the universe. Man must therefore seek harmony with the Great All. More: he must draw near to Divinity. To draw near to Divinity is, in our time, a pulpit phrase, the product of the brain of some poor cleric who does not know what he says. We must explain it.
Divinity — what is it? Where do we find it? For in order to imitate it, we need to know it. Shall we go with established religions, up there behind the blue clouds? Or where shall we find it? Within ourselves.
Saint Paul says: "Do you not know that you are temples of God and that He dwells in you?" In Saint Matthew, Christ does not say, "I shall be seated there in imaginary heavens," but rather, "Behold, I am with you always, even unto the consummation of the ages." And in Saint John, he declares: "I am the way, the truth, and the life." I could cite hundreds of biblical verses that maintain the same. "I am God; I and the Father are one," says Christ. And afterward: "I am the life." Thus, according to the same great Nazarene philosopher, life, in its intimate principle, and God are synonymous.
This theory, logical, natural, and simple, does not cease to be sublime and divine; and most of the great reformers represent it through Christ, Buddha, Zoroaster, Menes, Confucius, and Lao-tzu. Likewise, the great philosophers and mystics express it, only under different forms. The sacred book of the Chinese, the Tao Te Ching, whose author is said to be Lao-tzu himself, says: "The Great Tao penetrates everything and is in the creature." Tao, God, is the hidden, the holy, preexistent and existing in all things.
Muhammad preaches: "I am God, since God is in me."
What generally happens is that great men have used different names. Kant called it "the thing-in-itself"; Swedenborg, "love itself"; Jacob Boehme, "the fire" or "Spirit"; Schopenhauer, "the Will"; Plutarch, "the Inner Guide"; Pythagoras, "the Great Light"; the Jews, "the Logos" or "the Word"; the Gnostics, "the True Light"; and Tox, "the Inner Voice."
The divine or "inner" Ego, as we occultists call it, is the spiritual principle that produces and has produced everything existing, and it is what animates eternal transformation. The principle in itself does not change; only its manifestations change. Now, the greatest manifestation in man is the will that tends toward the good. Not, as we have said, the timid will of the pessimist, but the perpetual tendency toward progress.
The key of the initiates. To tend toward this progress, to stimulate the will, only initiatic societies possess the key — a sublime and powerful key that cannot be given to just anyone, for in the hands of the inexperienced it would be an explosive in the hands of children.
To possess this key, man must reach a certain state of moral elevation. It is necessary to achieve harmony with the universal will, to free oneself from the power of matter, and to break with the preconceptions that depress us, that hinder in us the development of the noble, and that prevent our evolution toward the Central Nucleus — the Father.
To seek that union with the Divine is and must be the sole aspiration of the being; and for this he must desire the development of his occult and latent forces. These should serve him only as a key to open the door that closes the inner prison where our elevated and divine Ego lies, bound in chains and iron handcuffs.
Once this door has been opened, once that powerful will has been awakened, we shall come into contact with the Creative Father, to whose impulse all that exists is due. Once, as I have said, the mysterious door has been opened where everything lies hidden, the torrent of Light that emanates from the Great All will invade us; and the more it illumines us, the more the chains that bind us to matter, to prejudices, and to errors will be loosened.
Then the handcuffs will break, until they fall in pieces; and thus we shall be able to go forth, already invested with our true being, free, into the plane of Absolute Truth, of true Liberty.
Telepathy. Thought has the tendency to attract others of a similar nature when it is projected as energy, and it shares this tendency with the weak. Thoughts have the tendency to mix, gather, and combine, and by any of these processes to reach the brain that requested them, or the one toward which they are directed.
Among married couples, how many times is the husband surprised that, wishing to say something to his wife, she anticipates him and says it first! This is a proof of telepathy. At other times, one thinks of a person, and that person appears immediately. It is because his mind reached us before he arrived. Thought can be perceived by psychic sight; and this is how some observers explain the transmission of thought and other analogous phenomena.
Nevertheless, such phenomena can occur in all kinds of persons. Who has not experienced a strange sensation after the accident or death of a dear friend? Who has not felt sensitivity to the sui generis atmosphere that invades a city on the eve of a battle, even though the battle takes place far away?
Will and intelligence are one. On the material plane we have seen that there is no matter without movement. On the mental plane, we may say that there is no intelligence without will; or, what is the same, that there is no will without intelligence. One does not exist without the other. Kant himself says: "The Will is the causality of living beings." One is blind; the other is paralysed when separated. It is necessary to understand that will is more than an aptitude; it is a faculty of the being. And, in summary, will and intelligence are nothing but two components of one energy. This energy is life.
Force attracts force; love attracts love; life attracts life; health attracts health. This is a law of nature. A robust and healthy person vibrates in his mental body with freshness and vigour. Whenever you see a being who spreads vitality, try to attract vitality to yourself, and you will see that he infects you with it; and you can do this without remorse. You cannot harm him; have no fear. All the vitality you manage to draw from him he will recover with abundance from universal life. Just as analogous thoughts attract one another, there exists another attraction, between contrary characters and opposite sexes.
In them resides a biological mystery, which is nothing but a magnetic attraction by which a person of superior will dominates the weaker one. The one who imposes himself, the one who dominates, the one who, master of his own will, subjugates the will of another, is undoubtedly an individual endowed with a great magnetic power; he is the pole that attracts. Such men exercise an irresistible power, a true fascination over women, awakening — often without wishing it — violent passions that lead their victims to suicide. These men have an innate magnetic power, and though their physical appearance may be the least suited to inspire love, they are pursued by the most beautiful females.
A secret of the hair. I shall permit myself to reveal to you a secret of Occultism, which teaches us what persons may attract us and who possesses a magnetic power in harmony with our own.
The hair is an escape route for the odic fluids, which produce a certain odour. If ten individuals smell the head of another who lends himself to the experiment, one will perceive a pleasant odour; the second will tell us that he smells nothing; the third will be repelled by the odour. This means that the magnetic force of the first vibrates in unison with that of the subject, and anything he undertakes with him will have good success. Those who perceive unpleasant odours should avoid associating with such persons, for the businesses they undertake with them will fail. It is understood that we are speaking of clean people who have not produced artificial fragrances by means of perfumes. Moreover, the odour of the head changes. A content, happy, vigorous person will have hair with a natural perfume, which will turn into a stench as soon as misfortune or sorrow befalls him.
The mentalist is positive. The mental force developed and handled by the Rosicrucian is not merely a current like electricity, which can be preserved in an accumulator; rather, it is rooted in us and depends upon our inner Ego. With a powerful mentality, one achieves triumph and success in all enterprises.
The mentalist is positive. To be positive is to be affirmative. He who is positive excludes all negation; and we already know that negation is always sterile, barren. Negation always projects shadows, while the affirmative, the positive, is Sun, radioactivity, life. Many men desire success, advancement. They dream of fortune. But they obtain no results because they are negative, indolent, and do not see the facts. "Ah! if I had fortune, if I had a protector like you, I would know how to make use of it; I would be richer than you." Let us ask men of fortune to what they owe their fortune, to what they owe their money, and they will tell us: "My method was this: to dispense with useless words and go directly to facts."
Edison was expelled from school for being stupid; then, like many idlers, he devoted himself to selling newspapers in the street, and afterward worked as a messenger in a telegraph office. One day mentality awoke in him, and he threw himself into facts, presenting his first invention, which earned him forty thousand dollars.
Henry Ford, the son of an emigrant, worked in the fields until his mentality impelled him to be positive; and today he is the richest man in the world.
Newton was a bad student and an even worse employee on a country estate; but one day he launched himself into doing, into positivism. Thus he achieved his great knowledge.
Carnegie was successively a stoker, a telegraphist, and finally a railroad employee, until one day he saw that being an employee, depending on others, was proper to an inferior being; he became independent, and we all know to what height the king of steel rose.
None of them was learned; but they all acted. They handled a strong mentality, and it gave them success. The mentalist knows his own worth. He does not ask help from others, because that would be to lower himself, to recognise the superiority of the one from whom he asks.
Better to give than to ask. For this reason there is much truth in the biblical phrase: "It is better to give than to ask." For he who gives is superior to he who receives; the worse position is that of the petitioner. Everything that I think plastically becomes realised. For this reason it is very convenient to keep our mind powerful and clean. But how is our mind nourished? Let us look at the daily press: murders, robberies, gossip, and revolts. For beauties, for teachings of elevated ethics, there is no space in our presses; and Rosicrucian publications are scarce, and the few that exist are not read when they should be.
Religion has become pessimism. In Philosophy and Religion, pessimism reigns. Religion makes a true cult of hatred of sin, quite contrary to the great positivist Nazarene, who never condemned and never knew how to reproach. Even Judas Iscariot received no reproaches from him, but words of love. The Church of today catalogues sins. There are mortal and venial sins; sins of thought, word, deed, and omission. And men are marked as lost sinners, children of Satan. Very differently did Jesus speak to his Apostles: "Do you not know that you are temples of God and that He dwells in you?" True religion is positive and of active mentality; and men have made it negative and full of pessimism.
Let us compare the figure of the kneeling gesture of the timid man, weeping over his sins before the altar, fearful of the punishment of hell, with that of the positive optimist, of the Rosicrucian mentalist, who sees his capacities, his future, and smiles at the prize, at Heaven. Nothing intimidates him; he knows what he can do, and triumph is his.
Do not wait for tomorrow. Let us not allow ourselves to be overrun by softness. Let us not content ourselves with formulating phrases of deceptive hope: "I will do it tomorrow," "luck will favour me." Let us dispense with such reflections. Let us act. Let us begin something, no matter what it may be. If you know how to write, do it today, and write the first page of your book; deliver your first speech; open your business; make your first experiment in the kitchen, if you do not yet have a laboratory. Do not wait until tomorrow; if not today — today itself. Otherwise you are not a positive mentalist, but a poor negative being, without energies, without merit, without capacity.
King of creation. Do not request help or support from anyone. Do not lower yourself; do not certify your impotence. Laugh at the whole world; feel yourself superior to everything and everyone. Act. Be positive — a positive man of power, king of creation, who imposes himself, who commands, but who does not conform.