Affirmations are positive statements about our being. The affirmation does not make a thing true, but prepares in consciousness the way to releasing what is already an eternal reality in the super-consciousness.

Writing Affirmations
Writing affirmations helps you to focus on what you expect for yourself and gives you a ready reference so you may read and speak your affirmation with clarity and directness. Here are some guidelines for writing affirmations in a positive, present tense, "I Am" manner.

1. Make Them Personal. You can only affirm for yourself. You are changing your way of thinking, your self-image or your belief system. Therefore, in most cases your affirmation will be an "I" or an "I am" statement.

2. Be Positive. Write your affirmations in a positive sentence structure. Do not write about what you want to move away from like "I am no longer lazy," but be positive; write about what you want, like "I am alive and energetic."

3. Be Short and to the Point. Make them one sentence if possible. Be specific and direct in what you expect for yourself.

4. Use Present Tense. Write your affirmations in the present tense. The subconscious mind works on a here and now basis and you are telling it how things are right now in your life.

5. Use Action Words. You already possess the ability, now indicate the achievement with words like "I am," "I have," "I choose," "1 accept." The more you act as if you are already in charge of this quality the faster your self image will make it evident in life.

6. Use Words of Emotion. Use exciting wording and feel the joy and happiness of being the way you want to be. Words that spark the emotional picture in your subconscious help to make the experience more believable and attractive. Also saying "1 love... "Its great to...." "I enjoy...," add a positive emotional charge.

Denial is a mental process of erasing from consciousness the false beliefs or attitudes we may be holding. Denials are not to be confused with the psychological dynamic of denial which causes serious problems in accepting what the facts of ones life may be. We use denials with affirmations. We deny that cancer has power to kill us--not the fact that we may have cancer. We deny the power of fear to continue in our life not that we have not felt fear. Denial, as a form of prayer is saying "no" to limiting our false beliefs that do not serve us. They are relinquishments of mental or emotional states and are best made without vehemence.

Examples of denials:

I no longer believe in lack or limitation.

Fear has no power to block my good.

The belief that I am unworthy (unlovable, clumsy, stupid, etc.) no longer has power in my life.

I say "No" to self-pity (anger, resentment, blame, guilt).

NO WAY!

I no longer believe that others can control my life.

Denials are best followed by positive powerful affirmations. Its been observed that the universe does not like a vacuum.

There is a poem that is popular in Truth circles, which incorporates the idea that nothing "can keep my own away from me." It is a wonderful poem, John Burroughs, who wrote it, was inspired, as all true poets are. It was a favorite in the Truth Center in London for many years, but I didn't find that most Truth students understood it. "My own shall come to me," they say glibly, and then they sit down and fold their hands and hope the Lord will get busy; but in my experience, He never has.

I have known good people who have said for twenty-five years, "My own shall come to me," and it has been coming all the time, but it has never arrived. They have been thinking and talking in generalities.

"The stars come nightly to the sky;

True -- but what is your own? That is the whole point. What is your own? Your own is what you are getting, and as long as you remain the person you are, you will keep on getting that. Why is it that nothing ever happens to most people? They are born casually, they grow up casually, they go to school casually, fall into a job casually, meet someone and get married casually, then one or two children come along casually. They go through life this way, and then pray for the end to come. They are always going to do something wonderful, but they never do because their mentality is casual.

Some of my students say, "Well, now, I havent demonstrated yet, but I know it is coming at the right time." I say, "What is the right time?" Now is the "accepted time." Now is the day of salvation. If you sit down and wait for things to happen -- for health, for prosperity, for understanding -- you will remain in that atmosphere, that attitude of simply waiting for something. If you want health, if you want understanding, if you want spiritual growth, and if you take the appointed means of God to get it, then your own will come to you. But nothing comes to you automatically, except what the race-mind brings automatically.

In the Jesus Christ teaching we learn to draw ourselves out of the race-mind, and to tune in to Divine-Mind. Then things begin to happen.

You have to make the contact with Divine Mind yourself. God never did anything for you and He never will. God never did anything for you or to you. He does it through you. He doesn't grow a rose for a rosebush. He grows it through the bush and the rose petals. He doesn't make a sunset for the sky. He makes a sunset through the sky. When you know the Truth that is God, you can be what you want to be, you can do what you want to do, you can have what you want to have. Your thinking is directed. You are no longer drifting in the breeze, you are directing your thinking. When you get on a merry-go-round, you climb on one of the horses. There is a great deal of noise, and you go around and around and around. This goes on for several minutes. Then what happens? You are exactly where you began, when it stops (perhaps it should be called a sad-go-round, because it doesn't get you anywhere). As long as you are in the race-mind, you are on a merry-go-round, getting nowhere.

The way to get out of the race-mind is by the scientific use of the Word. You have always had the power of the Word, but you have not always known you had it. Everything in your life today, you have spoken into existence by the Word at some time-everything, for good or for evil.

The presence of God in you is the Word. God is not an old gentleman living up in the clouds, a sort of highly inflated archbishop. God is infinite Life, love, truth-the Principle of all action in you. All the time you are seeking God outside, you are missing Him. The Word is not necessarily a spoken word. The Word is any definitely formulated thought.

If you could read the minds of the people as you walk down the street, you would be surprised. You would see that most people have just drifting current of thoughts passing across their minds. Did you ever observe your own thinking? Dont do it often, but do it once in a while. Watch the thoughts that come walking across your mind. Just sit back and watch the thoughts, untouched by you, that come. You will see that many are meaningless and futile. These are not the Word; but a definitely formulated thought for good or evil, that is the Word.

If you say, "My lungs are bad," or, "Im sure Im going to be fired next month," or, "Im sure our business is going downhill," or, "I know that a certain person doesn't like me" -- that is the Word. If you think, "I am one with God, I am Divine Spirit, God is the only Power" -- not drifting thoughts, you see, but definitely formulated thoughts -- these are the Word.

The power of the Word makes us creators. The things you think today may not materialize next week, but they come back. Every definitely formulated thought is an order that you send into the future, unless you overtake it with a denial. But it is much easier to speak the Word in the mind than to overtake it and cancel it in the mind. If you spill coffee, you can get the stain out of the cloth, but it is easier to avoid spilling your coffee in the first place than to remove the spot afterward.

Remember that you get out of life just what you put into it. The law of the universe is, "Nothing for nothing." You get out of religion what you put into it. [f you put in five percent, you get a five percent dividend; if you put in thirty percent, you get a thirty percent dividend; and if you put in one hundred percent, you get a one hundred percent demonstration. The whole universe is a universe of law. There is no chance. The events of everyday life follow along in the same way -- they follow a law.

All material objects are but symbols of thoughts and spiritual ideas. Houses, trees, shoes, hats, clothing -- all natural objects are really material symbols of things spiritual. For instance, you never saw a bird with three wings, if you saw a bird with one wing, you would know it was crippled. The law of nature is that a bird has two wings. The Word must have two wings, too, knowledge and feeling. If it does not have knowledge and feeling, the male and female, it is not creative. We see the law in the human race, in the animal kingdom, in the organic world, as sex. In the inorganic world, the law is symbolized in the electron and the proton. So in the realm of thought, there must be knowledge and feeling.

If you fail to get results from speaking the Word, it means that either the knowledge or the feeling is missing. Every thought means something if it is a sane thought, but it must also carry a feeling. You know that you are divinely spiritual, but do you always demonstrate it? We dont demonstrate ten percent of what we could. We know we are Spirit, we know we are one with God: but do we feel it?

How many of us feel that we look it? How many of us look like divine Gods? How many of us, when we look into a mirror, see divine perfection? Do we see there the image and likeness of God? Certainly we do not.

Why isn't the body redeemed? Why don't we regenerate? Because we know it, but we don't feel it. Why do we so often demonstrate evil, sickness, colds, headaches? Because we feel them, even if we think we don't believe in them. The feeling element is critical for human beings. The knowledge is just as important, but the trouble with humanity is in our feeling. Positive and negative feeling are the things that go under many, many different names.

Fear may go under the name of anger, doubt, resentment; yet it is the same thing. Negative feeling is fear, and positive feeling is love. That is the key to demonstration; negative feeling is fear; positive feeling is love. There is nothing else. Love always creates. You never knew a man to make a success in life who did not love his job. Love is creative.

Fear kills love in a little child before he is grown. A baby, before he is taught fear, runs to everyone with outstretched arms and loves them. Love is expansive, but fear cringes. I have seen people under the influence of fear, with their faces shrunk to half their natural size.

If your treatments are not giving you the results that you expect, find out whether the knowledge side or the feeling side is lacking. Usually, since you are a Truth student it will be the feeling, because you have the knowledge.

The man in the street does not know that he is spiritual and perfects. He believes in germs, microbes, doubt, and fear. We know Truth, so the only thing that we lack is the feeling side. Get the right feeling into your affirmations. Repeating affirmations without feeling accomplishes nothing. Jesus said it is the feeling that matters. But you won't get the right feeling until your all-day-long feeling begins to get right. You have to get the right feeling toward God, the right feeling toward yourself the right feeling toward your fellow man, all day long.

If you think negatively and feel negatively all day, and then expect to get a quick restoration to wholeness and perfection from 9:00 to 9:15 at night, you will be disappointed. The real treatment we give ourselves is our all-day-long thinking and feeling.

The first step is to forgive everybody. If you haven't already done that, do it now. But don't sit down and say, "I forgive Mary for hurting me so terribly, and I forgive Uncle Joe for his abominable conduct, and I forgive the landlord for wanting the rent." I knew a schoolboy who heard a poem about forgiving one's enemies. He went home and made a list of people he didn't like. He prayed for them for two or three nights, and then he saw that in making a list of enemies to forgive, he was really putting them on the blacklist, so (being sensible) he gave up the practice.

Just issue a general amnesty every morning. In the course of the day, when things come up that you could dislike, say "That's nothing," and let it go. Then at frequent intervals during the day, pause for a moment and send out a blanket thought of love to the whole world -- just a feeling of love and goodwill. If you do this, you will find a very definite change in your feeling, and then a change in your direction.

Human beings create their experiences by the activity of their thinking. Everything in the manifest realm has its beginning in thought.

This is the law of mind action, and with it we make our own world. What we give power to with our thoughts and truly feel with our emotions, that is what we are really thinking. "For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he." (Prov. 23:7 AV) In other words, we experience what we give our attention to, and we become what we think we are.
 
 

Simply stated, an idea that is life-transforming and exciting, if we understand it, is: It is mind that matters. This was a revolutionary idea one hundred years ago. At that time, it was the renaissance of an idea that had been around for centuries, but traditional Christianity had put it aside, had placed God "out there" and "up there" and had forgotten the truth that God is "in here." When this rebirth - in terms of a new approach to Christianity occurred, many new terms came into use regarding our relationship to God, even in-so-far as what we call God. Ministers and teachers began to think in terms of God as love. That wasn't too difficult to understand, for the Bible suggests (in John) that God is love. And if you turn that around, it is pretty obvious that love is God. We can easily say that life is God or God is life and God is light, light is God.

Another term brought to light is "mind." When anyone said, "God is Mind," or "God is Divine Mind," or "You are a part of God Mind," there were some unusual responses to that Truth. We have since come to realize that it is. indeed, the foundation of our lives. Charles Fillmore and many of those who were a part of the rebirth of metaphysics emphasized this idea, and it needs our consideration if we are going to live creatively.

With all the motivational sciences and ideas that have come along in the past quarter of a century, we haye come to recognize and understand the importance of mind. But we still haven't quite grasped the significance of how we are related to this activity. The idea of mind is essential to our primary understanding and working of the principles of Truth. If it is a term or word that is uncomfortable for us, at least we can agree with it conceptually so that we can work the principle.

Charles Fillmore said that God as mind [is] "the connecting link between God and man. God-Mind embraces all knowledge, wisdom, and understanding and is the source of every manifestation of true knowledge and intelligence. God as principle cannot be comprehended by any of the senses." Of course we understand that. Can the finite comprehend the infinite? No. Can a drop of water appreciate the whole ocean? No. That doesn't make the drop of water insignificant. We are as drops of water with all the potential, with all the capacity (not in quantity but in quality) of the whole ocean. All the potential, all the possibility is there. Mr. Fillmore goes on to say: "The mind of man is limitless, and through it he may come into touch with Divine Mind. The one mind is a unit and cannot be divided. The individual mind (that's your mind or what we call your mind) is a state of consciousness in the one Mind."

Essentially what he was saying is that our mind is our link with Divine Mind, God-Mind, infinite Intelligence, or all that there is; and all that there is has its genesis in Mind. If we understand that, we stop trying to work the process backwards. We begin using our minds, which are states of consciousness in the one Mind, in the way for which they were designed - to bring good into our lives, to be creative, to be productive, to be self-actualizing.

A fascinating legacy left to us by Einstein can help us understand the whole process of mind and matter. Part of one of his theories is: Matter becomes energy and energy becomes matter. An example might be the food we eat. The food we take into our bodies in terms of matter was energy in the first place and is converted into energy again in our bodies. Any unused energy is reconverted into matter, which we call fat. If we achieve a balance in the amount of matter or food-stuff we take in and the energy we spend, we maintain a balance in our weight. If we desire to lose weight, we use more energy than we take in as foodstuff or matter. There is a constant cycling action in all nature and all life where there is nothing lost, but everything is in a state of transformation. So we can easily make this transference and say that mind is matter or thoughts are things.

If you don't believe this, look around and see the things that you have brought into being because you thought about them. What gets your attention gets you. What you think about, you become. The attitudes you hold manifest themselves in the atmosphere of your life, in the climate of your world. You have an option. You don't have to think good thoughts -- high-level thoughts - for you have been given the privilege of thinking whatever you want. But also, you are charged with the responsibility of demonstrating what you think. So, if there are things in your life with which you are unhappy, the solution, very simply and bluntly stated, is to change your thoughts. You are not a puppet on a string; you have freedom of choice and free will, so recognize this and use it to your advantage, not to your disadvantage. Mind becomes matter; it manifests itself as things in your life and as conditions in your body - as either a lack or an abundance of substance, as healthy and whole relationships, as order, new ideas, and new opportunities. You are bound by unfailing spiritual law to demonstrate what you think about.

This doesn't mean that we have absolute control of everything that happens. This is one of the confusing areas where early metaphysicians parted company. There were those who said that mind was all there was, the only reality; that there was nothing factual, nothing to life as we understand life - and that there was no out-picturing of mind. Some disagreements developed over that. There was also a school of thought that wanted to place the total responsibility for all that was happening in the world on the head and shoulders of the few. But each of us is responsible for our life and our world - our own thoughts. No one can think our thoughts for us. At the same time, race consciousness is greatly affected by what we think. If we think in a creative, healthy, and positive way, little by little all humankind comes up higher. That is how we are tied together in terms of mind.

We are individualized in God-Mind, and our state of consciousness in Divine Mind determines what we will experience. So ask yourself what you want. Do you want happiness, a healthy body, prosperity, harmony? What do you want to see made manifest as something actual, as compared to the abstract? Begin the process right by beginning in mind.

The reason this idea found such wide acceptance was that everyone was trying to work to change situations on the surface - to manipulate people, circumstances, and things. Then a few people said, "Wait a minute, that is backward; that is not the way it actually works. It works from the inside out, not from the outside in. People are not moved, changed, and challenged by circumstances; rather, people change and challenge circumstances by what they think and feel." These few courageous, spiritually insightful people were able to communicate this idea to others who began using it and living it. And it is a part of our spiritual heritage today. It may well be the most important single idea that we can come to understand in terms of our own growth pattern and unfoldment.

There are thousands of self-help books, thousands of Truth books that speak to this idea in millions of words. But the idea stated very simply is: We are in mind with the one Mind, out of which grows all good. If we want to change our minds, that is our privilege, our responsibility. The mind is pivotal in action; it is our link with the world, it is our link with God-Mind, All-Good, All-Love, and eternal life. We decide what will get our attention, which direction we will grow, and what we will think about. As long as we think in a limited or disharmonious way, as long as we dwell on lack, illness, or unhappy situations, our attention is on the effect rather than the cause, and we will keep reproducing and recreating that undesirable condition or situation. When, on the other hand, we recognize for ourselves and for other people the truth that we were created to experience and to expect good to be made manifest as matter, as an activity of mind, then we are doing it right.

Have you had the experience of looking at someone and seeing incredible potential in that person, a possibility or a capacity that he didn't know he had? When you call this to his attention, you are calling forth something lovely and beautiful, a talent or characteristic that had to exist first in you. Have you ever thought about that? You are seeing, mirrored in your circumstances, in your life and your relationships with other people, only that which is happening in you. So often we give ourselves credit for so little. But you can only see in the world that which is happening in you. So, when you salute a characteristic, a quality, or a possibility in someone else, it is because it has found a response in you, a point of identification. Therefore, you can give yourself and the other person credit for having a new understanding.

If you want to change the circumstances of your life, if you want to put on this new self -not the way you put on your clothes in the morning, but in the inner part of you, the very fibre and essence of what you are spiritually, recognize that mind matters. Mind creates matter. The thoughts you think have an impact on your world and life. If you don't like some area of your life, if there is something you wish to see changed, change your mind. Get your mind in harmony with Divine Mind, which is always a part of you. What you call your mind, being pivotal in action, will want to give its attention to all the circumstances, to all the events happening on the surface of life. To make the changes needed on the surface and in the circumstances and situations in which you find yourself, it is necessary to redirect your thoughts. Direct them in the way of the one Mind, out of which grows unending love, unfailing light, eternal life and perfect peace. You will be accepting your responsibility for what happens out there because you will be causing it to happen. You will see yourself in a new light - a new role as a co-creator and shaper of your world, not as a victim of circumstances. You will see yourself as God sees you, as a king or queen in your kingdom.

1. I open my heart and mind in full surrender to the power of my indwelling God and align in love with my partners in prayer.

2. I believe that God is an energy of pure love flowing through me. I am a channel of its expression.

3. I take responsibility for my Life experience without guilt or judgment. I am ready to change my beliefs and attitudes at depth. My life is transformed

4. I am willing to release all unforgiveness for any perceived mistakes or wrongdoings. I forgive by now giving unconditional love and acceptance to myself and others.

5. In complete faith and trust, I speak into creation the desires of my heart. (State or visualize your desire.)

6. I joyously accept and give thanks that the desires of my heart are fulfilled. I move into life with confidence, knowing that Divine right action is at work.

7. 1 now have a covenant in which it is agreed that as a powerful being of God, my life is one of service to all humankind. My commitment is to live in a manner that sets the highest example for others to follow. I go forth with a spirit of enthusiasm, excitement and expectancy.