Preface

THE MAN WHO WORKED OUT THE PROCESS

It is unusual I assume for a businessman to accept the obligation of writing a foreword to a book of idealism, and any attempt on my part to add to its spiritual content would be vain assumption. But since I know of the phenomenal results of idealizing the process, I can perhaps give some measure of faith and hope to those who have not always succeeded and who now doubt the possibility of making their ideals become realities.

My certainty of the results of this process bases itself upon many years' personal contact with the attainments of Brown Landone, upon my own individual and business success in using the process, and upon my intimate acquaintance with the many executives who have with his aid made their ideals come true. Some of these ideals have been of the higher things of life; some of more mundane affairs, such as increasing one's salary from two or three thousand a year to a thousand a month or more by a few weeks' use of the process.

Brown Landone, the man, like all of us, has his individual habits and hobbies known only to intimate friends. For instance, he never reads anything idealistic immediately before going to sleep. " If I do," he says, " my mind reacts and I have unpleasant dreams; but, if I read something weird, my soul reacts and I live the night in a state of high spiritual consciousness."

Then there is the passion of "cleaning up things." Today, this is most annoying to some of the intimate friends whom he visits, for no sooner is he in the home than he makes for the basement or attic to satisfy his soul's desire to make things clean. It is a passion with him; it was born in him. As a child he would clean up his playroom rather than play with his toys. When but five years old he became so angry because the servants would not let him mop the kitchen floors that he ran away from home!

Although handicapped in childhood and youth with what most of us consider insurmountable physical handicaps, yet he has lived long, worked much and retains enduring vitality. Those in whose time he first worked -Helen Wilmans, Dr. Adams, Mrs. Eddy, Dr. Stockham and others -have long since passed into the greater life. Yet, today (I know from years of association), he often works twenty hours out of twenty-four and finds life and the work a joy because he loves both. You and I may not wish to work thus, yet it gives one great consciousness of power to know that someone has attained such spiritual contact with Life that he is able to do so.

His recreation is painting. After a day's work, usually from eighteen to twenty hours, he paints to rest himself before going to sleep. He paints at such times with phenomenal rapidity.

He has worked much and all he has done or written is original. In point of fact, he has done so many original things that many find it difficult to keep track of his work. More than twenty years ago he wrote of the value of vitamins, now being accepted by the medical profession; a generation ago he proved the solar plexus to be a brain by itself, a statement then ridiculed by biologists but now accepted; seventeen years ago he discovered that tone is most resonantly projected on the parabolic curve and it is just now being used by engineers to secure valuable patents; within this decade he has formulated a new science of sociology which conservative French thinkers have called "epoch making." He was the first man to work out a new science of the arts unifying the basic principles of music, literature, painting, sculpture and architecture; to work out neural reaction; and to prove that new brain structure can be developed by conscious functioning just as Burbank proved that new plant structures can be developed.

In this book one thought deserves more than passing mention. During the centuries philosophers have sought the basis of the soul's faith in the unity of all things. Clearly to present that basis of unity is now, I know, Brown Landone's one great life aim. He may or may not succeed in making the world conscious of this unity, but at least the attempt in The Spirit of Matter comes nearer making us know that the spiritual and material world are one than anything written previously. With such a consciousness of the unity of all things of spirit and of matter, the faith is strong and the way is clear to make our ideals come true.

EDGAR H. FELIX -New York City, June, 1922