12. THE POEM HANGS ON THE BERRY BUSH

To live undisturbed by passing occurrences you must first find your own centre. You must then be firm in your own centre, and so rule the world from within. He who does not himself condition circumstances allows the process to be reversed, and becomes a conditioned circumstance. Find your centre and live in it. Surrender it to no person, to no thing. In the degree that you do this will you find yourself growing stronger and stronger in it. And how can one find his centre? By realizing his oneness with the Infinite Power, and by living continually in this realization.

But if you do not rule from your own centre, if you invest this or that with the power of bringing you annoyance, or evil, or harm, then take what it brings, but cease your railings against the eternal goodness and beneficence of all things.

“I swear the earth shall surely be complete, To him or her who shall be complete; The earth remains jagged and broken, Only to him who remains jagged and broken.”

If the windows of your soul are dirty and streaked, covered with matter foreign to them, then the world as you look out of them will be to you dirty and streaked and out of order. Cease your complainings, however; keep your pessimism, your “ poor, unfortunate me “ to yourself, lest you betray the fact that your windows are badly in need of something. But know that your friend, who keeps his windows clean, that the Eternal Sun may illumine all within and make visible all without, -- know that he lives in a different world from yours.

Then, go wash your windows, and instead of longing for some other world, you will discover the wonderful beauties of this world; and if you don’t find transcendent beauties on every hand here, the chances are that: you will never find them anywhere.

“The poem hangs on the berry-bush, When comes the poet’s eye, And the whole street is a masquerade, When Shakespeare passes by.”

This same Shakespeare, whose mere passing causes all this commotion, is the one who put into the mouth of one of his creations the words: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” And the great work of his own life is right good evidence that he realized full well the truth of the facts we are considering. And again he gave us a great truth in keeping mith what we are considering when he said: “Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win, By fearing to attempt.”

There is probably no agent that brings us more undesirable conditions than fear. We should live in fear of nothing, nor will we when we come fully to know ourselves. An old French proverb runs:

“Some of your griefs you have cured, And the sharpest you still have survived; But what torments of pain you endured, From evils that never arrived.”

Fear and lack of faith go hand in hand. The one is born of the other. Tell me how much one is given to fear, and I will tell you how much he lacks in faith. Fear is a most expensive guest to entertain, the same as worry is: so expensive are they that no one can afford to entertain them. We invite what we fear, the same as, by a different attitude of mind, we invite and attract the influences and conditions we desire. The mind dominated by fear opens the door for the entrance of the very things, for the actualization of the very conditions it fears.

“Where are you going? “ asked an Eastern pilgrim on meeting the plague one day. “ I am going to Bagdad to kill five thousand people,” was the reply. A few days later the same pilgrim met the plague returning. “You told me you were going to Bagdad to kill five thousand people,” said he, “but instead, you killed fifty thousand.” “No,” said the plague, “I killed only five thousand, as I told you I would; the others died of fright.

Fear can paralyze every muscle in the body. Fear affects the flow of the blood, likewise the normal and healthy action of all the life forces. Fear can make the body rigid, motionless, and powerless to move.

(from: In Tune with the Infinite)