How do you germinate seeds in your soul?

Then Remember This―

And Remember!

Always remember—

You will conquer where you have failed—

You will reap where you have sown—

And till the ground where clods are turned—

The furrows be as driven snow.

Your wish so cherished will be blessed—

And heaven will be your rest.

All life is spirit, is spirit life. 

You can easily understand how the tiny spark of life, which the Creator has implanted can evolve until it becomes the complex spirit that inhabits the material form or body that you call you―

The you in your head.

You can further understand how this spirit that is in you may continue to evolve until it has become sufficiently strong or full of vitality or life to no longer need the protection of a material body, but can continue its evolution without this material hindrance.

It is still possible for you to further understand how this spirit that is now free from a material body can continue to evolve until it arrives in the presence of its God―

Until it becomes like unto the God Who gave it birth and started it on its evolutionary journey.

As the spirit evolves, the Law of Spiritual Evolution becomes more and more complex.

First there enters into spiritual evolution the law―Love. This law at once becomes an essential to the further evolution of spirit. A little later, the law Faith appears and begins to play its part in spiritual evolution.

The minute that you become sufficiently self-conscious to come under the operation of the Law of Right and Wrong, you begin the battle that is to decide your future evolution―

You begin the battle that is to decide how slowly or how rapidly you will evolve toward the Divine.

The spirit becomes conscious of its environment.

As the spirit continues to evolve, this consciousness increases. With increased consciousness comes enlightenment and knowledge, understanding and wisdom, and the ability to think and see and know.

Spiritual evolution is a slow unfolding attained through right living, through constantly holding the right attitude toward all life.

Your spiritual development can be measured by the sublimity of your thought and emotional depth of your feelings.

Under the Law of Spiritual Evolution, every virtue and vice is accounted for, considered and weighed, and either helps you in your evolution or retards you in your spiritual growth.

Nothing in this world is finished. Everything is in course of being developed or evolved or perfected.

Evolution is the first aim of all life, spiritual evolution first and then mental and physical evolution.

No religious theories, not dogmas or creeds are necessary to spiritual development. Just faith is all that is needed. Faith in some God, just something to cause you to seek to become better than you are, to cause you to make an effort to evolve out of yourself into something higher, something more like the faith that you hold—

As you mount higher and higher in the scale of spiritual evolution you become more and more in control of your destiny.

Have faith in some God and believe whatever you will or can. All is well.

Spirit is the electric spark, which makes possible material or physical life.

Without spirit there could be no material or physical or animal life, and this physical or material or animal life cannot in any case survive the departure of the spirit within.

Each spirit inhabits a material body that is capable of certain independent actions―a material body that was created to protect this spirit in the early stages of its development or until it has evolved sufficient vitality and strength and self-consciousness to no longer need such protection.

Each physical or animal form contains two lives, each capable of certain independent actions.

To the spirit that has not yet reached a high state of development, the trivial things of life may appear great and the great things of life may not appear at all.

Each spirit must attain the same amount of development before it can cross the bridge into the land where no material bodies are to be found or are necessary.

Spirit never sleeps. Only the physical mind sleeps.

During the slumber of the physical mind, the spirit often leaves its material abode for brief periods of time, often leaves its material abode and goes forth into the spiritual world to visit and learn much that it should know.

The more highly developed you are spiritually, the nearer your life becomes a harmony, a poem, a song.

Spirit knows no rest, nor seeks any, nor desires any until it has completed its journey, but when spirit is retarded in its development, when it is held back because it is out of harmony with the good, it grows restless and suffers much anxiety.

The lover of the beautiful, the dreamer, the poet, the artist, is many degrees nearer heaven and farther from earth than the practical man.

The beautiful is the good, and anything that tends to destroy the beautiful is the bad.

Love is a great beautifier, and so are sympathy and faith and charity and trust.

All things that tend to produce harmony between you and the purpose of life are great beautifiers.

All the beauty that you have known and become accustomed to in life is merely a trivial in comparison to the beauty that will yet be revealed to you a little at a time as you evolve higher and higher.

All beauty increases for you as rapidly as your consciousness increases.That which possesses beauty grows more and more beautiful the longer and more closely you behold it―

All things possess beauty. Each day a new world of beauty is unrolled for those who seek the beautiful. You are often elevated and enthused and inspired by the beauty that is conveyed to you in a poem or a thought, but it seldom occurs to you how much more beautiful and vital that beauty must have been to him who perceived it and translated it into language for you.

The most beautiful thing in the Universe is life, spirit life. Physical beauty depends upon form and shape and colour, depends upon physical appearance, but spiritual beauty does not depend upon any of these because it has no permanent form or shape or colour, is continually changing, yet it is the most beautiful of all beauty, but the beauty of spirit varies and increases with its evolution, with its development.

Spirit beauty is the only beauty that will bear close inspection. All other beauty is best observed from a distance.

The perception of the beautiful is a spiritual test. It reveals to those who are in a position to see how far they have advanced on their road to perfection.

Beauty is both like fire and frost. Neglect beauty and it freezes you. Approach too close to beauty and it burns you.

How can those who are too blind to observe the beauty of earth expect to behold the beauty of heaven?

There is a vast difference between the good and moral. The one is the fulfilling of the purpose of life, the other the obeying of the rules relating to conduct that society lays down.

He who does not know the good, but must follow the moral guideposts set up by society is not wise or highly spiritually developed, nor even learned though he may be a graduate of all the schools.

We wish everybody to live on our plane of life or a little beneath us.

It is wise to be moderate in most things, but not in virtue and goodness.

There is no extreme to wise living, to living in harmony with Nature and with the purpose of life.

Just as we must be more than moral to be really good, so must we be more than good to be divine.

Everything works together for good.

Do not look for goodness upon the surface of life. Goodness is more apt to be found beneath the surface, within the life.

The nearness of God to us depends upon our spiritual development and this development depends largely upon our attitude toward life.

All real friendships must spring from spiritual harmony. Life is not measured by years, but by living, by the amount of good it has brought us, the distance on the road to spiritual perfection it has carried us and the nearness to God it has left us.

Life is spirit. And the development of spirit accounts for all the different species of life and for the development of each of these species.

There is poetry and rhythm and music in everything that is in harmony with the purpose of life.

Most of us do not get as much out of life as we should because we do not know how to live.

To live is to evolve. It does not matter what you believe, but it is all important that you believe, and that you get into harmony with your belief.

Spiritual development requires of you first that you get in harmony with your belief. And second that you are passive and allow your belief to lead you toward the light.

All spirit has the power to generate certain material activities that produce a kind of life that is independent of spirit, so long as it is in contact with spirit as a generating force. But remove the spirit from contact with this material life and the material life ceases to live or to have life.

The life element or spirit that is in you does not differ in any essential from the life element or spirit that is in a tree or a flower or a bird or other animal or plant or mineral, does not differ in any essential, does not differ except in its evolution or development.

Each spirit is but a spark of God, which through evolution will become like unto the God who gave it birth.

If you wish to search for the spirit of one who has departed this life before having completed his evolution in human form, do not search in the spirit world, but among the newborns.

All life is spirit. Those who live profoundly live serenely and calmly and peacefully. It is those who live on the surface of life who suffer most from storms and tempests, whose lives are so full of discontent and unhappiness.

To fully understand one's spirit is to understand the spirit of the Universe and to know what life is about.

No one spark of life is of more importance than any other spark of life except in the progress it has made in its evolution.

All, everything, depends upon your attitude toward life.

You are the sum total, not of one life, but of all the lives that you have lived since God planted your spark of life in the first crude form of Nature.

Innumerable lives have been lived and countless periods of time have been spent in the evolution of the life that is in you.

Death is an adventure into the unknown. Death is as natural as sleep or birth, and no more to be feared. 

Death makes you young again. It is but the doorway that leads to a new life.

Death is never sudden. The inner or spirit is always conscious of the approach of death and is ready to depart. Though death is never sudden or a surprise to the dying, yet it is so free from sensation or feeling or jar that the departed are not conscious of the passing over.

Life blends into death and death into life again without your being conscious of the change. You simply become conscious that you are alive, and if you have any consciousness of your former life, it is a vague and visionary one, as something apart from yourself.

The dead do not possess any great knowledge of what is in the beyond. All things are revealed to them by a slow unfolding, an evolution.

You cannot always believe that which you wish to believe. Do not strive to believe true that which your inner life rejects as untrue and unnecessary to your spiritual evolution. It does not matter what you believe. Spiritual evolution does not depend upon belief. Besides, your belief will change with your evolution. Your spiritual self is a better judge of what to believe than are your spiritual teachers. And your spiritual self never believes in that which is no longer of use to it, in that which it has outgrown.

Your religious belief is merely your explanation or interpretation of the purpose of life while your spiritual development is the point in life at which you have arrived.

That religion that answers to all your present spiritual requirements is your religion and is true to you though it may not answer to the spiritual requirements of another living soul and cannot be true to them.

All religions are good. Your religious instinct seeks the light—the truth is never satisfied until it has obtained that for which it seeks.

Your religion is the sum total of all that you believe concerning life.

A religion that fails to keep pace with you in your spiritual growth must be left behind, cannot continue to be your religion.

Christ being the latest arrival from the Kingdom of the Gods brought with him many new ideas, but do not think that with Christ all is said, that God has nothing more to say to his people.

Faith has the power to save you from everything, even from yourself.

Hope is important, but it is not as important as faith.

Faith is essential to the possession of anything.

You always lose that in which you have lost faith.

Faith is a means of knowing that which could not otherwise be known. It is a means of comprehending that which you are not sufficiently enlightened to otherwise comprehend.

As long as you have faith, you evolve irrespectively of what you believe or whether you believe or not.

Faith is as necessary to science, as it is to religion. And when faith is lost, all is lost.

Enlightenment is a spiritual, not a mental quality. You acquire knowledge through study and experience and enlightenment, through spiritual evolution or development.

Fear stands like a ghost in the pathway of enlightenment and prevents many from becoming enlightened.

Your enlightenment increases in so far only as you follow it or are guided by it. The moment that you cease to follow your enlightenment and begin to do that which you know is not wise, your enlightenment and wisdom begin to recede from you and leave you in spiritual darkness.

To be moral is to play the game of life according to the rules laid down by society, but to be moral has nothing to do with being good.

Morality is the policy of man. That which will serve man's interest best is moral. Therefore, morality bears no true relation to the good, and may even be, and sometimes is, the bad.

Our moral standard changes with our morals and both are continually changing.

The moral cannot lift its soul high enough to touch the skirts of the good.

To sin is to get out of harmony with the purpose of life or of Nature. It is discord. It is to strike the wrong key or cord or note.

Sin does not have the power to destroy you. It can only impede, retard and delay you on your evolutionary journey.

Sin can only hold you back and force you to spend more lives than are necessary in material bodies.

Sin occupies but a narrow space in life. It cannot go beyond the point where self-consciousness is born, nor can it mount to that height of spiritual enlightenment to which your evolution soon carries you.

Sin is eventually a corrective force. It eventually pushes you toward the good by forcibly revealing to you the fact that you are out of harmony with the good or with Nature or with the purpose of life.

The farther you get from sin the less conscious you are of the existence of sin. And if you journey far enough from sin, sin will cease to exist to you.

Every evil, every falsehood, carries within it the germ of self-destruction. Every evil is a discord, is a note that is out of harmony with Nature, and with life.

Evil suggests evil to those who are evil. The minute you cease to be evil, evil ceases to exist to you.

Solitude is necessary to spiritual development, is one of the mysterious growth.

You are instructed by your virtues more than you are by your vices. The latter dulls your perception while the former helps you see.

The satisfaction of being in the right pays a higher dividend than the selfishness of having what you desire or doing what you wish.

He who does wrong is lacking in perception or knowledge or courage. The man who does wrong is not an enlightened man, nor a wise man, nor a man that is high in the scale of spiritual evolution.

The value of prayer is in the attitude produced.

Prayer unconsciously tends to bring you into harmony with the law of spiritual evolution and helps you in your spiritual development.

Some prayers are but the cry of a soul in distress. And some prayers are prayers of submission, of surrender, are prayers uttered by souls that have been in rebellion against the law of spiritual evolution and who now humbly submit to that law.

Thy will be done is one of the wisest of all prayers.

He who commits an unjust act thinks less of himself than he did before that act was committed.

Those who do not see goodness and beauty and purpose in every living creature, person and thing, do not see, are blind.

Your ability to see a thing depends largely upon your attitude toward it.

If you care for it, have love for it or sympathy or feeling, you are more able to see it.

It is with your spiritual eye that you are able to see and comprehend the most.

Observe repeatedly that which you would enjoy because nothing is seen in its entirety at first or until it has been long and repeatedly observed.

Everything reveals itself to you slowly and gradually a little at a time.

Everything that you observe becomes more and more beautiful the longer and more closely you observe it.

You are what you see and know and understand.

Your enlightenment is an accurate standard by which to gauge your development.

He lives the most wisely who lives the most in harmony with the purpose of life, who is less concerned in material things than others.

Wisdom is the fruit of spiritual development and consists in the knowledge of how best to live to evolve the most rapidly toward the Divine.

You cannot by any flight of your imagination fully realise the grandeur of your destiny.

Each spirit must work out its own destiny, must obtain its own spiritual development, though it may be helped or hindered by other spirits, none can succeed or secure for it that which it may have failed to obtain for itself.

The future does not concern you, but the present is of vital importance to you because out of the present your future is evolved.

Your future is illuminated for you for brief periods of time, much as the earth is illuminated by a flash of lightning.

Materialism is ignorance raised to its highest degree. It is ignorance so profound that none of the secrets of life can penetrate to it.

There is no sudden change from earth to heaven. You reach heaven by a gradual development or unfolding that is so gradual that you are seldom conscious of it and wake to find yourself in a different sphere from that in which you were.

All things that are are necessary. Nothing is that is not of some importance in the scheme of things. The importance of anything does not strike you at once. It is only after you have had time to reflect that you begin to grasp the importance of the most significant fact or event.

The petty and trivial things of life are the important things of life to those who have never ascended to loftier heights than the commonplace, to those who have never experienced what it is to live on a spiritual plane of life.

Nothing is of importance that does not reveal to you something that is new, something that you have never before seen, that does not disclose to you some secret of life and enlightens and helps you to live more wisely than before.

You never discover anything of spiritual importance without first having made spiritual preparations for that discovery.

Heaven is attained through spiritual development at the point where a physical body is no longer necessary, but the spirit does not pause there, it continues its evolution through innumerable heavens, each one of which is superior to the last or the one beneath it.

Spiritual Evolution—Thoughts on the Evolution of Spirit-life and Various Other Subjects