Live Youthfully Now
by
Russell A. Kemp
Chapter 2
Scientific Use of Mind Forces
Water has force. It lifts and floats ships. Air, too, has force. It lifts airplanes. Steam has force. It lifts the lids on boiling pots.
Observing these forces, men studied them and experimented with them, learning how to control and direct them to their own uses. Science formulated laws of physics governing their behavior. Men learned how to cooperate with the laws of physics governing the use of these forces. As a result, we now have enough mastery over certain forces of nature to accomplish miracles of power and flight through space.
Yet compared to the intensive study of the laws of physics, there has been little study of the laws of metaphysics — that is, the laws governing man’s relationship to God through his own mind, and how man can direct and control the higher forces of mind. It seems fair to assume that if we were as familiar with the laws of metaphysics as we are with the laws of physics, we could do miracles with our minds, surpassing those we now accomplish by material means.
A number of metaphysical movements have studied the mind of man, and have concluded that mind is the connecting link between the creative power of God and man’s personal identity. That is, each one of us is directly related to (and connected with) the great creative forces of the cosmos, through our own mind.1 By thinking in certain ways, we can direct, employ, and release beneficent creative forces into our own mind and body.
These forces are governed by definite laws, just as are the forces of nature that we use with such startling results and success in the field of physics. When we understand the mental and spiritual laws governing the use of our mind forces and learn to obey them, we can work miracles in changing our mind and body for the better.
Generally speaking, all modern metaphysical schools of thought use two great principles to employ and direct the creative power of mind. These two modes of mind action are called affirmation and denial. Since this book recommends the use of affirmation and denial, and since the more understandingly we use these two great principles the better our results will be, let us make clear just what they are and what they do.
What is an affirmation? It can be thought of as a way of relating our own mind, through our own consciously directed thinking, to the creative and constructive forces of the universal Mind. In this way we direct and release those universal forces into our own “laboratory of consciousness” to produce certain desired results.
Affirmation and denial are but the channels through which the self-renewing life principle, or spirit in man, works.
An affirmation is first of all a statement of something which we want to have come true, in our mind or our body or in our life. In order for it to come true, the affirmation must express an idea that is already true of man, somehow or somewhere, or in some way. We cannot successfully affirm any idea that is untrue.
Consider one definition of affirmation: “To affirm anything is to assert positively that it is so, even in the face of contrary appearances.” This is true, but only partially true. It misses a vital element of affirmation.
There once was a rather timid student of flying who bothered his instructor with fearful questions. “What would we do if the engine stopped?” asked the student. “We’d just try to start it again,” replied the instructor. “But if it wouldn’t start?” persisted the student. “We’d have to jump and use our parachutes,” said the pilot. “But suppose my parachute didn’t open,” worried the student. To which the pilot, who was tired of his questions, snapped back, “Oh, just flap your arms and say, ‘I’m a dicky bird!’ ”
Now of course no matter how positively the student asserted that he was a bird in the face of appearances to the contrary that he was not, we know it would neither transform him into a bird, nor enable him to fly by waving his arms. The point is that although he would be asserting something positively in the face of contrary appearances, he would not be making an affirmation. For an affirmation must assert an idea that is already true of God, man, or the universe. And man is man; he is not a bird. He could not save himself by such a statement.
On the other hand, if in an emergency like this he said, “God is my help in every need,” he would be making an affirmation, for this statement is spiritually true. (There is at least one case on record of a man who fell thousands of feet from a plane and landed without losing his life.)
Affirmations can contradict appearances and yet be true.
Suppose a young man who has a good home and job with his wealthy father in New York gives them up to become a “hippie” in San Francisco. After a time he finds himself without money, and without a job. He cannot obtain work because of his appearance and mode of living. So he is reduced to begging and living by his wits. Sometimes he is thrown in jail. To all appearances he is in bad straits, for he has no money, no job, and no home.
But suppose that his father in New York still loves him. He has kept the son’s former job open for him. He even kept him on salary for two months after he left, as a form of vacation pay, and deposited the money in the bank for him. Although in San Francisco his son is broke and unemployed, in New York he has a good home, money in the bank, and a job, all waiting for him! Which are the real facts about the son: the San Francisco facts, or the New York facts? The facts as known to his father are of course the real facts. The son has only to become aware of them, he has only to get in touch with his father, to cancel out what to him are the grim facts of life as he sees them in San Francisco.
When the son learns about the job and the money which are already his in New York, he will probably say to himself: “I’m not broke. I’m not out of work. I have a good job and money in the bank in New York. I just have to get in touch with my father and claim them.”
In other words, all he really needs is to know the truth about himself, isn’t it? The process of becoming aware that he need not be bound by his present circumstances, that he possesses resources which only needed to be claimed, the convincing of himself that in reality he is not broke or unemployed ... these are startlingly similar to what metaphysicians call affirmation and denial.
In true affirmation and denial we are always affirming something that is true of man as he is when seen from his heavenly Father’s viewpoint, and denying what is not true of man from this viewpoint. Although man may see himself as sick, poor, or weak in his own estimation, from the divine standpoint he cannot ever be poor, sick, or weak. These are subjective states of mind which he has come to believe are true of himself, just as the son in San Francisco believes that he is without money and unemployed.
The point is that affirmations and denials enable us to relate ourself to the whole truth about ourself, not just to the partial truths about us that we call our body, or our personality, or our financial condition. We have become so obsessed by these partial truths about ourself that we find it impossible to believe the truth about the whole of us, about ourself as the “whole man” of spirit, soul, and body. That is why we have to use denials to dissolve the wrong, partial beliefs from our minds, and affirmations to build up in ourself a consciousness of the whole truth about ourself. This is the truth that sets us free.
In the foregoing parable, the son in San Francisco has resources of which he was unaware, but they are all he needs to rescue him. Similarly, a body of evidence is accumulating that you and I and all mankind have vast, unexplored resources and powers in the unknown realms of our own mind and spirit.2 In reality, the physical part of us, which we usually consider to be all of us that really counts, is only a tiny part of us. It is just that portion of us that we know by means of our senses.
By employing our mind properly, so as to use in a scientific way the vast unknown powers and resources for living which are already a part of us as God’s whole man, we can live in an entirely new and better way. But these resources, and the whole man of us, lie beyond the senses. They are only to be found in the realm of mind and spirit. By believing in them, by learning how to avail ourself of them th rough right thoughts and words, plus actions, we can bring power and beauty and happiness into our life.
The right use of mind also involves knowing that our mind is related to the forces of nature, and that it has its own constructive and destructive forces, as nature does. In metaphysical mind science, affirmation employs, concentrates, and directs the constructive forces of mind. Denial employs the destructive forces of mind. Perhaps this idea of our own mind exhibiting the same constructive and destructive forces as nature will be quite startling to many.
We are accustomed to the idea that there are constructive and destructive forces in nature, because we see them in operation all the time. The constructive forces of nature, for example, produce an apple on an apple tree. If the fruit is not picked when it becomes ripe, there is no further use for it, as far as the tree is concerned. The constructive forces which produced it, from its beginning in the blossom to its maturity as a ripe and fragrant fruit, are through with it. They have done their appointed work, and there is nothing more for them to do.
So they abandon the apple. It now becomes subject to the disintegrating or nonconstructive forces, that is, to the destructive forces of nature. “De” as a prefix means “reversing or undoing of an action, depriving or ridding of, or freeing from.”
A familiar example would be the word defrost, meaning to deprive or rid something of frost, as a refrigerator, or a windshield. So the destructive forces of nature are really “deconstructive” forces. They reverse the constructive action which produced the apple, and start another process, just the reverse of construction, which we call decay. Thus the apple will fall to the ground, soften, disintegrate, and eventually be absorbed into the soil, where its primal ingredients will once more be available to the constructive forces, which can use them as a form of fertilizer for constructing more apples.
When we see the matter in this light, we realize that the destructive forces of nature are inherently just as good and beneficial to man as the constructive forces. But we do not ordinarily think so. We tend to associate the decay of the apple with loss. We say, “What a shame that beautiful apple is spoiled!” From the viewpoint of nature it is not a shame, merely a logical and beneficial action of the creative forces. These forces having been used to create an article for which a need did not develop, it is now necessary that they be used to “de-create” it, in order to release the substance embodied in it and make way for new creation.
Man’s mind has two major modes of action, acceptance and rejection, sometimes called the “yes” and “no” of man’s mind. Acceptance, the “yes,” is the creative principle, while rejection, the “no,” is the destructive principle.
Thus our mind, like nature, has two definite major functions: to create or to decreate. The creative function of mind employs nature’s constructive forces, and we use it through affirmation. The de-creative function of mind employs the deconstructive principle of nature, and undoes or decreates what is no longer needed or serving a useful purpose. This is the “no” of mind, and we use it through denial. (Notice the prefix “de” in the word denial, meaning to undo, to reverse, or to dissolve.
“The effect of right words of denial is like water, for they cleanse, loosen, free, wash away, and dissolve false appearances. The effect of right affirmations is to fill in, to fulfill, to make substantial, to build up, to establish, and to cause to come into appearance that which is real and true.” — Annie Rix Militz.
When we employ an affirmation, in the sense that the term is used in this book, we are using the constructive forces of our own mind, which are of course an expression of the constructive forces of nature, as they operate in and through our own thinking and feeling. When we use a denial, we are using the deconstructive forces of nature, through our own thoughts and words, to dissolve some established belief or mental structure which we no longer want to be operative in our life.
Using denial to neutralize a belief.
For instance, to say with deliberate intent, as suggested at the end of Chapter I, “Time of itself has no power to age me,” is to employ the deconstructive forces of nature, which operate on the mental level just as they do on the physical level. When we make this denial with a knowledge of our intention, which is to rid our mind of the belief that the passage of time automatically ages the physical organism, then we set into action the deconstructive forces of mind. They will begin the dissolving of this belief in our mind, and its corresponding fixation in the body cells. If we persist in using the denial, the thought forces which have been embodied in this belief will be loosened and released. Consequently the belief itself will disappear from our mind.
There is no element of magic, hocus-pocus, or so-called wishful thinking in our doing this. We are merely using our own mind’s natural powers to deconstruct a belief which we did not personally construct. We just inherited it, along with the whole body of beliefs that we inherited when we entered this human scene at birth.
For example, at one time, when a man was born he automatically inherited a belief that the earth was flat. However, a few of the more intrepid thinkers were somehow moved to particular belief. They dared to challenge it by sailing farther and farther across the sea in search of the hypothetical edge of the world. Of course they never found it. Eventually one returned to his starting point after having sailed around the world, and thus forever disproved the notion that the world was flat. Now we all inherit the belief that the earth is a sphere.
Mental evolution is still going on.
This process of challenging erroneous notions which are held in common by the human race is still going on at a furious pace. In fact, the book you are reading and the new ideas it presents are part of this process. This book’s purpose is to teach you how to use the constructive and deconstructive powers of your own mind to “defrost” yourself of the erroneous belief that age and decay are inevitable because you have lived a certain number of years. In forward-thinking circles it is now fairly well accepted that this belief is a fallacy. Many, many people are now living far beyond the Biblical threescore and ten, not in a semi-invalid state, but in good health and enjoyment of life. You can do this as well as they can.
Use your mind forces to stay young!
Say and believe:
I understand that life’s great creative, youth-giving forces are active in me right now. I am giving them direction with my mind, its I affirm:
The joy of God’s renewing life is now mine. God’s abundant life vivifies and rejuvenates my mind and body. God’s abundant life keeps me mentally and physically young.
God in me is an infinite source of radiant joy and uplifting strength.
God’s abundant life renews my capacity to enjoy living.
Use your mind! Use it scientifically to deconstruct the outmoded beliefs in the power of time to cause aging. Use it to construct, by means of these affirmations, new beliefs that will keep you young, while you enjoy the maturity and fruits of experience.
I do not live by time. I live by virtue of God’s life force within me, which is timeless and eternal.
When we consciously declare this, we can see how we are using the deconstructive forces of our own mind. We are using them to dissolve the belief that our life span is governed by time. And in the same declaration we are employing the constructive forces of mind to construct, in our own mind, a true idea — that you live by virtue of God’s life force in you, which knows no time. Having no sense of time, it cannot age. It might be compared to electrical energy. Can you conceive of electrical energy getting old, so long as it is in existence? And electrical energy is only a pale shadow of the divine life force that animates your body and mind and soul.
The principle holds true for all the deconstructive and constructive statements in this book. Indeed the whole book is, as you read it, either deconstructing or reconstructing the mental structure of your mind, wherever it is concerned with length of days and enjoyment of life.
More helpful facts about affirmations.
You should now understand that when you use an affirmation you are not “kidding yourself,” nor are you trying to make yourself believe that something is true when it is not true.
The longing that I feel to be made new is the longing of life to renew me.
Life itself feeds and strengthens my desire to be made young.
I feel the joy and uplift of working with life to be made new, right now.
You are not lying when you affirm such statements of spiritual truth, even though they may not be in keeping with what your senses tell you. You are just using the natural constructive forces with which God has endowed you in your own mind, to bring forth onto the physical plane an already existing spiritual reality. You are giving these natural constructive forces direction, concentrating them, giving them a pattern to follow. And the mental energy you employ in doing this will be the substance that your mind will embody in the desired mental structure. If this is too hard to understand right now, just take it on trust, and believe. “Faith is the standing ground of the hopeful, the conviction of unseen facts” (Ferrar Fenton translation).
To take another parallel from nature, is the apple tree lying in the early spring, when it stands bare and apparently lifeless, and yet, by its very bareness, affirms the blossoms of spring and the ripe red fruit of autumn?
Is not the “standing ground” of the bare tree an activity, an intangible pattern of force fields already at work preparing the leaves and blossoms, though there is no visible evidence of their presence?
And is not this unseen, intangible activity just as “real” as — in fact, may it not be a great deal more “real” and more fundamental in its nature than — the tangible blossoms and fruit that later on appear? If the farmer looked at the bare tree and said: “This tree seems inactive and dead, but I know that it is not dead. This tree is alive, and it is even now clothing itself in leaves and blossoms” — can you understand the sense in which he declared this? If so, you have grasped the idea of unseen realities and force fields which are literally “the standing ground of the hopeful, the conviction of unseen facts.” And it is these “unseen facts” that later on will appear as facts to man’s senses.
Youth is still yours!
Say:
I am releasing and directing youthful enthusiasm, youthful energy, and youthful optimism into my mind and body, by this thought.
My enjoyment of life is not governed by the years I have lived. Youth is still mine, in my divine potential.
You are not lying when you affirm your possession of youth, even though from the physical standpoint your days of youth may be past. You are just working with the great constructive forces of nature, and your own hidden, divine potential, to bring forth the “unseen facts” of that real and enduring youth that is ever present on the inner side of your being. You are, like the bare tree in spring, setting the invisible forces of nature and of Spirit into operation, that they may bear fruit, according to what you affirm and envision.
You are not telling an untruth when you affirm to be a fact something which is an unseen fact in your own soul. There are physical facts, and there are also soul facts. Soul facts are real and true. They outrank facts on the physical plane. The youth you affirm to be yours is already yours, as a spiritual possession. In order to enjoy it as an actual physical experience, you have to process it through the constructive forces of your own mind. Your body, which is always the obedient mirror of your mind, will outwardly display the youth you are affirming as soon as your subconscious acceptance of it is complete.
You can of course hasten the mental processing and enjoy the fruits of your affirming by actively believing that the whole process is completed. This is the way God’s wonderful Law works, as was so clearly stated by Jesus. “Whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you receive it, and you will.”
So deny the appearance of age. Affirm youth to be yours now. Say:
I deny the race belief and appearance of age. I speed the word of youth to every part of my being, now.
Actively believe, mentally enter into, and picture as yours already, the desired youthfulness you are affirming. Then relax, and rest in a sense of peace, while your body organization accepts and translates your desire into physical form. This is believing in depth that you have received.
Deny and affirm. Use two-way mind action.
Here you have been given a way of employing the two great modes of mind action, the constructive and the deconstructive. Nature needs and uses both of these principles in its ceaseless activity. We too need to use both of them in the conscious application of our creative mind forces. By using them with understanding, we can remake ourself, and ultimately remake our world as well.
By such right use of our creative mind power, we can regain that joyous feeling we had in youth: that our life is still ahead of us, and we can make of it what we will. Get the feeling that you are taking hold of your life right now. You can still determine what you are going to be, and what your life is going to be. This was one of the greatest joys of youth ... and you have not really lost it. The years have not robbed you of it. Life has been treasuring it, keeping it in store for you, until you grew spiritually aware enough to reclaim it as yours. Claim it now!
When you grasp the fact that God has endowed you with these great natural creative forces, which are just as active, just as creative and powerful at any time of life as they are in youth, and that you can scientifically direct and control them with your own mind, you are that moment, for all practical purposes, reborn. It is no exaggeration to say that by learning to use our mind forces scientifically, and to work in close cooperation with the surge and spring of God’s bountiful life within us, we can remake ourself, and ultimately remake our own world as well.
I am made new, restored and rejuvenated by the natural constructive forces of my own mind and body. I am grateful to God, who makes this possible.
I use my new life and energy with wisdom and discretion, to enjoy youthful maturity, now and forever. Amen.
This method of directing and employing the forces of man’s mind was long the exclusive possession of secret brotherhoods. But it was rediscovered and made available to the world on a wide scale, nearly a century ago, here in the United States. The incredible thing is that so few people today know anything about it, and many reject it as some form of hocus-pocus, or to use the time honored cliche, “wishful thinking.”
As someone wittily said, “Light travels with remarkable speed, until it encounters the human mind.” But surely this is not true of your mind, is it? Never let it be said that your mind is closed to new ideas, with the blinds or habit thinking or religious prejudice or superstition tightly drawn.
New ideas are “windows of the soul.” As Ella Wheeler Wilcox wrote: “Let there be many windows in your soul, that all the glories of the universe may beautify it.”
May these ideas about the scientific use of mind forces add new and beautiful “picture windows” to for you to enjoy.
Keep Young with the News
November 10, 1967 Happy birthday! It’s Armand Schaub time again. This means he’s throwing his annual birthday party tomorrow at the Del Monte Gardens in Monterey. Armand will delight the attending children with his antics on roller skates. Each year the redoubtable Mr. Schaub wrings something a little bit more difficult out of his skates to tickle his enthusiastic audiences. All this would be highly routine except that the birthday Armand is celebrating is his 78th. Go to it, you young old timer!
November 24, 1967: In Rio Oso, California, J. H. Biedler and his wife celebrated Thanksgiving and their 74th wedding anniversary. “Mother makes a wonderful oyster dressing, and I’m going to cook the bird,” remarked Mr. Biedler. The Biedlers were married in Minnesota in 1893, moving to California when the packinghouse executive retired. Mr. Biedler and his wife are both 93, and he still possesses a valid driver’s license, which he uses.
July 26, 1967: In Williamstown, Massachusetts, one academic critic finds Herman Haskins to be a “new, young talent.” His watercolors are “filled with the verve of your own youth,” the critics say. Haskins, a retired meatcutter from North Adams, is 80. He began painting at 78 in a primitive style similar to that or the late Grandma Moses. He has completed fifty paintings thus far, all scenes he remembers from his life in western Massachusetts.
May 4, 1968: A 53-year-old woman, unconscious in a flaming bed, was rescued by her 79-year-old mother, who carried her daughter fifteen feet to safety. The mother was only slightly injured.
February 1, 1967: Charles P. Wiekel, regional representative of the new Administration on Aging, with offices at San Francisco, told the Seaside (California) Rotarians, “The key to successful retirement is to remain physically and mentally active.” Wiekel said there are some optimistic experts who predict that within thirty-three years (end of the century), man may live forever. He said that a British authority on the subject had recently declared on a television program, By the year 2000, one may have to seek permission to die.”
April 28, 1968: In a talk at the symposium marking the one hundredth anniversary of the University of California, Dr. Russell V. Lee, founder of the Palo Alto Medical Clinic and the Palo Alto Medical Research Foundation, said, “The potentialities of a full rich life after 65, and even after 80, are greater than ever believed or hoped.” Prevention of senility, he said, lies in activity, but not in competitive activity.
“Society and the individual himself must plan for the years after 65, which can be the richest,” said Dr. Lee, 72, who “retired” five years ago. “Aging is a state of mind, and not chronology.”
He said the post-65 generation can have more fun than ever before, by working on the “decorative side” of the social structure. “They can make things beautiful, plant trees, work in the arts and literature, even work with children,” said Dr. Lee.
- “Human thought is an integral part of the universe, of the cosmos.” — Lecomte duNouy.
- “The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness.” — William James.
