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2 Class 13 Entering into the Spirit of It Part I
3 This is David Neagle, and I want to welcome you to Class 13 of Just Believe Masterclass. If you remember, in Class 12 we focused primarily on raising your standard. During Class 13, we re going to be covering with you Entering into the Spirit of It based off of lessons of Thomas Troward. Let s begin. Before we get into Troward s work, I want to draw a correlation between several pieces of literature that I use to teach from that I think are going to be beneficial. We re going to bounce back and forth actually for Lessons 13 and 14. I m going to start off with Working with the Law, by Raymond Holliwell. Holliwell is talking about the spiritual supply. He says, The spiritual supply from which the visible comes is never depleted. It never runs out. In other words, there s no lack. Everything that is coming from the one sustained source is never depleted and there is no lack. It never runs out. He says, It s with you all the time. It s omnipresent. It will yield according to your demand upon it. It is not affected by your ignorant or blind talk of lack or loss. Only you are the one that s affected and you control your manifestation with your thought. The unfailing resource is willing to give. It has no choice in the matter. If you continue to pour out your thought into this substance, this will prosper you. Let me go back into this a little bit. It says, It will yield, meaning Spirit, according to your demand upon it. I think what we have to realize is that a lot of the time we re not in the life-giving spirit of the thing that we want to create. We ve all heard Get into the Christmas spirit or the holiday spirit meaning a spirit of cheer or goodwill. Every single thing has a spirit that is contained in it. When we re talking about increasing our income, making our life better or a specific thing in our life that we choose to change or want to change, that specific thing has a specific spirit to it. Back of that, that means the causation or the main spirit of anything is the idea of more life. He said that this spirit itself is not affected by any ignorance that we may have, so if we are ignorantly believing in lack or loss, we re the only one that s affected by that
4 and the spiritual supply is not affected by that. We have the ability to control how we think, what we re doing and what we say. This spirit is an unfailing resource and it s willing to give. As a matter of fact, it has no choice in the matter to give, so if we continue to pour out our thought into this substance, it has no choice but to prosper us. This is really cool when we consider that way back in 1902, one of my favorite authors, Thomas Troward, wrote a little piece on this in his work called Entering into the Spirit of It. It s something that I ve used to teach on the Mastery level for a long period of time. I m going to get into this work and then I m going to bounce back and forth between a couple of other different things as we go through it. Just sit back and take a listen to this because it s absolutely brilliant in the awareness that it helps bring to a person s life. Troward says, Entering into the spirit of it, what a common expression and yet how much it really means, how absolutely everything. We enter into the spirit of an undertaking, into the spirit of a movement, into the spirit of an author, even into the spirit of a game, and it makes all the difference both to us and to that into which we enter. A game without any spirit is a poor affair and an association in which there is no spirit falls to pieces. A spiritless undertaking is sure to be a failure. On the other hand, the book which is meaningless to the unsympathizing reader is full of life and suggestion to the one who enters into the spirit of the writer. The man who enters into the spirit of the music finds a spring of refreshment in some fine recital which is entirely missed by the cold critic who comes only to judge according to the standard and the rigid rule, and so on in every case that we can think of. I want you to really think about this. He says, If we do not enter into the spirit of a thing, it has no invigorating effect upon us and we regard it as dull, insipid and worthless. This is our everyday experience and these are the words in which we express it.
5 The words are well chosen. They show our intuitive recognition of the spirit as the fundamental reality in everything however small or however great. Let us be right as to the spirit of a thing and everything else will successfully follow. Just that sentence alone says so much. Let me read it again. Let us be right as to the spirit of a thing and everything else will follow. In previous lessons, you ve heard me teach that we don t necessarily need to know the how in something that we re doing. We need to make the decision that we re going to do it. We need to step into that decision fully and everything else will come. When we step into the decision, we re not stepping in in a benign emotion. We re stepping fully into the spirit of what that thing is with the excitement and the enthusiasm that it naturally has, and everything else that comes with it fill follow. He says, By entering into the spirit of anything, we establish a mutual vivifying action and reaction between it and ourselves. We vivify it with our own vitality and it vivifies us with the living interest, which we call its spirit. Therefore, we more fully enter into the spirit of all with which we are concerned and the more thoroughly do we become alive. The more completely we do this, the more that we shall find that we are penetrating into the great secret of life. It may seem a truism, but the great secret of life is livingness, and it is just more this quality of livingness that we want to get a hold of. It is that good thing of which we can never have too much, but every fact also implies its negative and we never properly understand a thing until we not only know what it is, but we clearly understand what it is not. I m going to stop there for a moment and I m going to bring in something from Napoleon Hill in an attempt to amplify this last statement that Troward is making. It is so profound, so deep and rich with so much truth that, if we don t stop and really consider what it s saying, the potential impact that it could have in our life and what it is that we want to manifest could simply just go by the wayside. If we think to ourselves that we really can have anything that we desire and we can create anything that we want in our lives if we only have our mind right about the thing, we come to a pretty honest acceptance that when we make a decision we
6 have to develop the consciousness around the decision that allows whatever it is that we want to come in. If we don t understand what it is, then we have a problem. If we go to Think and Grow Rich and we take a couple of statements from the work itself, we see that this truth comes right off the pages. Hill says, One of the main weaknesses of mankind is the average man s familiarity with the word impossible. He knows all the rules which will not work. He knows all the things which cannot be done. The book was written for those who seek the rules which have made others successful and are willing to stake everything on those rules. He goes on to say that success comes to those who become success conscious. Failure comes to those who indifferently allow themselves to become failure conscious. You have two polar opposites here. You have success consciousness and you have failure consciousness. He says, The object of the book is to help all who seek it to learn the art of changing their minds from failure consciousness to success consciousness. Let s go back to what Troward said. He said, Every fact implies also its negative and we never properly understand a thing until we not only know what it is but we clearly understand what it is not. Another weakness found in altogether too many people is the habit of measuring everything and everyone by their own impressions and beliefs. What are we talking about? We have to understand what success is and what it is not. Many years ago, I did a recording called The Art of Success. In that recording, I simply stated that if you come from a general working-class family, if you come from a middle-class family such as I did, the value system that most people are impregnated with during their upbringing within those families is totally for the idea of survival and not rich with success. They actually contradict the values of success. If we start with understanding the polar opposites of those ideas, we can very much begin to understand this deeper-rooting spirit inside of ourselves that may literally be at opposing odds with entering into the spirit of something.
7 Let me give you an example of what that looks like. If we are told that to be successful one of the things that we need to be is bold, and that comes from a higher principle or a higher value of success principle, but being bold in the middle class or the working class is considered rude, then we have two opposing ideas. Bold is just bold. It is neither good nor bad. If we use it in a way where we consider it to be rude, then we re entering in the spirit of being rude. If we see it as being of influence or standing up for ourselves or maybe even creating a boundary for ourselves, then we re entering into the spirit of growth. We re entering into the spirit of confidence. Let me go through this again. Every fact implies also its negative and we never properly understand a thing until we not only know what it is but also clearly understand what it s not. He goes on to say, To a complete understanding, the knowledge of the negative is as necessary as the knowledge of the affirmative, for the perfect knowledge consists in realizing the relation between the two. The perfect power grows out of the knowledge by enabling us to balance the affirmative and the negative against each other in any proportion that will thus be giving flexibility to what would otherwise be too rigid and form to what would otherwise be too fluid so by uniting these two extremes to produce any result that we may desire. There s an old hermetic saying, Solve et Coagula, meaning dissolve the solid and solidify the fluid. What does this mean? It means that we are able to take anything that we are working with, we can enter into the spirit of it and it doesn t need to be rigid. It can be fluid. It s our rigid ideas along with the ideas of possibly the need to be right, for instance, that do not allow us to be fluid enough and flexible enough to create the success that we want. It also keeps us from entering into the spirit of anything because we have a rigid idea of what the spirit is and we can only enter into the spirit of what we are, not the spirit of what the success we re looking for is actually suggesting. He says, If we would discover the secret of entering into the spirit of it, we must get some idea of the negative, which is the non-spirit.
8 In various ages, this negative phase has been expressed in different forms of different words suitable to the spirit of the time. Clothing this idea in the attire of the present day, I will sum up the opposite of Spirit in the word mechanism. We could use the word structure also and that would work just fine. Even though he wrote this in 1902, I think the word mechanism actually works. It still works and you ll understand it as I go through the rest of the lesson here. He says, Before all things, this is a mechanical age and it is astonishing how great a part of what we call social advance has its root in the mechanical arts, meaning what we do and how we do it. If we reduce the mechanical arts to what they are or what they were in the days of the Plantagenets, the greater part of our boasted civilization would recede through the centuries along with them. We may not be conscious of all of this, but the mechanical tendency of the age has a firm grip upon society at large. In other words, how society is doing anything at that particular age or at that particular stage of social evolution. We habitually look at the mechanical side of things by preference to any other. Everything is done mechanically, from the carving on a piece of furniture to the arrangement of a social system. It is the mechanism that must be considered first and the spirit has to be fitted to the mechanical exigencies. We enter into the mechanism of it instead of the spirit of it and so limit the spirit and refuse to let it have its own way. Then as a consequence we get entirely mechanical action and complete our circle of ignorance by supposing that this is the only sort of action that there is. How can we bring that into something that is actually practical for what we re doing? Let s look at the possibility of sales in business. There are all different kinds of sales tools that we can pick up today, thousands of them. There are books, CDs and seminars with all kinds of teaching around sales. If we pick up any sales system, and you could use system or mechanism meaning the same thing here, and we just follow through with whatever that system is without putting any spirit behind it or entering into the spirit of the sale itself, it is dead as it
9 stands. It doesn t work. There is no influence that actually takes place there because there s no spirit behind it. He goes on to say, This is not a necessary state of things even in regard to physical science, for people who have made the greatest advances in the direction are those who have most clearly seen the subordination of the mechanical to the spiritual. The person who can recognize a natural law only as it operates through certain forms of mechanism with which he is familiar will never rise to the construction of the higher forms of the mechanism which might be built upon the law, for he fails to see it is the law which determines the mechanism and not vice versa. This person will make no advance in science, either theoretical or applied, and the world will never owe any debt of gratitude toward him, but the man who recognizes that the mechanism for the application of any principle grows out of the true apprehension of the principle studies the principle first. In other words, we re studying what the cause is first, knowing that when that is properly grasped it will necessarily suggest all that is wanted for bringing into practical use. If this is true in regard to the so-called physical sciences, it is a fortiori. Let me explain what that word means. Fortiori is a word that means with greater reason or more concerning force. One conclusion is more certain than another. He says, It s a fortiori, true as it regards to science of the spirit. It is more certain than the conclusion. There is a mechanical attitude of mind which judges everything by the limitations of past experience, allowing nothing for the fact that those experiences were for the most part the result of our ignorance of spiritual law. If we realize the true law of being, we shall rise above the mechanical conceptions. We shall not deny the reality of the body or of the physical world as facts, knowing that they are also spirit, but we shall learn to deny their power as causes. In other words, the physical world that we live in is not the cause. It is the effect. In other words, we shall learn to distinguish between the causa causata and the causa causans, the secondary or apparent physical cause and the primary or the spiritual cause, without which the secondary cause could not exist.
10 Then we shall get a new standpoint of clear knowledge and certain power by stepping over the threshold of the mechanical and then we enter into the spirit of it. We re not allowing the mechanical and we re not allowing the system to be the cause. The system is the natural outworking of entering into the spirit of anything that we do. He says, What we have to do is to maintain our even balance between the two extremes, denying neither spirit nor mechanism, because they re both important, which is the form and through which it works. The one is necessary to a perfect whole as the other, for there must be an outside as well as an inside. Only we must remember the creative principle is always inside and that the outside only exhibits what the outside creates. Hence, whatever external effect we would produce, we must first enter into the spirit of it and work upon the spiritual principle whether in ourselves or others. As so far as we work with other people, you have to ask yourself, Are you working with the cause or are you just dealing with effects? He says, By doing so, our insight will become greatly enlarged, for from without we can only see a small portion of the circumference. Think about this. When we re standing outside of something, we can only perceive a small portion of the circumference of something, but when we re in the center, we can see the whole of it because we can completely pivot our perception so we can see all of it. It s the same thing. He says, If we fully grasp the truth that Spirit is the creator, it is the center, we can dispense with painful investigations into the mechanical side of all of our problems. If we re constructing from without, then we have to calculate anxiously the strength of our material and force of every thrust and strain to which they may be subjected. Very possibly after all, we may find that we have made a mistake somewhere in our elaborate calculations. If we realize the power of creating from within, we shall find all these calculations correctly made for us, for the same spirit which is the creator is also that which the Bible calls the Wonderful Numberer.
11 Construction from without is based upon analysis, and no analysis is complete without accurate, quantitative knowledge. Creation is the very opposite of analysis and carries its own mathematics with it. To enter into the spirit of anything then is to make yourself one in thought with the creative principle that is at the center of it. Therefore, why not go to the center of all things at once and enter into the spirit of life? This concludes Class 13. This is David Neagle, and I ll be with you again on the next class of Just Believe Masterclass.