Glenn Clark: God’s Reach — Part 3

God’s Reach front cover

Twenty Four Ways to Improve Our Life
(and the World)

Hi Friends,

What I have to offer here is a framework for understanding our “metaphysical toolkit.” Given one of six particular life issues, such as health or prosperity, we have four tools available in the 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th dimension. Taken together, they offer a framework for understanding twenty-four ways to achieve a better life and to move the human race forward.

This is valuable because metaphysical writings can be obscure and confusing. We need to have a sense of where to go and what to do. This framework helps move us from what Emilie Cady called “blind faith” to “understanding faith.” It helps us understand which tool to choose and how high we must ascend for the tool to be effective. That is something new in metaphysical writing.

Here are 24 metaphysical practices from Part 3 of Glenn Clark’s book God’s Reach that will transform our life and world, sorted by area of concern and the dimension where they are found:

Before you begin exploring these tools, I encourage you to read the short six paragraphs in the Forward to Part 3, for several reasons. First, this two minute read is exceptional metaphysical writing; reading the Forward will set your consciousness where it needs to be before exploring the tools.

Second, Glenn Clark in the Forward cautions that “there is a hair-line where prayer for things of this world can go slithering off into magic, where man tries to control God rather than laying himself at the feet of God and letting God control him.” It is true, and I believe Glenn Clark would agree, that 4th dimensional practices are somewhat godless. But the practices in the three higher dimensions are theistic; they rely on the eternal values and divine plan revealed by God in the 5th dimension, the love and harmony orchestrated by God’s love in the 6th dimension, and the blissful union with God in the 7th dimension. The admonition and promise is that we must seek a right relationship with God first and then all things come to us. It’s not all about you.

Mark Hicks
Sunday, November 6, 2022

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Foreword to Part III
12. Friends
13. Health
14. Guidance
15. Inspiration
16. Finances
17. Statesmanship

 

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PART III
Forward

Having discovered in Part I and II the beautiful patterns of goodness, truth and beauty awaiting us in the fifth dimension; and having caught a glimpse of the ecstatic orchestration of love and harmony awaiting us in the sixth dimension; and having taken steps toward the blissful union with the Father awaiting us in the seventh dimension, the Big question that faces us now is how can we bring all these priceless treasures into practical manifestation down where we live today, in ways that will make our lives and the lives of our friends richer and finer.

When Peter reached his highest level at the Mount of Transfiguration he didn’t want to come down again. “Let the world go hang” was his sentiment; “let us build three tabernacles and stay here.” I have been told that the Hindu masters, when they succeed in attaining union with the Absolute, withdraw as hermits and let the world drown in its own tears. They would transcend but not transform this mortal world.

That is not the purpose of this book. Its first purpose is to show how we can transcend the limitations of this world; but its final purpose is to show how we can transform the limitations of this world.

When Jesus commissioned his disciples to go forth and “preach the gospel, heal the sick, and cast out demons, he meant what he said. He didn’t mean for his ministers to preach the gospel and stop there. Over and over again he reiterated “Blessed are those who hear these words of mine and do them ... by their fruits ye shall know them.” Jesus never meant for our application of his teachings to end with the Sabbath Day. Jesus’ religion was for every day — something we should carry into our business office, our kitchen and our athletic field. His promise, “Whatsoever ye ask in my name” is just as applicable to the problems of healing and guidance and friendship and finance as it is to the problems of the church. To him, they were one and the same.

One thing that has deterred religious leaders of the Evangelical churches from following in Jesus’ footsteps more earnestly in applying the gospel teachings to the realms of healing, guidance and world affairs is, in the words of Douglas Steere, their awareness that there is a hair-line where prayer for things of this world can go slithering off into magic, where man tries to control God rather than laying himself at the feet of God and letting God control him. Folks who have attended my camps and read my books (not merely dipped into one or two of them), realize that I draw that line very carefully. No one should read this Part III until he has read both the parts that preceded it. But when one really lays himself at the feet of God he discovers that the truest thing Jesus ever said was “Seek first the Kingdom of Heaven and its righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you, and what are these things but the things that pertain to our daily life? The very core and center of the Lord’s prayer was Thy Kingdom come ... on earth as it is in heaven,” and the burden of Jesus’ sermon on the Mount and of all his parables was how to bring that heaven into manifestation in the affairs of our practical life.

The simplest way for you to bring heaven to earth is to see the footprints of heaven in the outer realm around you, transmute them through meditation and contemplation into your inner philosophy and hold them as the blueprints of God’s perfect harmony in your deepest consciousness till God’s blessing is breathed upon them, and then let them flow out again in faith and love and crystal-ize in lovely actions, beautiful creations, inspiring poems, miraculous healings and transformed lives.

 

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CHAPTER XII
Friends

IN THE second dimension we deal with people on the level of our five senses. We see them, we hear them, we touch them, and in crowds we even smell them. As we grow more intimate with them, we rise into the third dimension where we shake hands with them, and say endearing words to them, and when they become a part of our own family, we even kiss them. The folks we would become better friends with we will go out of our way to meet; we will take pains to please them, we will entertain them, we make gifts to them.

If we would become a political or social leader where we would have to multiply our friends into thousands we find it helpful to study books on how to win friends and influence people; we enroll in courses of “charm,” or take instructions in public speaking or salesmanship or character analysis or applied psychology. We even buy books on etiquette and try to learn all the rules that govern politeness, such as how to dress for proper occasions and which fork to use first at a banquet. These are some of the three-dimensional ways to win the good will of people.

This three dimensional level of man’s relationship to man can run a wide gamut from the most superficial affection to the most devoted loyalty. On formal occasions one can easily shock the sensibilities of others by coming in street dress, and yet offend no one if he ends the banquet puffing at cigarettes or drinking evil-smelling alcohol. In a church the same behavior would offend all. Such are some of the strange, inconsistent customs of dealing with people in the third dimension.

Many have been the attempts to classify people. They have been classified according to race, to nationality, to religion, to sex, to political affiliation, or social rank, but Jesus Christ cut across all these superficial distinctions and partitioned mankind into three basic categories into which they fall in natural relationship with us.

The first group are those we feel naturally drawn to, the folks that God has selected from the beginning of time for our lives to be thrown with. The second group are those that neither by proximity, affinity, or other relationships do we find ourselves drawn to. The third group are those with whom we do business or meet in passing without any need of raising the question either/or.

The only thing we need to look out for he cautioned us was never to let our behavior to these three groups descend to the second and first dimensional level but at every opportunity that presented itself, to be prepared to lift it up to the fifth, sixth and seventh dimension. To this end he said, take heed that the affection you bear toward those you are drawn to doesn’t descend into lust (even in your heart)> and take heed that your lack of natural affinity to those you are not naturally drawn to doesn’t descend into intolerance, disgust and hate (even in your heart); and finally, don’t mistrust or cheat those with whom you do business.

But suppose the one you are drawn to gets an infatuation for you, someone asks, suppose he desires you to go a mile out of your way with him? Then Jesus tells us to go two miles, and the infatuation will either wear off or be turned into wholesome comradeship and good will. Suppose the one you are not drawn to slaps you on the cheek? Then lovingly and forgivingly turn the other cheek and he will become your friend for life. Finally, what if the one you do business with takes advantage of your willingness to trust him without contract or formal note? Suppose he steals your very shirt off your back? Then give him your overcoat as well and keep on trusting and he will make restitution for all he has stolen; or, if he fails to do so, what you have lost will return to you from some other source. If you follow these instructions, said Jesus, you cannot lose. Even where defeat seems to loom, you can turn defeat into victory.

Never was such an amazing code of conduct presented to mankind before. Thus Jesus revolutionized all our relationships with people in this three dimensional world of ours by opening the flood gates and letting all the powers of the higher dimensions flow in upon them and bless them.

When one enters the area of the fourth dimension, he goes beyond the third and second dimensions enslaved to the intellect and five senses, and finds himself in the field of extra-sensory perception. It was on this level that Jesus was speaking when he advised mankind not to lust in their hearts and not to hate in their hearts revealing that the inner thought was as powerful as the outer action.

Luther Burbank was speaking on this level when he wrote that the time would come when people who threw out hate thoughts, envious thoughts and other negative thoughts into the atmosphere would be considered just as much enemies of society as people who threw poison into wells. There is no question at all why wide sweeping plagues always follow in the wake of great wars; it is because of the veritable flood of hate thoughts, fear thoughts and despair thoughts that thousand of people are throwing out upon the air. The flu followed World War I; infantile paralysis followed World War II.

One reason why movie stars find it so hard to live a normal family life is because so many million theater goers are falling passionately in love with them every night their faces appear on the screen. With such floods of emotional, lustful, possessive thoughts pouring in upon them, no wonder their so-called private lives are so often pulled out of balance. Indeed no group so desperately needs the loving protection and powerful guidance that can be found only on a still higher dimension than the performers in the moving picture industry.

On the other hand, a great and good man who is accepted by a large block of society as a saint finds this undergirding of faith in him a great impetus toward sainthood. There is no question whatever that Gandhi, who considered himself a very weak human being was literally hoisted into sainthood by millions of loyal disciples.

A woman who fears that her husband is becoming infatuated with other women can help, redeem the situation by stepping into the fourth dimension and saying every night before she falls asleep, “Never forget, John, how dearly your wife, Mary, loves you and believes in you and wants your highest happiness.” If she confines herself to this extra-sensory approach and refrains from all nagging, beseeching, arguing and quarreling, her chance of success will be much greater. I knew a man who won his sweetheart by saying every night, “Adelaide Emerson, raul Anderson loves you.”

A wonderful way to win or hold friends is to set aside a period each day merely to love them without possessiveness. A minister I know has a big cardboard on his desk with pictures of the friends he most cherishes pasted on it, and every once in a while he looks at them and loves them. This seemingly casual insignificant practice actually blesses, protects, and strengthens them in ways that cannot be measured. Moreover, in the fourth dimension of radiation and counter-radiation everything you send forth returns to you. For instance, Frank Laubach puts pictures of Jesus all around his room and as a result, not only Christ, but Christ-like people are drawn to him wherever he goes.

My son, Miles, upon starting his senior year in Central High School, St. Paul, realizing that he had been cold and aloof from his classmates, asked his mother every morning to pray that he would love everybody that day. To his own amazement he was not only elected president of the immense senior class but later was voted the most popular boy in the entire high school.

Wonderful are our opportunities for not only increasing our friendships but also for purifying and ennobling them by a proper use of this fourth dimensional extrasensory way of loving them.

On the fifth dimensional level we step into rhythm with our own Divine Plan, the pattern God has made for us in the Mount, and here we find safer, more solid foundations for building lifelong friendships than on any lower plane. It is very true that some friendships like that of Ruth and Naomi, and David and Jonathan, were decreed from the beginning of time. There is no doubt that some marriages are truly made in Heaven. Every one of us has some natural affinities whom we can trust with our inmost secrets, and whom we can think aloud with or even be silent with without giving offense.

“Asleep, awake, by night or day,
The friends I seek are seeking me.
No wind can drive my bark astray,
Nor change the tide of destiny.”
   —(“Waiting” — John Burroughs)

Years ago I composed this psalm prayer which I have “prayed” off and on ever since: “I believe that God has selected those persons who are to belong to my plan, and that through proximity, mutual attraction or need, they and I are continually finding each other out. I believe in praying for ever-increasing capacity to love and serve them and for greater worthiness to be loved and served by them in return. I believe in sending out a prayer to the Father to draw to me those who are meant to help me and to be helped by me, in order to express my life together with them.”

If you are very desirous of forming permanent, unbreakable friendships I would advise you each morning to step into this fifth dimension and pray, meditate and know that every person sent to you this day will be sent to you by God. Trust that you will meet exactly the persons you want to meet when they want to be with you. To find your friends on this level you don’t need to travel or write in the third dimensional manner; you don’t have to depend on affirmations and mental telepathy in the fourth dimensional way. All you need do is to KNOW that God has the perfect plan for you and rest back in perfect TRUST. Then act upon the Divine Guidance that comes to you, and go, unafraid, to the persons you feel drawn to, and accept without question people who come to you even though at first you may want to avoid their coming. Put yourself completely in God’s hands and let Him arrange the pattern of your life, yes, depend upon Him to choose your friends, acquaintances, and close partners for you.

And now you are ready to step into the sixth dimension where you may have the privilege of experiencing the real orchestration of souls. You can function in this area with the greatest power after you have found some mutuals, affinities, yes, brothers of your very soul on the fifth dimensional level. When you have found them, you will be drawn to seek opportunities to sit in mountain-top experiences with them in the sixth dimension as often as the occasions permit. And yet there must be no possessiveness. Your mother love must not descend into smother love. You must share your friends on this level with all mankind.

Step out along the love bands that knit you together, dwelling not so much upon the charm of personality in each as much as you rest upon the blissful heavenly love and peace that unites you with them. In Book IV Chapter IV in Water of Life1 where I describe the third level in Heaven, you will find a complete picture of this sixth dimensional orchestration. Chapter VI of the same book reveals the heavenly power that radiates from the orchestration of heavenly-anchored friends.

When you enter the seventh dimension of friendship, the highest blessings are yours. You are then abiding in the Father, and all your friendships take on a heavenly tone. As you love your friend, you are really loving the blessed Christ in your friend. Then loving your friend in this heavenly way, you learn at last what is meant by the love of God. “He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” (I John 4:20) At last you know the reality and the blessed joy of loving the Lord thy God with all thy mind, all thy heart, all thy strength, and all thy soul. From this time on you are never lonely. You will always have a friend in Jesus. This level when reached can purify and ennoble friendship on all the other levels.

  1. Water of Life: Glenn Clark — Macalester Park Pub. Co.

 

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CHAPTER XIII
Health

HEALING on the third dimensional plane as practiced in the world today consists of applications of hot or cold water to the parts affected, of salves and ointments, of massage and adjustments of the bones and muscles; or the application internally of medicines and drugs and vitamins and the control of diet. The only way to penetrate to the inside organs themselves is by ultra violet rays of some kind or the incision of the surgeon’s blade.

But when one steps up into the fourth dimension the organs are laid as bare and exposed to the eye of the soul as the outer body is exposed to the eyes of the physician. This can be illustrated by an analogy drawn from the second dimension. A two dimensional man is a flat man living in flatland, a land of only length and width and no height. When height is added he becomes three dimensional. A page from any physiology book will reveal the flat picture of a man with all his organs exposed. Let us imagine the other flat men who reside on this sheet of paper, coming together to consider what ails him and how they can pull the ailment out of him. But, alas, they cannot raise their hands or heads up into the air and look down upon the interior of this man, all they can do is to come to the outer boundary of his body and there stop. If one of his organs is out of place all they can do is massage, or if need be cut into it from its outer boundary.

But any of us three dimensional creatures can look down upon these organs from above and from our superior height we can easily rearrange the parts exactly as they should be arranged. In exactly the same way people living, moving, and having their being in the fourth dimension can look inside three dimensional bodies and readjust the position, the form, and the very action of the organs which seem out of harmony with the rest. This can be done through the simple application of the newly discovered laws of psychosomatics; in other words, through the penetrating power of the emotions which do not stop at the outer surface of the body but vibrate deep into the secret parts from an entirely higher dimension.

An entire new breed of fourth dimensional doctors has been suddenly released upon mankind by this new discovery of an old truth enunciated thousands of years ago: As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” Learned books on psychosomatics are merely putting into big, unpronouncable scientific language what Jesus stated in simple terms two thousand years ago. “Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man, but that which cometh out of the mouth. This defileth the man” Matt 15:11

When I came to St. Paul in 1912 a woman on the next block was dying of cancer of the throat. She had been to all the greatest physicians in America and not a one gave her any hope. At last she went to a woman who believed in prayer.

“There must be someone you hate,” she was told.

There certainly is. I can’t even think of her without feeling sick all over.”

“Unless you forgive her I can’t pray for you with any hope.”

“I will never forgive her,” she replied, and so they parted.

That evening when she told her husband he made no comment until they were ready for bed. Then he said, “Let us kneel down together and have a prayer.”

As they knelt he put his arm around her and said, “Now we are not going to get up till you forgive that woman.”

“Then we’ll kneel here all night.”

But before morning she relented and forgave the woman. That was in 1912. In 1947 I met her in Miami. She was in the front row of an audience I was addressing, the healthiest looking person in the room, almost as young looking as she was thirty-five years before.

Here was a definite example of how a changed emotion in the fourth dimension penetrated where it was not safe for a surgeon’s knife to operate and changed cancer cells into healthy cells within a matter of days. A fourth dimensional doctor can reach into a man’s throat and lungs and erase all asthma conditions by the simple method of washing out the emotions of self-pity. He can lower the blood pressure by sweeping out rebellious resentments, and relieve stomach ulcers by removing the sense of inadequacy. Elisha had a deeper wisdom than he has been given credit for when he commanded Naaman, the leper, to bathe seven times in the river Jordan. In my book How to Find Health Through Prayer, I state my faith that anyone who applies these seven baths to the whole of his being can be cured, no matter how long or how serious his illness. Try bathing your outer skin, your inner skin, your blood vessels, your lungs, your thoughts, your emotions, and finally your soul, and see whether any illness can stand before it. A regimen of bathing, drinking pure water, wholesome exercise, deep breathing, right thinking, happy emotions, and peace of soul is the combination par excellence for insuring sound health.

Thousands of chiropractors have joined the “Beamers” association, a group that has discovered that one-tenth of the adjustment for so-called illnesses is physical and nine-tenths spiritual. By getting on the beam and using “concept therapy” they have worked miracles comparable to the work of the psychosomatic M.D.’s. I explore this whole field in the book referred to above. Rebecca Beard, herself a licensed M.D., in her book Everyman’s Search; Starr Daily in Recovery relating the healing experiences of Roland Brown, a Baptist minister; and Agnes Sanford, an Episcopal minister’s wife, in The Healing Light all verify the points that I am making.

When we come to the fifth dimension we rise above the place where “work” is needed. We reach the place where man is visioned as he was originally made “after the likeness and image of God.” Here man finds his divine plan with no manner of flaw. Anything wrong is merely an error in his or her thinking; or, what is a more accurate way of putting it, a twist in his feeling. The difference between the fourth and fifth dimension is that the fourth dimension physician observes the trouble and works hard mentally and spiritually at removing it, while the fifth dimensional physician calmly looks at the perfect pattern given man in the Mount and by refusing to see the wrong twists or errors, trusts that they will fade away. As the psychosomatic physician feels at home in the fourth dimension, the metaphysical physician feels at home in the fifth demension. Needless to say, it depends very largely upon which level the patient lives, which physician he should summon for help.

St. Paul was standing in the fifth dimension when he assured the sailors on the storm-ridden sea that no one would drown because an angel had let him look into the future and see his safe arrival at Rome. Rickenbacker had more than his share of hairbreadth escapes but always came through because of his innate fifth dimensional sense of a destiny controlling every event of his life.

When we reach the sixth dimension we step into the orchestration of harmony and contagious love, an orchestration which can use the penetrating rays of the fourth dimension or the steady visions of the divine plan of the fifth dimension, and with joy and serenity bring the finest and most permanent healing of all. It is fine and permanent because love is in it. When two or three come together in perfect harmony with deep love in their hearts for one another, that mutual love creates the perfect wave-length by which God’s infinite healing Love can reach the patient. The only permanent healing power in the world is love and love can only find entrance into any situation through the path created by love. For love is the power that draws all things into perfectly adjusted and harmonious relationship with everything else.

Miracles can happen when a group of mutuals come together with love in their hearts for the patient, with absolute harmony and trust and love for each other, and rest in that love and trust until they rise into a sense of serene peace and exquisite ecstasy and actual bliss. And when such love is directed toward a so-called sick and ailing body, it draws every cell, nerve, gland, and organ in that body into perfectly adjusted and harmonious relationship with every other cell, nerve, gland, and organ. Fix firmly in your mind this definition of love and it will lift you into the sixth and seventh dimensions and you can rest with absolute knowing that wherever love is released, healing will take place. This exalted love, experienced on the sixth dimension, is God Incarnate, for “God is Love”; and the moment we experience the Love of God, the door opens wide for all the powers of the seventh dimension to come into play.

Jesus taught us that higher than our own little efforts to cast out wrong thoughts and bring in the right ones is the Power of God when we turn to Him in absolute faith and ask Him to set our inner house in order.

He can wash out all the sins and errors and mistakes of the past. Indeed He has a cleansing fluid, the redemptive love of Jesus, that is guaranteed to do what nothing else can do. The greatest need of everybody in the world is a blood transfusion of the love plasma that was shed on Calvary. Christ can anoint the most hidden parts of the inner body with Divine Love, the most powerful healing ointment in the universe.

But how can we invite this great Physician to take over our case and expect His love to cause all our internal organs to function in perfectly adjusted and harmonious relationship one with another? The answer is simple but a little hard to apply. We must turn to Him with a belief that goes beyond belief, with a faith that goes beyond faith — yes, where belief and faith merge into absolute knowing, One purpose of this exploration of the higher dimensions is to help turn our weak belief and our wavering faith into complete knowing.

Christ’s healing Love enters us when we turn to God with remorse and repentance for our own sins and forgiveness for the sins committed against us. That is the first step and we have taken the second step when we turn to him with faith in his power to heal and gratitude for the blessings he has brought us in the past.

But in addition to these two steps — complete repentance and absolute faith — a third is very necessary — and that is that we relax our body, mind, and soul completely into His hands with perfect trust regardless of what the outcome is going to be. In other words to let go and let God. When you truly let go and let God take complete control you will be amazed at the results that will come to pass.1

  1. Those finding it hard to “let go” should send for Glenn Clark’s correspondence course in Spiritual Therapy which guides the student through the “Seven Baths of Jordan.” Payment optional with the student. Address Macalester Park Publishing Company, 1571 Grand Avenue, St. Paul 5, Minnesota.

 

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CHAPTER XIV
Guidance

THE ART of guidance consists largely of learning which of life’s limitations we must accept and which we can change. We have to accept our ancestors, our parents, and the age in which we were born. We cannot change our race or our sex. The radiant acceptance of these facts, these people, and this environment constitutes the first step in Guidance. Two-thirds or three-fourths of our Guidance is given to us on a silver platter without our having to do anything but accept it. Indeed the first virtue that is essential for the art of guidance is obedience.

The fact that we were born into a certain age means that we have work to do in that age. The fact that we were born into a certain nation means that we have some service we can render that nation. God has given us parents, brothers and sisters, and other human relationships, not by accident, but so that we can do something with or for those particular people.

The art of living consists of knowing what part of our so-called destiny we should accept and what part we have a right to change. There are some things about these walls of destiny that do not seem to be good, and that deep down in our heart we want to change. If a great desire comes to us deep down in our heart to change these walls, we should listen to it. If a change would hurt no human being, but bring blessings to all, you can listen to it as the Voice of God.

One cannot change one’s sex, but Susan B. Anthony so yearned, deep in her heart, for the privileges that men had of sharing in the government, that the very fact that she was a woman who could not vote and yet yearned to vote, and had the gift of writing and speaking, opened the way and put her on the path of a creative life of reform that has brought blessings to many.

Dr. George Washington Carver could not change his black skin, and the possession of it often brought him into humiliating positions. But by using the native, almost primitive, psychic intuitions regarding nature and the growing things of nature, characteristic of his humble race, and adding to that the analytical mind and trained intellect obtained in northern universities where chiefly members of the white race attended, and crowning all of this with a great and simple faith that grew out of his habit of communing with God, he was able to map out for himself a destiny that transcended in many ways the destiny of men whose opportunities and racial bac grounds were more propitious than his.

Helen Keller seemed destined to go through life as a public charge, helplessly walled off from humanity by the three-fold limitations of deafness, dumbness, and blindness. One by one she overcame these. She learned to hear by placing her hands on the throat and lips of the speaker, and to speak by making her own throat act out syllables as theirs had acted. She even learned to tell color by the feel of the flower.

When Michelangelo went down to Rome one winter to work in sculpture, he found that all the Carrara marble had been taken by other sculptors. Only a large, broken, misshapen piece remained. With nothing else to work on he sat down in front of that unpromising piece of material and studied its possibilities and its limitations. Finally he figured out how, by creating a figure with arm outstretched in this way, and head bent that way, he could give a tolerable reproduction of David with his slingshot facing Goliath. He set patiently to work with the result that the choice room in the famous Pitti Art Gallery of Florence is given over entirely to this great masterpiece of Michelangelo’s — the most prized object in that wonderful collection.

You are given certain possibilities and certain limitations. The art of living for you is to determine how you can create a masterpiece by actually utilizing your limitations, and by using to the fullest extent the talents God has given you. The difference between a pessimist and an optimist someone has said is that the pessimist sees a difficulty in every opportunity and an optimist sees an opportunity in every difficulty. Michelangelo, Helen Keller, and Dr. Carver were supreme optimists who created masterpieces out of seeming limitations. What a challenge that presents to us! What can we do with our life?

If man in his higher dimensions would make as great use of his gifts as the creatures in the lower dimensions make use of theirs, he would have no difficulty in living in accordance with the Divine Plan God has prepared for him. The acorn is obedient to its Divine Plan and grows into an oak tree. A bee flies in circles until it determines the direction of its hive, and then it goes on a “beeline” straight to that hive. The bee goes through space to its Divine Plan! The acorn goes through time to its Divine Plan. The question before us is, how can man, moving above time and space, find his Divine Plan with the same certainty as the bee and the oak?

Whales, I am told, always find their groups, salmon go back through the streams to their spawning grounds. Birds fly south in winter and north in summer; no one tells them how, they follow their Divine Plan.

Let us humble ourselves and go down into the second dimension for a while and see if we can catch the secrets of the birds and the beasts. Let us rest a while in our physical organism, so marvelously constructed of nerves and glands and deep subconscious urges, and see what it has to tell us. Take your cue from the squirrel. If you have the collecting instinct of this little rodent, direct your craving to a higher purpose and give it wholesome expression. Look at the beaver and if your practical hands itch to undertake constructive jobs, be true to your urge. Look up to the birds flying and soaring in the upper air, and if your imagination seeks these higher flights, try your hand at poetry and music and art.

Trust your body as a natural compass and barometer as sensitive as any instrument ever made by man. Navigators on planes know the secret of staying “on the beam.” They pick up a signal from a city toward which they are flying and as long as they hold a beeline toward that goal, all is well. The moment they swerve seriously off the course either right or left, the jarring note on the erring side warns them.

The body that clothes our sensitive soul can furnish us signals for our guidance as effectively as these instruments of the air navigators if we only know how to interpret them.

Luther Burbank was so sensitive to the feeling of flowers and plants that when he went through a field to select the special ones for further experimentation he chose them so instinctively and so rapidly that he merely dropped a white ribbon on each as he passed by and two men following him tied the ribbons. Dr. Carver’s whole being was so attuned to the flowers that he could actually talk to them and catch their messages in return.

When I came to St. Paul in 1912 I heard of the miracles of Indian Joe. If anyone were drowned in a Minnesota lake and no amount of dragging disclosed the body, Indian Joe was summoned. He would demand that all others leave the lake on the night he made his search. Then seated alone in his canoe in the darkness, as unerringly as a hound would follow a trail, he would be led to the exact place where the body lay.

Starr Daily has told how men in the underworld upon entering a city would sandpaper the palm of their hand almost to the quick, then hold the hand high in the air and know whether it would be safe to remain there or not.

Civilization has so neutralized the native instincts of the body that the gifts of guidance on the second dimension are well nigh lost. But why not try it? For instance, if every time you pick up the phone to make application at a certain company, you get a headache, try another company. If every time you telephone a man to make a deal the line is busy, don’t think it is a mere accident. God is warning you. If every time you feel a grudge against your boss you get stomach ulcers, quit feeling that grudge. When Amelia Earhart’s plane crashed it was God’s warning not to attempt the around-the-world flight until more prayer preparation was made. Her husband was a man of wealth and gladly had another plane built. It, too, crashed. The Lord was now shouting at her. But she procured another plane and was off on her fatal journey. I dare say most of my readers haven’t the sensitivity of the animals. But if George Washington Carver were hearing what I am saying, or my part-Indian friend, Gene Estes, they would catch the impact of it at once!

Let us turn to the third dimension where the process is as follows: Think out the situation, collect the facts, weigh them, analyze them, and compare them looking into causes and effects. At last come to the best decision you can. Then sleep on it. The next day see if the decision is clear cut, logical, and what is most important of all, if it brings peace of mind.

If the logical approach does not make things clear or if it is a situation that baffles a logical conclusion, or if it does not bring peace of mind, the next step is to rise into the fourth dimension. Just as the dog, in the second dimension, puts himself in tune with the odor vibrations which abound in the airways, try putting yourself with equal faith in tune with the guidance vibrations which abound in the fourth dimension. Just know that these vibrations are here, and move with perfect abandon wherever the impulse leads you. Electrical power is generated by vibrations set in motion by the alternate current produced by negative and positive poles. Guidance vibrations are set in motion by another kind of polarization, the need on the one hand and the supply on the other.

As the dog is the pathfinder par excellence in his dimension, we can do nothing better than use him as the model to follow in our fourth dimension. The secret of his power consists of three things; he has a very sensitive nose, and he has no inhibitions, and no opinions. The soul of man is very sensitive to guidance, but this sensitivity is simply smothered under the weight of his inhibitions and opinions. After your intellect in the third dimension has gathered the facts and weighed the causes and effects leading to several projected solutions, then drop all your thinking and step into the fourth dimension and wait quietly, perfectly uninhibited and perfectly unopinionated, for a solution to come to you out of the ethers. In other words, know with absolute certainty that wherever there is a need there is also a solution for that need somewhere out there in space and if you can get quiet enough the need and the supply will ultimately find each other.

The first law of guidance in the fourth dimension is emptiness. The secret of the dog’s gift of guidance springs from an empty mind. Socrates had that emptiness. His chief virtue was that “he knew that he knew nothing.” This enabled his guardian angel to give him perfect guidance every morning. George Washington Carver had that emptiness. The little flower was “the conductor” that in the early hours brought him guidance out of the ethers for the whole day.

I find my emptiness in the pool of Siloam. Remember, it was perfectly still, except when an angel of the Lord came down and ruffled it. Then the first one in after that movement found the healing he sought. I quiet my mind. It becomes empty. No fear, no resentment, no inhibitions, no opinions of any kind, no wishful thinking; as cool as the pool of Siloam. I am lost in the Spirit. Then the first thought that comes to me, the first impression, the first urge, I accept as the angel of the Lord — and I act upon it. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred I find it is the right one.

But it is in the realm of the fifth dimension where guidance comes the most perfectly and with the least effort. Here, as you know, the perfect patterns reside. The finished plan awaiting you there is whole, perfect and complete. All you need do is tune in to it.

To see the pattern ahead in Time, all you need do is to climb to a high vantage point, just as you would when you would foresee what was ahead in Space, and from that vantage point, see exactly what obstacles you have to weave your way through, and what limitations you have the privilege of making a detour around. Here is an example of such a detour, which saved a life:

One Sunday morning I received a telephone call from Mrs. Simpson, one of my dearest friends in Minneapolis. She said, “Can I see you this morning regarding something that is of great importance to my life — it is something that cannot be put off, as I am leaving for the Mayo Hospital tomorrow.”

I replied that I could see her after my morning Bible Class at Plymouth Church. But little was I prepared for the unusual story I was to hear.

“Last Wednesday morning,” she began, “I received a telephone call from Miss Stella Holbrook, one of my friends. Her voice betrayed great excitement, and I could tell that she was under enormous strain. She said,’ ‘My dearest friend is in deadly peril. I must see you immediately.’

“In a few moments she arrived at my apartment. She looked haggard and as she sat down she looked me searchingly in the face. ‘The one who is in deadly peril, she said, ‘is yourself.’

“ ‘What!’ I exclaimed. ‘Why, I haven’t been sick for years, and I never felt better in my life than I do at this moment.’

“ ‘No matter,’ she said, ‘you must see a doctor at once.

“ ‘Explain yourself,’ I said.

“ ‘You must listen to me, even if what I say may seem absurd. I had a dream about you last night. I could see you walking up and down the room holding your head between your hands. Finally you turned toward me and I could see that you had gone insane. It made such a deep impression upon me that I couldn’t sleep. I walked the floor all night.’

“ ‘What!’ I exclaimed. ‘This sounds absurd!’

“‘No matter how it sounds,’ she replied, ‘you must see a doctor, if only for my own peace of mind. I never had a dream that was so real. Promise me that you will go to a physician at once.’

“So I promised and went. To my surprise the doctor discovered that I had a tumor that might press upon my brain and cause insanity unless something were done about it right away. He said that I should be operated on at once. I told him that I wanted to have Rochester check. So I am starting to Rochester tomorrow morning — but I wanted to talk with you before going and have your prayers joined with mine.”

“To pray for a situation of this kind,” I began, “and to pray with faith, requires that we first clear the ground. Anything associated with divination of any kind tends to make one feel helpless. How can one turn aside the hand of Fate? That fear is foolish — first of all we must understand that there is no power in the psychic realm — and that is the realm where divination resides — that can stand against the far greater power that functions in the spiritual or the heavenly realm. To foresee a thing in Time, is just like foreseeing a thing in Space. If you saw a washed-out bridge in front of you in Space, you would not run head-on into it, would you? You would make a detour around it. Well, it is the same way in Time. Miss Holbrook was able to climb the high hill of Love and see a bridge down, as it were, out there in Time. She foresaw an illness that you seemed to be running into head-on. But that will not be necessary. You can make a detour around it.”

“And how can I do that?” she asked, just as naturally as she would ask the way to Des Moines. She was a remarkable woman, and I never saw greater poise and calm.

“Just as you would make a detour around a danger in Space,” I replied. “Turn to the right. And by right I mean just exactly what Jesus meant when he said to Peter after he had been fishing all night without success. ‘Cast out your net on the right side!’ The right side is always God’s side. In other words turn to God. Turn to Him completely and utterly, and put your entire problem into His hands with absolute faith that He has the power to remove the danger from you.

“I understand exactly,” she replied. “You know that I have no fear for myself. I have never worried about myself, so you can count on me not to block your prayer in that way. Moreover, I can arrange my summer so that I can go off to the mountains and spend the entire summer in happy work and quiet prayer.”

“Splendid,” I replied. “Now I feel sure that God will take care of you.”

Three months later I received another telephone call. “I am back from my summer vacation,” came the voice, “and I want to invite you and Mrs. Clark to have dinner with me next Tuesday evening at the Women’s Club.

On the veranda overlooking Loring Park, the most beautiful view one can obtain in the very heart of Minneapolis, Mrs. Clark and I sat down with her and with the majestic autumn sunset before us listened to her remarkable story.

“Well, I went to the Mayo Clinic,” she began. “They verified exactly what the doctor up here had said. The surgeon in charge advised immediate operation. But before taking me to the operating room he. called in Dr. Will Mayo. ‘Dr. Will Mayo,’ he said, ‘has something greater than the power of the average diagnostician. He has intuition — one might call it spiritual insight.’ When Dr. Mayo examined me he verified what the other two doctors had already discovered, and then, as though speaking from a sixth sense, said, ‘Don’t operate right away. Go away for three months, and then come back, and we will decide what to do.’

“So I went away to the mountains. I spent the time literally and figuratively in the mountains of prayer. I had no fears, in fact I gave no thought whatever to this trouble, but turned my thought to God and my fellow man. Then when September came I went back to the hospital.

“When the specialist had finished his X-ray examination he exclaimed, ‘Something must be wrong here. I must have Dr. Judd, the chief brain specialist, check up on this at once. What would people think of the Mayo Clinic if its records showed that you had a growth the size of a hen’s egg in June, and that it had completely vanished by September!’ So Dr. Judd examined me, and when he got through he seized both of my hands, jumped up and down and exclaimed, ‘This is a miracle!’ ”

As one looks at the Divine Plan of this world, all arranged according to the pattern on the Mount in the fifth dimension, we can see how this world would today be an earthly paradise if our leaders would rise high enough to accept it from the God viewpoint, and not from the man viewpoint. Behold the Plan:

In God s Book of Life, in His Blueprint for this age, we are ONE WORLD. The radio, the jet plane, the host of modern inventions drives that fact home to us. If we are one world we should become one people under one union of nations. We should have one central overall ruler. Do we all agree? And that overall ruler should be God. We should then unite in one great wish, one great prayer, and one great vote — that God become the One Ruler of this One World.

The moving pictures of this wonderful new scenario, entitled One World, are all prepared; they are in the cinema operator’s machine, ready to cast their perfect pictures upon the screen. But who is going to operate the machine? Ah, there is the question. If some over-impatient operator runs it, using ultra-rapid motion, the picture will become a jumble, running together until nothing is clear. If he be a doubting operator, using ultra-slow motion, the pictures will move so slowly that intervals between eras of prosperity, instead of being lovely periods of transition, will be so drawn out that they will become horrible times of depression, unemployment, and suffering. If self-centered egotists turn it, they will turn the machine backward, letting scenes of harmony arranged by God be changed into scenes of discord, scenes of love into scenes of hate, scenes of peace into scenes of war. Isn’t that EXACTLY what is happening today? If in the decade 1935-45 Roosevelt, Hitler, and Stalin had stepped aside and let God operate the machine, we should be seeing today a veritable heaven on earth. The chapter on Dynamic Symmetry in Statesmanship will discuss this further.

But how can one rise to a high enough vantage point to get this clear view of the future? First of all we should admit that there are some who are more greatly endowed with this gift of foresight than others. But all can find the safe detour if they will turn their eyes upon God each morning and see Him and His plan as clearly as they can. In other words, if you would see ahead in space you should first of all get your field glass in focus. At first you see nothing — it is all a blur. Then a simple twist of the instrument and there you are, the blur is gone. To get your spiritual field glass in focus to see ahead in time, first get your spiritual lens in focus by turning to God in thought.

I have often said that if I were a business man and got out of bed on the wrong side some morning I would get back into bed and phone my office that I would not come until the afternoon. If in the afternoon I still found myself getting out of bed on the wrong side I would postpone my important decisions until the next day. The crash of 1929 could have been avoided had all the business leaders of America had their field glasses trained in focus on God and the good of all instead of upon greedy profits each for himself.

The fifth dimension has no past and no future. All time comes to a focus in the Eternal NOW. Jesus stood in the fifth dimension when he said, “Take no anxious thought for the morrow, for the morrow will take thought for itself.” The special key to opening the door to perfect guidance in this dimension is the great fundamental law, that if you would prepare for the future which you have not seen, your first step is to straighten out the past which you have seen.

When I shave I shave the face in the mirror. I have never seen my face. My friends have, but I haven’t. I feel it but I have never seen it. All I see is the reflection in the mirror so I shave that, and when the job is completed I find that my face is shaved. By the simple process of removing the bristles of the past I remove the bristles of the future. If I look into the mirror with resentment I will see only resentment in the future. If I brood over the cheats of the past I will find cheats laying wait for me in the future. If I hang on to the hurts of the past I will bring hurts upon myself in the future.

Jesus was stating this law when he said, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Shave away all the unforgiveness, all the fears, all the frustrations, and all the resentments of the past and a clear future will loom ahead. Have repentance for any wrong that you have done to others and make atonement if you can. If you can’t make atonement to the one you’ve wronged, make it to someone else. If you find it hard to forgive yourself, avail yourself of the forgiving, cleansing power of the blood of Christ, and welcome the forgiveness of His grace to wash out all remaining “karma. Hard things in the past which you can’t erase, accept with radiant acquiescence because they at least helped to turn you to God. Then train your lens upon the future and what a future you shall see! And how do you do that? Just refer to your Divine Plan and you will see your future coming to greet you.

We have spent a long time in the fifth dimension where the “blueprints” for most of our important guidance can be found. And now for confirmation of these plans move into the sixth dimension and gather your choice spiritual friends around you. Step into the silence around the pool of Siloam, and when the angel ruffles the water let the first one in give his impression. If the others agree wit him, you can have confidence that the guidance is right. But here the key word is agree. It is the key that Jesus gave us in His mighty promise, “When two or three agree, anything they shall ask will be done for them of the Father.” You must have absolute oneness in the group. Get still. Then when you drop all inhibitions, all opinions, all wishful thinking, and try to think only of God and of the love that binds you all together in harmony, your guidance can come clear and true. Put your problems in the form of a question — just one, and know that the answer resides in the question as the plant resides in the seed. Plant the question in loving soil and the answer may leap forth.

If the group is not harmonious enough or clear enough ask some close kindred soul to join you alone in prayer. Sometimes the best guidance of all comes through asking a child between four and seven, the age when he is least inhibited and least opinionated, and you will be amazed at the wisdom of his answer.

And now you are ready to enter into the seventh dimension, coming into the presence of God himself. He has been reaching you in all the lower dimensions — indeed most of us get his messages easiest when they are “stepped down” to us through a number of gradations, — in primer-size letters that can be read on the lower levels. But once in his presence all our needs can be solved.

On the seventh dimension one naturally turns to God’s Holy Book. There we find him as our teacher, our partner, our guide, and the light upon our path. There we can lean back utterly upon the promises in his Holy Word. Psalm 32:8 gives us God as a Teacher: “I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go.” Proverbs 3:6 gives us God as a Partner: “In all thy ways acknowledge him and he shall direct thy paths.” Then Isaiah 58:11 gives us God as our Guide: “And the Lord shall guide thee continually and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones; and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.” John 8:12 gives him as a Light: “I am the light of the world.” Yes, he is a lamp unto our feet.

The key word in the seventh dimension is Ease. Let go and let God. Do things effortlessly, easily. Let your mind work conversationally; talk it over with God aloud, but quietly. Ask him to use your lips and talk to you. Or sit down and write your question and then when the Voice within speaks, write the answer that comes through naturally and easily.

Sometimes God uses our mind to bring us thoughts that we would not otherwise think, thoughts that intuitively tell us whether it would be foolish to go on, or to stay behind. Sometimes he uses our emotions, and when we are in tune with him we can accept it as guidance not to undertake a task when a great depression or abhorrence comes to us every time we consider taking it. If peace and happiness descend upon us every time we turn to another solution, we can accept that, too, as guidance. All these thoughts and all these different feelings should be listened to, as, other things being equal, they are the very Voice of God trying to get through to us.

When you ask the Lord for guidance and have a sense of peace you may know that God has planned it. There are fourteen places in the Bible that describe peace as the gift of God. When you get that peace, then you will know you have made the contact. Then you can know that all will be well.

 

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CHAPTER XV
Inspiration

I HAVE often told my students that the power that runs all the machinery of the world’is produced by falling water. No struggle, no effort, it just falls. But in order to fall it has first to surrender itself to the sun and be drawn up. The power that is created by the waterfalls comes from water that has been drawn up to a higher altitude level by the sun direct. The power created by the water in the average factory comes from water lifted through the combustion of coal or gas (in other words “canned” or “bottled” sunshine) to a higher temperature level in the boiler and as it descends to a lower temperature level in the generator, the power is produced.

The higher up the water is drawn, I told my students, the greater the power that is produced. In the same way, the higher you rise and the more effortlessly you go about your creative writing and speaking, the more powerful your message will be.

And then I proceed to cite the levels.

If you remain in the third dimension and write your theme from a sense of duty, your only object being to win an A or B grade, your theme will be a worthy contribution for the waste basket. If you can rise to the fourth dimension and get a real desire to write you may have something deserving attention. If you rise still higher and discover a vital, eternal truth awaiting you in the fifth dimension, you will at last have something worth while to write about. This discovery flowing down from this height will awaken your desire in the fourth dimension to bring it into the finest expression you know how in the third dimension.

But if you rise still higher, into the realm of love and harmony in the sixth dimension, and make that your starting point, you will find that through the perfect orchestration of the love and joy in this high fellowship, many vital and eternal truths will be born out of this blessed communion of souls. Finally, if you rise to the point where you can say, Lord, you take this pencil and write this message through my hand, the greatest inspiration of all will come to you.

And so I found that if I had my writing class begin with a period of silence wherein each in his own way mounted into the seventh dimension and made contact with the God of all life, and if I took pains to see that loyal love and good will prevailed among the members in the sixth dimension and if I helped stimulate them to find an eternal truth in the fifth dimension, the writing improved fifty percent.

One day, a student of mine, Marion Daily, who was to represent Macalester College in a national extemporaneous speaking contest where there were to be 100 contestants, came to me for advice. Instead of telling her how to gather material, how to organize it, how to express it — all valuable enough in the third dimension — I lifted her at once into the sixth dimension. “When you get up to speak, I said, “know that everybody there loves you. Look out upon them and love them all and make it your sole objective to make them all happy.”

When she was fortunate enough to reach the finals and the subjects were drawn, two of the competing girls burst into tears. She cheered one successfully but the other said, “I drew a topic I don’t know anything about.” “I know a lot about that,” said Marion, “let me help you outline your talk.”

After spending half the hour helping others, she turned to prepare her own speech. When she came to speak, she gave no thought to winning the prize; she gave all her efforts to loving the people and making everybody happy. She succeeded so well in making the five judges happy that they gave her first prize.

And so my students discovered that any creative work done on the third dimension ended up in the waste basket, and not until they rose into the fourth dimension did they find themselves above the field of drudgery and in the realm where true art begins. Instead of three dimensional Dynamic Symmetry of command and reluctant obedience they had reached the fourth dimensional realm where the Dynamic Symmetry of earnest desire finds its balance in confident relinquishment. A successful sculptor gave a perfect illustration of this:

“When I am given a commission from an owner of a large estate for a statue, I plant the desire to bring this forth in appropriateness and beauty in the back of my mind, and then I go off and leave it perhaps for weeks, giving no thought to it whatever; that is, no conscious thought. Then one day the owner of the estate calls me and asks how I am getting on. Then I stretch out under a tree with my head in the shade and my feet in the sun, and get very quiet to see what comes through. And, sure enough, there gradually unfolds the perfect figure as I want it brought forth. Then I get my clay and start working with zeal and enthusiasm and keep working till the statue is done.”

Indeed this alternation of desire and relinquishment, followed by the Dynamic Symmetry produced by the pendulum swing of stillness and enthusiasm, is the key to the skill of all natural born artists. When Wordsworth beheld a field of daffodils he planted the desire to record it in verse. He then relinquished it to do other things but deep down in his sub-conscious mind the desire abode awaiting its time:

“For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye,
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.”

Then one day sitting in his garden following a period of deep quiet the poem would burst upon him almost in its entirety and with breathless enthusiasm he would put it upon paper to bring happiness to people for all time.

The pendulum swing on the fourth dimension is the perfect Dynamic Symmetry by which the perfect work of art all ready and waiting on the fifth dimension comes through. The Dynamic Symmetry on the fifth dimension can be summed up in the confident faith expressed through unhurried patience and peace of such men as Michelangelo, Rodin, and Borglum who claimed that all they had to do was to cut away the clay that didn’t belong, the statue was already there.

When one rises to the sixth dimension the Dynamic Symmetry takes on the high voltage of an audience who loves the speaker, eager to hear his message, and a speaker who loves his audience, eager to fill their need. Such a combination releases more creative power than anything else under heaven itself.

Ruskin’s mother’s pride and interest in her son, in spite of all the “smother-love” attached to it, undoubtedly did more to bring forth his genius than all the professors at Oxford combined. The Brownings’ poetry flowered in the light of their love. The covers of this book could not contain all the names of great men whose powers were brought to fruition through the warmth of another’s deep interest and love. I have often explained how my own flow of books in these later years, at the rate of a book a year, was really drawn out by the loyal friends who attend my Plymouth Bible Class in winter and my Camps Farthest Out in the summer. Instead of being interruptions to the writings of my books, the class and the camps are the actual creators of my books.

Finally we come to the highest dimension to which man can rise — Union with the Father. Work produced on this level will never die. The reason why the Holy Scriptures have outlived all other literature is because the Hand of God was behind the men who wrote them. The Epics of Homer and Virgil have the mark of permanence because they opened with invocations to the Muses who were the guardians of the Holy Spirit in those days. The Book of Job and the book of Faust both have their opening scenes in heaven and both — one written in ancient, and the other in modern times — will live forever.

So I say to all who would create anything in this world, whether it be a speech or a happy home, rise up as high as you can and then fall effortlessly over the situation. The way to overcome any problem in life is to come up over it. Jesus puts this truth in matchless words, “Seek first the Kingdom of Heaven and its righteousness and all these things will be added unto you.”

And what will you find in the Kingdom? Love! And what is Love? Here is the answer in the form of a prayer, the mere repetition of which will bring inspiration to anyone doing creative work:

Our Heavenly Father,
We know that Love is perfect understanding,
For Love is the light which makes all things clear,
For Love is the giving up of self to the Larger Self,
So that the Larger Self pours through us as through a channel,
And this activity of Love is perfect Wisdom, is perfect Understanding,
Bringing perfect Inspiration, perfect Peace, perfect Joy.
When the Larger Self speaks, all knowledge, past, present, and to come,
Speaks through us without check and without limit,
For that which is in part is passed away,
And that which is perfect is come.
For man, standing rooted in eternal Love, relaxed to its eternal harmonies,
Makes of himself a conch
Through which the music of the spheres finds voice and utterance,
And man, divested of self and expressing Thee,
Stands, witness to Thine imperishable Glory.1

  1. The Soul’s Sincere Desire, Glenn Clark, Little Brown & Co., Boston.

 

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CHAPTER XVI
Finances

YOU WILL find nine-tenths of the people of the world who live in the third dimension expending most of their energy striving for better jobs, greater economic security, and more outstanding financial success. Toward this security and success they are using all kinds of techniques and marshalling all their mental and moral and physical attributes to achieve their ends.

“The secret of success is industry” said Benjamin Franklin; “frugality,” said Calvin Coolidge; “clever advertising,” said Bruce Barton, and so it goes. When a business is “sick” an efficiency expert is brought in. He investigates to see if there is too large a payroll, or too many untrained or inefficient workers, or if they are using inferior materials, or are not catering to the right people. Books on how to win success in business are legion.

Our economic order on the third dimension can be likened unto an oil field filled with pumps. When oil is beneath the ground all we do is sink a shaft. But as one rides through the oil fields he sees something else besides the shaft, something that looks like a see-saw in constant rhythmic motion. That completes the picture. Make contact with the source and fall into harmonious balanced rhythmic action and the hidden riches become available for us.

Look at the fulcrum on which a teeter-totter is based. The fulcrum does not move no matter how much the children seated on the ends of the teeter-totter rise and fall. As a matter of fact, nothing is either gained or lost by this motion. As far as one end of the board goes up, the other goes down. The equilibrium is never really disturbed, but the children on the ends of the teeter-totter get a lot of fun out of it.

Let us put a bank, with its deposits of gold, in place of the fulcrum. Let the teeter-totter consist of a man coming to take money from the bank. But he really takes nothing; he does not break the equilibrium. He replaces every cent he takes out with an equal sum in the form of what is called “collateral.” After many months he returns the money he borrowed and withdraws his collateral. Nothing has really happened to the fulcrum but in the meantime a hundred new homes have gone up.

So while nothing happens at the central fulcrum, the fact that the fulcrum existed, the very fact that it did nothing but remained itself, has in the first of these instances, led to making two children happy, and in the other to making many people happy.

When we step into the fourth dimension we don’t have to locate any particular and definite source of wealth in the ground or in the bank. Just as Dynamic Symmetry in the material realm is demonstrated by negatively charged electrons and the correspondingly positively charged protons, each seeking and finding each other, so Dynamic Symmetry in the financial field is illustrated by the unfailing way in which our needs are met when we have put ourselves sufficiently “on the beam” to attract supply from sources we know not of.

When my sister, who lived in California, had two houses for sale and no buyers, I told her of this law and suggested that we pray, not for the sale of the houses, but that the persons wanting such homes, even though they might be 3,000 miles away would be made happy by the finding of them. The next day a friend of mine who lived three thousand miles away and who was considering moving to California asked if I could help him find a couple of cottages he could buy in that neighborhood. They were exactly what he wanted and both parties were made happy.

Another “pump” in the fourth dimension is a sincere desire and a humble relinquishment. The trouble with most of us is that we press down too hard on desire and fail completely on relinquishment. Desire is only one prong of Dynamic Symmetry. If we depended upon that alone, the world would get as out of balance as a teeter-totter with a child on only one end of it. Desire is the Rhythm end of this pumping process; relinquishment is the Alignment end. To want a thing very much and yet be willing to relinquish it if the Lord has some better plan, is the perfect attitude of mind to draw to you that which belongs to you.

When I desired an automobile for my wife and children to get out into the beautiful country on summer days but found I lacked the money to buy one, I recalled how my little girl had dug a well in the seashore sand and had waited patiently for the tides to come in and fill it for her. My wife and I laid our need for money before the Lord and told him that we felt sure that if it were a real “well” the tides of his supply could fill it for us, but if it were only an imaginary one, we would not expect his tides to fill it. In other words, we relinquished our seeming need entirely into his hands to decide whether it were real or not. This perfect balance of desire and relinquishment released the power that drew the exact sum we needed within the next ten days.

When we step into the fifth dimension we reach the place where all that belongs to us is already prepared and waiting. All we need do is produce our credentials and claim it. Anything that brings you happiness and peace, and hurts no one else, belongs to you. Nuts were made for squirrels. They have a perfect right to gather them. A dog or rabbit would be entirely out of his territory claiming nuts. The Lord allocates his gifts to those they actually belong to, and his distribution is guided and directed by the peace in the hearts of those to whom they belong.

The conventional way of drawing your own to you is to tithe. The surest way to draw to you that which is yours is to take steps towards giving others that which is theirs. Giving unto God that which is his opens the door for him to give you that which is yours. The Hebrew people were the ones who started tithing and became in their day the richest race in the world. The Mormon Church followed suit and has become the most opulent church of modern times. No member of the Mormon community has ever had to go on relief. They claim that every Mormon who has tithed willingly has prospered. Silent Unity, the Prayer Center of the Unity School of Christianity, receives thousands of calls for prayer every day, and they report that never has a tither asked for prayer for supply.

Matthias Baldwin, founder of the great locomotive works, made it his practice to set aside one-tenth of the earnings of the company to be used for religious and educational purposes. At one time his firm was encountering tremendous financial difficulties. He had no funds left to tithe with, so he made out notes signed by himself, which he later redeemed, all of which were paid. During this crisis his associates asked him to stop his practice of tithing, but he cried, “Why, that is my one safe investment.”

A man who tithes said to me one day, “You can beat the bank of Monte Carlo once in a while but you can never beat the bank of God and his law. As ye give ye shall receive. It gives forth of its riches only to those who obey the law.”

Another way of expressing the Dynamic Symmetry of the fifth dimension is the Spirit of Opulence balanced by the Spirit of Service. This is the teeter-totter that “pumps” wealth to people faster than anything else. Gold seems to be drawn to some people as iron is drawn to a magnet. These people love money and all the lovely things money can buy, but they also love to bless and help others with their money and let it serve others in every way they can. Love of money alone can close the door against its coming unless your other door is open for giving it forth to bless others; and he who gives lavishly without due appreciation of the value of what he gives is likely to die a pauper.

If I picked out any particular company that illustrated this combination I could think of no better one than International Business Machines, and no clearer statement of it than the credo of Thomas J. Watson:

“We must give more than we get. I always get much more than I give. That is because I can give only what is within me, one single man, whereas I can receive what all other men have to give. All of our dealings with men must be mutually beneficial. They must be balanced. Both sides of a transaction must give happiness, not just one side. If you think you have the best of a deal with any man go think it over. If you conclude that he has not benefited equally with you then you have surely gotten the worst of the deal. If, in my dealings with men I lose money that is nothing; but if I gain money and lose a friend then I have lost heavily and I will run fast to catch his friendship and bring it back. If you hurt anyone you hurt everyone, therefore, if you help anyone you help uplift the whole human race.”

On pages 228=231 of my autobiography, A Man’s Reach, I give two striking examples of the working of this law. My booklet, The Secret Power in Business, has many more. Here are a few additional ones:

One day a man came into my office. “I am putting all my fortune,” he said, “into constructing a factory to develop a new invention but the patents have been delayed in coming through. Now, just when we are ready to go into production we find another company has stolen our secret and secured the patents before me. I stand to lose all.”

“The invention belongs to you?” I asked.

“Yes, but I don’t know what a court of law will do.”

“Remember this,” I continued, “your own cannot be taken from you. I am going to ask you to memorize the first, third and last stanzas of John Burroughs’ ‘My Own Shall Come to Me.’ Hold fast to that truth and I can pray for you with power.”

Within a year his problem was solved and the sole rights for marketing this product in America and Europe were granted to him.

One day a college student came into my room. “Your philosophy didn’t work last night, Professor. I was held up by a highwayman and my watch was taken from me.” So, my philosophy didn’t work? Well, that was just too bad. But I knew Jesus’ philosophy would work. I had told this chap to have no fear — nothing that really belonged to him could ever be taken from him. A week later he came into my room and sank back into a chair.

“I think I should tell you something, Prof. My father three years ago found that watch in the back seat of a taxi. He brought it home and instead of advertising it in the Lost and Found column of the St. Paul paper, he finally listed it in a little paper of South St. Paul seen by no one but a few cattle men. So I guess the watch didn’t really belong to me.”

So Jesus’ philosophy worked after all, which reminds me to give my readers this caution: if any of you are holding anything, from watches to real estate, that doesn’t honestly belong to you, you had better lock your house very carefully every night, and keep all your contracts in burglar-proof safes. If all you possess is what you have honestly earned and truly deserve, you can leave your doors unlocked and keep your valuable papers in your business desk.

When we step into the sixth dimension we are where orchestration of love and harmony and good will abound. In that atmosphere any company that has a worthy product will succeed. Let me illustrate:

My father was manager of three companies, one after the other. The first thing he did in each case was to invite in the agents from all over the state and tell them, “We plan to be one well related family, and we want, above everything else, to share with each other a spirit of good will and harmony.” In each case the agents went out and in one year doubled the business of the company.

I happen to know that the same spirit was created in his companies by my friend, Ralph Budd, as president, first of the Great Northern and later of the Burlington. He trained more railroad presidents than any man who ever lived, one of whom was his own son, John. All of them caught this gift of putting harmony and team work into everything they did. One of them who was a close friend of mine, Al Williams, was president in succession of Western Indiana Railroad, Lehigh Railroad, Western Union Telegraph Company and Westinghouse Air Brake Company, and into all of these companies brought the same spirit of harmony with the same outstanding success.

This law of Dynamic Symmetry on the sixth dimension has been put into words in a remarkable way again in the credo of Thomas J. Watson,

“In all the seventy-nine countries where this business operates, we are all one brotherhood. We have but one thought, one creed — mutual helpfulness to each other. We feel that brotherhood in our very handshake. It is real. Our very language is a universal one. We all understand each other, no matter what our tongue. We want that friendliness to reach out into every other business. This business is a mountain of good thoughts piled one upon the other. If they are all good thoughts, our business will endure forever.”

When we enter the seventh dimension we are in the presence of God. Many business houses would not feel at home in this rarefied atmosphere. But those that do have the seeds of permanence in them.

Arthur Nash took the Lord as his Senior Partner and his business prospered. Le Torneau took the Lord as his major partner so completely that he keeps only a tithe for his personal expenses and gives the nine-tenths to the Lord’s work. Marshall Field never advertised in the Sunday papers and his business outgrew all the other businesses of its kind in the world. George Dayton of Minneapolis decided against advertising in the Sunday papers and his department store grew from the smallest to the greatest in the Northwest. J. C. Penney, Vash Young and scores of others I can name were outstanding examples of men who put God first. George Muller started his orphanages with no money but with such implicit faith in Jesus’ promise that what one asks in the inner room with the door closed will come to him openly, that he never requested a penny from any man, and his prayers to God offered in secret brought seven million dollars. No wonder the Bristol Orphanages became the greatest in the world.

Once my friend, Harvey Hill, came to me with one of the most audacious proposals I ever heard.

“Americans don’t know how popular religion can be made if people are offered the very best. In Winnipeg where I have often been they have the daring to rent an immense hall and bring the greatest spiritual leaders from all over the country, sell tickets and after a week of packed meetings they pay all expenses and have a sum to give the City Council of Churches besides. If you will choose seven praying people to undergird me with prayer, I will undertake to put on a Crusade for Christ such as Minneapolis has never seen.”

“Do you have any money in case you fail?” I asked.

“Not a cent. Only my faith in God.”

I tried to dissuade him from it, but he went straight ahead with a program that would entail the expenditure of $3,000. I did, however, gather seven God-inspired souls to meet with me once a week in prayer for God to bless the mission.

My premonition that Americans will gladly buy season tickets for football but not for religion turned out to be sound. The only time the 2,000 seats were all sold was the night George Washington Carver spoke. When the Crusade was over there was a $1,200 debt. I called my prayer group together.

“We are a prayer committee and under no responsibility to undergird this crusade with money. But I have found the one point where religious leaders can hurt the cause of religion seriously is by lack of integrity about money. I suggest that we seven take some steps to wipe out this debt right now. I for one will gladly subscribe $300 from my professor’s salary, and as the Koronis Camp Farthest Out has over $300 balance from last summer, I shall ask the treasurer to give $250 of that to this cause.”

Immediately George Wheaton, the hardware man, said, “I will give $100,” and C. H. Andrews, the grain man, said, “I will give $100,” and Stella Wood, director of Miss Wood’s School, said, “I will give $100,” and in ten minutes the entire sum was raised.

I left the meeting and went to the college just as Mr. Frederick Bigelow, president of the Board of Trustees, was coming out. Professor Hall, the registrar, remarked as I entered the door, “Mr. Bigelow just now said that he never had a happier time in the world than the past hour sitting in that chair signing his name.”

In my postoffice box I saw a colored slip of paper. A check for $300, a personal gift from Mr. Bigelow. I glanced at the boxes of the other fifty teachers. A slip in every box! How could Mr. Bigelow do it? Why did he do it? Did my gift act as a vortex to draw all these gifts from him? If it did, just think of the vast prosperity his gifts in turn would bring to him!

That evening a lawyer friend of mine called on me. “My aunt, Mrs. Pomroy, will not be at the camp this coming summer. She is on her death-bed. But you know how full of outgiving joy she is. Well, she wants to have the fun of giving away her money before she dies. So she sends this check for $250 for the Camp Farthest Out.” — I gasped. Exactly the sum I had promised to give from the Camp! “And this other check for $250 she wants to give to your Plymouth Bible Class.”

As I went to my Bible Class the following Sunday my heart was full. I was walking in the Kingdom of Heaven. Yes, I was truly experiencing the Seventh Dimension. At the door of the class Mr. Wheaton met me.

“Something strange happened this week,” he said. “A lawyer came to me from New York. ‘I make my living finding lost money,’ he told me. ‘The receiver pays me half. Did you know you have $100 in the Citizens Bank?’ I told him I never deposited a cent there in my life. He said, ‘Come and see.’ The cashier looked through his books and said, ‘You have $100 deposited here 35 years ago.’ I wouldn’t believe it. He explained that it was originally in the American Bank. I told him I had deposited my savings as a paper boy in that bank long ago. ‘But,’ I said, ‘it failed!’ ‘No,’ he replied, ‘it didn’t fail. Our bank absorbed it!’ ” He handed Mr. Wheaton a check for fifty dollars and at his request the other half to the lawyer and whispered to him to return after seeing the lawyer off. When he returned the cashier was writing out another check for $83.00. “This is the interest,” he said.

A woman so long indebted to Stella Wood that she had written it off her books brought her $100, and Mr. Andrews story would take a chapter in itself. His “returns” ran up in the thousands.

Things like this don’t happen every day. Why did it happen in this case?

I think it was because everything pertaining to this Crusade was in the seventh dimension. A Crusade for Christ, a committee of unseen folks in an inner room, the shouldering of a debt to help a cause outside the givers — a daring attempt to bring the Spirit of Christ to a great city — and a clear cut case where the giving was without any expectation of reward. We let go of our money — not as an investment but as an adventure with God. Our act of unselfishness, without expectation of reward of any kind, to a cause the sole object of which was to bring folks to God, stepped us right into the treasure hold of God Himself. As fast as we poured out, God poured in.

There are few adventures that bring such joy to the giver. Try it and feel the bliss of union with your Master.

When we rise into the seventh dimension and accept our place as a Son of God we find we are surrounded by great riches. Then we discover that all the fruits and sweets the world has ever grown or man has made for man to eat are ours, and all the money ever minted, and all the pictures ever painted, and all the books ever written.

“Show me your fruits,” someone may say. “Show me your money, show me your pictures, show me your books.” Ah, friend, a million servants are taking care of these fruits and books and pictures for us. We would not want to be weighted down by the care of them. As fast as we need them, in perfect order and in perfect sequence, according to our needs, they come to us. A thousand men are digging gold out of the hills, other thousands are minting the gold for us. Bankers are taking care of it or us, taking care of it and giving it out to people who need it to pay us in exchange for services we may render them from time to time. The order and sequence that God has arranged for this money to come to us is according to the measure of service we render. Sometimes the money does not come in as large a measure as the service we render. Then we rejoice and are exceeding glad, for we know that we are having treasure stored up for us in Heaven, where “neither moth nor rust doth corrupt and where thieves do not break through and steal.” Sometimes it comes faster and in greater measure than the service we render. Then we are humble and pray that our greed shall not disarrange the perfect schedule of the Master Planner and lead us to miss some of His beautiful scenery and some of His happiness and perfect joy.

But if we trust all to God and stay our mind wholly on Him, then all things come to us in perfect order and in perfect sequence, and our mind is kept in perfect peace, because we trust in Him. Then the world becomes one vast home where all are our brothers and sisters, and our loving Father watches over us carefully to see that all our needs are filled.

 

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CHAPTER XVII
Statesmanship

THE HISTORY of the world has been for the most part a history of war. The art of statescraft has been largely an art of warcraft. The philosophy of nations has perverted the slogan “the survival of the fittest” to mean the survival of the best fighters — those who are the most adept in destroying the lives of others.

But every field of history contradicts the wisdom of this. Just as the dinosaur, saber-toothed tiger and cave bear have become extinct, and the gorillas, grizzly bears, lions and tigers are being supplanted by helpless cattle and sheep, so the nations who waxed great through the wielding of swords and spears are being replaced by nations who cooperate and serve. What were the conquering nations in ancient times? Egypt, Assyria and Babylon. What do they amount to now, and where are the mighty Medes and Persians? Who trembles today before the tramp of Macedonian phalanx “and the march of the Roman Legions”? Spain no longer dominates “the Spanish Main,” and Britain is no longer “mistress of the seas.”

The great armies of Napoleon under the mightiest general that ever lived succeeded in only one thing — bringing France into a period of decadence from which she has never emerged. Half a million magnificent men, tall and strong, marched with Napoleon to Moscow and only twenty thousand came back. The French race today is two inches shorter than one hundred and fifty years ago.

The only “fighting nations” that survive are Britain and Germany, and one is a shambles and the other a soft target for any atomic bomb that comes its way. Hitler has done for Germany what Napoleon did for France.

The United States of Soviet Russia and the United States of America have survived as the strongest fighting nations today because they have rarely used their fighting strength except in self defense. But unless these two nations now rise above the jungle methods of imposing their ideologies upon the world, their lights, too, will go out. The survival of the fittest is still the slogan the nations live by, but it will remain a snare and a delusion leading them to destruction unless the word fittest is properly redefined, not as the fighters, but the lovers, not those who combat but those who cooperate, not the proud but the meek. Jesus gave the best formula for survival ever given when he said, “The meek shall inherit the earth.”

Which will be the great nations one hundred years from now? It doesn’t take a prophet of the fourth dimension, or a seer of the fifth, or a sage of the sixth, or a saint of the seventh to prophesy that they will be China and India, the two meekest and mildest nations of the past-conquered, trampled on and dismembered by all the powers that did business with them. They will not conquer the earth, mind you, but inherit it; like a ripe plum it will fall gently into their laps after all the fighting ends and the shouting dies away. Whether the United States survives among the leaders depends upon two things a Can we be meek enough? Can we serve enough?

When we rise from the second dimension of war, where America has always given a good account of herself, to the third dimension of diplomacy, our government has been revealed as a comparative novice at that game. At Yalta and Potsdam and practically everywhere we pitted wits against better equipped foes.

What the United States needs right now is a Board of Strategy that can match the strategy that Russia has been using against us. She has been out-maneuvering us on every level.

For one hundred years, Great Britain was a dominant power in the world. She perfected a strategy that has never been equalled before or since, until now Russia is using it with remarkable skill. The secret of Britain’s strategy was to keep the two powers that were next to her in strength in constant antagonism or conflict with each other, while she rode safely on the crest of the wave.

Today Russia is afraid of only two nations: one is the United States and the other is China. Due to China’s racial background, totally different from Russia’s, and her centuries under the Confucian social system rooted in the family and totally opposed to Marxian collectivism, and the strategic location as the leader of all of Asia, Russia has more actual grounds for fear against China than she has against us. In short, due to her location and her resources, and her needs, China is in most respects a natural rival of Russia and a natural ally of the United States. If we ever got together, Russian strategy would fail. Her game is to play us off against each other and that she has cleverly proceeded to do. Through Machiavellian tactics Russia got us involved with China in a war which neither of us, left to ourselves, would have chosen. As two friendly Kilkenny cats, when their tails are tied together over a wire, claw until only a strip of fur remains, so all Russia had to do was to tie China and the United States together over the line known as the 38th parallel and then sit by and watch the “fun.”

Long ago our War Department deduced from the experience of the western “gun-toters, that the nation which can get the draw upon its opponent has half won the war. This explains our elaborate organized attempts to “read the mind” of the enemy: first in the field of espionage; second, through air reconnaissance; and third, through radar. But we have not yet explored the fourth method: mental telepathy. Since Duke University has conclusively proved that telepathy exists, why cannot our government gather a few persons who possess this gift in an especially high degree and use them as the King of Israel used Elisha who informed him of every ambush the foe prepared for his troops before his men fell into their traps?

Let me illustrate how the debacle of Pearl Harbor might have been prevented: A few days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, which occurred at dawn, Hawaii time, but a little after high noon midwestern time, a woman, highly respected and very prominent in her little Minnesota town, called upon me in St. Paul.

“I am suffering under a guilt consciousness, a terrible sense of remorse over an amazing experience that came to me on Sunday morning, the 7th of December. When I awoke a voice out of the ether spoke distinctly to me, ‘Wire the White House and cable Honolulu that Hawaii is in imminent danger!’ I had never had an experience like that and the whole thing confused me greatly. Was it an authentic warning or was there something queer about me? I didn’t want people to think me a crack-pot. As the morning wore on it gave me no rest. At ten o’clock I felt I must consult someone I could trust, and I thought of you as one who might interpret what this meant. Then I remembered you had a Bible Class at ten and would probably be in church at eleven. I waited till twelve. Suddenly at noon the same voice came again, ‘Too late to wire the White House. Cable Honolulu danger is at hand.’ It seemed so absurd for little me to cable a message like this clear to Honolulu, so I remained in this state of confusion and inaction until, a little after one I turned on the radio, and the room was suddenly filled with the excited voice of some unknown announcer screaming to the world the terrible things taking place that very hour at Pearl Harbor. Do you think this disaster could have been averted had I acted on that first warning in time? Please, please, tell me, Dr. Clark.”

Her anguish was pitiable. But I was able to bring a measure of peace to her when I assured her that human understanding at this time is so adolescent, if not actually infantile, along these lines, that any cables or telegrams she might have sent would in nine chances out of ten, have been cast into a wastebasket as the ravings of a crack-brained fanatic.

Eight years later my conclusion was verified when I visited Hawaii and discovered how even a more conventional warning of danger had been spurned by those in charge. A private soldier who was an amateur radio enthusiast kept phoning the army radio office, which had ceased operating for the night, that he was catching sounds of alien planes approaching. To every call he sent, he received the same answer, “Go sleep off your drunk.” What would they have done to such a starry-eyed cablegram as this lady would have sent them? Isn’t it time we began to throw other things into the wastebasket besides messages from heaven?

There are some thinking folk who believe that before the Pearl Harbor attack the Japanese Board of Strategy-engaged a team of Buddhist priests especially skilled in Yogi technique of the fourth dimension to concentrate “black magic” or hypnotic powers upon the American Intelligence Department in Hawaii so powerfully as to numb them against detecting signs of the coming attack.

Greater protection than the telepathic vibrations of the fourth dimension, however, would be the clairvoyant gifts of actual divination of coming events long before their occurrence. This belongs to the field of the fifth dimension. As a matter of fact all the prophets of Israel who followed Elisha foresaw, through their fifth dimensional lens, doom and captivity coming upon Israel unless their nation stepped up into the sixth dimension and ceased their exploitation of the poor. As the nation failed to heed their warning it ran head-on into the ruin prophesied for it. Today the prophecy of doom is the same and today the nations are taking no more heed than Israel did of old. They are taking no steps into the higher dimensions as commanded. The more frightened the free enterprise countries get, the more frantically they concentrate on lower dimensions and the less on higher. Meanwhile the Russians have perfected a technique of forging poverty and insecurity into a weapon of aggression wherever they please. That seems to be the only weapon they need to wield to create war on any front where human misery opens the way. The nations where forms of cooperative effort have been adopted — Britain, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark — permitting emphasis upon production for use more than production for profit, are the only European nations that have no danger of communism within their own borders today. In contrast to these, Italy, Greece, and France, where the masses are exploited, can be taken by Stalin over the telephone. The same is true of the under-privileged nations of Asia. Most of the billions of dollars the United States has sent to Europe has been spent on arms and most of the remainder has fallen into the hands of the “haves” instead of the “have-nots.” When I went to Europe in 1948 I found that was especially true in Greece, Italy and France.

A committee our government sent to the Philippines reports the islands are hot-beds of exploitation and graft. Neither the Philippine government nor ours is doing anything about it. The same was the case in Nationalist China. Some say the Rhee government in Korea was not too good. Certainly it is true of Indonesia and Indo-China. We are a Christian nation, and yet in facing these and other major crisis in the past fifty years we have not once used the Christ method to meet them. Gandhi, seeing our apostasy, chose to remain outside a religion which had so little faith in its Founder’s teaching; instead he chose to follow the Founder without taking His name:

“Here was a man (Gandhi),” writes E. Stanley Jones, “in loincloth and with a lathee (bamboo stick) going out to do battle with the greatest empire that ever existed and promising not to return until independence had been gained. Never were two sides more unequally matched. But here was something more than a little man and a stick. Here was the embodiment of an idea; he would match his capacity to suffer agams the other’s capacity to inflict the suffering, his soul-force against physical force; he would not hate but he would not obey, and he would wear down all resistance by an infinite capacity to take it. Here was a technique that had been applied here and there in history, but never applied to a problem on the scale of nothing less than the freedom of one-fifth of the human race. The stakes were immense, and the cards seemed stacked against him. How could he win? But we soon began to see the immense power of an embodied idea. The British were baffled. This was illustrated to me when a burly Irish military officer said to me: If only they’d fight with weapons we’d understand, we would show them something, but this. . . .’”1

Within this year I am writing, a movement started in Italy gives us hope that even the Christian nations may some day start applying the paradoxes of Jesus of the seventh dimension in the affairs of practical life. Indeed it is called the “upside down strike.” Between the Lines describes it as follows:

“It began when 120,000 impoverished peasants had unsuccessfully petitioned their wealthy landlord, who owned 60 square miles of rich farm lands, for higher wages. Instead of a stop-work strike the peasant leaders finally persuaded their associates to double their efforts, do much more work each day than was asked of them, extend their activities to road mending, fence repairing, restoration of old buildings, etc., a veritable onslaught of voluntary services and good works! All would see how eager the workers were to help their employer increase his wealth if he would be just and generous with them. He would have to yield in self defense! What a stupid fool and scoundrel he would be not to reward and capitalize upon such good helpers!

“The idea has also threatened to spread to some Italian industries — workers at the bench voluntarily putting in extra hours working through holidays, devising ways to increase production, going all over the factory to rebuild, restore, improve the property; to support their request for a raise. A picket line can be pilloried by strike-breakers, supported by sound trucks blaring out anti-union epithets; armed guards can drive strikers from the plant; even the militia can be called out. But with this new idea, what on earth could a boss do?

“Let us suppose that this principle were applied to the international scene; instead of all the invectives we are hurling at the Chinese communists, a great campaign might be organized to send great quantities of surplus food, clothing, medicine, to hungry destitute China. We could accompany these shipments with an overwhelming publicity campaign so all of China would know what we were doing. That is important, for then the Chinese communist leaders would not dare refuse our gifts for fear of a general revolt among the desperate Chinese masses — a revolt that would surely be forthcoming. Such a maneuver on our part would put a powerful squeeze on Russia s pretended friendship for China which had occasioned more of looting than of giving. The blow to Russia’s prestige would be staggering.

“Then suppose, just as the Moscow politburo began to dig out from under the diplomatic impasse created by our moves in China and Europe, we should launch a similar ‘upside down attack’ against Russia! For the Soviet has not yet recovered from the war’s destruction.

“All political scientists and historians would concede that such an effort would be the most devastating onslaught the Red Moscow tyranny has ever faced. There is not a diplomat who would not agree. Such an effort would change the face of the entire world outlook.

“But it would take something that our very rich country and its leaders so far apparently do not possess — a resource of hearts and mind and a creativeness and daring of intellect that our continued absorption in militarism does not permit.”

It doesn’t require a prophet of the fifth dimension to foresee what practically all the missionaries of Asia, from Frank Laubach and Stanley Jones down, have been proclaiming for the past twenty years, that unless the white races bring to an end their imperialistic exploitations of the dark races we shall be involved in a war in comparison with which World War II would appear a mere parlor game. But, as in the days of Jeremiah and Amos, the rulers listened to their war chiefs and disregarded their prophets. Instead of sowing love and reaping love, we sowed the wind and are reaping the whirlwind.

If the Christian Church had honestly accepted this forecast they would have started praying. If the political and economic leaders had accepted it and taken warning they would have ceased their exploitations of the dark races and instead established co-operative relationships for the benefit of all. As a result there would have been no war. Our governments by raising a billion dollars and sending missionaries, agriculturists, doctors and teachers to Asia, would have saved the expenditure of four hundred billions on war. Our churches, by training and sending one hundred thousand missionaries to carry the gospel of love, would have saved the world the need of giving fifty million of its young men in death.

Historical analysts report that America has never lost a war but she has never won a peace. It isn’t surprising. We have a Department of War. When “finis” is written on the period of war — what then? We haven’t a Department of Peace! This makes it clear to all lovers of peace that if we want war to end, the next step for our government to take is to establish a Department of Peace. The duties of such a department would be, first, to build a national foreign policy based on justice, friendliness and good will; and second, in case of war to plan in advance and put into effect a peace that would be fair, equable and lasting.

Knowing the long period of time that would be required to persuade a sufficient number of our law makers to bring about such an innovation in our national government and knowing that one act is worth a thousand words when the act is in accord with the will of God, a group of us have decided to set up a model Department of Peace and in a small way let the world see what a power such an instrument can be for good.

A hundred years before the Tennessee Valley Authority was established and the great work undertaken that carried prosperity to the citizens of many states, Colonel Lay of Birmingham, Alabama, got a conception of the wealth that could be brought to his native state if its water power, then going to waste, could be properly harnessed by the building of an immense dam. He spent a quarter of a century lobbying with the Government officials in Washington without avail, and only near the end of his life did he think of turning to private capital to bring his dream to pass.

With wars and rumors of wars impending all around us we cannot afford to wait a quarter of a century to have our dream come true. So without waiting for a reluctant Congress to act upon this suggestion, a great gathering of people meeting in Washington with Frank Laubach and me decided to profit by the experience of Colonel Lay and try to enlist the private capital of interested individuals (not the capital that is stored in banks but the capital that is stored in human hearts) and establish a Department of Peace right away.

In three large congregations in Washington in the opening days of the New Year of 1951, Frank Laubach and I decided to hold our own Congress because the other Congress was bewildered! There, in a great downtown church, we began to organize our own Department of Peace and in the words of Frank Laubach, “declare a War of Astonishing Kindness and plan an assault of unselfish deeds upon the world.”

One of our first undertakings was to create a Spiritual Embassy in our Capital City. To house our Department of Peace we purchased a building in Washington where people of all faiths and all denominations can come and pray for the government or arrange to meet with their senators and representatives at stated times. In this capacious building the leaders of the Washington prayer groups and others interested in prayer will meet at least once a month in a School of Prayer. Every time Congress convenes there will be someone in the gallery of both Senate and House praying for their deliberations to be guided by God. Each Congressman and Senator will also have a number of people especially appointed to concentrate in prayer for him. In innumerable ways this Spiritual Embassy Building will be made the center for focusing the prayers of all the praying groups of the nation upon the President and the leaders of Congress and the various departments of government. From it will be issued each month a News Sheet for Those Who Pray.

The Department of War carries on its functions by means of an Infantry Force, an Artillery Force and an Air Force. In place of the Air Force our Department of Peace will be supported by a Prayer Force; in place of an Artillery Force we shall have a Corps of Message Bringers; while the Infantry Force will be made up of earnest sincere Christian “foot soldiers” who are doing God’s work in their homes, factories or wherever they happen to be.

There are thousands of prayer groups all over the nation to furnish the Prayer Force, and one of the undersecretaries of the Department of Peace will supervise the formation of many more, keeping in touch with them all as far as possible so they may be enlisted for special service at any time of crisis. One important branch of this Prayer Force consists of the army of shut-ins, veterans in hospitals and people in old folks’ homes who have plenty of leisure. These will form one of the most vital battalions that can be found to pray with power for the peace of the world. We feel that just these untapped reserves when properly marshalled and brought into action might turn the tide of destiny toward peace.

Another under-secretary will keep track of the movement of the Message Bringers so that they will not all bombard the same town at the same time. By bringing these flying squadrons into action at the right time and the right place, city after city will be taken over by the forces of peace. At this point our Department is singularly well-equipped. We have a well-trained battalion of spiritual veterans with especial gifts for awakening folks to the deepening of the spiritual life, available to invade any territory wherever the need calls. Preceded by a barrage of prayer from hidden prayer nests all over the nation, these veteran campaigners can march into any city, coming in waves one after another until all its strategic centers are taken. Then in departing they can leave as a garrison a thriving Christ for Others Group capable of holding all the ground that was gained, and mopping up the areas where more work is needed. These city strongholds of Prayer furnish the landing fields for the Messengers of Light to get footholds in the cities and recruiting grounds of old and young for the camps and training schools.

As one important function of the War Department is to work out plans for co-operating with allies abroad for the winning of wars, our Department of Peace is cooperating with spiritual leaders in foreign lands for the winning of peace. Friends are planning several Religious Odyssey Tours for us to foreign lands where spiritual retreats with Christian groups will be interspersed between periods of sight-seeing, thus building bridges for international understanding and co-operation and friendship on the highest levels.

As the War Department has base camps for training their recruits, our Department of Peace is already conducting between twenty and thirty training camps carefully distributed in every section of the country throughout the months of spring, summer and fall where people can be trained in the disciplines and release to be found in the spiritual life, where they can experience its joy and contagion, and where they can learn to pray with power.

The War Department has a West Point as a year round institution for the training of officers, and the Peace Department has also acquired a “Spiritual West Point” for the training of spiritual leaders. West Point on the Hudson has no more attractive setting than our Koinonia Training Center, located in one of the most beautiful areas just outside of Baltimore. Those capable of reading the handwriting on the wall are aware that unless our nations turn to God we stand in imminent peril. I would urge young men and women who are considering a political, scientific or professional career to attend one of these training camps, or better still, to spend a year at Koinonia, the Spiritual West Point for training ambassadors of the Spirit.

Lest people get the notion that this concentration on the power of prayer and the power of love is some scatterbrained escapist philosophy of impractical dreamers we are undergirding this entire Department of Peace with the soundest foundations of scientific research. One of the most famous universities of America undertook a few years ago to prove beyond the question of doubt the reality of telepathy and the scientific laws underlying it. The scientists engaged in that research at this great university are now working hand in hand with our Department of Peace in exploring and determining the significance and reality of prayer and the great fundamental laws by which it works. Our training camps that deal with prayer are serving as their field laboratories for experimentation and field research. Having discovered, for instance, the law by which the Hopi Indians are able to bring rain through prayer, we are now exploring how the methods of Jesus when properly employed by a sufficient number of dedicated people might bring peace to the world through prayer.

As the War Department has its staff for publicity and propaganda, our Department of Peace is well-equipped for the distribution of literature of the spirit. A nationally known publishing house, publishing a quarterly magazine dedicated to this work, has a large force busy filling thousands of orders coming in each week from all over the country for books on prayer and the deepening of the spiritual life. Over half its profits go to the underwriting of this movement.

You are urged to enlist in this army which is going to work joyfully and rhythmically to develop a Department of Peace to balance (in dynamic symmetry) our government’s Department of War.1 When this Department of Peace has established itself a little longer and proved to the leaders of the nation what such activities could do for peace and national well being, the government may wish to assume some of the responsibility of carrying on a similar program but on a much larger scale. When national and individual efforts work hand in hand we can then feel assured that permanent peace shall actually come to this world.

  1. If interested write Department of Peace Religious Embassy Building, 1707 19th St. N. W. Washington, D. C.

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