But before one can become either the great master musician or the perfect creator of a beautiful and harmonious physical body he must “develop a consciousness” of his oneness with whichever his ideal may be, whether of music, health, or whatever else he may desire.
Whenever we really want anything our desire always is so strong, powerful and overwhelming that we are willing to pay the price of persistency and application and we go after it with all the energy we can command and work to make it come to us. We strain, strive and use every effort within our power, and when we do succeed in getting it in this way we find the results very unsatisfactory. This is because the world has developed a consciousness of force and uses force (either physical or mental, or both) in obtaining what it wants.
Force creates inharmony and some day the world will learn the great lesson that there isn’t anything, no matter how valuable it may seem to be nor how much we may desire it, for which it is worth paying the price of one moment of inharmony.
We should learn then to do our work of “developing a consciousness” without worry, anxiety, strain, effort, tenseness, friction, for all these thoughts and emotions create inharmony. We should learn not to fight for anything but to build and “develop a consciousness” of our oneness with it, creating it in this manner in our thought world first, recognizing that it is ours NOW (no matter how far away its materialization may seem to be from us) and then do on the objective plane whatever we think is necessary or advisable to aid us in its materialization, but do this quietly, calmly, and with a power which KNOWS it will succeed. Do it because we love to do it, because it is a “blessed privilege” for us to do it. We should never do anything with a consciousness that it is work or drudgery, for that kind of a consciousness makes the doing of that particular thing a work or drudgery to us.
A BLESSED PRIVILEGE
She was a very motherly woman of about fifty years of age who had been coming to me for treatment on account of nervousness. She was getting along nicely, although she had only been under my care for about a week, when one day she came into the office all flustrated and in a highly excited state of mind.
In explaining the cause of her condition she said she was afraid that all the good work we had done had gone for naught and that there was no hope for her whatever. This was because her husband’s sister, who lived in one of the small up-State towns, had arrived the night before for a three weeks’ visit and that while she loved her sister-in-law very much, yet they never got on very well together and this visit meant three weeks of untold misery in trying to please her visitor. She then unloaded into my ears a tale of woe which took her half an hour to relate although she talked as fast as her tongue could rattle it off. I sat back in my chair and listened quietly until she finished her list of complaints and I do not think she omitted a single one of them.
Although my patient was a dear woman and would not intentionally hurt the feelings of any one—she would much rather suffer herself than to do that—yet I saw plainly that her attitude towards this visit of her sister-in-law had brought her to a condition where she would have an attack of hysteria did it continue. The word picture she painted of the previous visits and the miserable times she had on those occasions would have caused almost any one to believe that the sister-in-law was a demon incarnate masquerading as a human being, instead of being only an ordinary average woman living in the country and who delighted in the freedom and the fascinating sights of a large city.
When my patient had finished her story of condemnation, criticism and complaints, I said: “Is that all?”
“Well, isn’t it enough?” she answered.