Lessons in Living

IN this book I design to state in logical and practical form the new philosophy of life and To do this I must stick closely to a clear statement of the philosophy itself, without trying to give you too many proofs. It might take seventy lectures to reason you into accepting the new view of life; and still you would be unconvinced. Why? Because reason is an endless labyrinth out of which no man emerges unaided by a higher wisdom than itself. Reason is the original Chinese puzzle, forever unsolved until you get up above reason; up above the labyrinth and look down upon it to see where you are going. The walls, and walls within walls, of reason's labyrinth are your prejudices. No man climbs over a prejudice; he merely seeks the first opening around it, and finds himself in another alley of the labyrinth! The only way to know a blind alley before you see it, the only way to know your own prejudice-wall when you see it, is to go up in a balloon and look down. Once admit that there is a way to get above reason, that there is an intelligence above reason, in which reason lives and moves and by which it expands and grows, and you find yourself already mounting and looking over the walls of those blind alleys of reason that lead into more blind alleys. If you keep on looking down on reason you will eventually raze many of its prejudice-walls, that serve no purpose except to cut off the view of life as a whole. "A narrow mind" is a most expressive term; it exactly describes the mind whose energy flows between endless prejudice-walls that merely shut off its view of larger things, while it wanders endlessly in mental alleys that lead to more mental alleys, weariness, death. These prejudice-alleys-common to all mankind-are alleys built through reasoning by the light of the five physical senses only. Not until man finds these inadequate and turns away yearning for a satisfaction never found, does he realize that after all there may be more to life than he has seen, smelt, felt, heard, or tasted. Then he looks up from his mental alleys and glimpses-PRINCIPLE, instead of things; God above and in things, instead of man alone, inadequate. "He that cometh unto God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him." Perhaps there may be some who cannot get away from their prejudices long enough to really catch the new view of life. Let us take a hint from Shakespeare, then, and play pretend. "If all the world's a stage" and we are players, let us choose to lay aside our old parts while we read these pages, and let us take up the new part of the new thought philosophy, forgetting the old and putting into the new all the imagination and will and interest at our command. Let us assume a philosophy if we have it not. Let us play pretend, like children. Only as little children can we enter a new heaven and transformed life.