the Book of Divine
Instructions so constantly repeats "Fear not; doubt not," because we can
never divest our Thought of its inherent creative quality, and the only
question is whether we shall use it ignorantly to our injury or
understandingly to our benefit.

The Master summed up his teaching in the aphorism that knowledge of the
Truth would make us free. Here is no announcement of anything we have to
do, or of anything that has to be done for us, in order to gain our
liberty, neither is it a statement of anything _future_. Truth _is_ what
is. He did not say, you must wait till something becomes true which is
not true _now_. He said: "Know what _is_ Truth now, and you will find
that the Truth concerning yourself is Liberty." If the knowledge of
Truth makes us free it can only be because in truth we are free already,
only we do not know it.

Our liberty consists in our reproducing on the scale of the individual
the same creative power of Thought which first brought the world into
existence, "so that the things which are seen were not made of things
which do appear." Let us, then, confidently claim our birthright as
"sons and daughters of the Almighty," and by habitually thinking the
good, the beautiful, and the true, surround ourselves with conditions
corresponding to our thoughts, and by our teaching and example help
others to do the same.

XI

YOURSELF

I want to talk to you about the livingness there is in being yourself.
It has at least the merit of simplicity, for it must surely be easier to
be oneself than to be something or somebody else. Yet that is what so
many are constantly trying to do; the self that is their own is not good
enough for them, and so they are always trying to go one better than
what God has made them, with endless strain and struggle as the
consequence. Of course, they are right to put before them an ideal
infinitely grander than anything they have yet attained--the only
possible way of progress is by following an ideal that is always a stage
ahead of us--but the mistake is in not seeing that its attainment is a
matter of growth, and that growth must be the expansion of something
that already exists in us, and therefore implies our being what we are
and where we are as its starting point. This growth is a continuous
process, and we cannot do next month's growth without first doing this
month's; but we are always wanting to jump into some ideal of the
future, not seeing that we c