V

“Discovering something deep within”

Several centuries before Jesus lived, another man who thought and taught similarly to him in many ways challenged people in Athens about how to live. Socrates was interested in people discovering something deep within themselves that desired to express a high ethic for greater livingness. He believed that, when people come from the heart and think with the greatest rationale, a great society emerges. The people of Athens railed against him because they did not want to live a life of high morality but rather one that took advantage of others for their own gain. He was tried and found guilty of influencing their children to believe that everything is relative, which had meant to them that no ethic is binding upon anyone. He was forced to drink a deadly cup of hemlock poison.

Plato was a disciple of Socrates, and even though he watched the treatment given to Socrates he chose to follow in his footsteps. Plato succeeded in teaching a very similar message. It included that right thinking, discipline to live by right thoughts, and building a life mission to express High Ideas, would make our world a much better place. Plato was convinced that the pursuit of beauty, Truth, and goodness would make our Souls function best. But in time, other ideas pursued by kings and other rulers made people into servants of lesser expressions of life.

In the seventeenth century, Baruch Spinoza of Amsterdam and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz from Germany taught that we live in a world that is at one with God. In the eighteenth century, there was a further reemergence of people who believed in thinking High Ideas and living by them for the good of themselves and others. Most of the great spokespersons were Germans. The idea was given great charge through the philosophy of a very great thinker by the name of Immanuel Kant. He did not define it blatantly, but opened the door to the ideas that were later to become New Thought, through brilliantly pursuing a philosophy that had a place for the combination of High Thought and High Feeling. Although he believed that the Supreme Mind was very much a reality, he did not think that we could know anything about It. Nevertheless, he taught ideas that other great philosophers used to explain the certainty of Its reality.

Among various philosophers who followed him and identified themselves with his logic was a man named Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Teaching in the great Universities of Jena and Berlin, he espoused a philosophy constructed upon Kantian idealism, and specifying that God is Spirit or Mind and pervades all of the universe. When we think, we use that Mind for our designs. He encouraged people to think High Ideas in order to construct a moral world of the highest order. Other philosophers of his time thought similarly, such as Friedrich Schelling, Herman Lotze, Gustav Fechner, etc.

In the nineteenth century, several persons pursued these ideas further, explaining that when we use High Thoughts with considerable feeling, problems could be resolved with ease. It is this conception that established New Thought, the basis of building Spiritual Pathways that provide solutions to anything by our using High Thoughts while embodying them by feeling their legitimacy. Particular ways to think with the desire to manifest wonderful experiences in life, here and now, take place in the lives of those who study, believe, and utilize these findings.

The empowerment comes through the simple thought that there is One Mind in the universe, which people use every time they think. A negative use of it gives us negative experiences. A positive use of it gives us positive results.