Perfect Liberty : Part 1

Freedom Talks No. II
by Julia Seton, M.D.

(Page 8 of 13)

"No man lived to himself and no man died to himself."

The more we look at humanity and study its expressions, the more we become convinced of the truth of these words. It is not hard to see that our human ties are closely knit with everything and everyone, but it is not always easy to understand how they have come to their sometimes almost hopeless tangle.

We are a part of everything in the universe, seen and unseen, and as we have within us a response to every emotion, hope dream, impulse of any kind known or recognized by the human race. As we study and understand our relationship to people, things and expressions, we cannot help but grow deeper and deeper into the clearness of the great truth, namely, the universal and abiding one-ness of man and God.

Some of our relationships in this one-ness are very indistinct and obscure, while some are very distinct and painfully objectified.

The first Truth for us to take up is this - we have and express in our being and our environment just these things with which we have related ourselves, either through inherited or acquired lines of thinking; no one gives to us but ourselves, no one takes away from us but ourselves, no one is to blame but ourselves whatever we have or have not; we, and we alone, are the architects of our own fortune or misfortune.

We get everything in life by the law of conscious or unconscious relationship with it through the simple act of thinking; our thoughts are lines of transference over which may pass to us not only the things which we desire, but also those which our fear brings down upon us and which we do not desire.

Unconscious relationship differs from conscious relationship and brings us the things with which we have connected through the law of omission; conscious relationship is union, and brings everything into expression under the law of commission.

Both of these lines are constant and their results undeniable, but one brings us the whole, the constructive, while the other opens our life for the control of the destructive, the limited.

When thinking passes into a fixed power in our life, it may be used to perfect or destroy the whole mechanism of our present and our future. Long lines of conscious and unconscious thinking bring about certain expressions, and these expressions in time become a part of our very existence, and our environment, good or bad, bears witness to this relationship.

One day upon the streets of Boston I saw an old woman selling newspapers; her hair was gray, her skin brown and wrinkled, her clothing shabby and only half sufficient for the chill of the hour; she was simply poverty-stricken, and her old, thin, piping voice trembled as she called her papers in an effort to compete with the crowds of newsboys around her. Many bought her papers, drawn to her through pity, and her evident need. I felt sorry that with her gray hair so near the grave life should have only this to offer her, and I sought a reason for it. I asked her to tell her story.

She was the daughter of a minister; her mother had been the proverbially meek little woman of history, perfectly fitted to be her father's wife. Her grandfathers on both sides of the parental tree had been ministers; she gave me a graphic sketch of the long line of concentration which she had been born into and in which she continued.

There was a long line for concentration and relationship with lowliness of spirit, for grace, for the utter sinking of self; lack of demand for place or power; lack of self-righteousness, absolute submission sown through generations, sown for her in her own life. It had to bring forth its fruit and it did bring it forth in the form of that gray-haired, beautiful, ragged old woman, who, in the days of her declining years, gathered her harvest on the cold streets of a rich city, underfed, poor and alone.

She was still true to her inherited concentration, for while I questioned her she said, "Health, money and happiness were not for her," and that "her family had borne the cross of poverty and sickness all their lives and borne it nobly, and some day the Father would give them their reward." Don't you see that the mind that is poised where her mind was, and where her family's mind had been for generations, could not escape the law which they had built for themselves.

Here was an example of unconscious relationship; can't you see how unwittingly she hourly and daily made anew her relations with the very things which must by their very nature divorce her from the things which she never sensed belonged to her. The fixed thinking handed down to her from the past, bound her like a galley-slave and kept her life held against the law which was daily destroying her; she was unconsciously related and she remained unconsciously related to the laws which made for loss and lack in her life, unable to see the paths where she turned aside from her Father's house, and His universal abundance; blind to her power of new creating.

When we begin to study our lines of unconscious relationship we find that we are appalled almost at the ten thousand little tendrils which bind us to our old relationships; we think ourselves "good easy man" this moment, and the next moment sees us opening the door of our life to thought forms which if entertained, will certainly become for us a poor relation, and demand our support for ages. We daily open our lives to endless tramp thoughts which dwell with us and in the end beggar us.

We need hourly to set a guard on our field of unconsciousness, and absolutely refuse to admit into our daily mind any thoughts less than those which distinctly relate us with all the beautiful things of life, and we must never forget the truth of the power of our own personal creations. We can be what we will to be; we can be related to whatever we choose to be related to; we can choose this day whom we will serve and start the hour of our rebuilding.