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— 1 John 4:1

Metaphysical meaning of judgment (rw)judgment--Mental act of evaluation through comparison or contrast. Spiritual discernment; the inner voice through whose expression we come into a larger realization of ourselves.

Judgment is a faculty of the mind that can be exercised in two ways--from sense perception or spiritual understanding. If its action be based on sense perception its conclusions are fallible and often condemnatory; if based on spiritual understanding, they are safe.

judgment, day of--That period in man’s development when the law of justice and righteousness begins to be felt in his consciousness, and he finds himself in the midst of experiences where he must learn the law and conform to it.

The great judgment day of Scripture indicates a time of separation between the true and the false. There is no warrant for the belief that God sends man to everlasting punishment. Modern interpreters of the Bible say that the “hell of fire“ (Matt. 5:22) referred to by Jesus means simply a time in which purification is taking place.

judgment seat--The “judgment-seat” (Rom. 14:10) is within man. A judging, or discerning between the true and the false, is going on daily in us as overcomers; we are daily reaping the results of our thoughts and our deeds.

In the American metaphysical tradition, including Swedenborgianism, Spiritualism and New Thought, the spiritual power of “judgment” is the mind ability to compare and discern. Judgement, or discernment, is the inner weighing of impressions that determines whether perception is guided by surface appearances or by deeper spiritual understanding. In this sense, judgment becomes inseparable from spiritual development. It is the place where consciousness either falls into the distortions of sense perception, or rises into the clarity of inward discernment.

From this perspective, what Scripture calls the “day of judgment” is not an external apocalypse, but a stage in human awakening, when the law of justice and truth becomes inwardly felt. Life itself becomes the tribunal. Every thought and action returns as experience, and the soul learns through consequence the difference between what is real and what is illusory. The “judgment seat,” as the apostolic writings suggest, is therefore not outside the human being but within it, a continual process of inner evaluation through which truth and falsehood are separated in lived experience.

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Thomas Lake Harris was a 19th-century spiritual radical who at various times aligned himself with Universalism, Swedenborgianism, and communitarian socialism. For Harris, as for many of his contemporaries in the 19th-century reform and revelation movements, inner perception was not automatically reliable simply because it claimed spiritual origin. The same age that produced visionary claims and communal utopias also produced sharp warnings about credulity, projection, and the dangers of mistaking psychic impression for divine truth.

It is in this tension that Harris’s “few words of caution” take on their force. While spiritual illumination was widely sought and often regarded as evidence of higher knowledge, Harris insists that discernment itself must be tested, refined, and disciplined. Not every inner impression is trustworthy. Not every voice of illumination is divine in origin. Even revered figures, sacred texts, or charismatic teachers can become objects of intellectual bondage when judgment is surrendered rather than exercised.

Thus, the theme of judgment in this context is double-edged. It is both the gateway to spiritual realization and the safeguard against spiritual deception. It is the faculty that must itself be judged, purified, and awakened.

To discern truth from deception requires the conscious exercise of judgment as a spiritual faculty—what Charles Fillmore described as one of the twelve powers of the mind. This means testing every teaching, impression, or revelation against reason, conscience, and the fruits it produces in life. Not every voice that claims divine origin is rooted in truth. Some channelers, gurus, or spiritual teachers may sincerely believe they are transmitting higher wisdom while actually expressing distorted psychic influences or personal projections. Even in matters of mediumship, where communication with the unseen may indeed occur, discernment remains essential; as the apostle warns in 1 John 4:1, we are to “test the spirits.” Spiritual openness without discrimination leads to confusion, while disciplined discernment safeguards the integrity of the inner life.

The text below is by Thomas Lake Harris and it was originally published in The Univercoelum and Spiritual Philosopher, an influential mid-19th century reform journal associated with the early spiritualist and harmonial movement surrounding Andrew Jackson Davis. Founded in New York in the late 1840s, the paper brought together an eclectic circle of writers, including Thomas Lake Harris, who contributed as a poet and spiritual thinker within this experimental intellectual community. The journal sought nothing less than the “establishment of a universal system of truth” and the reorganization of society, blending Swedenborgian theology, Fourierist socialism, reformist politics, and early explorations of spiritual phenomena. Within this environment of bold speculation and competing revelations, Harris’s cautionary voice stands out. His text reflects both participation in and critique of a culture that often elevated inspired speech to unquestioned authority, insisting instead that true spiritual life requires a continual return to the inner seat of judgment, where every claim must be tested rather than assumed.

A FEW WORDS OF CAUTION

Having been a deeply interested observer of the singular psychological phenomena and disclosures that are now becoming so frequent in their occurrence, and having observed that pernicious consequences may result, and are resulting, from an improper use and superficial understanding of them, I feel impelled to publish a few words of caution at the present time, asking that the ideas advanced may meet with serious consideration.

1. I observe a tendency on the part of certain minds to place implicit reliance on all statements which come from persons in states of Mental Illumination; to make their words authoritative; to receive their sayings as oracular and infallible; to accept and endorse their statements without evidence and without investigation. This is visible among the sect of “Swedenborgians.” Many among them receive Swedenborg as infallible authority, and enslave their minds to his statements. They carry their blind, idiotic subserviency so far as to deny their reason and distrust their intuitions, if so be that they are at variance with the statements contained in their teacher’s Doctrines of the New Jerusalem, or “Memorable Relations of things seen and heard in Heaven and Hell.” No matter how unreasonable an idea, or how great a mass of evidence sustain it—provided Swedenborg deny it, it is treated with contemptuous indifference, as unworthy of notice.

I observe the same tendency among some who have been interested in the various statements put forth by Mr. Davis. It pains me to the heart to find men who ridicule the supernaturalists for making the sayings of Moses, or Jonah, or Jude, authoritative and infallible—greater than reason, more reliable than conscience—falling themselves into the same error, believing whatever Mr. Davis alleges because he utters it; without investigation, without proof—without even asking for proof. It ought to be borne in mind that Mr. Davis’s book contains errors and contradictions, in the midst of much that is truthful. It ought to be remembered that he has made grave mistakes, and at any time is liable to repeat them. The very ideas he advocates show conclusively that this slavery of the mind to the assertions of any man, this voluntary paralysis of reason, this setting up of oracles and blind reception of their words, is a foul transgression; and history adds, has been the cause of unnumbered misfortunes to the race. If I apprehend aright the position of Mr. Davis, he recoils as much from this as I do. Now, while the evil is in its incipient state, be warned and let it extend no farther.

2. Another error which many minds fall into is to suppose that because a person in a state of Mental Illumination utters truth on one subject, he is therefore reliable on all other subjects; and because truth is given forth at one time, it is uttered at all times. Minds are variously constituted. Some have faculties fitting them for the investigation of physical subjects, others for the investigation of moral or social sciences. Some only arise into high states of mind at rare intervals, others frequently; but the mind that today utters some great truth or some important fact may tomorrow fall into some dangerous error. Swedenborg made many important scientific disclosures. As a philosopher he stands pre-eminent and alone. But when he transferred his attention to theological subjects, he became the victim of the wildest hallucinations. Swedenborg, too, in some states of mind saw the most beautiful moral, spiritual, and social truths, and at other times flatly contradicted himself, expressing opinions hostile to his previous views. It is well, then, to hesitate before receiving the opinions of any man on religious points as true because he excels in the field of physical science; well also to pause before receiving the views of any one as true today because he uttered truth at a previous time.

3. Again, it is well to remember that a proud man—one who is vain, boastful, arrogant, unkind—can never have accurate perceptions of the highest spiritual and moral truths. There exists on his part a moral inability to comprehend this range of ideas. Purity is the cause of insight. Unless a man exhibits in his life, his words, his works, the marks of Christian discipleship, he is unworthy of credence as a teacher of religion and morality. Neither are we to suppose that because a man has a marvelous insight into material facts, or claims a profound knowledge of spiritual things, that he is inwardly pure and Christ-like. A diseased moral state often exposes those of peculiar mental powers to dangerous hallucinations, and begets fancies which have no foundation in truth or nature.

More I might add upon this subject, but I am admonished that the space I have at my disposal is already filled. Let us then be cautious in our investigations. Let us receive nothing on the dicta of authority, but accept every idea which commends itself to the reason as true, to the conscience as right, and to the affections as good.

T. L. H.

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— Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence, 1776

“Association is destined to reorganize society on the basis of harmony, for the happiness and elevation of the whole.”

— Albert Brisbane, 1843

Metaphysical meaning of joy (rw)joy--The happiness of God expressed through His perfect idea--man. Joy and gladness are strength-giving, especially if the mind is fixed on the things of Spirit. Affirm: "The joy of the Lord is my strength."

Happiness has long been one of the most contested ideas in modern thought. It appeared simple, almost self-evident, and yet every major intellectual tradition fractured it in a different direction. In the early nineteenth century, reform thinkers like Albert Brisbane argued that the principle of Association would reorganize society toward the “happiness and elevation of the whole,” suggesting that well-being was not merely individual but structural, something produced through properly arranged social relations. In contrast, later critical thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek complicated the very desire for happiness itself, suggesting that what human beings often wanted was not happiness in a direct sense, but participation in something meaningful, even if it involved struggle, contradiction, or dissatisfaction.

Between these poles, older philosophical and spiritual traditions offered another layer. Epicurus treated pleasure not as indulgence but as a sign of balance, an indicator that life was aligned with nature rather than excess or distortion. Swedenborg, in a different key, suggested that disorder and self-deception were not simply obstacles to happiness but already their own form of suffering, where separation from divine order produced its own kind of inner consequence. In the political language of modernity, this tension was already embedded: Locke’s triad of life, liberty, and property became Jefferson’s “pursuit of happiness,” subtly shifting from something secured through right order to something endlessly chased, and therefore perpetually deferred.

Modern psychology complicated this further. Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs suggested that well-being was not a luxury or a bourgeois fantasy, but a layered human necessity that unfolded from survival to belonging to self-actualization. In that sense, happiness was not something reserved for the privileged, but something that emerged when basic needs, social connection, and purpose were held together in balance. It was less a static emotional state than a form of integration. This was why it could be said that happiness was not an escape from struggle, but a condition in which struggle became meaningful rather than disintegrating. It was something to do, someone to love, something to strive for, and something to be loyal to.

It was precisely this tension that early Harmonial and Fourierist Spiritualist writers attempted to resolve. In the pages of The Univercoelum and Spiritual Philosopher, an early Spiritualist periodical emerging in the late 1840s within the broader reform ferment of New York and the Northeast, questions of mind, society, and cosmic law were often treated as parts of a single unfolding system rather than separate domains. The journal stood at the intersection of Fourierist associationism, Transcendentalist reform currents, and the emerging Spiritualist movement associated with figures like Andrew Jackson Davis, and it helped articulate what came to be called Harmonial Philosophy—the idea that the universe was governed by laws of correspondence, attraction, and moral-spiritual equilibrium.

Within this intellectual atmosphere, authors writing in its pages often treated happiness not as a subjective feeling but as the natural outcome of alignment with universal law, particularly through the principle of “passional attraction,” which suggested that human desires were not inherently corrupt but structurally meaningful when properly organized within society. One such essay on happiness was signed only “J. B. W.” Despite its clarity of vision and philosophical coherence, the identity behind those initials remains uncertain. It does not appear in surviving Spiritualist or Fourierist directories, and no definitive biographical record has been found to connect the signature to a known figure in the movement. The author therefore remains a minor, almost spectral presence in the archive—visible through ideas but not through a recoverable life.

In this framework, happiness was neither a private pursuit nor a bourgeois privilege, but the lived expression of a correctly ordered world—where inner life, social form, and natural law moved in the same direction.

HAPPINESS.

But one object should engross the attention of the philanthropist—the production of universal human happiness. To rescue mankind from the depths of vice and degradation; to guide into their proper channels the misdirected faculties of the mind; to disseminate those pure and holy principles which elevate and refine the spiritual nature of man: this should become the delightful task of every lover of his species. To the accomplishment of this end, every lofty and generous spirit, longing for the emancipation of his fellow beings from the thraldom of ignorance and superstition, should direct all his energies with an unwavering zeal and untiring patience.

The first step to be taken for the improvement of the social world is to secure a clear and correct understanding of the cause and nature of those evils which render it a scene of desolation. In order to eradicate a disease, it is indispensable that the physician understand its cause and nature. A correct comprehension of the evils prevailing in the social world will suggest their proper remedies.

What then, let us inquire, are the laws which govern the human mind in respect to happiness? I answer, they may be resolved into one universal immutable law—the principle of Association. For a readier conception of this position, we will briefly consider the operations of this law as manifested throughout the whole fabric of Nature.

Chemistry teaches that there is a certain relationship existing between different substances, which under proper circumstances causes them to meet and unite; such substances are said to have an affinity or affection for each other. Thus oxygen and silicon, when left free, will harmoniously combine and form that substance which enters largely into the composition of the earth’s crust. Substances whose inherent dispositions and interior natures are similar, when brought in contact, will harmoniously associate, and, as it were, combine in a quiet and friendly manner.

Thus throughout the realms of infinitude there is no particle so refined but what it somewhere meets, as it were, with companions whose congeniality of nature provides it with a friendly and harmonious association; and none so gross as to prohibit a similar reception. Consequently, by knowing the inherent qualities or inclinations of a particle of matter, the nature of others which is indispensable for their chemical union is manifest.

The human kind is endowed with the same immutable principle that governs the material universe. Therefore, by knowing the inherent affections or affinities of the mind, the external circumstances and influences congenial to its own nature, satisfactory to its aspirations, and consequently with which it can harmoniously associate, are evident.

From the secret depths and inmost recesses of the human soul are continually springing up the living waters of its unchanging affections, which, if allowed to pursue their natural channel, present a scene of indescribable beauty and harmony; but, on the contrary, if obstructed by adverse influences, the living landscape of the mind is converted into a loathsome wilderness.

It will be found to be unexceptionably true that as man is surrounded by circumstances and influences congenial with the innate affections of his mind, with which he can harmoniously associate—just in that proportion happiness will be its result. Happiness is harmony; and misery is the effect of unnatural and uncongenial influences operating upon the mind.

Surround a mineral with substances for which it has no affinity, and disunity will be manifest. Surround man with influences for which he has no affection, and misery, contention, and misdirection will ensue. Here lie the causes of the evils which afflict the human family; and it is here that the benevolent Reformer should direct all his energies.

If you would abolish the evil and wretchedness which pervade the community, if you would make man better and happier—remove the obstructing and adverse influences that prohibit his spiritual growth; teach him that those affections which an all-wise Creator has implanted in his breast are in themselves good, and, when unvitiated by improper teaching and guided into proper channels, are productive of righteousness and happiness.

The human mind has an affection for Liberty. It requires an atmosphere of freedom in which it can give vent to its interior meditations. It is capable of infinite expansion, and anything tending to limit its powers, or quench the outgushing of its natural aspirations, is manifestly wrong and injurious.

A violation of this requirement of the mind has become the source of much of the misery that has rolled in upon the human race like an inundation; for man, instead of enjoying the privileges of harmonious association with circumstances congenial to the purest and deepest affections of his nature, has become the wretched subject of mental servitude and unfeeling tyranny.

Oppression has prevailed instead of freedom. The iron heel of tyranny, in its blood-marked course, has trampled upon the necks of millions of human beings and crushed to earth all pure and holy aspirations, till man has not even dared to express a wish for a better destiny.

Thus the innate aspirations of man’s spiritual nature have been checked and circumscribed, but not destroyed. Deathless as their immortal fountain, the smothered and obstructed waters have from time to time overleaped their opposing barriers, and in one mighty flood swept away all that dared to withstand their progress.

You may see the vestiges of these inundations on the green plains of a thousand fields where Liberty and Truth have striven with Tyranny and Error. Forever onward is the march of this sweeping inundation, and accumulating power by progress, the disturbed waters will ultimately dash away all obstructions and flow on peacefully and harmoniously in their native beds.

The mind has an affection for Truth. As the magnetic needle follows undeviatingly the movements of the magnet, so is the mind constantly influenced by the irresistible and congenial attractions of Truth. This is the grand object sought for through the innumerable theories, discussions, and isms that pervade the world.

But the mind has not been left free for the investigation. Different nations have reared an “Infallible Standard” of Truth, thereby marking out the boundaries of thought, restricting the privileges of free inquiry, and vainly endeavoring to compel man to believe that which appeared to his reason uncongenial and absurd.

They have engraved upon their columns, “you must search no further,” and, under the penalty of torture and death for disobedience, the voice of reason has been unheard and the silent aspirations of the spirit suppressed.

Here, even at the present enlightened day, is the source of much of the disunion and uncharitableness that taints the religious world; and the unfriendly and unrighteous epithets of “Infidel,” “Unbeliever,” “Heretic,” etc., are applied to those who cannot receive the doctrines believed by a few to be infallible.

If, then, the beings of celestial mold—beings who watch with guardian gaze the wandering steps of man; who rejoice when he is content to steadily and progressively journey on to the Temple of Truth; who weep when he becomes the wretched subject of his own misdirection and folly—bitter must have been the tears they shed over such a standard and test, reared by the dominant ignorance and bigotry of a misguided race.

Thus the affections of the mind have not been gratified, and, as an unavoidable consequence, the social world has been a scene inharmonious and devoid of beauty. Besides this, improper and unnatural desires have been generated. By committing substances to the stomach which at first are disagreeable, an unhealthy appetite is gradually produced. The same is true with the mind; surrounded with corrupting influences, oppressed and degraded, the mind has inordinate desires—man in his affections is not man.

The first step to be taken in order to ameliorate the present moral and social condition of man is to surround him with those influences which are congenial with the undying aspirations of the spiritual nature. Among these are freedom of thought, speech, and investigation, and the pursuit of Truth. Nothing should be considered as infallible unless sanctioned as truth by an enlightened Wisdom.

When man can search for immortal Truth unawed by power and unswayed by prejudice, then the first step in his progress to a better and happier social condition will be taken. When this movement is accomplished, the sun of the millennial era will arise on the human race, and all other movements requisite for social and spiritual improvement will naturally and inevitably follow.

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As historian Gary Ward Materra argues in Women in Early New Thought: Lives and Theology in Transition, women were among early New Thought’s most important innovators. In particular, women like Conger recognized something that many of their male counterparts did not: that New Thought’s emphasis on mind, transformation, and inner divinity carried profound social and political implications. For them, metaphysical religion was a framework for personal healing, spiritual insight and the reimagining society.

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Conger stands at the center of this synthesis. Born in Missouri and trained in the practical world of print culture, she came of age intellectually in radical environments such as Ruskin College, where she studied economics and embraced socialism. By the early 1900s, she had joined the staff of Appeal to Reason, the largest socialist newspaper in the United States, with a circulation exceeding half a million readers. There, she authored a regular column—“Hints to the Appeal’s Wise Women”—addressed to a largely male readership but explicitly calling women into political and spiritual self-consciousness.

Conger insisted that socialism was not “for men only,” but a movement inseparable from the emancipation of women. At the same time, she openly integrated New Thought principles into her socialist work. She taught that thought itself was a transformative force. Individuals and societies alike were shaped by their habitual mental patterns. Social injustice persisted, she argued, not only because of material conditions but because people believed it to be inevitable. Change, therefore, required both outer action and inner reconstruction.

This fusion of spirituality and socialism was not accidental. Many women in New Thought circles saw a deep compatibility between the two. Both traditions emphasized human potential, freedom, and the possibility of remaking the world. Conger gave this intuition a clear voice. Just as people could reorganize economic life collectively, they could also take conscious control of their inner lives. The struggle for justice and the discipline of thought were, in her view, part of the same work.

The column that follows reflects this synthesis. It moves fluidly between moral exhortation, metaphysical reflection, and practical encouragement. What might initially read as spiritual advice reveals itself, in context, as part of a larger revolutionary vision—one in which the transformation of consciousness and the transformation of society proceed together.

In recovering Conger’s voice, we glimpse a moment when American metaphysical religion was not yet domesticated into self-help culture, but pulsed with political urgency—especially in the hands of women who saw no contradiction between spiritual awakening and social liberation.

Hints to the Appeal’s Wise Women

By Josephine Conger

Use Real Worth

In years gone by, many were soughtfor what they seemed to be.Men and women alike pursued favorfor appearances we admired.

But now ideals are changing.Those we place upon the moral pedestalare those who contribute to true advancement—women of character.

We are not yet the foremost women of the age,but, properly striving,we are becoming so.

The first measure of womanhood—the better we would be—is that we must cultivatethe divine more and more.

Without goodness, we are nothing.Only virtue can make usmen and women of equalmoral worth.

Great God—must this continue?Must this measure go on throughout the world,wherever we are?

The thought of the age is this:They may rise with the light;the power is within.Let inner greatness show itselfand find expression.

The Ideal

How vain it is to wishthat the forces of life are wholly external.The truest beauty lies within us—a deep and living tone of nature.

We are called not merely to endure,but to love and to trust—for it is faith that lifts.

In the good and the beautiful of life,honor and respect follow thosewho do not seek them.

It requires struggle.We walk many paths of faith,and often do not understanduntil the journey’s end.

Yet deep within the heart,a whisper speaks—calling us to venture,to surrender to truthfor the betterment of all.

No single soul is the savior of the world.In the God of life, all things abide.

And nothing that is truly eternalcan be taken from us.

Things to Think About

Last week we considered the positive philosophy of life—the adaptability of organized effort moving toward a definite purpose. Too long have we drifted, hoping merely to reach safe harbor and avoid the storms. But safety is not the method.

We discover our true identity only in the light, by working out truth in life itself. To know what one has, to truly see it—this is the path. Yet even as we resolve to stop drifting, we find it difficult to know where to stand, to resist the pull of old habits.

The movement of New Thought brings much that is good, but also something more: it gives us the power to investigate ourselves, to look within, and to discover the philosophy of life firsthand. We learn that we must be grounded in truth, not in appearances. From this realization, we begin to draw from our own inner store.

As we do so, new avenues open—paths that lead toward the divine life. We begin to see what truth means, and more importantly, we begin to live it. This is not something given to us ready-made; it is something we must work out. It requires a definite choice.

When we come to understand that truth resides within us, growth begins in earnest. We learn to depend upon the inner life, to be guided into truth rather than merely searching for it outside ourselves.

Step by step, we become established in that truth. And in time, we arrive at a profound realization: all that is good is not distant or withheld—it is already ours.

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This vibrant moral socialism was shaped not only by class analysis and direct action, he was also an organizer with the Industrial Workers of the World, but also by affinities with Christian socialism, the conviction that the ethic of Jesus was irreconcilable with capitalism and pointed toward collective liberation for the poor and oppressed. Debs described socialism as “Christianity in action,” arguing that under capitalism the competitive scramble for profit corrupted the human love of neighbor central to the Gospel, whereas under a truly just social order, that love could flourish unimpeded.

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At the same time, Debs moved comfortably in circles influenced by New Thought, a spiritual current that emphasized the creative power of mind and aspiration. Among his friends in this orbit was Wallace D. Wattles, the New Thought writer later famous for The Science of Getting Rich. Wattles fused metaphysical optimism with moral earnestness and was himself driven by Christian socialist convictions. When Wattles died in 1911, Debs wrote a warm letter of sympathy to his family published in the New Thought periodical Nautilus, acknowledging Wattles as a comrade whose life and work reflected shared hopes for a more humane and abundant society where spiritual and material freedom are not separate but intertwined.

In this 1894 essay, Eugene V. Debs reflects on the meaning of Independence Day through the lens of patriotic socialism, Christian moral vision, and New Thought spirituality. Written at a time of widespread economic hardship, labor unrest, and social inequality, Debs revisits the revolutionary spirit of 1776, the courage of ordinary people who struck for liberty and justice, and contrasts it with the crises of his own era, when workers struggled for fair wages and basic rights.

Debs frames the Fourth of July not merely as a celebration of the past, but as a call to live up to America’s founding ideals, reminding readers that liberty, equality, and social justice require both moral courage and collective action. Influenced by the ethical principles of Christian socialism and the spiritual optimism of thinkers like Wallace D. Wattles, he blends patriotic pride with a vision of a society shaped by justice, compassion, and the dignity of labor.

The following excerpt captures Debs’s impassioned critique of late‑Gilded Age inequities, his admiration for the revolutionary spirit of the Founders, and his enduring hope for a more just and humane America.

The Fourth of July

by Eugene V. DebsPublished in Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine, vol. 18, no. 9 (Sept. 1894), pp. 872–874

Mr. Samuel J. Niccolls, in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat of July 4th, has a paper captioned, “Thoughts for the Fourth,” and begins:

The Fourth of July, by unquestioned right, stands first among our national holidays. The great event it commemorates must ever make it dear to all true Americans and lovers of liberty.

Usually it has been celebrated with some boasting over our manifest destiny and our favored condition as a free people. But whatever we may think of our future as a nation, the return of Independence Day this year finds us in a condition that excites distress and alarm among all serious-minded men. Our industries are prostrated, trade is paralyzed, capital is unemployed, labor is full of unrest and discontent, and hope for better times is sick and weak. Serious apprehension is felt on all sides about greater evils to come, and there can be no relief until these are addressed. Urgent questions must be settled promptly and finally before prosperity can return. It is a most serious time when a people begin to distrust themselves and their institutions.

Two things are especially evident and ominous. One is the prevailing lawlessness of the times. Our present condition contrasts sadly with earlier periods in our national life. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the American people has been their respect for law. Observers from Europe, where force is essential to preserve public order, have praised this, and writers like De Tocqueville and Prof. Bryce have noted it.

The Fourth of July commemorates an event dear to American workingmen opposed to oppression, robbery, and degradation: the day when the people—a large majority—struck against the laws and authority of England. Prior to July 4, 1776, the colonies were full of agitators. They defied courts and officials, challenged the king and his armies, and engaged in battles with both defeats and victories. Washington and his compatriots were denounced as anarchists, nihilists, rebels, and traitors. Bounties were placed on their heads. Yet, despite the suffering and sacrifice involved, the leaders pursued principle over convenience. They enlisted sympathy and aid from abroad—France provided money, troops, ships, and munitions—and, with this support, Washington and the patriots eventually succeeded.

Thousands of loyalists (Tories) opposed the strike, denouncing it and its supporters as traitors. But this was the greatest strike on record. It produced a new nation and demonstrated that the strikers were not anarchists; they were advocates of just laws, good government, and liberty. Their rallying cry: “Give me liberty or give me death.” From 1776 onward, Americans have kept the spirit of independence alive, loving liberty and resisting tyrants. As Grant said, this is “the American way.”

Today, the American people face enemies more insidious than King George. Mr. Niccolls observes:

Within the last ten years, professed anarchists have appeared among us. They are avowed foes of all government and labor to bring society into a disorganized state in which each man makes his own law. The murderous spirit that recently killed the chief magistrate of France animates thousands in our own land.

This spirit is not limited to declared anarchists. Many, who would bristle at that label, still organize to defeat law in pursuit of selfish ends. Capitalists sometimes cloak oppression in legality; in labor, laws securing rights are defied for organized agendas. Some anarchists have been imported by employers seeking cheap labor, but even so, native-born assassins like Booth, Guiteau, and Prendergast remind us that lawlessness arises from conditions, not merely nationality.

Anarchists are effects, not causes, of social conditions. As President Cleveland said, the financial and industrial demoralization beginning in 1893 was largely caused by congressional legislation. Multitudes of hungry, idle, ragged men are the effect—conditions that can breed anarchists anywhere. Arbitrary power, despotic laws, and courts protecting plutocrats inevitably provoke rebellion. Military suppression may restore order, but liberty suffers.

The grand Fourth of July, as a holiday celebrating equality and inalienable rights, has lost its luster. Today, court injunctions and armed deputies protect plutocratic interests while the masses suffer. Sympathy for labor has become fashionable, yet when strikes inconvenience the public or the wealthy, authorities crush the strikers with force.

No fair-minded person can fail to sympathize with wage-earners seeking justice and fair share. But while sympathy is due, it should not blind us to the dangers of misguided movements. Recent strikes have evolved into civil war in several states, subverting social order. Municipal, county, and state authorities often lack power to maintain peace against violent strikes.

In 1776, the Fourth of July celebrated liberty understood by patriotic colonists. In 1894, wage-earners fight for honest wages, without which comes poverty and degradation. When striking for bread and basic rights, they are met with troops and suppression. On that July day, millions of hearts beat like funeral drums to the graves the plutocrats dug for liberty, and the plutocrats won.

Some hope for remedy in the ballot, but for over a century, voting has failed to prevent oppression. Still, if the populace is sufficiently aroused, honest men may be elected, and the Fourth of July may be rescued from enduring disgrace.

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There is a recurring rule in history. When an empire begins to decay, whether by malice or negligence, it ceases to care for the very people who sustain its power. Some have described fascism as imperialism turned inward. At that point, decline becomes inevitable. Armies go unpaid. Officers forget what they’re supposed to be upholding. Service is rewarded with neglect or even outright contempt from those they’re supposed to be serving. These are signs that the system’s cohesion is dissolving from within.

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This pattern appears again and again. In the Roman Empire, unpaid and overstretched legions grew disloyal and fragmented. In the Ottoman Empire, the once-elite Janissaries became demoralized and politicized as the state failed to maintain discipline and purpose, which led to a series of rebellions that ended up tearing the empire apart. In the Spanish Empire, repeated bankruptcies left soldiers undersupplied and mutinous, which led to its gradual decline by financial and military exhaustion in the face of nationalist rebellions in the colonies. And in the Russian Empire, the breakdown of morale among troops and officials under the strain of war helped bring about total collapse and the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics based on Marxist Communism, an entirely new form of government the likes of which the world had never seen.

The lesson repeats with almost mechanical certainty. Once an empire neglects those who defend and administer it, it begins to lose not just battles, but its inner coherence. From that point on, decline is no longer a distant threat but an unfolding reality.

But what is the new world? Who is struggling to birth it?

I recently listened to an interview by religious studies scholar Jeffery Kripal, where he said something like, “You can look at Netflix and see a thousand visions of the future, but they’re all negative, they’re all dystopias.”

Kripal, in The Superhumanities, argues that the humanities have been “lobotomized” by stripping out the extraordinary elements of human experience—visions, precognition, mystical states, leaving a narrow, depressing, and overly political view of humanity. He contends that this secular flattening reduces humans to mere data points, ignoring the “vertical dimension” of consciousness, where altered and transcendent experiences provide first-person knowledge of reality. Kripal calls for a “superhumanities” that reclaims the transformative and ecstatic power of literature, art, and intellectual history, treating them as amplifiers of consciousness. By acknowledging these “impossible” or extraordinary aspects of humanity, the humanities can move beyond the purely materialist and political frameworks, embrace utopian and visionary possibilities, and restore a richer, more imaginative understanding of human potential. Kripal urges putting the “weird” back on the table, integrating the immanent and transcendent to fully honor the fantastic dimensions of human life.

In many ways this is what I have tried to do with my dissertation and research on the intersections of enchanted Spiritualism and radical socialism, focusing on Andrew Jackson Davis, John Murray Spear and others.

But we need a utopian imagination now more than ever. The old world IS dying. A new world WILL be coming. The time is now to start building the next one. That starts with utopian imagination.

Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) provides a vivid historical example of the power of utopian imagination that Kripal argues the humanities have largely abandoned. In Bellamy’s novel, a man from the late 19th century falls asleep and awakens in the year 2000 to find a society transformed. Industrial production has been collectivized, wealth and labor are equitably distributed, and social harmony has replaced competition and poverty. Bellamy’s vision offered concrete inspiration for rethinking social, economic, and cultural structures.

The book sparked the creation of the Nationalist Clubs, a network of organizations dedicated to spreading Bellamy’s ideas and exploring ways to implement them. Some of these groups even attempted small-scale experiments, establishing utopian colonies such as Kahweh, which sought to live out Bellamy’s principles in practice—communal property, shared labor, and social equality. While most of these experiments ultimately failed due to economic pressures and logistical challenges, they demonstrate the tangible power of imaginative vision to mobilize real-world action.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed continues this project, depicting an anarchist society that tests the limits of human cooperation, labor, and social equality. It offers readers a chance to inhabit these worlds and experience the structures firsthand as lived possibilities in their imagination. Le Guin offers what she herself called an “ambiguous utopia.” Anarres, her fictional utopian world, is not a nightmare to be escaped, nor a paradise to be idealized. It is a living experiment, full of tensions, contradictions, and ongoing struggles. Conflict arises not from a monolithic tyrant, but from the difficulty of sustaining freedom in practice. The Dispossessed does something dystopian fiction rarely attempts. It treats the future not as a field of moral and social experimentation rather than a cautionary tale. It invites the reader to inhabit a world where better arrangements are possible, while refusing to deny the effort, discipline, and self-critique required to make them real.

That tension mirrors the internal dynamics of horizontal protest movements. In Occupy encampments, for instance, participants attempted leaderless assemblies, consensus decision-making, and shared resources. Like Anarres, these spaces revealed both the beauty and the fragility of cooperation without coercion. Le Guin helped people feel what such a society might be like from the inside, not as an abstract theory but as a daily practice full of friction. Movements like Occupy were not just reacting against capitalism. They were experimenting, often in real time, with forms of life that rejected centralized authority. Occupy’s famous insistence that “another world is possible” is almost a paraphrase of Le Guin’s literary project—showing that different social arrangements are not only conceivable but habitable, even if imperfect.

Le Guin herself articulated the deeper philosophical stake in one of her most widely cited lines:

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings.”

That comparison reframes political reality as historically contingent rather than metaphysically fixed. Just as the doctrine of the divine right once appeared natural and eternal until it collapsed under pressure, so too can contemporary economic systems be imagined otherwise.

We remember Aldous Huxley for Brave New World while forgetting his constructive visions. Cultural memory prefers warning over possibility, dystopia over utopia, because dystopias feel urgent and plausible while utopias feel distant and unreal. We remember Aldous Huxley for Brave New World while forgetting that he spent the last decades of his life trying to articulate a constructive alternative. His final novel, Island (1962), was written deliberately as a counterpoint to Brave New World. Where the earlier book was a warning, Island was intended as an offering: a thought experiment about what a humane and spiritually integrated society might look like.

The novel follows Will Farnaby, a cynical Western journalist who is shipwrecked on the fictional island of Pala in the Indian Ocean. At first he arrives as a kind of emissary of the outside world’s values—profit, extraction, and geopolitical intrigue. But as he recovers on the island and encounters its people, he gradually discovers that Pala has developed a radically different civilization. It is not technologically primitive, nor anti-scientific. Instead, it attempts to harmonize modern knowledge with spiritual insight, ecological restraint, and psychological well-being.

Huxley imagines a society organized around several striking principles. Education integrates science, the arts, meditation, and emotional self-understanding, aiming to cultivate whole human beings rather than merely efficient workers. Children are raised partly through “mutual adoption clubs,” giving them multiple mentors and social supports rather than isolating them within nuclear families. Economic life is decentralized and cooperative, designed to avoid the extremes of wealth and poverty that characterize industrial societies. Politics operates through participatory councils rather than rigid hierarchies.

Perhaps most distinctive is Pala’s emphasis on consciousness itself. The culture encourages mindfulness, contemplation, and psychological honesty. Huxley imagines carefully guided rituals using what the novel calls “moksha-medicine”—a psychedelic sacrament intended not to pacify people, as the drug soma does in Brave New World, but to deepen awareness and spiritual insight. Technology and pharmacology exist in both novels, but their social purpose is reversed. In the dystopia, they are tools of control; in the utopia, they are tools of awakening.

In this sense, Island reflects the philosophical direction of Huxley’s later life. Through works like The Perennial Philosophy and The Doors of Perception, he became increasingly interested in the convergence of science, mysticism, and psychology. The society of Pala embodies that synthesis: Buddhist mindfulness, Western science, ecological stewardship, sexual freedom, and democratic cooperation woven into a single cultural fabric. The goal is a deeper form of human flourishing—clarity of mind, compassion, and a sense of unity with the larger web of life.

Yet even this utopia is fragile. As the story unfolds, Pala faces pressure from external powers eager to exploit its resources and from internal factions attracted to the wealth and militarism of the surrounding world. The novel ends with the island on the brink of invasion, suggesting that enlightened societies must continually defend themselves against the gravitational pull of greed and domination.

This tension reveals something important about Huxley’s constructive vision. Unlike naive utopias, Island does not claim that a perfect society could permanently escape the darker tendencies of history. Instead, it proposes a cultural direction: a society consciously designed to cultivate awareness, cooperation, and ecological balance. The tragedy of the novel is not that such a society is impossible, but that the world around it may not yet be ready to sustain it.

Mark Fisher captures this condition with stark clarity in Capitalist Realism: we can imagine the end of the world in vivid detail, yet even modest changes to our economic and social systems remain nearly unimaginable. Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man gave this blockage a political vocabulary, presenting liberal capitalism as the final horizon of human development. Together, they describe not just an ideology but a felt limitation—a quiet foreclosure of possibility in which the future appears as repetition, management, or collapse, but rarely as genuine transformation.

For Fisher, this was not simply an intellectual problem; it was an existential and cultural one. Capitalist realism operates by colonizing desire and expectation. It trains us, often unconsciously, to treat alternatives as unrealistic, unserious, or already failed. Even our rebellions are pre-contained, expressed through styles, consumption choices, or cultural gestures that leave underlying structures intact. The result is a strange inversion: we are surrounded by constant change—technological upgrades, cultural churn—yet experience a deep stasis at the level of social imagination.

This is why Fisher became increasingly interested, especially in his later, unfinished project Acid Communism, in recovering moments when this imaginative barrier briefly dissolved. Acid Communism was not a call for escapism, nor merely a reference to psychedelia in the narrow sense. It was Fisher’s attempt to name a historical and experiential opening—most visible in the late 1960s and early 1970s—when large numbers of people felt that a different way of living was not only possible but already beginning to emerge.

In this framework, “acid” points to an expansion of consciousness, a loosening of rigid perceptual and social habits. “Communism” points not only to economic reorganization but to shared life, collective joy, and the dismantling of alienation. Fisher was interested in how music, spirituality, experimental communities, and political movements once converged to produce a sense that work, time, gender relations, and social hierarchy could all be reimagined. The tragedy, in his view, is that this opening was closed—absorbed, commodified, or suppressed—before it could fully articulate itself.

What matters is that Fisher does not abandon utopia; he relocates it. Rather than treating utopia as a distant blueprint, he begins to see it as something immanent in experience—glimpsed in moments of solidarity, creativity, or altered awareness. These are not complete systems, but signals, fragments of a different world breaking through the present one. The task is to connect these fragments, to translate fleeting experiences into durable social forms.

For Kripal, mystical insight, psychic phenomena, and visionary states expand the boundaries of what we consider real. For Fisher, similar expansions, whether through art, collective action, or altered consciousness, loosen the grip of capitalist realism and reopen the field of the possible. Both suggest that imagination is not mere fantasy but a mode of perception, a way of apprehending realities that have not yet stabilized into institutions.

New Thought is know for a simple axiom: Thoughts shape reality. Our spiritual faculty of imagination is what shapes the reality we know. Human beings are meaning-makers, capable of perceiving, envisioning, and enacting worlds that do not yet exist. Utopian fiction, mystical experience, and visionary thought do more than entertain. They train us to see possibilities, to rehearse alternative societies, and to expand the range of what we can recognize as achievable. Our current systems may make modest change seem impossible, and capitalist realism tells us the world we have is the world we must accept. Yet history shows that when humans collectively dare to imagine the extraordinary, whether in Bellamy’s Nationalist Clubs, or Le Guin’s anarchist moonm those visions ripple into material practice.

The task before us is urgent. We can no longer afford the intellectual flattening that ignores the transcendent, the ecstatic, the impossible. By allowing our thinking to stretch beyond the limits of conventional reality, we prepare ourselves to act in ways that reshape the material world. The humanities, literature, philosophy, and the mystical all become instruments for change when they reconnect us with the superhuman, the enchanted, the radically possible. In this sense, the very act of imagining is political, moral, and practical. To envision a better world is already to take the first steps toward building it, and the time to start is now.

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In the early nineteenth century, amid the upheavals of industrialization and revolution, Charles Fourier proposed a startling premise. The disorder of society did not arise from flawed human nature but from a misalignment between human passions and the structures meant to contain them. Where others preached restraint, Fourier preached orchestration. Where others saw desire as a problem, he treated it as a divine instrument waiting for the right arrangement.

Fourier’s project belongs to a broader current that Catherine Albanese later named “American metaphysical religion.” This tradition insists that mind, matter, and spirit interpenetrate. It rejects a rigid divide between the material and the divine and instead treats the world as charged with meaning, correspondence, and possibility. Fourier stands at an important threshold in this history. He does not speak the later language of “mind power” or “mental causation,” yet he lays down a cosmology in which attraction governs everything from the stars to the human heart. The same force that binds planets in their courses animates desire, labor, and social life.

This is where his thought intersects with what can be called critical enchanted materialism. Fourier refuses both crude materialism and abstract spiritualism. Matter is alive with tendency and relation. Passion is not merely psychological. It is ontological. Social arrangements are not neutral containers. They either harmonize with the deeper currents of existence or distort them. In this way, Fourier offers a critique of early capitalism that is not only economic but metaphysical. Poverty, alienation, and monotony appear as symptoms of a deeper dissonance between the divine order of attraction and the artificial systems imposed by civilization.

Fourier’s influence did not remain confined to utopian communities or socialist theory. His emphasis on attraction, harmony, and the reorganization of feeling flowed into the religious and philosophical movements that would reshape American spirituality. Through currents such as Spiritualism and, more specifically, Harmonial philosophy associated with figures like Andrew Jackson Davis, the idea took root that the universe operates through subtle laws of correspondence and attraction. These movements translated Fourier’s social metaphysics into a language of vibration, sympathy, and inner alignment.

From this soil emerged what might be called the affective strand of New Thought. In contrast to later, more strictly noetic formulations that emphasize belief or mental assertion, this stream centers on feeling, resonance, and attunement. It appears clearly in the work of Ralph Waldo Trine, whose vision of harmony depends on bringing one’s inner life into alignment with a larger spiritual order, and in Wallace D. Wattles, who frames desire itself as a creative force that participates in the generative activity of the universe. In both, one hears an echo of Fourier’s conviction that attraction is primary, that it precedes reason, and that it can guide human life when properly understood.

To read Fourier, then, is to encounter an origin point. His “law of attraction” is not the simplified slogan of later popular spirituality. It is a comprehensive theory of the cosmos, society, and the passions. It binds theology to political economy, architecture to desire, and divine providence to everyday labor. The selections that follow reveal a thinker attempting nothing less than a total reorganization of human life, grounded in the belief that the forces moving within us are the very forces that move the universe.

Textual Note on Source and Translation

The following selection is drawn from The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier Selected Texts on Work Love and Passionate Attraction, a modern English-language anthology of writings by Charles Fourier.

This volume presents selections from Fourier’s major works, including Le Nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire (1829), in translation and edited form. It represents the first substantial new English selection of Fourier’s writings in the twentieth century and was designed to highlight those aspects of his thought most relevant to modern social theory, especially his doctrines of passionate attraction, social harmony, and the critique of civilization.

All excerpts reproduced here follow the wording of that edition, with minor corrections to typographical and OCR errors for clarity. Editorial notes and footnotes in the original volume have been omitted unless otherwise indicated.

Charles Fourier, The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier: Selected Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction, ed. and trans. Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971).

METAPHYSICS AND THEODICY

God and His Properties

The multitude has perennially been deceived into thinking that the designs of God are impenetrable, that men should not even seek to know God. Common sense suggests the contrary; it obliges us to begin our studies with the simplest of all our problems: the problem of God.

In antiquity the Creator was travestied by fables which confounded Him with a horde of 35,000 false gods, each more ridiculous than the others. At that time it was assuredly difficult to study the designs of God, to make some sense out of the celestial masquerade. Thus Socrates and Cicero confined themselves to gaining detachment from the follies of their age, and to adoring the unknown God without making further investigations which would have been thwarted by the spirit of the time. Socrates was nonetheless the victim of his age.

Now that these superstitions have been dissipated and Christianity has brought us back to sound ideas, to the belief in a single God, we have a sure guide in undertaking the study of nature. Starting with the principle that all enlightenment must come from God, and that reason can only foster enlightenment insofar as it conforms to the dispositions of the Creator, it remains for us to determine the essential properties of God: His attributes, His designs, and His methods of achieving the harmony of the universe. On this score, certain rules which are already known can lead us to the discovery of those which remain unknown.

In dealing with this question one must proceed by degrees and begin by analyzing a very small number of the properties of God, focusing on the most evident, such as the following:

* The integral direction of movement

* Economy in the choice of means

* Distributive justice

* The universality of Providence

* Unity of system

1. The Integral Direction of Movement

If God plays the most important role in the direction of movement, if He alone is master of the universe, the sole creator and dispenser, it is up to Him to direct all aspects of the universe, among others the most noble aspect, that of social relations. It follows that the laws governing human societies must be the work of God and not of men. If we are to guide our societies toward the good, we must seek the social code that God was bound to compose for us.

2. Economy in the Choice of Means

If the mechanism of societies is controlled by God, it should be distinguished by the economy in the choice of means that we attribute to Him in naming Him the supreme economist. But the principle of economy requires Him to work with very large social groups, and not with the smallest which we name “the family” or “the conjugal household.” Above all, the principle of economy requires God to choose passionate attraction as the driving force in human affairs.

3. Distributive Justice

There is not a trace of it in civilized legislation, which increases the poverty of men in proportion to their industriousness. The first sign of justice should be to guarantee the people a minimum which would increase in proportion to social progress. Is there any justice in a state of affairs where the progress of industry does not even guarantee the poor a chance to obtain work?

4. The Universality of Providence

Divine Providence should be extended to all nations, to the so-called savages as well as to the civilized. The savages are truly free men, and any industrial system which they reject is contrary to the designs of God. The form of industry which we offer them, agricultural fragmentation and domestic isolation, is not part of the providential plan, for this system fails to satisfy the impulses given by Providence to those who are closest to nature.

The same can be said of any order based on violence. Any class that is constrained directly, as are slaves, or indirectly, as are wage-earners, is deprived of the support of Providence, which has no other agent on this planet than attraction. Therefore, the civilized and barbarous order, which is based uniquely on violence, is contrary to the designs of God; and there must be another system applicable to all classes and to all peoples, if it is true that Providence is universal.

5. Unity of System

This implies the use of attraction, which is the known agent of God, the mainspring of the social harmonies of the universe, from those of the stars to those of the insects. It is thus by the study of attraction that we must seek the divine social code.

THE DIVINE SOCIAL CODE

Destiny! The word sounds ridiculous. Anyone would fear to be taken for a visionary if he did not scoff at the idea of a pre-established destiny, of a divine and mathematical theory concerning the relations of societies and the mechanism of the passions.

Nevertheless, how can one suppose that an eminently wise being could have created our passions without having previously determined their uses? Could God, who has spent an eternity creating and structuring worlds, have been unaware that the first collective need of their inhabitants is for a code regulating the social relations of men and their passions?

Under the guidance of our self-proclaimed sages, the passions merely engender calamities which make one wonder whether they are the work of Hell or the Deity. Try out successively the laws established by the most revered of men, by Solon and Draco, by Lycurgus and Minos, and the result will always be the nine calamities which constitute the subversive mechanism of the passions. Should not God have foreseen the shameful results of man-made laws? He could have observed their effects on the billion globes created prior to our own.

He should have known, before creating us and endowing us with passions, that human reason would be insufficient to harmonize the passions and that humanity would need a legislator more enlightened than itself.

Unless one wishes to regard God’s providence as insufficient, limited, and indifferent to our happiness, it follows that God must have devised for us a passional code, a system for the domestic and social organization of all humanity, which is everywhere endowed with the same passions.

How can we suppose God to be more imprudent than the least experienced among us? When a man gathers building materials, does he not always make a plan for their use? What would we think of someone who bought stone, timber, and supplies for the construction of a large edifice without any idea of the kind of building he wished to construct? We would take him for a madman. Yet this is the degree of ineptitude that our sophists attribute to God in supposing that He could have created the passions, attractions, character traits, instincts, and the other materials of the social edifice without having made any plans as to their use.

God must have composed a passional code regulating our domestic, industrial, and social relations. How then can we suppose that He wished to hide this code from man, the only creature who needs to know it? He has not concealed from us a much less important branch of the laws of movement, that of material gravitation and the celestial harmonies. Since the time of Isaac Newton, He has initiated us into the mysteries of the equilibrium of the universe, which had previously been regarded as unfathomable.

Why should we suppose that He wishes to deny us knowledge of the system which He must have composed concerning the mechanism of the passions and of societies? For what reason would He refuse us the science which is most directly concerned with our needs, with our industrial relations?

THE LAW OF ATTRACTION

We already know that God relies solely upon the force of attraction in guiding the movements of the planets and the suns, which are creatures immensely greater than ourselves, and in guiding the insects, creatures far inferior to us. Could man alone be deprived of the fortune of being guided toward social good by attraction? Why should there be a break in the chain of the system of the universe?

Attraction is the divine guide of the stars and the animals, and it suffices to place them in harmony. Why should it not be equally sufficient for man, whose place in the universe is midway between the planets and the animals? Where is the unity of the divine system if the mainspring of general harmony, attraction, is not just as applicable to human societies as it is to the stars and the animals?

Philosophical wisdom and civilization come from men, and attraction comes from God; for it acts prior to reason, and even prevails over the reasoner who has decided not to obey it. Thus it comes from a power superior to reason and human wisdom. This power can only be God. If attraction gives rise to evil in civilized, barbarian, and savage societies created by man, is this not an indication that these societies are incompatible with the designs of God?

Nature shows us, through the example of animals, that if passionate attraction leads to harmony, it does so conditionally, provided the prerequisites of harmony are available. Thus bees can build a hive only when they find flowers, which are the chief element of their social mechanism. Similarly, beavers could not establish their industrious society in a country lacking wood. For these species, such materials are essential conditions of harmony.

Human beings are in a similar position. Their attraction can attain its goal, universal harmony, only when the two prerequisites of harmony are available. These are luxury and theory. You have already created luxury, which is the more important of the two agents. It remains for you to discover the theory.

Without both means at your disposal, you are like beavers who find wood without water or water without wood, and are unable to organize their society. Despite the increase in luxury and the development of the arts, you have not escaped the poverty that besets the majority of society. You possess luxury without the means to use it.

This means is the theory of social harmony, which must bring a greater or lesser degree of luxury to all inhabitants of the globe. Reflect upon this truth: the birth of social happiness depends on two discoveries:

* Luxury, without which harmony cannot be organized

* The theory of harmony, without which luxury cannot be used

Since attraction is ineradicable, it works ceaselessly in men and animals. It is the source of their happiness in harmony and of their misfortune when the conditions of harmony are absent.

When these conditions are lacking, attraction becomes a cause of disorder. The fault lies not in attraction, but in circumstances. Man is the only creature whom attraction constantly directs toward disorder. This indicates that a subversion has occurred in the mechanism of human passions. This subversion is the condition of existing societies.

Since you are unable to repress the passions, you seek to adapt them to established laws and customs. You would do better to change circumstances so that they conform to the designs of attraction.

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Does nonduality mean the material world is an illusion? In this lecture, I argue no—offering a powerful alternative to the A Course in Miracles framing by exploring the dialectic between internal and external, spirit and matter.Responding to Superhumanities, this talk draws on Hegelian philosophy and enchanted materialism to show how consciousness and material reality are dynamically intertwined—not opposed. Rather than dissolving the world into illusion, nonduality becomes a deeper unity that includes and transforms matter itself.Featuring clips and insights from Eric Butterworth (on Emerson & Spinoza), Slavoj Žižek, Vera Dawson Tait, and James Gaither (World Spirituality podcast on The Essential Charles Fillmore), this video bridges New Thought, critical theory, and spiritual philosophy.The lecture culminates in a “Southern Cross Meditation” inspired by Michael Topper, alongside a critical reflection on the phrase “you create your own reality”—revealed here as only a partial truth when separated from historical, social, and material conditions.If you're exploring New Thought, nonduality, metaphysics, or the future of spiritual philosophy, this is a bold and grounded intervention.🔔 Subscribe for more content on spiritual philosophy, New Thought, and the science of spiritual reality.

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#Nonduality #Hegel #NewThought #EnchantedMaterialism #Superhumanities #Spirituality #Philosophy #Consciousness #Dialectics

“Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18). Antebellum America answered that warning with plans, measurements, and walls meant to carry a new spirit.

In the decades before the Civil War, the United States became a proving ground for social and spiritual experiment. Markets expanded, cities grew, and inequality sharpened. Many reformers saw more than economic change. They saw a world losing its sense of meaning, a society bending toward what they called Mammon. In response, they asked a daring question. What if society could be rebuilt in form as well as in spirit?

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One of the most influential answers came from Charles Fourier, brought into American life by Albert Brisbane. Brisbane’s Concise Exposition of the Doctrine of Association (1843) translated Fourier’s system into a practical vision that could be built, inhabited, and tested. It helped inspire communities such as Brook Farm and the North American Phalanx, where reformers sought to give physical shape to harmony.

Fourierism carried a deeper claim than economic reform alone. It worked as a form of critical enchanted materialism. It challenged the idea that matter exists only as property or profit and insisted that the material world holds meaning, relation, and power. The Fourierists understood matter and spirit as intertwined and responsive to one another. Human passions, natural forces, and built environments belonged to a single living order. To reorganize labor and daily life meant participating in a wider alignment that touched both the visible and the unseen.

Architecture became the field where this vision took form.

The Phalanstery, the great communal edifice of Association, gave this philosophy a body. Its corridors, halls, and wings were arranged to guide movement, encourage cooperation, and cultivate shared life without erasing individuality. The building expressed a belief that structure could educate desire and that beauty could sustain social unity. The ground plan of the “Edifice of an Associated Township” served as a kind of material theology. It mapped a world where warmth, efficiency, sociability, and dignity were woven together in a single design.

This vision moved within a broader current of spiritual searching. Transcendentalism affirmed the presence of the divine in nature and in the self. Spiritualism taught that unseen realities pressed upon daily life. Fourierism joined this current with a practical aim. It sought to organize these insights into the routines of work, habitation, and community. It treated the built environment as a medium through which higher laws could be expressed and experienced.

Brisbane’s Edifice stands at the meeting point of these currents. It brings together social theory, spiritual aspiration, and architectural design in a single vision. It imagines a society where unity appears in visible form, where daily life reflects a deeper order, and where matter itself participates in meaning.

What follows is a corrected transcription of Brisbane’s description of that Edifice. Read it as a plan and as a testimony. It shows how reformers of the antebellum era sought to build not only new communities, but a new relation between the material world and the life of the spirit.

THE CORRIDORS OR COVERED COMMUNICATIONS

One of the most convenient and beautiful features in the material arrangement of the Edifices of Association will be a large and spacious Corridor, or enclosed Portico, which will wind around one entire front of the building, and will form an elegant covered communication, which will lead to, and connect, all parts of the Edifice—the public halls and saloons, the exchange, reading-rooms, private apartments, halls of industry, etc.

The Edifice of an Association may be compared to a town under one roof, and it must have an avenue or public way, corresponding to a street, which will form a means of communication with all quarters of the building; this avenue is the Corridor or enclosed Portico, which, in a large Association, should be about twenty-four feet wide; by means of it, the inhabitants could, in the depths of winter, visit each other, go to parties, public assemblies, concerts, lectures, etc., without knowing whether it snowed or rained, or whether it was cold or blustering.

What an advantage, what a source of comfort it would be to have, instead of an open street, exposed to the hot sun in summer and to the cold in winter, and which is always either dusty or muddy, a spacious and elegant Corridor, forming, besides a most convenient and comfortable mode of communication, a delightful place of promenade, a place for exhibitions of works of Art and Industry, and useful for other public purposes! How much unnecessary disease would also be avoided by such covered communications, for we may safely estimate that one-half of colds, consumptions, pleurisies, and rheumatisms, is the result of exposure and sudden changes of temperature! What an economy also in carriages and in the various means of protection, such as cloaks, furs, umbrellas, overshoes, etc., to which we must now resort to protect ourselves against the weather in going from our houses into open and exposed streets! If people would but reflect with impartiality upon the immense economies, the comfort and convenience, the saving of time and sickness, which would result from the combined and scientific system of architecture of Association, they would be enthusiastic in their admiration of it, and would condemn utterly our present defective and unhealthy system of building.

The Corridor of a large Association should be, in the centre of the Edifice, about twenty-four feet wide, and in the wings eighteen. In a small Association, such as would be first established, it could be much narrower. It would pass along on a level with the first story or on the top of the basement, and not upon the ground, as some openings for carriages must be left through the basement. The Corridor could be placed on the outside of the building, and the top would form a terrace for the second story; or it could be enclosed within the outside walls of the Edifice, and the roof would project over it. In the latter case, it would be the height of the entire building—that is, three stories—and the windows which lighted it should be high and spacious, like those of a church. The doors of the public halls and private apartments would open upon it, as the outside doors of our houses now open into the street; flights of steps would lead from it to the upper stories. In a large and opulent Association, with what elegance could its corridors be fitted up! what an ornament they would be! and what a field for the display of the genius of its artists!

“To pass a winter’s day,” says Fourier, “in the Edifice of an Association,—to visit all parts of it without exposure to the inclemency of the weather,—to go to balls and parties in light dresses without being incommoded by the cold, without knowing whether it rained or stormed, would be a charm so new, that it would be alone sufficient to render our residences and cities detestable. If an Edifice, like that of an Association, were erected in our Societies and adapted to the usages of the present mode of living, the convenience alone of covered communications, warmed in winter and aired in summer, would give to it an immense value. Its rents, for the same quantity of space, would be double those of our present houses.

“If the civilized World, after three thousand years of study and practice in Architecture, has not yet learned how to construct comfortable and healthy residences, it is not very surprising that it has not learned how to direct and harmonize the Passions. When men fail in the smallest calculations in the material order, it is not surprising that they should fail in important calculations in the moral or spiritual order.”

EXPLANATION OF THE GROUND PLAN.

A—Avenue passing between the Edifice and the store-houses, granaries and other out-houses.S—Public Square, formed by the centre and projecting wings of the Edifice.G—Garden enclosed within the central range of buildings; it would contain the greenhouses and form a winter promenade.a, c, b, d—Court-yards between the different ranges of buildings; they are about a hundred feet wide, ornamented with trees and shrubbery, and crossed by Corridors.

P, P, P, P—Large portals or entrances to the Edifice.C—The Church.H—A large Hall for musical representations and festivities.B, C, D,—Granaries, store-houses and other out-buildings.

To avoid giving too great a length to the Edifice, it must be composed of a double range or line of buildings, encircling the court-yards—a, c, b, d, and the garden—G. The broad dark line does not represent the foundation walls of the Edifice, but the entire width of a range of buildings; it is intended, together with the light dotted line around the inside, which is the corridor, to represent a width of seventy-five feet.

Around the inside of the Edifice winds the spacious Corridor or enclosed Portico, which we have described; the reader will see that it forms a belt, encircling all parts of the building and uniting them in a whole.

The ranges of buildings which enclose the garden—G, will be reserved for public purposes. They will contain the Council-Rooms, Reading-Rooms, Library, Exchange, Public Halls, Banquet-Rooms, Salons for parties, social unions and public assemblies, and some of the higher-placed apartments.

The open spaces left between the parallel ranges of buildings should be formed into a hundred and twenty feet wide; they would form elongated court-yards, traversed by corridors, and should be planted with ornamental trees and shrubbery; in association the useful and the beautiful must be in every way combined.

The noisy workshops would be located in the basement of one of the extreme wings; their noise would be lost in this distant part of the Edifice, and would not incommode the inhabitants.

Play-grounds for children would occupy the court-yard of the same wing; such a place would be necessary, particularly in winter.

A portion of the wing opposite the one devoted to noisy occupations, would contain the suites of apartments reserved for travellers and visitors.

The Edifice of an association of the largest description would be about twenty-two hundred feet in length; with these dimensions the grand square enclosed by the two wings each five hundred feet long. As we descend to smaller associations, the size of the Edifice could be much reduced, and for an Association of four hundred persons, a comparatively plain building would answer the purpose.

The gardens should, if practicable, be located behind the Edifice, and not behind the granaries and other out-houses, near which the fields of grain had better be placed. This distribution must, however, be regulated by locality.

The square garden—G, would be planted with evergreens and would contain the greenhouses; it could in winter be enclosed, so as to form a beautiful promenade, where flowers and foliage would charm the eye and perfume the atmosphere. What a source of pleasure and health would a winter garden of this kind be!—and how many similar improvements over the present mode of living could be introduced in Association!

Let Man apply the principles of combination and unity to Architecture,—to the construction of his dwellings, and the greatest improvements in household arrangements, affecting health, comfort and convenience, can be introduced. For instance, the Edifice of an Association could, by means of proper apparatus connected with the large kitchen fires, be warmed throughout in the most efficient, cleanly, comfortable and economical manner, and so as to avoid all danger of conflagrations. No such convenient, safe and economical system can be introduced into the separate dwellings of isolated families; the same number of families that would form an Association must now incur the expense and endure the incalculable trouble of keeping up several hundred little fires.

The Edifice could be supplied with water with equal convenience and economy; pipes containing hot and cold water could be conveyed into all the private apartments, supplying each abundantly, and with baths in addition, if required. What a source of health and cleanliness! and what a saving in the complicated labor of carrying water daily to all the rooms of the Edifice!

This beautiful and economical system would also be introduced in the mode of lighting. A small gas apparatus, the expense of which would be trifling, could be fixed up, and would supply the Edifice with gas in all its halls and salons, as well as its private apartments—could be brilliantly lighted.

What economy in oil and candles, and what a saving of time and trouble in cleaning and trimming daily hundreds of candlesticks and lamps!

In the isolated household, these and numerous other advantages, so important and desirable, and so productive of economy, comfort and health, cannot be attained. So long as the present isolated mode of living continues, dirt, drudgery and disease must necessarily exist, and to an immense extent.

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In this section—“Abundance”—Wattles builds his argument on a declaration from Jesus Christ: “I come that they might have life; and that they might have it more abundantly.” Wattles treats that line as a statement of universal law. Life expands. Mind seeks greater expression. Nature presses humanity toward fuller and richer living.

From this foundation he rejects the central assumption of the modern economy: competition for a limited supply. Wattles insists that the Mind of nature advances the life of all people, not the success of one at the expense of another. Anyone who seeks for others what they seek for themselves enters what he calls “at-one-ment” with the intelligence that moves through all things

.

Wattles also confronts the realities of business, wages, and profit. He does not call readers to withdraw from commerce or build isolated communes. Instead, he demands a higher rule: give real life-value in every exchange. When work increases the life of others, prosperity follows without exploitation.

Two years before publishing The Science of Getting Rich (1910), Wattles already states the core of his prosperity philosophy. Faith, service, and cooperation with the creative intelligence in nature generate wealth that multiplies life rather than drains it.

The essay that follows pushes the argument of The Law of Opulence to its boldest claim yet: when people seek abundance for all, the forces of nature themselves move to supply it.

Part 3: Abundance

“I come that they might have life; and that they might have it more abundantly.”

God, the Mind of nature, produces the Abundance of nature with the purpose of providing for the development of man; not of some men, but of man. The purpose of nature is the continuous advancement of life; and as man is the embodiment of God and the highest form of life, the purpose of nature must be the continuous advancement of every man into more abundant life.

That which seeks the advancement of every man cannot take anything from any man; therefore, to be one with the Mind of nature is to seek the advancement of all at the expense of none; to seek to get for all what one desires to get for oneself.

This must lift one entirely out of the competitive thought. “What I want for myself, I want for all;” that is the declaration of independence aimed at the competitive system.

“Our” Father, give “us,” – that is the prayer of the advancing life.

This declaration and prayer are in unison with the Mind of nature; the man who so declares and so prays is mentally one with all that lives—God, nature, and man; and this is the “At-one-ment.”

To be mentally one with the Mind of things makes you able to register your thoughts on that mind, and your desires as well.

When you desire a thing, and your mind and the Mind of things are one, that thing will desire you, and will move toward you. If you desire dollars, and your mind is one with the Mind that pervades dollars and all things else, dollars will be permeated with the desire to come to you, and they will move toward you, impelled by the Eternal Power which makes for more abundant life.

To obtain what you want, you only need to establish your own “at-one-ment” with the Mind of things, and they will be drawn toward you.

But the primal purpose of the Mind of things is the continuous advancement of ALL into more abundant life; therefore, nothing will be taken away from any man or woman and given to you unless you give to that person more in the way of life than you take away.

It will be plainly seen that the Divine Mind cannot be brought into action in the field of purely competitive business. God cannot be divided against Himself. He cannot be made to take from one and give to another. He will not decrease one man’s opportunity to advance in life in order to increase another man’s opportunity to advance in life. He is no respecter of persons, and has no favorites. He is equally in all, equally for all, and at the service of all alike.

To make the “at-one-ment,” you must see that your business gives to all who deal with you a full equivalent in life for the money value of what you take from them.

I say in life; that does not necessarily mean in money value. Here is what many critics of the profit system fail to understand: that a thing of small value to one man may be of inestimable value to another who can use it for the advancement of life. A box of matches would be worth more to an Esquimaux than Millet’s “Man with the Hoe.”

The value of a thing to a man is determined by the plane of life on which he stands: what is of no value on one plane, or in one stage of his development, is indispensable on another plane, or in another stage. The life-giving power of any article may be out of all proportion to its monetary value. This book is not worth a dollar in so far as the cash value of the paper and ink are concerned, but one sentence in it may be worth thousands of dollars to any reader. You may sell an article for more than it cost you, making a profit; but the purchaser may put it to such use that it will be worth hundreds of times its cost to him, and in that case profit is no robbery. See that your business meets this fundamental requirement; that is the first step.

When you have done this, you are one with that Intelligence in nature which is working for more life for all; you are “working together with Him,” as St. Paul says; you and your Father are one. The aim of your work is that all may have life, and have it more abundantly.

What you seek for yourself you are seeking for all, and the mental principle in everything that you need begins to gravitate toward you. If you need dollars, the Mind of things, in the dollars, is conscious of the need; and you can affirm with truth: “Dollars want me.” Dollars will begin to move toward you, and they will come, invariably, from those who need what you can give in exchange. The Divine Mind will attend to the transference of that which is needed for the advancement of life to the place where need exists.

This will apply not only to all that you need to keep your business going, but to all that you are capable of using to enter into fuller life yourself. No good thing will be withheld from you.

Your unity with the Evolutionary Power, with the Purpose of nature, will be such that you will receive all that nature has to give. Because you will do always the will of God, all things are yours, and you need to compete with no one.

But you must bear in mind that your wants are impressed on the Divine Mind only by your faith. A doubt cuts the connection. Anxiety and fear cut the connection.

Exactly as you are in the matter of impressing your own subconscious mind, so you are in the matter of impressing the Mind of things. Your affirmations fall flat unless they are made with the dynamic power of absolute faith.

The Mind of things will not act positively for doubt and hesitancy.

“What things soever ye desire when ye pray, believe that ye receive them and ye shall have them.”

We cannot walk and work with God and distrust Him at the same time. If you feel distrust, you impress the Mind of things with distrust of you, and things will move away from you rather than toward you.

The requirements for non-competitive success are very simple:

Desire for everybody what you desire for yourself, and be sure to take nothing from anybody without giving a full equivalent in life; and the more you give the better for you.

Then move out in the absolute faith that all you need for the fullest life you are capable of living will come to you.

Pray with unfaltering faith to the Father that it shall come to you, and thank Him in every prayer, from a heart full of gratitude, that it DOES come to you.

Everything that comes to you then will mean more life to someone else. Each gain you make will add to the wealth of someone else. What you get for yourself—life—you get for all. Your success adds to the life, health, wealth, and happiness of all.

But someone says: Wherein does this differ from competition, after all? Are you not still competing with those in the same line of business?

No! What you gain will not come from the limited supply for which others are struggling, but from the Whole.

Let me illustrate: It may be said that there is only a limited supply of money in the country; not enough to supply the needs of all. Suppose a large number of people enter this Way of Life, and dollars begin to move toward them all, there will not be enough to go around. That is true, but the thought of need impressed upon the mind of things would react upon the minds of men; new currency laws would be passed; the bullion would begin to move toward the mints; and the printing presses to turn out bank notes if they were necessary to the advancement of life. The mind of things reaches beyond the coined cash, into the gold and silver lying in the hearts of the hills; and it will all begin to move forward when it is called for by the prayer of faith.

And the same is true of everything else. Not only the mints, but the mills will start whenever a sufficient number of people have entered the way of the advancing life.

If it be urged that the wage system prevents the workers from living full lives, the answer is that whenever the workers begin to live full lives, if the wage system stands in the way of their advancement it will be changed. Their demand for more life will be all that is required to change it.

Life cannot be advanced by changing systems, but systems may be changed by the advance of life.

There is plenty of work to be done in the erection of useful and beautiful things; all that is needed is a demand for those things by those whose sole purpose is to use them to give more life to all.

As the number of such people increases, the prosperity of all will increase, and a constantly increasing proportion of all classes will come into the Truth, abandoning competition and the way of the limited supply, until the kingdom will be established on earth as it is in Heaven.

“And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes;

and there shall be no more crying, neither shall there be any more pain; and there shall be no night there.”

END

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In Part 2, “Leaven,” Wattles grounds his argument in a short parable from Jesus Christ: the kingdom of God as leaven hidden in the meal. He treats the image as a law of life itself. Nature pushes constantly toward fuller expression. Life multiplies. Consciousness expands. Humanity evolves toward greater capacity to know, feel, and enjoy life.

Wattles wrote during a period of fierce debate about competition, socialism, and economic struggle in modern industrial society. He confronts that problem directly. The business world appears to run on competition for a limited supply, yet Wattles insists that a deeper reality governs the universe. A living intelligence fills nature and works everywhere to increase life.

These pages reveal ideas that Wattles would soon refine in The Science of Getting Rich (1910). He argues that scarcity grows out of the belief in limitation, while life itself drives toward expansion and abundance. When people recognize this creative intelligence and cooperate with it, they step into the natural movement of the universe toward greater life.

The essay that follows shows Wattles developing one of the central themes of New Thought prosperity philosophy: life always seeks more life, and the forces of nature themselves move steadily toward human growth, advancement, and abundance.

Part 2: Leaven

“Whereunto shall I liken the kingdom of God? It is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, until the whole was leavened.”

The kingdom of God is in nature like the leaven in the meal—in all and through all. It includes all nature, for God is the cause of nature; and when nature is perfectly natural, there is the kingdom of God in all its fullness.

If God be the Mind of nature, then there can be no more perfect expression of God than in the naturalness of nature.

The kingdom of God includes all life, for God is the Life itself; and when life is lived in a perfectly natural way, there is the kingdom of God in all its fullness; for there can be no more perfect expression of God than the living of life in a natural way.

And this brings us to the question: how may life be lived in the natural way?

The living of life consists in continually advancing into more life. Drop a seed in the center of a field; the life in the seed at once becomes active; it ceases to merely exist, and begins to live. Soon it produces a plant, and a seed head, in which there are thirty, sixty, or a hundred seeds, each containing as much life as the first seed contained.

These fall into the ground, and in their turn begin to live; and in time there are a million seeds in the field, each containing as much life as the first seed contained.

The life of the first seed, by the mere act of living, has increased a million fold.

The living of life consists in continuously increasing life; there is no other way to live.

This necessity of life for increase is the cause of what we know as evolution.

There is no such thing as evolution in the mineral world. Minerals do not advance or progress. Lead does not evolve into tin, tin into iron, iron into silver, silver into gold, and so on.

Evolution is found only in the organic forms of life, and is caused by the natural necessity of life to find fuller and fuller expression.

Life on this earth began no doubt in a single cell; but a single cell could not give sufficient expression to life, and so it formed a double-celled organism; then organisms of many cells; then vertebrates; then mammals, and finally, man.

All this because of the inherent necessity of life to advance forever into more complete expression.

And evolution did not cease with the formation of man; physical evolution ceased, and mental and spiritual evolution began.

Man, from the beginning, has been developing more ability to live. Each generation is capable of living more than the preceding generation. The race is continually advancing into more life, and so we see that the living of life means to live more.

The action of consciousness continually expands consciousness. The primal necessity of mind is to know more, feel more, and enjoy more; and this necessity of mind is the cause of social evolution, and of all progress.

If we take conscious life—as we must—to be the highest expression of God, or of the Mind of nature, then the purpose of all things must be to further the development of conscious life; and if man is the highest form of conscious life—and he is—then the purpose of all things must be to further the development of man.

And if the development of man consists in the increase of his capacity for life, then the purpose of all things in nature must be to further the continuous advancement of man into more and more of life.

Life finds expression by the use of things. The measure of a man’s life is not the things he possesses, but the number of things he is able to use rightly; and to have fullness of life is to have all the things we are capable of using rightly. The purpose of the Mind of nature being the continuous advancement of man into more life, it must also be the intention of that Mind that every man shall have the unrestricted use of all the things that he is capable of using and enjoying rightly; or that “his own shall come to him.”

The purpose of God is that all should have life, and have it more abundantly. God is the Mind of nature, and God is in all, and through all; therefore, the mind, or intelligence, of God is in all and through all, like the leaven in the meal.

The desire for advancement is a fundamental fact in the action of mind; therefore, the desire for advancement is in all, and through all. All things desire the advancement of every man.

If a man desires any good thing in order to live his life more fully, that thing desires him also. The mind of things responds to the mind of man when man desires advancement. All things work together for good to those who desire only advancement.

The greatest of all facts to us is the fact that there is a Mind in nature which desires us to have all the things we are capable of using, and willing to use, in the direction of fuller life, and that this Mind is in the things themselves, tending to bring them toward us; and that if we take the right course, recognizing this Mind and working with it, all things must come to us.

But this Mind is the Mind of the Whole, not of a part; and if we lose sight of the Whole and enter into competition with our fellows for a part, we lose all.

For competition of a part is virtually a denial and rejection of the Whole. He who recognizes and accepts the Whole cannot compete for a part. It is the idea of competition for a limited supply which prevents us from seeing and accepting the Abundance which is ours. We still keep up the foolish struggle of Caesar’s kingdom, because we cannot see the kingdom of God, which is all around us and within us.

“If my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight,” said Jesus.

We do not get fully out of the ideas of the kingdoms of this world; we still do more or less fighting.

But how are we to avoid competition when the whole business world is proceeding on the method of competing for a limited supply? How can we get work without competing for jobs? Can we succeed in a competitive world without competing? Shall we withdraw from the world and form communistic societies?

Certainly not. To try that is to fail. A communistic society is a body of people who do not compete with each other, but who do compete with everybody else.

No community can be complete unto itself without greatly limiting its members in the means of life; and to do this is to defeat the end aimed at. And if it is not complete in itself, satisfying all its wants, it must compete with the outside world for what is lacking, and this is what we seek to avoid.

No separation of a part from the Whole in any way will solve the problem. The community scheme is inconvenient, unnatural, and impracticable.

Shall we establish socialism and the cooperative commonwealth? We cannot do it, because socialism and the co-operative commonwealth can never be established; it must establish itself, and it may take it a long time yet to do so.

We cannot do away with competition by legislative enactment of any kind so long as the majority of men believe in the limited supply; so we must keep right on in business under the present system, and yet cease to compete.

Can we do it? Yes. But how?

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The Law of Opulence, first published in 1905, presents these ideas as practical guidance for living in alignment with “the kingdom of God” on earth. Wattles challenges the notion of scarcity, arguing that competition arises only from a false perception of limited resources. Instead, he envisions a world where abundance can be generated creatively, ethically, and collectively, allowing each individual to flourish while contributing to the welfare of all.

The following is the first part of Wattles’ text, presented in a clean and readable form, preserving his original message while removing extraneous publication details.

Part 1: The Kingdom of God

“Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

The first essential in living the new life is to abandon the idea of competition and the belief in a limited supply. Many who consider themselves practitioners of New Thought never fully achieve this.

Competition in business originates from the notion that resources are limited. It assumes that if there is not enough to go around, people must compete for what exists. Some New Thought adherents still believe that wealth is available only to those with superior ability or power to attract a larger portion from a fixed supply. They apply New Thought principles on a competitive plane, striving to develop superior attracting power, injecting new energy into business, and affirming, “I am success”—all while believing they can only succeed because others fail.

Though such individuals often achieve success, this competitive approach is not the true New Thought. It is the perfected form of old, limited thinking—a vision of Caesar’s kingdom, not the kingdom of God. Their prosperity is fluctuating and dependent on circumstance. Deep within, they carry fear born of perceived limitation. No one can be free from fear while believing in scarcity, for if there is not enough, the risk of going without always looms.

The essential elements of life—food, clothing, shelter, education, and recreation—are abundantly supplied by nature and human ingenuity.

* Food: The potential of intensive agriculture is immense. For example, the state of Texas alone could feed the current global population if fully cultivated. Our food supply is vast, varied, and capable of infinite growth.

* Clothing: Cotton, wool, linen, silk, and other fibers can clothe everyone richly. Even the most humble or neglected plants could be transformed into new fabrics through human creativity.

* Shelter: Building materials are plentiful—clay, stone, sand, lime, and cement abound. Mansions could be built for all without exhausting natural resources. Furnishings, books, musical instruments, and art are similarly unlimited.

There is no shortage of work, either. Modern machinery has multiplied human productivity many times over, and six hours of labor per day could meet every need and luxury. With such abundance, there is no reason to compete. We need not worry about scarcity, panics, or reversals.

We only need to seek the kingdom of God and cultivate righteous relations with one another—and all these things will be added unto us.

And what is the kingdom of God?

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The North Bloomfield Phalanx explained. Why did this ambitious 1844 Fourierist community collapse in scandal? In this video, I investigate the site of the lost utopia to uncover the truth. Using historic newspaper clippings, maps, and on-location footage, we break down the controversial history of Edwin A. Stillman, the legal battles, and the accusations that left members "stripped of everything." Join the investigation to see what remains of the phalanstery and discover the secrets of this forgotten New York experiment.Hashtags#UtopianHistory #Fourierism #NorthBloomfield #Phalanx #AmericanHistory #NYHistory #ForgottenHistory #UrbanExploration #SiteInvestigation #HistoryDocumentary #19thCentury #RochesterNY #NewYorkHistory #AlternativeHistory #Utopia

Trine writes for the reader seeking both inner peace and practical guidance: “the attaining to an habitually happy or peaceful state of mind,” “the development of personal power,” and even the “bread and butter problem” that concerns almost everyone. Yet he also calls attention to the larger social stage, warning that a nation indifferent to governance allows “the few…to enrich themselves at public expense.” His vision is both personal and prophetic: spiritual growth cannot be separated from ethical engagement with the world.

Intellectually, Trine blends Emersonian transcendentalism with the Christian socialism of George Herron. The result is a book that guides the reader toward spiritual realization while challenging them to confront the economic and social inequalities of their time. As he observes, “he who is not economically free, is in a slavery of the most haunting and endeavor-crushing type.”

Trine situates himself in the devotional wing of New Thought, focusing on ethical living, heartfelt connection with the Divine, and the cultivation of character, rather than abstract mental formulas. This makes the final chapter—“The Life of the Higher Beauty and Power”—all the more striking. Trine admits its placement might seem unusual, but he trusts that “the reader himself will, in the end, be the best judge of this.” Here, he moves from practical guidance to the transcendent, showing how beauty, virtue, and spiritual power can shape both personal fulfillment and the moral health of society.

From the opening dream-vision of the poor and the weary to glimpses of divine mercy and possibility, Trine’s work fuses social realism with spiritual aspiration. The Land of Living Men remains a remarkable guide for anyone seeking to live fully—ethically, spiritually, and in harmony with the larger world—and its final chapter offers a vision of the higher beauty and power that elevates human life to its fullest potential.

THE LIFE OF THE HIGHER BEAUTY AND POWER — INDIVIDUAL NATIONAL

To be at peace. To be happy. To live in contentment. To have a satisfying and harmonious — a successful life. This echoes the longing of perhaps every normal person. The fact that it so echoes a universal longing, indicates, to me at least, that it should be the natural, the normal life.

In order to live a harmonious life there must be something to be in harmony with; and here it is the great secret of life and its successful and satisfactory fulfilment.

That there is a Spirit of intelligence and of love in the universe, no normally constituted mind, and one that has lived at all near the higher life, however they may have come to it, can for a moment doubt. There is a Power, beneficent if worked in harmony with, that pervades all and through the channel of great systems of law governs the universe and all that is in it. Every decade we are discovering new laws and forces, and the latter seem to be all the finer in their nature. This is perhaps on the part of the process of evolution, so developing, so unfolding us, that we are getting nearer and nearer to the essence, the inner nature — the soul of things.

What was the actual beginning of things no man knows. Nor is it essential or important that we do know. But in the beginning, as now, was Being, self-existent and all-pervading — the Spirit of Infinite Life and Power that is back of all, working in and through all, the source, the life of all. This seems to be a self-evident fact — Infinite Being projecting itself into existence, — therefore the spirit, the substance, the life of all there is.

Various terms or names are used by different minds; but to me this Infinite Being is God. To know this as our source, the very essence of our being, and from which or from whom we cannot be cut off, can separate ourselves, only to our detriment, is to recognize ourselves as spiritual beings; it is to be born into the spiritual life, and the spiritual life is the life eternal. Thus we come to know God in the degree that we realize that in Him we live and move and have our being. In the degree that we live in the realization of this truth, does this spirit of Infinite Life and Power reveal itself to our consciousness more and more, and it is in this way that we grow and unfold in the spiritual life.

It is through great systems of law, definite and immutable, that God or Infinite Being works. To know these laws, and to live, to work in harmony with them brings peace and harmony; wilfully to violate them brings inharmony and struggle and suffering. They all work together for good. To live in harmony with them can bring us only good. To fail to recognize or wilfully to violate them brings necessarily the opposite of good, namely evil. Evil has its origin properly speaking not in God, but from a violation of the laws, shall we say, the ordinances of God.

To realize that in essence, though not in degree, we are one with the life of God, and then to open ourselves, our minds and our hearts, so that a continually increasing degree of the God life can manifest itself to and through us, is to understand more and more and to come into a continually greater harmony with the laws under which we live and which permeate and rule in the universe with an unchangeable precision.

It is through our non-recognition of the life that is in us and the laws by which all things are governed, in other words, living out of harmony with the laws under which it is decreed we must live, that inharmony and evil with its consequent pain and suffering and despair enters into our lives. There are those who have lived so fully in the realization of their essential oneness with the Divine Life, that their lives here have been almost a continual song of peace and thanksgiving.

As individuals — expressions of Being projected into existence — we are given the power of choice. We can choose to open ourselves so fully to the realization of the Source of our life, and open ourselves so fully to its influx, that we will find the attributes of this life manifesting, incarnating themselves more and more in our lives, so that in time we take on more and more the wisdom, the insight and the powers of this Life. In this way we are gradually changed, from the natural to the spiritual, from earth-men to God-men, fulfilling the undoubted purpose of our being — self-realization, and the returning to that from which we came. Coming as babes, returning as fully grown spiritual beings, gaining our experience in contact with the material world — through the agency of the material body, and for some purpose of which we do not yet know, but that shall be revealed to us in due process of time. What it is, cannot concern us materially now, the truth will come when we are ready for it. To know the laws under which we are living and to bring our lives into an ever completer harmony with them, is the main thing. Step by step, in this, as in all things, we learn as we go. There is but one way to learn to do a thing, and that is to do it; to learn to live, and that is to live; not in the past, nor in the future, but in the now. Not in dreaming, not in theorizing, but in living in the great present, in the continual now. To dwell on the life, the truth, as it is today, and live it, is to build for the life of tomorrow; is to lay the foundation for the larger and fuller life that is to follow. All of which is simply working out the process of evolution, of development, of becoming.

We learn to live by living, not by memorizing the dead past, nor by building air-castles for a future that needs our care and our building in the present. And we learn to live in harmony with the laws of life either through choice, gladly, appreciatingly, understandingly, and of our own accord, or we are pushed and taught through suffering. God will have obedience. To know God is to know His laws; for His laws are written in the heart of man.

By dwelling continually in this life of God we come into that condition where we are led more and more by Divine guidance, where the Divine wisdom and power and life so manifest and illumine our being, and through this our understanding, that we know more and more to do the right thing at the right time; and for such, to know is to do.

While the end of life is not attained through intellectual processes alone, the mind, the intellect nevertheless is a means to this end. It is through the mind that the connection is made between the human and the Divine. It is through thought operating through the channel of the mind that we are able to realize and keep our connection with Infinite Being, our source. It is by virtue of the mind, working through the brain, that we are connected with the material, physical universe. The body is material, physical. Every particle of it, through the food we take, is from the earth and the air, and to the earth and the air every particle of it finally returns.

To realize that the body is not the self, but the instrument by which the self is temporarily related to and made able to live in a material world for the purpose of experience, growth, development, is a great aid in arriving at the realities of life. The folly then of giving supreme attention to it, and the things that pertain to it. To give it sufficient attention to enable it to become the clearest, the soundest, the most perfect instrument, that it can be made and kept for the real self to use, is the part of wisdom, for it is the true middle ground.

Now, why this, I hear it asked, in a book of this nature? In order to get a basis in religion, in philosophy, in reality, for life, for the individual life; and as is the individual life so is the national life, never higher, never lower. As Dr. Patton, formerly president of Princeton University, once said to a class of young graduates:

"Religion is the goal of culture, and the educated man must stand in some relation to God. He must have some philosophy of human life, some theory of society." And as Milton has said: "There is nothing that makes men rich and strong but that which they carry inside of them. Wealth is of the heart, not of the hand." And as Mazzini once said: "Where there is no vision the people perish."

The chase for the material has of late years become so great and so absorbing, whether by fair means or foul, that it has become one of the notorious features or characteristics of the time. And while I believe the heart of the people and the heart of the nation is sound, by virtue of the vastly superior numbers of splendid, honest, unpurchasable and high-minded men and women among us, both old and young, a strong materialistic tendency is nevertheless a marked characteristic of the time. As there is perhaps no greater truth in connection with human life than — As a man thinketh in his heart so is he, and also, that we grow into the likeness of those things we most habitually contemplate, also, that all life is from within out, for as is the inner, so always and necessarily will be the outer, it becomes clearly apparent how essential it is that the right centre or basis of life be established.

We hear it often said, and said in the most well-meaning way, that the physical, the material, is the basis of life. Now I would put it in another way, a safer and I think a truer way. The spiritual is the basis and the end of life, and the physical, the material, is the channel through which it manifests and works and unfolds and masters. The latter is not to be despised or slighted, but to be used, to be wisely used, but to be subordinated to its proper place. Thus it becomes a great blessing and helper rather than a hindrance and a curse.

To have an abundance of the world's goods is good if rightly used; but to make the accumulation of material things the chief object of life can end only in disappointment. Such have but a pinched and stunted life which is unsatisfactory and empty of joy to themselves, and, except by way of warning, is of but little if any value to the world.

Each one must find a centre for life from which all radiates, or, putting it in another way, a basis, a foundation upon which all else is built. Such a centre or such a basis, one that is stable and satisfactory, is earnestly longed for by myriads of people. An instinct for the religious life is born in practically every human soul. So many great chunks, as the years have passed, have fallen away from our theological systems, and so many are still continually falling away from them, that it is hard or well-high impossible for an earnest, mentally honest man to find any satisfactory or even acceptable basis for the religious life there. Such in common with all others will find that the uniform teaching of all the most inspired teachers in the world's history, whatever the religion or system of belief has been, is that the essence, the substance of religion is the consciousness of God in the soul of man. A foundational basis for this I have endeavored to give in the early pages of this chapter, that in Him we live and move and have our being. In what an immediate and vital way John Tauler has put it in the following:

"I have a power in my soul that enables me to perceive God; I am as certain as that I live that nothing is so near to me as God. He is nearer to me than I am to myself. It is part of His very essence that He must be present to me."

"Within us, not without, is the presence of God," said St. Augustine. Sin is, in fact, unconsciousness of the presence or working of the Divine Life and Energy.

"This is inseparable from religion," was the keynote to the philosophy of that most spiritual of philosophers, Fichte. "An insight into the absolute unity of the Human Existence with the Divine is certainly the profoundest knowledge that man can attain," said he again.

It was the most inspired who has yet lived among us who said: "Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, Lo there! for, behold the Kingdom of God is within you." And again: "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you." It was He who gave the substance of the moral law and therefore the essence of religion as — Love to God and love to the fellow-man.

To me, love to God is this dwelling continually in the conscious living realization of the essential oneness of our life with the Divine Life — seeking to have no other will than that the Divine will may manifest to and through us, and may work through us. How significant then — "Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on Thee," and also, "In all thy ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy paths." How truly in the light of this truth does Fichte say that the expression of the constant mind of the truly religious man is this prayer: "Lord! let but Thy will be done, then is mine also done; for I have no other will than this — that Thy will be done." And how thoroughly in keeping with "Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on Thee," is his thought in the following:

"Whatever comes to pass around him, nothing appears to him strange or unaccountable— he knows assuredly, whether he understand it or not, that it is God's World, and that there nothing can be that does not directly tend to good. In him there is no fear for the future, for the absolute fountain of all blessedness eternally bears him on towards it; no sorrow for the past, for in so far as he was not in God he was nothing, and this is now at an end, and since he has dwelt in God he has been born into light; while in so far as he was in God, that which he has done is assuredly right and good. . . . His whole outward existence flows forth, softly and gently, from his Inward Being, and issues out into Reality without difficulty or hindrance."

Love to the fellow-man is the realization of the fact that we are all parts of the one great whole, that the source and essence of life in each is essentially the same, that love is the established law of life, and that the law will have obedience or it will strike its punishment upon all who do violence to it.

"He that loveth not his brother, abideth in death," said the Master Teacher, and this is simply the enunciation of the law that's written deep in the universe and that is immutable in its workings.

"All beings are the fruits of one tree, the leaves of one branch, the drops of one sea. Honour is for him who loveth men, not for him who loveth his own," says the Persian.

Truly we are all parts of the one great whole, and one cannot suffer or have injustice done him without all sharing in that suffering and none more than the author of that injustice.

It was by virtue of His perceiving so clearly the laws in relation to human life that are so immutable in their workings, that enabled and prompted Jesus to give anew to the world an epitome of the laws relating to all human relations when He said, "And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise."

It is what is ordinarily termed the Golden Rule. I have never seen any wiser or more suggestive commentary upon it than the following, by the late Hon. Samuel Milton Jones*:

"As I view it, the Golden Rule is the supreme law of life. It may be paraphrased this way: As you do unto others, others will do unto you. What I give, I get. If I love you really and truly and actively love you, you are as sure to love me in return as the earth is sure to be warmed by the rays of the sun. If I mistreat you and abuse you, I am equally certain to arouse the same kind of antagonism towards me, unless the Divine nature is so developed that it is dominant in you and you have learned to love your enemies.

"The Golden Rule is the law of cause and effect, of action and reaction in the field of human conduct and human life, just as certain here as the law is definite and certain in the domain of physics.

I think the confusion with respect to the Golden Rule arises from the different conceptions that we have of the word love. I use the word love as synonymous with good will. So when I speak of doing the loving thing, I mean doing the reasonable thing. When I speak of dealing with my fellow-men in an unreasonable way, it is an unloving way. The terms are synonymous, absolutely. The reason why we know so little about the Golden Rule is because we have not practised it.

What we term the Golden Rule is an absolute law of life, and it will have obedience through the joy, and therefore the gain it brings into our lives if we observe it, or it will have obedience by the pain and the blankness it drives into our lives if we violate it. As we give to the world so the world gives back to us. Thoughts are forces, like inspires like and like creates like. If I give love, I inspire and receive love in return. If I give hatred, I inspire and receive hatred. The wise man loves; only the ignorant, the selfish, hate. And the man who loves and serves is he who has solved the riddle of life. For into his life comes the fulness, the satisfaction, the peace and the joy that the Law decrees. He it is who is the wise man.

The man who has no sense of service to his fellow-man, whose idea is primarily gain for himself, whether honourable or dishonourable, is the supreme fool in life, by virtue of his ignorance leading him into the violation of a law that condemns him to a pinched, a stunted, sunless, joyless life.

"If the gatherer gathers too much," says Emerson, "nature takes out of the man what she puts into his chest; swells the state but kills the owner. Nature hates monopolies and exceptions."

We do well when we remember this- — one can never do an injury to another without in some form or another suffering for that injury himself. Why? It is so written in the Law of the Universe, that's all. And we likewise do well to remember — one can never do a real loving, unselfish, kindly act without deriving a benefit from such act himself; and if at any time there are apparent exceptions to this it is, I believe, because our limited vision does not enable us to see the total relationship of human actions.

"No man in the world ever attempted to wrong another without being injured in return,— some way, somehow, sometime. The only weapon of offence that nature seems to recognize is the boomerang. Nature keeps her books admirably; she puts down every item, and closes all accounts finally, but she does not always balance them at the end of the month."**

As the life of a man is of more value to him than the house in which he lives, so the possession and growth of the faculties that enable him to enjoy the things that pertain to and that spring from the inner life, are of more value to him by way of bringing him happiness and contentment than any possible accumulation of material things. Wealth is good — as a means to comfort; good as a servant, never as a master; good as a feature, never as the chief end of life.

One of the most pitiable sights that I know is the way some very rich men die. Let the following serve as the type of many. A man has made gain — money-getting — the chief object of his life. In time, shall we say through nature's abhorrence of abnormalities, the greed for gain becomes his master and dries up his very powers of enjoyment of the finer things in life. He accumulates a hundred million, with all the care and worry that keeping this invested to the best advantage means. He is of but little use to the world, and through the dwarfing of the finer qualities of his life, and the drying up of his powers of enjoyment, he has also become so to himself. He dies. Three months after, he has gone, his name is scarcely ever heard, except perhaps in some long-drawn-out or bitterly fought will contest. His end is like that of a dog. In short, many a dog, faithful and intelligent and useful, has been more genuinely mourned and longer and more gratefully remembered. And then if it is true, as I believe it must be, that we commence in the other form of life exactly where we leave off here, taking with us only what we have gained by way of soul growth, and spiritual unfoldment, but not one cent — not one cent — and having, moreover, no further control over any material possessions, how poor, how pitiably poor is such a life. Contrast it with the following as an ideal and a purpose for a life:

"I am primarily engaged to myself to be a public servant of all the Gods, to demonstrate to all men there is good-will and intelligence at the heart of things and ever higher and yet higher leadings. These are my engagements. If there be power in good intentions, in fidelity, and in toil, the north wind shall be purer, the stars in heaven shall glow with a kindlier beam that I have lived."

And what a life was the life of this man Emerson who deliberately chose this as his part. And what an influence while he lived, and truly for all time to come. Not three months, nor three centuries can forget his name or cease to bless his memory.

Another, in whom success in the sense of excessive gain develops pride and an itchiness for ostentatious show, builds a mansion — a home? — costing four million dollars, thinking also that it will be a sort of monument, a reminder of, himself. Within fifty years, or within even a much shorter period of time, it may be the possession of a Barnum and the home of a good up-to-date circus. Such is the security of a man's hold upon material possessions.

And how few seem to be able to stand success and remain good, healthy, sensible, normal men! It seems strange that so seldom can a man become successful as to either wealth or power without taking on, mentally at least, the strut of the turkey-cock. A really great man, however, is always immune from this affection. It is rather as Pope said:

"Of all the causes which conspire to blind

Man's erring judgment, and mislead the mind,

What the weak head with strongest bias rules,

Is Pride — that never-failing vice of fools."

The law seems to be absolute in that "whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted." Nature seems to abhor an abnormally developed pride, snobbery, too marked a consciousness of superiority. And to the — I am holier than thou — feeling, she applies always the brand of Hypocrite, and she burns it deep.

Another makes the accumulation of material things the chief object of his life, rising from humble circumstances, possessing unusual abilities, but giving but an infinitesimal amount of these abilities to his city or his state, both badly in need of such service; but rather conspiring with their enemies to make special privileges for a few greater, to secure acts alienating valuable properties from the people of his city and state, to avoid a just share of taxation, thereby defrauding and throwing greater and unjust burdens upon all of his fellow-men, except upon those equally dishonest and contemptible in this same practice of tax-evasion. His life here closes considerably before a normal and well-rounded life should close, and on quitting he directs that practically the entire results of his life work go to a couple of young grandsons, not yet in their teens, in order that the family name and business may be preserved.

"Every man," said Marcus Aurelius, "is worth just so much as the things are worth about which he busies himself." The business may be preserved or it may tumble into ruin. Nature deals so in mockery when a man fancies he can have a controlling hand in the final actual disposition of his material possessions.

The family name may be preserved and it may be raised even to a higher esteem, or it may be preserved in the records of an inebriate asylum. A man can have an actual say only in regard to his own life, never in regard to the life of any other. Not by ambition and gain alone for self but,

"By labor, incessant and devout, to raise earthy to heaven, to realize, in fact, the good that as yet exists only in idea — that is the end and purpose of life; and in fulfilling it we achieve and maintain our unity each with every other, and all with the One."

Many a rich man's son has found the handicap of great riches too great to allow his making even a decent success of life; the incentive which nature seems to have decreed as a healthy and strength-developing factor has been neutralized by the burden which an over-rich father has dumped upon him.

Many a daughter, also, has found her life sinking into idleness and futility, losing the beauty and the chief charms of womanhood, and a designing or worse than empty marriage has fallen to her portion.

Surely wealth is of the mind and the heart and not of the hand. And the man who makes as his life work only gain for self, and who fails to recognize his inexorable relations with his fellow-men, fails completely in getting from life what he thinks he'll get; for he finds that what he gains turns to a greater or less extent to ashes in his hands, and what he bequeaths to his descendants is far below what it might be, — he or she who is at all worthy of receiving such bequest would rather it be a few millions less and be accompanied with a name of honour and a memory to be revered, than that it come with the tremendous handicap it many times comes with.

As we come to a fuller appreciation of these facts and of the laws of human life and relations that will not be denied, then more and more will "we measure the degree of civilization not by accumulation of the means of living, but by the character and value of the life lived."

Now I have said naught nor would I say aught, against wealth. I believe in wealth — sufficient for all the legitimate comforts of life; and I believe in it so thoroughly that I plead for a state wherein it can become the portion of a much larger number than has ever yet been known. And while I do not share in the belief that our time is necessarily more materialistic than other times have been, I do realize and most keenly that the economic conditions during the past few years have produced a class of men so materialistic in their entire outlook, so insatiate in their greed for ever larger gain, so drunk with opportunity and power, that they would pull the very pillars of the state to the ground, if a united and determined people did not come forward and say, so far, and no farther.

It is against the aggressions of these and the abuses we have permitted them to give birth to and fatten upon, the aggressions of these against the welfare of their fellows, against the economic and political institutions of the nation, that we must battle for some time to come with an alertness, with a determination and a bravery that can know no defeat. With a mind calm and determined and with malice towards none, must these great battles for the redemption of this nation be fought.

And as excessive wealth is of no real value to any man nor to his descendants, but becomes more often a veritable curse, and as it makes its possessors many times a menace to the very welfare of the nation and to the welfare of every man, woman and child in the nation, we will be doing a twofold service through such warfare and subsequent vigilance, in saving its possessors and its would-be possessors from their own folly, as well as conserving our own common interests.

It's the middle ground that carries with it the satisfactory solution of life. Excesses have to be paid for with heavy and sometimes with frightful interest.

Life, the life of everyone has its perplexities, its problems, its struggles and its work to be done. Humanity is brave, and there are but few who do not stand up like men and women, some almost like very Gods, to the end. It certainly should be the aim of each to throw no hindrance in the path of any fellow-being, to make no load heavier; but rather to lend the hand whenever we can.

"Oh the skies are blue and a ribboned road

Shall the pilgrim's heart beguile:

Yet hurry not so fast with your load,

For there is many a mile.

And it's here a friend and there a friend

To bear your hand a while:

But none will go to the journey's end,

And few will stay the mile."

And in connection with the problems and perplexities and apparent losses that come and that must be met as the days hurry away, I believe without the question of a doubt, that the time will come when we will see the part that each thing has had to play in our lives, and we will give thanks that it came just as it came. I believe, moreover, that a sort of an inborn universal feeling of this nature is a reason why humanity is brave.

A hope that never wearies, a faith that defies defeat, an attitude of mind that compels gladness, will help us to stand like men until we realize this glad culmination. And if one would find the easier way, it lies in the ever conscious realization "Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on Thee."

*Mayor Jones of Toledo was to my mind one of the most significant men politically that our country has yet known. A man who believed in actually adopting the law of life as enunciated in the Golden Rule as a basis for personal action and for the administration of public affairs. A man who used public office only for the highest public good. A man whom the people therefore so trusted that, running as an independent candidate against the candidates of the two dominant political parties, he was able to poll a vote of nearly 17,000 out of a total voting number of 24,000. It is rather significant, is it not? — and this against the combined and determined efforts of the machines of both political parties, both local and State, and in face of the united opposition of all the newspapers and corporations in the city, and not a few of the eminently respectable people. So far as his influence upon the political future is concerned, and it will be, even as it is being already, carried into activity by younger men who are coming into the field of political action, it is unquestionably true that no greater or more valuable man has ever come from or been associated with the State of Ohio.

** From that excellent little booklet "The Majesty of Calmness," by William George Jordan.

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The signs of crisis surrounded him. Fascist regimes tightened their grip across Europe. The Great Depression still scarred the global economy. Dictators promised national rebirth through discipline, violence, and national glory. Churches prayed for peace while governments stockpiled weapons.

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The Italian political thinker Antonio Gramsci described moments like this with brutal clarity:

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”

Gramsci saw these periods as an interregnum—a dangerous interval when old institutions lose authority but no new order has yet taken their place. In that vacuum, politics fills with improvisations: strongmen, demagogues, and movements that promise salvation through force.

Fillmore recognized the same crisis, though he spoke the language of spiritual life rather than political theory. If Christianity truly believed in the living power of Christ, he asked, why did the nations of Christendom march so confidently toward war?

He refused the easy answer that politics alone had failed. Fillmore traced the crisis deeper, into the spiritual consciousness of modern civilization itself.

Christianity, he argued, had shifted its center of gravity. Churches celebrated the historical Jesus while neglecting the living Christ mind that Jesus revealed. Prayer became petition. Faith became memory. The spiritual discipline that Jesus practiced—an inner alignment with divine intelligence capable of transforming human consciousness—largely vanished from public life.

A civilization organized around fear, rivalry, and domination inevitably reproduces those forces in its institutions. Economic struggle becomes class conflict. Political rivalry becomes nationalism. Nationalism becomes war.

Yet Fillmore did not see the crisis only as collapse. He also saw latent life within the wreckage.

The prophet Isaiah offered a striking image:

“There shall come forth a shoot out of the stock of Jesse.”

The tree appears cut down. Only a stump remains. Yet hidden life still pulses in the roots, waiting to break forth again.

Gramsci’s “new world struggling to be born” and Isaiah’s “shoot from the stump” describe the same historical mystery from different angles. Periods of breakdown often conceal the beginnings of renewal.

Fillmore believed that renewal begins within the human spirit. When the Christ mind awakens within individuals, it reshapes the social world they create. The inner life becomes the seed of a new civilization.

Fillmore wrote these words on the eve of World War II, when many still hoped the storm might pass. It did not.

Yet the question he raised has never disappeared. In every age of upheaval humanity must decide what will emerge from the crisis: monsters—or the first shoots of a new world.

What follows is Fillmore’s essay as it appeared in the December 1937 issue of Unity Magazine. Section headings have been added for readability.

Can Christ Prevent War?

By Charles Fillmore

Published in Unity Magazine, December 1937

The World Powers and the Church Are Powerless to Prevent War

ISAIAH prophesied that there should come forth a shoot out of the stock of Jesse, a Redeemer and Saviour, whose judgment and whose spirit of peace would reconcile the whole world. All Christians have expected Jesus Christ and His people to bring about the results prophesied by this great poet and prophet. But where are the evidences? Where is the failure, and who is responsible?

Now we know that Jesus was not a great warrior. We don't think of Him as in the Alexander or the Napoleon class. We cannot conceive of Jesus slaughtering, like Napoleon, three thousand Turkish prisoners, because he did not want to be bothered with feeding them. Yet how do we reconcile the claim of Jesus to all power in heaven and in earth with the terrible slaughter of Christians in the great World War?

In Europe where the war began is the home of the three great branches of Christianity, the Catholic Church, the Protestant Church, and the Greek Church. Tens of thousands of educated priests and ministers of these churches pray daily and have prayed for centuries to Jesus Christ for His intervention in the affairs of the world, but right in the face of these prayers the rulers of the nations of Europe are going forward building up tremendous armies and the most destructive engines of war ever known; and strange to say, this Prince of Peace, who has all power in heaven and in earth, and His millions of followers do not stay the expectation of war.

Yet whole nations will be impoverished by war and commerce will be demoralized, and despair marks the faces of financiers everywhere in the anticipation of a gigantic struggle. Also today dictators the world over are frantically beating the air in their attempts to satisfy the discontent and revolutionary demands of the unemployed.

And why, you ask, this impotency?—this army of claimants to great power among men, yet so helpless in a world of which they claim the Creator was the source, which He still rules, and which, our prophet says, “he shall smite … with the rod of his mouth” (Isa. 11:4)

We cannot help but think that there is something radically wrong with this army of the Lord. His representatives are evidently not understanding or carrying out the orders of the Prince of Peace. They are listening rather to the war cry of the insane destroyers of the world's civilization. Instead of praying for universal peace, for the reign of peace and love, they are praying for the victory of their armies.

The Christian Church Doesn’t Really Believe Peace Is Possible

In ignorance of the principles which Jesus taught, Christians have worshipped and looked to His personality and told us about His miracles that occurred nineteen hundred years ago. Now with the millions of ministers, billions of church property, and the largest following of any religion in the world, Christ is not given any place or power as a living presence in any government of the world.

They celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ with elaborate displays of loyalty to Him and His work. Mention the fact of His birth to the average Christian, and he will associate it solely with the advent of Jesus of Nazareth and none other.

Not only is the Christ mind that Jesus brought to light ignored, but the work of Jesus in demonstrating that Christ mind is banished with the claim that Jesus died on the cross and that He went away to heaven.

Thus not only the foundation principles of Christ are ignored but the greatest issue of all time is overlooked; that is, the overcoming of death and the restoration of life to His body, as accomplished by Jesus.

So we find that the average Christian does not really believe, as taught by Paul, that Christ should be “formed” in man (Gal. 4:19), nor does he understand the scientific law that Jesus demonstrated when He restored life to His crucified body.

In the face of this impotency of the followers of Jesus to live up to His teaching is it at all strange that the practical men of the world look upon the Christian church as a form of worship having no relation to affairs of state or everyday practical life?

In our daily papers and other periodicals giving the proceedings of our lawmakers, do we find any reference to divine law? It is universally assumed that God plays no part in the affairs of any government on earth.

Prayer Is Necessary for Freedom

Should Paul make the plea today that he made before Festus and Agrippa, that he had seen and talked with Jesus, he would doubtless be promptly adjudged of unsound mind and incarcerated in an insane asylum.

It is true that one may talk and write of supermundane things, but no court of law, scientific body, or government executive will take seriously any claim of any man that he possesses powers beyond the dead level of mediocrity.

Prayer plays no part in the mental action of the men of affairs. Prayer is considered with indifference because it is generally taken for granted that prayers are not necessary.

The fact is that prayer is not understood. The great majority of persons think that prayer is merely asking God for something you want and have been unable to get in any other way.

One who has come under the mental discipline covered by the word prayer discerns that it includes the activity of the mental faculties that cannot be described in words. No human language can tell of the connection that takes place on the inner planes of mind when one in deep meditation makes conscious contact with spiritual light.

Prayer is not supplication, a begging God to give things to man. Prayer at its highest is the entry of the ego into a realm of mind forces that, rightly projected, change the character of every cell in brain and body.

One who has mastered even the primary technique of prayer has made contact with the spiritual ethers that connect all minds, high and low, and by means of which great reforms for the good of man can be projected into the world's thought ethers, as Jesus Christ prayed.

He prayed whole nights. He was not begging God over and over again to do what He asked. Jesus Christ was laying hold of the thought forces that bind the whole human family in the bondage of their own making, and He was setting them free with the freedom of His spiritual understanding.

And every man in his prayers might recognize and take advantage of that freedom. It will never be thrust upon man or any one without his asking; without the open mind.

We Have a Stump of Jesse That May Be Quickened

So here we have the key to the situation that this God that we are praying to, this Prince of Peace that we are invoking, is under law—divine law.

In his prayers Isaiah, the poet and philosopher, had a perception of the spark of divinity through which man may quicken the mortal into the divine.

This shoot that was to come out of Jesse means that there is an everliving principle in man that has been submerged. It has been cut down and merely a stump exists today in human consciousness; but there is enough virile energy in that stump, if it were quickened, to bring forth the real man, the fruit, which is Christ.

“And there shall come forth a shoot out of the stock of Jesse, and a branch out of his roots shall bear fruit.

And the Spirit of Jehovah shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of Jehovah.”

(Isaiah 11:1–2)

This has always been interpreted as referring to Jesus of Nazareth. There is no evidence that Isaiah had any personality in mind when he was inspired to write these words.

He saw that awaiting man's appropriation, there was a great universal principle, the Spirit of Jehovah, and when this was quickened in man he would rise to a divine standard, where he would judge after his inner intuition, knowing that love would bring peace between man and man.

He would not judge upon external evidence nor after the sight of his eyes, neither decide after the hearing of his ears.

When the Stump Is Quickened We Will Have a Guide to Peace

Jesus laid down that law in order that we should not judge according to appearances. He said we had ears but we heard not.

In other words, we must look upon all this as representing a principle, a universal principle of righteousness; and we must realize that this principle, if it is quickened in man, will prove for him a great guide; and that through this inner quickening, this conviction of spiritual Truth, man's word will become more potent.

The words that he speaks will do away with the sin. It is not that the Christ word shall destroy people—the wicked—but, as Ferrar Fenton translates it,

“By the rod of His mouth He will conquer the world,

And its Wickedness slay by the breath of His lips.”

You can see that the original writings were all based upon principles and not personalities.

We are also taught by this same prophet that, not only in the world outwardly but especially within man, the animal forces shall be pacified:

“And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb,

and the leopard shall lie down with the kid;

and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together;

and a little child shall lead them.”

(Isaiah 11:6)

This is poetical; it is not to be taken literally. It deals with principles: with the wolf, the devouring element in man, and with the innocent, loving nature of the lamb: they shall become unified in man's consciousness.

When we have produced this unity we shall find that the childlike mind will be restored to us.

As we study the whole lesson, then, we find that it deals with wonderful principles that are idealized and yet not carried out.

Jesus taught that we should take up serpents with impunity, and if we drink any deadly thing it should not hurt us. Here again Isaiah calls our attention to the same truth:

“The sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp,

and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder's den.

They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain;

for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of Jehovah,

as the waters cover the sea.”

(Isaiah 11:8–9)

This beautiful, poetical vision of Isaiah's is capable of expression in the world today.

If our world leaders would only see that there is a power behind this world chaos that, if invoked or even consulted, would straighten out everything for us! Sooner or later we must come to a recognition of that guiding power.

We must incorporate it into our civilization.

Then we shall have world peace, and then we shall know what it is to celebrate the birth of the Christ mind. We shall know what it is to reincarnate in our mind and in our life that wonderful Spirit which was in the Lord Jesus Christ.

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Scripture gives us remarkably few words from Joseph. He never speaks a recorded line. Yet the Gospel calls him “a just man.” Not charismatic. Not dominant. Just. His strength is relational rather than performative. His authority is expressed through care, restraint, and responsibility.

This video explores St. Joseph as an archetype of ethical masculinity: a competent craftsman, a merciful partner, a protective father, and a man deeply receptive to divine guidance. Drawing from Scripture, Christian metaphysics, and New Thought theology, we examine Joseph as the embodiment of intuitive wisdom—the masculine principle that listens, meditates, and acts faithfully once clarity comes.

Together, Joseph and Mary represent the sacred union of wisdom and soul, understanding and imagination, strength and receptivity. Joseph models a masculinity that refuses to weaponize power, absorbs uncertainty without displacing it onto others, and remains present in moments of fear, exile, and obscurity.

This is a reflection on:

Masculinity without domination

Justice rooted in mercy

The dignity of competent work

Fatherhood as stewardship, not ownership

Strength that makes space for others

In an age of noise and anxiety, Joseph teaches us how to stay—to build without boasting, to protect without possessing, and to love without demanding recognition.

#StJoseph

#ChristianMasculinity

#QuietStrength

#BiblicalMasculinity

#FaithfulPresence

#SacredMasculinity

#SpiritualWisdom

#JusticeAndMercy

#ChristianMetaphysics

#NewThought

#MasculinityReimagined

#FaithAndWork

#GentleStrength

#JustMan

#Fatherhood

In this Palm Sunday sermon at URSC, we explore Holy Week as a living, inner spiritual journey—drawing from New Thought metaphysics, Charles Fillmore, Swedenborg, the Gospel of John, and a powerful Palm Sunday talk by Eric Butterworth, alongside Olga’s guided meditation.

Beginning with the raising of Lazarus and moving through Palm Sunday, the cleansing of the Temple, betrayal, surrender, crucifixion, stillness, and resurrection, this message reframes Holy Week as a path of awakening, purification, release, and rebirth—the progressive realization of the Christ consciousness within.

✨ In this sermon, you’ll explore:

Palm Sunday as the welcoming of spiritual authority within

The donkey as mastery over instinct and conditioned thought

Hosanna as a metaphysical prayer for the safe growth of the Christ ideal

The cleansing of the Temple as purifying consciousness

Judas as unredeemed life force and misplaced faith in material power

The Cross as the crossing out of error thoughts

The Tomb as sacred stillness and integration

The Resurrection as the full awakening of divine identity

We also reflect deeply on Eric Butterworth’s Palm Sunday message, “Palms and Passover,” which bridges Christianity and Judaism, revealing the Last Supper as a Passover Seder and reminding us that Jesus taught not a new religion—but a present-tense realization of divine life.

“The kingdom of God is within you—now is the time.”

This sermon invites you to ask:

By what authority is my life being lived right now?

Am I riding the donkey—or is the donkey riding me?

What am I feeding in my consciousness: love or fear?

🌿 Holy Week is not about looking backward—it is about entering Jerusalem within.

May this teaching support your own journey of humility, courage, devotion, and inner resurrection.

Featuring:

• Palm Sunday Sermon at URSC

• Eric Butterworth – Palms and Passover

• Olga’s Meditation

• Unity / New Thought metaphysical interpretation

• Gospel of John & Charles Fillmore insights

🔔 Subscribe for sermons, metaphysical Bible teaching, and spiritual philosophy

👍 Like, share, and comment with what Holy Week means to you

#PalmSunday #HolyWeek #EricButterworth #UnityChurch #NewThoughtChristianity

#ChristWithin #MetaphysicalBible #CharlesFillmore #SpiritualAwakening

#Hosanna #Passover #InnerTransformation #PracticalMysticism

Drawn from the spirit of Palm Sunday and the quiet moments following the triumphant entry into Jerusalem, this meditation invites you into the inner garden—a place of reflection, surrender, and awakening. Here, we gently explore what it means to accept our divine identity, to release fear, and to embody a deeper love for God and neighbor.

This is more than a meditation—it is a preparation of the heart for the sacred journey ahead. A time to center yourself, to listen inwardly, and to align with the presence of peace and purpose within.

Take a few moments. Breathe. Enter the silence. 🌿

This episode blends biography, metaphysics, archival audio from This Thing Called Life, and a practical guide to renewing consciousness. Featuring the story of the two gardeners, Holmes’s Statement of Beliefs, insights on imagination, meditation, visualization, and the spiritual laws that shape your reality.

Perfect for seekers of New Thought, Christian metaphysics, Ernest Holmes, Mitch Horowitz readings, Religious Science history, and anyone ready to transform their inner life and experience the creative power of Divine Mind.

#ErnestHolmes #ScienceOfMind #NewThought #ReligiousScience #SpiritualLaw #AffirmativePrayer #MetaphysicalChristianity #MindRenewal #CreativeMind #MitchHorowitz #Romans12 #HolmesWisdom #ConsciousnessShift #SpiritualGrowth #DivineMind

This video explores Shaker theology and daily practice through clips from the documentary Shakerism: The First 200 Years and a sermon titled “Shakers and the Sacred in Everyday Life.” Drawing on Christina Ward’s Holy Food, we examine how belief was embodied through food, labor, craftsmanship, and disciplined community life.For the Shakers, cooking, farming, laundry, and furniture-making were not mundane tasks but acts of prayer. Guided by the principle “Hands to work, hearts to God,” they transformed ordinary life into a living sacrament. This episode traces the Shakers’ spiritual gifts, gender equality, communal economy, influence on Spiritualism and New Thought, and their enduring relevance in a distracted, consumer-driven world.

#Shakers #SacredLabor #AmericanUtopias #ReligiousHistory #NewThought #Spirituality #FaithAndWork #HandsToWorkHeartsToGod #19thCenturyAmerica

What if a 1930s radio preacher publicly rejected the virgin birth, denied original sin, and questioned the authority of the Bible?

In Episodes 5–8 of the 1935 Psychiana broadcasts, founder Frank B. Robinson boldly critiques orthodox Christianity, compares biblical stories to pagan myths, and disputes traditional doctrines about Jesus and salvation.

Once called one of the largest religious movements in the world, Psychiana represents a powerful moment in American alternative religion.

Featuring restored archival audio and period photographs.

Source: University of Idaho Library Digital Collections (Frank B. Robinson Papers).

Educational use.

#Psychiana #ReligiousDebate #HistoryOfReligion #OldTimeRadio #AlternativeChristianity #FrankBRobinson

In this Unity Rochester Spiritual Center message, Mitchell K. Jones explores the inner chamber as the Silence where consciousness is lifted and spiritualized imagination awakens.

This video includes archival audio clips and historic recordings woven together with relaxing visuals and contemplative music, creating a meditative atmosphere for Lenten reflection.

Featuring:

• Archival Charles Fillmore “Preachment” 78 record

• May Rowland – *I Feel the Presence of God*

• Neville Goddard on the creative power of imagination

• A Good News segment on Restorative Justice

• A guided metaphysical meditation: A Drill in the Silence

Learn how to release fear, deny false belief, affirm divine Truth, and reimagine your life from Christ consciousness this Lent.

Enter the Silence. Close the door. Let God be God in you.

#Unity #Matthew66 #AffirmativePrayer #InnerChamber #NevilleGoddard #CharlesFillmore #Lent #Meditation #ArchivalAudio

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Explore the importance of positive thinking beyond revolutionary optimism — from radical optimism and meditation to Peter Schumann’s Possibilitarianism. Reflect on the limits of ICE and activist tactics in Minneapolis after recent federal agent shootings and rising tensions in protests. Learn why calm, clear thinking leads to better choices, with insights from True Anon clips, Ed Rabel on Jesus, a Unity film, and a closing meditation by Martha Giudici. Stay grounded, inspired, and empowered.#RadicalRevolutionaryOptimism#Possibilitarianism#PositiveThinking#RightThinking#ConsciousAction#MeditationPractice#InnerCalm#SpiritualResilience#MindfulLiving#UnityPrinciples#BeyondProtest#CalmInCrisis#RethinkingActivism#Minneapolis#NonReactive#PeterSchumann#TrueAnon#EdRabel#JesusTeachings#IndependentMedia#HopeWithClarity#StillnessIsPower#ChooseCalm#AnotherWorldIsPossible

We explore the warm stream of revolutionary imagination—where Marxism meets mysticism, utopian movements embrace esoteric ideas, and political subjectivity is shaped by spiritual experience. Topics include materialist spirituality, enchanted materialism, and how re-sacralizing our relationship with nature and matter can inform a more humane and liberatory politics.

The episode also draws from

• Orestes Brownson on Saint-Simon and proto-socialist mysticism

• Saint-Simonianism’s influence on Eliphas Levi and the French occult revival

• The key distinctions between occult, esoteric, hidden, secret—and how American metaphysical religions applied a “spiritual sunshine law”

• A New Thought perspective on the occult, including archival audio from Eric Butterworth

• A BBC documentary on Annie Besant, tracing her path from socialist organizer to Theosophist

• Dr. Stephan A. Hoeller’s Esoteric Gnosis lectures on Eliphas Levi, the Enlightenment, and the non-dual relationship between science and religion, matter and spirit

• The tension between rationalism and mysticism in modern political culture

The episode includes a Good News segment and closes with a past-life guided meditation sourced from the 1990 Edgar Cayce A.R.E. VHS program Remembering Egypt.

If you’re interested in the spiritual countercurrents of the Left, the history of esoteric socialism, enchanted materialism, or the deeper metaphysical forces shaping political imagination, this is a wide-ranging, insight-rich deep dive.

#Socialism #OccultHistory #EsotericSocialism #Mysticism #Metaphysics #NewThought #AnnieBesant #EliphasLevi #Gnosis #EnchantedMaterialism #SpiritualPolitics #LeftHistory #Marxism #Occult #Esotericism #EdgarCayce #EricButterworth #Theosophy #UtopianSocialism #HistoryPodcast #PoliticalSpirituality

In Part 1 of this two-part deep dive, we uncover the extraordinary origins of Andrew Jackson Davis, the self-taught clairvoyant whose visions launched American Spiritualism and reshaped 19th-century religious culture.

Featuring exclusive insights and archival clips from **Tom Cratsley**, **Ronnie Pontiac**, and Spiritualist **Reverend Marilyn Awtry**, this episode traces Davis’s journey from humble beginnings in Blooming Grove, New York, to his emergence as the “Poughkeepsie Seer.”

In this first installment, you’ll discover:

✨ The story behind *Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations and a Voice to Mankind*—an 800-page trance-dictated metaphysical epic

✨ How Davis’s spirit-guided “Harmonial Philosophy” inspired utopian socialist experiments from the Wisconsin Phalanx to Brook Farm

✨ His role as a reformer allied with abolitionists, women’s rights activists, and progressive intellectuals

✨ The early conflicts between Davis’s philosophical Spiritualism and the sensationalism of séance culture

✨ The historical context provided by scholars like Robert Delp and Catherine Albanese, illuminating the social, scientific, and spiritual currents of the era

✨ How Davis challenged the religious establishment and helped redefine “religion” as a universal human phenomenon—sparking the 1853 Hartford Bible Convention controversy

**This video sets the foundation for Part 2**, where we explore Davis’s wider legacy, his metaphysical system, his influence on New Thought, Theosophy, Christian Science, and the New Age, and why his ideas still matter today.

🔔 Subscribe now for Part 2: *Andrew Jackson Davis: Thought, Legacy & the Harmonial Cosmos*

👍 Like, share, and comment—your engagement helps keep this history alive.

May Rowland, longtime director of Silent Unity and one of the most beloved voices in New Thought, guides listeners into the stillness where divine love and healing presence are felt most clearly. Whether you’re seeking comfort, spiritual grounding, or a moment to reconnect with Source, this classic Unity message offers a peaceful retreat for the soul.

✨ Use this for:

• Meditation and prayer

• Stress relief and relaxation

• Quiet study or spiritual contemplation

• Background inspiration during your day

🔔 If you enjoy Unity teachings and New Thought classics, consider subscribing for more archival audio, spiritual talks, and calming visual meditations.

#Unity #MayRowland #NewThought #Meditation #RelaxingVHS #SilentUnity #ComeYeApartAwhile #SpiritualHealing #ASMRSpiritual #VHSaesthetic

Also included is the 1980 Silent Unity Christmas Service, bringing sacred music, prayer, and inspiration from Unity’s spiritual tradition. Perfect for those seeking Christmas classics with a New Thought twist.

✨ Listen for holiday joy, spiritual insight, and timeless Unity teachings.

#Christmas #SilentUnity #UnityChurch #NewThought #ChristmasPodcast #HolidayPlay #JamesDilletFreeman #UnityTeachings #ChristmasService #Nativity

In this powerful live lecture (Part 4 of the series), Barry reveals how the stories of the widow’s oil, Elisha, and the Shunammite woman are metaphysical blueprints for faith, imagination, inner transformation, and the creative power of consciousness.

Following Neville’s method of inner interpretation, Freedom Barry shows:✅ How biblical characters represent states of mind✅ How “oil,” “vessels,” and “multiplication” symbolize spiritual law✅ Why 2 Kings 4 holds the secret of moving from lack to abundance✅ How to apply these parables to manifest change in your own life

This rare lecture captures Barry’s authentic voice, humor, and depth at a time when few were teaching Neville’s message. The old VHS quality adds to the historical and spiritual value of the recording.

Perfect for students of Neville Goddard, mysticism, metaphysical Christianity, Law of Assumption, and Bible symbolism.

► Watch this if you want to understand how the Bible is really about YOU and your imagination.

We will reflect on a timeless guiding rule from Sri Harold Klemp, founder of Eckankar:

“Is it true, is it necessary, is it kind?”

This simple three-fold test offers a powerful filter for our thoughts and words before we give them voice. In doing so, we answer the biblical call that “the one who loves God must also love their brother and sister” (1 John 4:21), understanding that loving speech is a fundamental expression of our faith.

Together, we will consider:

* How our words, like spiritual seeds, plant the future we will harvest.

* The difference between speaking from a consciousness of fear and speaking from a consciousness of faith.

* Practical ways to use our words to bless, heal, and uplift our bodies, our relationships, and our community.

In this rare live lecture, Freedom Barry—one of Neville Goddard’s most devoted students—dives deep into Mark 13, one of the most prophetic and challenging chapters in the New Testament. Speaking during Holy Week, Barry confronts a bold and unsettling question:

If Christianity has been practiced for 2,000 years… why have the same old evils remained?

With his signature blend of metaphysical insight, scripture, and practical spirituality, Barry explores:

* The inner meaning of Jesus’ apocalyptic teachings

* Why external religion has failed to transform society

* The difference between belief in Christ and living from Christ-consciousness

* How “the end of the age” refers to an inner awakening, not world catastrophe

* What true spiritual transformation requires from each of us

Barry challenges passive faith and calls for authentic inner rebirth—the only force capable of ending war, greed, fear, and separation. This is not a doom-and-gloom sermon. It is a fiery, visionary call to become the living temple of God.

Whether you love scripture, metaphysics, or Neville-style mysticism, this lecture offers a profound reinterpretation of Mark 13 that feels more relevant than ever.

A forgotten voice. A timeless message. A radical invitation to real Christianity.

This video explores a revolutionary synthesis: uniting the inner power of consciousness and spiritual truth (New Thought, Christian Mysticism, Swedenborgianism) with bold, material action rooted in Kingdom of God Economics—a vision drawn from Jesus, the Early Church, and thinkers like Wallace D. Wattles.

🎥 In This Video, Explore:• Why spiritual bypassing leaves us vulnerable to the horrors of violence, oppression, and systemic corruption• How the Kingdom of God offers a radical alternative to empire and greed• Swedenborg’s vision of inner and outer evil—and strategies to confront both• Integrating prayer, meditation, and mystical union with concrete justice work• Jesus’ "Kingdom of Heaven" as a revolutionary call to build a cooperative commonwealth on Earth

⏱️ Timestamps:0:00 – Introduction: Facing Darkness Beyond Naïve Optimism13:09 – Part 1: The Temptation of Idealism (New Thought, Wilmans, Butterworth)31:37 – Part 2: The Material Conditions of Evil (Swedenborg, Systemic Analysis)55:48 – Part 3: Kingdom of God Economics – Jesus’ Revolutionary Vision (Wattles, Early Christian Socialism)1:27:13 – Part 4: The Call for Synthesis (“Render Unto Caesar”)1:46:26 – Part 5: Practical Steps for Spiritual & Material Transformation2:00:00 – Conclusion: Turning Fear into Courage, Darkness into Light

📖 This Video Is For You If You're Exploring:• Christian Mysticism & Meditation – Finding inner light to illuminate the shadows• New Thought & Conscious Creation – Moving beyond surface-level self-help into ethical manifestation• Spiritual Activism & Systemic Change – Bridging faith, mysticism, and justice in the real world• Understanding Evil – Theologically, metaphysically, and materially• Kingdom Economics – Reclaiming the biblical vision of justice, abundance, and shared power

🗣️ Join the Conversation:This Halloween, consider: What does it mean to confront the darkness with both love and courage? How are you transforming fear into action? Share your reflections in the comments.

🔔 Subscribe for more mystical theology, radical spirituality, and practical justice teachings.👉

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📌 Keywords (for search visibility): Evil, Confronting Evil, Darkness, Fear, Kingdom of God, Jesus Teachings, Kingdom of God Economics, Christian Mysticism, Spiritual Bypassing, Wallace D. Wattles, Swedenborg, New Thought, Charles Fillmore, Unity Church, Practical Spirituality, Sacred Economics, Systemic Injustice, Liberation Theology, Faith in Action, Beyond Capitalism, Inner Light, Outer Action

🔥 Hashtags:#ConfrontingEvil #KingdomOfGod #SacredEconomics #ChristianMysticism #SpiritualActivism #JesusTeachings #NewThought #FaithInAction #DivineJustice #BeyondCapitalism #PracticalSpirituality #SystemicChange #SpiritualBypassing #WallaceWattles #Swedenborg #LiberationTheology #FearAndCourage #HalloweenSpirituality #DarknessAndLight #UtopianChristianity

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Join us as we critically examine the first half of the inaugural issue of the Univercoelum and Spiritual Philosopher, exploring W. M. Fernald’s provocative essay on the necessity of new and higher revelations. We unpack his arguments for reasoned spiritual insight, a truer understanding of God, and the reform of society, while situating his ideas in the broader context of 19th-century spiritual philosophy. This episode illuminates how early spiritualist publications sought to reconcile faith, intellect, and social progress in an age of skepticism and rapid intellectual change.

Keywords: Emanuel Swedenborg, Swedenborgian theology, spiritual art, George Inness paintings, Things Heard & Seen explained, Swedenborgian architecture, Joseph Worcester, doctrine of correspondences, metaphysical art, heaven and hell as states, sacred symbolism, Tonalist art, spiritual growth, esoteric philosophy, Mitchell K. Jones.

Practical steps include:

* Seeing beyond appearances to the deeper truth.

* Choosing love and separating from cruelty.

* Seeking first the kingdom of God within, trusting that all else will follow.

Denial: I separate from all that diminishes me and embrace only what uplifts me.

Affirmation: I seek first the kingdom of God within me, and all else is added in perfect order.

“I went by the field of the sluggard… and, lo, it was all grown over with thorns… Then I beheld, and considered well; I saw, and received instruction.” Proverbs 24:30–32

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🔔 Subscribe to catch Part 2: Useful Living and Mystical Knowing—where we make Swedenborg’s wisdom practical for modern life!