Order of Essenes Book Ten begins to discuss the “art of living” and the need to “practice” to build the life you desire.
I like this perspective. Reframing life as art, and thinking of yourself as the artist, gives you the freedom to explore, work with what you have, and enjoy the practice of improving every day.
Life is a research project, and you are the subject. Play, learn, and grow.
Purposeful Planned Living
Purposeful planned living is the way to a more abundant life.
In the universal ever-present creative substance, there is the seed of every good thing – health, happiness, success – waiting to be brought into manifestation in the material world.
The impulse and form of this materialization must come from a mind supplying a pattern or mold into which life essence is continually pouring.
Love
We are capable of forging on the anvils of the heart that greatest of all emotions – love. We give it. We respond to it. We are elevated by it. It is the one known effective solvent for human problems.
1, 2, & 3 Story Intelects
There are one-story intellects, two-story intellects, and three-story intellects with skylights. All fact collectors, who have no aim beyond their facts, are one-story men. Two-story men compare, reason, generalize, using the labors of the fact collectors as well as their own. Three-story men idealize, imagine, predict; their best illumination comes from above, through the skylight. -Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Streams of Habit
Many of our streams of habit are canalized toward useful and desirable goals; others are like meandering rivers which always take the line of least resistance. The longer our lifestream follows its aimless course, the deeper the river bed and the harder it is to cut through the enclosing banks.
Cleanse your mind of negative destructive things – doubt, worry, or fear – those pictures of want, and lack and illness with which you have flooded your consciousness.
The human body is a complex and highly integrated machine. It takes food, air, and water and converts them by chemical and biological processes into flesh, blood, bone, and energy. In the production of these, it employs various chemicals of its own creation.
Many and varied chemicals are formed by thought processes, moods, feelings, and emotions. These thoughts – and chemicals – affect the material man in a direct physical manner.
Life is Research
Research sounds formidable but on the contrary, it is very simple.
Chas. F. Kettering says, “Research is nothing complicated. It may use a laboratory and it may not. It is purely a principle and everybody can apply it in his own life. It is simply a way of trying to find new knowledge and ways of improving things which you are not satisfied with.
What are some of the things you would like to have? Why can’t you have them?
Write down ten things that you don’t like about your business, about yourself, or about the way you are doing things. (If you can’t think of ten things, there is something wrong with your imagination and vision faculties.)
Now try to work out some way of correcting those ten things. If No. 1 is too difficult to solve, try solving the others, just as you put a word in a crossword puzzle. Each of these problems that you solve will make the others easier. You will be surprised when you find how well they fit into eachother. If you do that, you are a research worker (subject-yourself).
Practice the Art of Living
There is one basic fact in life which you must accept. That fact is that life itself is perfect.
The mastery of life is achieved by the ceaseless practice of the mechanics which make up the art of living.
A good personality is the result of practice, not introspection.
We stress doing definite important things, as the road to health, happiness, and success.
You must understand the mind, conscious, subconscious, and superconscious, but the mind is intended to think with, not to worry about. It is an instrument to live with, not to live for.
Every human being is endowed with an infinitely precious stock of attention power, but daily the mind is assailed and distracted by a thousand appeals and distractions.
In this work, your success, your attainment of your longings and desires, will largely depend upon concentration, meditation, determination, expectation, and action.
For a moment contemplate in review…
Your physical body is ever-changing and every twenty-four months you are practically one hundred percent a different individual physically. Every new cell or atom or life unit added is perfect and without age; it will in its new home and new life form, conform to its surroundings; it will be endowed from the first instant with intelligence, mentality, character, consciousness, it will be stamped with the real You trademark, and thenceforth subject to the chemical and biological changes. It will respond to, and its destiny be subject to your thoughts. It will make up one of the billions of the component parts of your subconscious. It will ever work towards perfection unless guided or influenced for imperfection. It will observe the unchanging and unchangeable laws of unity and harmony. It will die, pass on, and change when the law is violated. It will ever keep its contact with universal intelligence, the omniscient, from whence it came. Everything is included in a ceaseless interaction of cause and effect.
Nothing can escape nor set aside the law… “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap” is as true in the invisible realm as in the field of agriculture. No one can deny it, nor can one cheat the law, and no one escapes it.
If one would come to know the greater-self, let him enter his own closet and shut the door. There he will find his most dangerous enemy, and there he will learn to master him. He will find his true self. There he will find his truest friend, his wisest teacher, his safest adviser-himself. There he will find abiding within himself the Holy of Holies.
Finally, from weakness to power; from sickness to health; from discord to harmony; from failure to success; from misery to happiness—all these positive developments are for you to demonstrate.
The Essenes principle is this: Each has the power for potential perfection.
In the course of these Instructions, you will come to realize the almost magic-working possibilities, which can result from meditation, concentration, and affirmation.
Before you arrive at that stage, however, you must be conditioned, prepared, and instructed upon the subject of relaxation, so that satisfying results may be attained, easily, simply, and always naturally.
*Relaxation Exercises* – see book…
Positive Thinking
Every thought which you project into the universal creative substance will be worked out in your body or affairs, just as you picture it. How foolish and destructive therefore to project what you fear and do not want. Is it not the more sensible thing to picture clearly the things or conditions you desire.
Think positively of good fortune, not negatively of misfortune.
The electrons of man’s brain are stirred to action by faith and acting concurrently with the spiritual ethers, they hasten nature to produce quickly what ordinarily requires months of seedtime and harvest,
