The New Thought Simplified · 28 of 38

Second Suggestive Lesson

I assert my freedom from the rule of the seen and temporary. The invisible life principle fills all space, for God is omnipresent. O soul within, how little hast thou been aware of thy grand opportunities and privileges! How hast thou timidly groped thy way through material fogs and mists when thou mightest have lifted thyself to the plane of spiritual verities! How thy whole horizon has been black with clouds which were only the shadows of thy dark thoughts and imaginings!

I am a living soul, and not a fleshly being of mere physical sensation. I never have seen myself nor my nearest friend. What my eyes behold is only outward expression.

As I am soul, nothing outside can harm me. Fire may burn my body, but it cannot touch me. Water may drown my form, but it is harmless to me. I— the real—am impervious to illness and to so-called death. Nothing in the universe can injure me but my own false and mistaken thinking.

Insight

Fire may burn my body, but it cannot touch me. Water may drown my form, but it is harmless to me. This is Wood at his most metaphysically bold, and it lands close to the Bhagavad Gita 2.23-24 (weapons cleave it not, fire burns it not, waters wet it not, wind dries it not) which is also the strongest statement in the Sanskrit literature of the deathless Self. The Buddhist analogue in the Dhammapada gives a softer version of the same recognition. The pastoral kernel is genuine and contemplative: there is a layer of self that is not what the senses pick up, and the disciplined attention can locate it. The risk in 1903 New Thought idiom, and worth flagging, is that the line can be read as instruction to deny ordinary physical care, which Wood does not mean. The body still matters; what matters more is what stands behind the body.

I continually suggest the good to myself. Day by day I extract it from seeming evil. I form it from the infinite supply of spiritual substance which surrounds me. I breathe it in and embody it. I give myself to it, and it overflows my old self-imposed and baseless limitations.

I Lift My Consciousness from the Seen to the Unseen.