Everything in the universe is resolved into your own inward experience. It matters little what is without, for it is all a reflection of your own state of consciousness … what you are, so is your world.
It matters everything what you are within, for everything without will be mirrored accordingly.
All that you positively know is contained in your own experience; all that you ever will know must pass through the gateway of experience, and so become part of yourself.
Your own thoughts, desires, and aspirations comprise your world, and, to you, all that there is in the universe of beauty and joy and bliss, or of ugliness and sorrow and pain, is contained within yourself.
By your own thoughts you make your life, your world and your universe. As you build within by the power of thought, so will your outward life and circumstances shape themselves accordingly.
Whatsoever you harbor in the inmost chambers of your heart will, sooner or later by the inevitable law of attraction, shape itself in your outward life.
The soul that is impure and selfish is gravitating with pinpoint precision towards misfortune and catastrophe; the soul that is pure, unselfish, and noble is gravitating with equal precision toward happiness and prosperity.
Every soul attracts its own and nothing can possibly come to it that does not belong to it. To realize this is to recognize Divine Law.
The incidents of every human life are drawn to it by the quality and power of its own inner thought-life. Every soul is a complex combination of gathered experiences and thoughts, and the body is but a vehicle for its manifestation.
What, therefore, your thoughts are, that is your real self; and the world around, both animate and inanimate, wears the aspect with which your thoughts clothe it.
“All that we are is the result of what we have thought. It is founded on our thoughts; it is made up of our thoughts.” Thus said Buddha, and it therefore follows that if a person is happy, it is because they dwell in happy thoughts; if miserable, because he or she dwells on unhappy and debilitating thoughts.
“But do you really mean to say that outward circumstances do not affect our minds?”
I do not say that, but I say this, and know it to be an infallible truth, that circumstances can only affect you in so far as you allow them to do so.
We are swayed by circumstances because we have not a right understanding of the nature, use, and power of thought.
If we believe (and upon this little word belief hang all our sorrows and joys) that outward things have the power to make or mar our life; by so doing we submit to those outward things, confess that we are their slave, and they our unconditional master.
By doing this, we invest them with a power which they do not, of themselves, possess, and we succumb, in reality, not to the mere circumstances, but to the gloom or gladness, the fear or hope, the strength or weakness, which our thought-sphere has thrown around them …
