CHAPTER 8.

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

“As soon as you begin to live in the truth that you hold all power within
you, new worlds will open up in all directions like magic.”
INVISIBLE

1

THE first great laws in human functioning we have dealt with as The Law of Overflow and The Law of the Positive Ingredient. They are interdependent. We found that we obtained the dynamics of our forward evolution from the Positive Ingredient, whose great reservoir is the Invisible World, and that it is perfectly possible to make conscious contact with that reservoir. But now we encounter a third great law, and this we may call The Law of Complement. It, too, can be simply stated. ‘HELP CAN COME TO US FROM THE INVISIBLE, BUT ONLY IN COMPLEMENT TO OUR OWN EFFORT.

2

It is difficult to grasp the full implication of this statement. Or at least we ourselves were slow in getting to it. The Invisibles told it to us often enough, and in a sufficient variety of forms. We took their urgings to “make the dead lift,” to “make it so,” to work hard if we expected them, the Invisibles, to do anything for us, only as spurs to action. The implication to us was that the Invisibles would give or withhold their help according as we were good and deserving children. It did not dawn on us that the giving or withholding was not in their choice. Yet time after time they plainly said so, in so many words.

Here is how some of it reads, as it came to us scattered over the years.

“We are not permitted to carry the growth itself. That is in your hands.” “The force we bring into the world comes from a combination of conditions created by the person himself. We can only take advantage of that combination. Once a person of his own force establishes it, we can act on it. The initial step is your work. This force is, roughly speaking, emanations from you which meet complementary forces from this side.” “The energy with which you demand of us will be the measure of what you will get. IT IS NOT SO MUCH THE ENERGY OF DEMAND AS THE SHOWING OF A FORCE THAT CALLS ITS COMPLEMENT. It is the energy of measure for measure, given and received.” And many more, similar, that pointed so exactly to what was meant that I now marvel how I was so stupid as to miss it. Some of the references were not so direct but were still sufficiently pertinent. Talking specifically of raising vibration, the Invisible said: “It is best to remind you that this control, this acquisition of raised vibration—whatever you choose to call it—is absolutely within the desire of the individual. It is a thing one builds or does not build, according to his calibre. There is no use craving what you do not put out the energy to take.” What misled us was the fact that we were then being given the technique, so we confined the application of what was being said to that particular job.

“There is,” said the Invisible, “a curious reciprocity about this. We can only take advantage of effort, and you have to supply the effort. You happen to be at a friend’s house tipping a table. There is our chance. But we might shout at you for ten years.

“We cannot do your end of it. Make a start, no matter how gropingly or blunderingly. The initiative of your objective efforts is vitally necessary for the complement of our directive efforts. We cannot direct NOTHING.

“Let us call it inspirational force for the sake of giving it a name. It comes from a COMBINATION OF CONDITIONS, CREATED BY THE PERSON HIMSELF. We only take advantage of the condition. It is very difficult to do much toward creating that condition. Once a person of his own force establishes it, we can act on it. The initial step is your work. We gather naturally around those who permit us to. It is something like digging a well to earth, only we work with peculiar forces of attraction.

We hesitate to use words like soul yearnings, for instance, because in your mind they have other significances from ours. The idea is that we cannot in any satisfactory degree work on an unreceptive person.

“By that brute force you accomplish the first dead lift. It is just determination and faith that helps that first sheer lift. That manifestation with yourself you must get before you get any response.

That is what people do not realize. They don’t put any strength into it, and when it won’t work at once, they go the other way. You must get the strength yourself.” But, had we noticed it, the same principle was many times applied to other of our activities than the mere technique of the teaching. For instance, one day inspiration was the subject under consideration.

“Inspiration,” said they, “is purely a complementary force. That means that it is only placed as a decorative capital on a column you have already built. That is absolutely so. Inspiration comes only in attraction to some definite output, some definite production. It cannot come unless it has a container. Inspiration fills only what is prepared for it. It is like electricity, it has to be brought into a mechanism made ready for it.

“Your progress is in your own hands. We can do little but watch you gain necessary strength before we can help you further. THAT IS THE LAW. WE CAN ACT ONLY AS THE COMPLEMENT TO THE ACT.”

3

Now in that last statement is one word on which the real understanding of the law of complement depends. It is the word can.

Note what the Invisible says: “We can act only as the complement to the act.” Not “we will act” or “we shall act.” “We can act.” “That is the law.” The phrasing means exactly what it says. What we loosely call the spiritual forces are UNABLE, under the law, to act directly on the obstructed universe. They must have something to complement, something to spark them, to set them in motion.

So when we fail to get the response, or the help, or the communion we desire, either from the Invisibles or the higher spiritual forces, the refusal is not whim, or an arbitrary judgment of our deserts. And yet at times it seems just that. The Invisibles are able to help us, for again and again they have done so, at times almost “miraculously” it seems. But at other times, in predicaments when it would seem that the most misanthropic would in sheer charity lend a hand, they pay us no attention at all. There is no sense to it—if they are indeed our friends and wish us well. We do not like to think them that kind of people.
However, if we accept this Law as binding, we can understand. The Invisibles are always there, always ready. But they can act only when we ourselves offer something strong and worthy of complement. They are ever eager to give and to help, but they are constrained by the law to “measure for measure, given and received.”

4

Like all general laws, this one acts universally, depending for its effects on the medium in which it operates. It explains many things. For instance, the usual experience of “sitters for communication” or psychic phenomena. Sometimes they get good results, sometimes very poor results, sometimes utterly misleading results, or none at all. They use great ingenuity in explaining these discrepancies. Some times the explanations become almost fantastic. As a matter of fact, under this law of complement, a “good” sitting results when the sitters have enough sincerity, honesty and, above all, selfless purpose or aim to bring to the seance sufficient material for the Invisible operators to work with.

A “poor” sitting is of course the reverse. And when, as often happens, the Invisibles terminate any session of any kind with the statement that “power wanes” or “the juice is giving out,” that does not mean, though we usually interpret it so, that they, the Invisibles, have come to the meeting on a certain tankful of gas, but rather that we, the sitters, have come to the end of our contribution for the occasion.

The same principle carries into the more spiritual content of prayer. The subject will be later treated, but it is enough to say that if we get response it must be in supplement to that which we offer from our hearts.

And without that offering there shall be only silence.

A wider application is evident in the processes of evolution. If human consciousness itself, mankind as a whole, gets its power to advance only in complement to its own constructive contribution, then we can understand why the first stages of evolution were so slow, and why at present the pace accelerates. Primeval conditions were torpid. Primeval man had a pretty meagre equipment of either insight or what we call the moral forces. He was, perforce, immersed in the seething egoism necessary for mere survival. He had not the slightest idea of benefiting anybody but himself. His purpose was to save his skin or make his leisure and comfort. Only occasionally, but neither largely nor often, did self-interest extend into wider construction. The aggregate positive contribution of the whole earth make-up, physical and human, was very slight. Evolution had to do the best it could in complement. With this scant seeding to plant and reap and plant again, how could progress be anything but slow? But in the long sequence of harvests, each more abundant than the last, is it not evident why in the latter days of our evolution in consciousness we seem to be fairly bursting forth into the clear of understanding—though we have still a long way to go! For the first time the process is groping its way out of the automatic.

In all ages a few of the illuminated have understood what it is all about, but they have been so very few that we have set them in a class apart—saints, holy men, saviors. Now men as a race are fairly on the verge of taking conscious and personal charge. In the not-too-remote future no longer will they act only from that native instinct for creative inventive building which distinguishes mankind from the purely instinctive animal. Nor will the motive be preponderantly self-interest.

Then, it is reasonable to infer, as the opportunity for complement is more abundantly offered, the pace of evolution will correspondingly hasten.

5

Fortunately the automatic has a wider meaning, or we might still be back with the cave men. As, for instance, what an Invisible pointed out to us in the course of a talk an esthetics.

“Each honest and vital effort, whether conscious or unconscious, toward beauty or that overflow that makes for beauty, is a constructive power.

And the sum total of those efforts, whether in a humble crocheted lamp mat, or in an attempt at stage effects in the theatre, or in an honest though pathetic attempt at decorating a hotel lobby, or a flower over the flower girl’s ear—all make in the aggregate a formidable onward-pushing construction which, even though scattered and comparatively unmarked, goes far to overbalance the spectacular, disheartening destructions that get in the newspaper headlines and worry everybody with the idea that the country is going to the dogs. It’s the aggregate. The Recording Angel idea is not far off—with his debits and credits.” Nor, the Invisible rather ironically observed, need we too seriously indulge our egoistic complex that we are, as the saying goes, the only pebbles on the beach. Evolution could get along without us! In the larger view of evolution as a whole we must not overlook the fact that the very processes of nature, as far as they are harmonious, add their quota to that which may be complemented.

There is no occasion, the Invisible underscored this point, to deny its spiritual complement to the bird song at dawn, or the smooth, exact, beautiful interplay of the natural forces that keep the rhythm of the tides or the rains. Possibly, in the very torpid beginnings of evolution, that may have been the only tiny power that, by ever so little, tipped the wheel off center! Volitional action had its innings only eons later! Certainly man’s consciousness was not then involved: man was not there.

In a manner of speaking he is still “not there.” But he is getting there, and like all other evolution the pace is accelerating. One further step and he will have arrived at least at the point of taking charge consciously. He must come fully to realize that, by this law, each act of his life, no matter how trivial, does offer a force to meet its complement. He already appreciates that action has consequence in the physical world, and therefore he puts thought and will into his efforts.

Only now is he beginning dimly to sense that there are also other effects, in the invisible or spiritual. When he does so fully, he will direct just as much conscious thought to bringing about these effects as he does to the obvious of the physical. He will realize that in planting a seed, or tightening a nut on the assembly line, raking up the leaves, or washing the dishes, he is not only producing a flower or a part of a motor car or a tidy household, but he is offering a chance for spiritual complement. The satisfaction he gets from the material accomplishment must thereby be enhanced. And the sense of drudgery must dissolve in the perception that what he must do releases the possibility of a higher accomplishment.

No matter what our estate, great or small, or how straightly we seem to be bound by triviality, if consciously we realize—give thought—that here in our hands is the choice, to offer or to withhold a chance for particularization and complement of that which comes from the Source, then will the occasion overflow.

So there is the act, and the realization we put into it. The latter is what gives it its ultimate value; not the mere external result. Therefrom comes our sense of its importance, and its meaning and pleasure and satisfaction. If we have to the full that feeling of CONTRIBUTION, we shall savor one of the greater meanings of the words in the Bible: “Ask and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened to you.” But note that you must ASK, SEEK, KNOCK before you will be given or will find or have it opened. They are the complements to your own act—and impossible without it.

CHAPTER 9.

MEDITATION

“Never reach out for this world with concentration of
mind, but with what I might call inflation of spirit.”
INVISIBLE

1

CONTACT, as I have said, is a matter of individual experience and definition. It is hoped that the books and the previous pages have at least given the reader a basis for his own impression. It does not matter how diverse—and divergent—these impressions may be. Their value is in picturing to each an objective in which he can have faith. Now it is possible to be less vague. Granted an objective, how are we to go about reaching it? How are we to achieve this Contact? For this purpose there are really two positive exercises, so to speak. Or perhaps it would be better to say two aspects of the same exercise. We name them meditation and prayer. These are so much alike that to the inexperienced they might appear to be one and the same. Nevertheless there is a useful distinction.

Meditation might be defined as a consciously entered state of attunement with the Source of all being; a conscious, purposeful offering of ourselves as a channel for the flow-through from the Source; and finally, a conscious directing or INTENTIONING of the flow toward some desirable purpose.  Its nature is essentially active, autonomous.

Prayer as a state of consciousness is also an attunement, but rather in the purpose of communion with, or submission to, a Higher Power than of overt activity. Its action is more passive and receptive. Except for these slight distinctions the terms meditation and prayer can be considered, for practical purposes, as nearly enough synonymous. 

2

As to a technique of meditation we received quite a volume of exact directions. I say a technique, for this method might not be adapted to everyone alike. Nevertheless it is worth presentation, somewhat condensed, if only for the reason that any kind of blueprint in these matters is almost unique in its precision.
“This series of exercises I want you to do,” began the Invisible, without preliminary.

“1. Lie down on the floor, comfortable, relaxed; the way a dog does. Then imagine yourself above your body; imagine yourself as a bird flying; or an airplane flying; or yourself in an a lane.

“2. Then think of a river in connection with the blood stream in your body; as flowing all through; a constant vital flow easily but securely, as water falls down hill, not fast, but in the rhythm of a river.

“3. Think of beautiful groves of fruit, vineyards, the coming harvest of which you are to partake that is going to build up the channel through which the river is to flow—the body.

“4. Think of the air as something delicious and sweet, as something you want very much. You are to take the air consciously in your lungs. Think of it as full of life, as the sunshine is full of life.

“5. Think of your body as a piece of machinery that you must operate and take care of, keep oiled and clean, like that of your boat or car. You must consciously—remembering the first exercise—try to feel the flow of the blood, the ease of the machinery.

“6. Think that God created man in His own image; that you are God, a part of the great Whole which creates itself, and which is going to help you recreate its own machinery.” Those were the simple rules laid down for one just starting his first formal meditation periods. Of course the ultimate “nice intermingling,” as Betty called it, is something grown into by much more inclusive techniques, but here is one way to begin. We soon could see and acknowledge the unwisdom of telling exactly what to expect from continued meditation. Such detail was much too likely to substitute anticipation for simply doing the present job. And also there would be temptation to kid one’s self into the idea that the result described has been reached long before such is the fact. The value is in the process without reference to results.

Referring to Exercise No. 1, in the above schedule, the Invisible gave these further hints. You are not to “make your mind blank,” said he; that is impossible.

“In the first exercise you not only rise above your body; but also above your brain-mind. You do not empty out extraneous thoughts from the latter: you leave them there, just as you leave your body there. You do not live down among them, following them about; any more than you live down among your body sensations, following them about. Ordinarily when a spider gets on your body, for instance, your whole attention rushes to the spot. But when you are absorbed in some interest—or are asleep—you detach just enough of your mind to remove it, “mechanically,” you say. So with impingements on the brain-mind, either by stray or extraneous thoughts, or by small bodily sensations that demand some measure of adjustment. Thus they do not force you to abandon your present purposes.

“It is easier to avoid being diverted from these exercises by the tendency of the conscious mind to lure you down its own free associations, if you remember that the conscious mind is a creature of time.

Left to itself, it tends to deal with the past—what you have done, memory; or with the future—what you are going to do; speculation. It but rarely, and then only in intensive concentration on something specific, stops exclusively in the exact present. Refuse to budge from the moment of Now. Let the conscious mind escape you to the right hand or the left—the past or the future—if it will, but do not accompany it. Thus the you-yourself can poise in its necessary elevation above the body, above the brain-mind, in the superconscious that touches the fringe of the timelessness of a Now that contains all the rest. This statement has little value or meaning as a mere statement, but has great value as a hand-up to actual experience.

“When you have realized this as an experience, you can train the conscious mind not to pluck at you unreasonably and unmannerly and improperly. ” Obviously this is a single and simple exercise of the imaginative principle, designed to shift the balance of attention. To some the foregoing directions will suffice, but the Invisibles had a further refinement to focus upon if capturing the sensation proved difficult.

“After rising above your body in general, until that has become more or less automatic, concentrate on rising above your HEAD. As soon as you have the impression that the breath through your nostrils is below (in space) your mind, instead of above it, you will have gained this.

“The mental attitude at present,” they further suggested, “is of observation, not of doing. You are using imagination, but it is not the imagination of the brain-mind; it is imagination of the body. The imagination of the body, as distinguished from the imagination of the mind, is that it is imagination of construction THROUGH SENSATION. That of the mind is imagination of construction THROUGH IDEA.” So much for Exercise No. I, the getting away from awareness of the body.

As for Exercise No. 2, the consciousness of flow-through, the Invisible warned against strain and self-consciousness.

“You do not THINK the process of the vital flow by any applied effort of the imaginative will. You simply NOTE THE FACT. The fact is facilitated by your attention, but is not inaugurated by it.” Or, putting it in another way: “When you think of the vital flow in your body, YOU are not INITIATING anything. This stream is already flowing through your body. If it did not, you would not be alive at all. You are coming into observation of an already existent and continuous fact.” Once we recognize the sensation, they continued the instruction, we should try consciously to establish it as a condition that is to continue throughout the twenty-four hours, or until the next meditation period. We instruct it to “go on working.” “Then,” said they, “we must pause deliberately from time to time and for a second or two take notice that it still is going on. That does not mean an effort to ‘recapture’ the feel of the flow-through, but to bring to awareness that it is going on.

The final step is to be able to give full attention as usual to all the necessities and details of daily life and work, and STILL to remain aware—ALL THE TIME—UNDERNEATH those activities—of the feel of the flow. A sort of double attention, as it were, but without diminishing either attention. This may be facilitated by deliberate practice during meditation. Select some small topic of daily life and think about it, but see if you can do so and still keep full awareness and encouragement of the process of inducing the flow-through.” It is well not to tackle this “double attention” experiment too soon.

That is all we are supposed to do, as beginners in technique. But ultimately, the Invisibles pointed out, as an anticipatory parenthesis, the job will be to develop better conditions in ourselves for the flow.
“What you are creating is the channel for the flow. The strength of the flow is automatically determined by the strength of the channel. Your building is to strengthen the channel in order to permit, to deserve, so to speak, a more vital flow.” For the purpose of this building we must next attend to the gathering of the materials therefore, which is the real significance back of the very imaginative third and fourth exercises. Later, from her vantage of the unobstructed, Betty impressed on us that she now works in essences; and that, in a way, is exactly what we are called upon to do here. From the “beautiful groves of fruit, vineyards, the coming harvest,” and all the rest of which we are advised to think, what we really draw is the essence of abundance, vitality, life which they embody, a distillation of those qualities. We are not sufficiently advanced, as yet, effectively to take the pure thing, from the source itself, so we must allow ourselves—in meditation—to be drawn in thought to that imaginative image which most nearly expresses the particular “abundance” we most need.

“The sense-of-abundance exercise,” said the Invisible, “is to be done as though you are feeding into the stream the necessary ingredients for aliment and construction from an abundance at your disposal and in which you dwell.” There is no profit in specific examples. Each will find his own symbol according to the shape of his head. But, said the Invisible, “it should be noted that there are two sorts of abundance to be taken in—that of FORCE or power for construction, and that of material of which the construction may be built. Simple examples of the two are the sun and, the field of grain. The sun is abundance in its purest form. It is the origin and source of all the physical abundances. “But,” warned the Invisible, “it is too pure an essence for sole diet. It must be transformed into variation—as it is transformed into the plants and animals and minerals which make up the expression of the life force.” A more assimilable image to conjure up for the pure force side of the intake, they suggested, might be a waterfall.

“It is a force of abundance compounded of many sorts of forces. Its plunge is the combination of the force that lifted the vapor from the sea, the various forces that made the winds to move, the air to cool, the vapor to condense, the resultant stream to flow downhill, until at the brink of the plunge is a great and mighty and resistless abundance of actual power that may be breathed in as a single thing, an element of refreshment and vitality. This is a good example of what we meant by a DISTILLATION of abundance. It is thus prepared for ingestion, as the varied elements comprised in physical food are concentrated by natural processes in the grain of wheat.” Whatever the “distillation” from whatever imagined objects or conditions, we must not, in this earlier meditation, try to direct the force to any specific purpose of our own. Right now we are merely attracting the material for construction, for growth.

“You dump it into the vital stream you have thought of as flowing through you in the second exercise. You do not think of using it in any, specific way. That use is an automatic process of your mechanics of life. It is analogous to the use made of the denser material you put at the disposal of your bodily processes by the ingestion of food. You supply the food: the automatic mechanics of your life processes distribute its uses.

Neither the physical nor the spiritual uses are as yet your conscious affair. This distillation is as material as food, but in the subtler realm of the Beta body. It is not a mere idea.
“In the world of abundance, of which you think imaginatively, and from which you draw the constructive aliment, the distillation is various, and not homogeneous. The aliment should not be a mere hash or soup of everything. Your diet should be various and discriminating. It is like your physical diet, selective. We showed you, in shallow and ripple and crossing and pool, one of your Alaska rivers; and you were a bit impatient with yourself because you thought your ‘mind was wandering.’ But that, for the moment, and as a specific example, was a specific distillation of a specific form of abundance, which at that time you were ingesting by means of the breathing-in symbol. It would, however, be a mistake to will your imagination toward any specific form of abundance.

Your attention must be permitted to saunter. It will then be attracted toward the need of the moment. There is a distinction, however, between this and idle wandering, which can be understood only through the actual experience: a certain basic alertness of spiritual appetite. The breathing-in is merely a connecting symbol through which you approach a contact. The contact is determined by your spiritual instinct, and not through your intellectual interests or appraisements.” It is not now our job—it must be emphasized—to insist on the exact application of whatever force we are inducing. “Holding the thought” for the purpose of “demonstrating” a mink coat or a new situation or what we think to be wise in the way of specific aid is out. That will come later, if at all, when we do become wise.

“The specific utilization of the balanced ration in the construction of your channel is not your affair; any more than is the varied use of the constituents of your blood stream in the construction of your body.

Only the judicious and intelligent direction of your diet. Nor is it your business to attempt with the brain-mind to emphasize either the force aspect or the material aspects of its constituents; nor to strive, with whatever good intentions, to influence construction toward the ‘more spiritual,’ or the ‘more materially robust.’ That is equivalent to reanalyzing ingested food. Accept results happily and unsearchingly.

Their quality is appropriate to your own, and dependent on it. Your quality is your stature, to which you cannot add merely by taking thought. Distinguish between growth and construction.” And on another occasion, and by another Invisible: “The main thing to watch is the intrusion unbeknownst of small desires.

You must brush from the integrity of this meditation all trace of personal inclinations.” Not that arriving at decision in the specific instance may not happen through meditation; but it will be, in that case, without the conscious use of the intellect. The problem may be formulated; set on the back of the stove, so to speak, and dismissed from the mind.

And, finally, there should be no strain in the attention to intake.

“When,” said the Invisible, “you have imaginatively pictured any one of these numerous abundances, so that you have come to the visualization of breathing in its distillation, then it is not necessary, during that period, to continue to hold it continuously and persistently in mind. The channel is connected, and the flow-in will continue in that period of doing the exercise.”

3

These exercises, and others which may occur to us as practical, should be concentrated upon one at a time until their control is effected. But whatever their number, they are really integral.

“They are of course,” said the Invisible, “actually one thing; or, rather, by means of them you attain to one thing. Eventually they blend together, so that if you touch any one of them, enter by any one of them, the others are automatically entered also. Any one implies all the others.

“So,” the Invisible followed out the logic of this, “the next step after acquiring a fair facility at these exercises, is to try to discard the imaginative symbols and to enter directly into the pure SENSATION.

Thus in the first exercise forget the IDEA of the airplane, or the bird, or whatever device you have used to get the IDEA of rising above your body.

Forget the IDEA of being above your body. See if you cannot enter directly the SENSATION you experience when you have succeeded in doing so. Confine yourself to the first exercise until you have caught the knack.” When these two things have been grown into the direct entrance into the essence, the sensation of whatever symbols have been useful; and the blending of all the separate components into one direct action—then we are ready for the next step forward.

“That accomplishment,” said the Invisible, “comes only with practice of each separately, and in their due order. Like a golf swing. You cannot think of them all at once; you can think of but one thing at a time. But you can, ultimately, enter the benefit of their blend, when practice has synthesized them into a state of being that functions—like any being—as a whole.

“The establishment of this state of being, as a whole thing, is best made consciously at the beginning of the day. It is best entered by the door of the abundances. You will allow your sauntering instinct to select its day’s ration through the imaginative contemplation—which is also appropriation—of the form of abundance, both of force and material, which attracts its appetite. This abundance is then there present for the day’s needs. On it you will draw for sustenance and refreshment momentarily, from time to time, without necessity of the elaborate devices of specific ‘exercises.’ You will do so by the simple device of rising to it, bringing with you for its automatic utilization the orderly and interdependent mechanisms which the exercises have constructed, controlled and operated by the orderly subconscious you have trained.”

4

“I have a great plea to make,” said the Invisible; “I want you to come with me, all of you who are ready. There is only one way to do it. Part of your time, when you are not at your work, I want you to lay aside all effort at understanding and interpretation, and come out into the wide outside and bask. Just say to yourselves: ‘I will lay aside the symbols for the reality. I will be a mere responsive plant to unwordable influences. My busy, near-sighted little self is quieted, set aside for the purpose of expanding a great and dormant power within me. It is weak; it barely records impressions as yet; but through it surges all that is enduring.’ “You must periodically withdraw yourself from your work and your world, if you would keep your vitality in it. It’s a great secret law that must be obeyed if you would give forth life and create. Don’t wither your good growth; take the sustenance it needs to preserve the spirit through its lower forms of manifestation. The spirit is vast outside. Think always of your work as the mere letting of the sun through windows. Do not use up the atmosphere in the rooms of your mind. Keep firmly in mind the hygiene of the spirit. It is absolutely necessary for its persistence in deteriorating surroundings. What you are doing looms large in importance, but always be possessed and directed by the conviction that it is a mere crystallization of an underlying spiritual reality. This reality must be continually associated with for refreshment. Therefore bask in it as it suits your temperaments.”

The Law of Complement and Meditation is an extract from With Folded Wings by Stewart Edward White.