VISUALIZE

Step #1: Find a Comfortable Place to Visualize

Step #2: Eliminate all Outside Distractions

Step #3: Immerse Yourself in the Visualization

Step #4: Get in Touch With Your Senses

Step #5: Repeat This Exercise Every day for 20 Minutes

Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought …

Jeff Foster THE DEEPER MEANING OF “ABUNDANCE”

This text will keep you true to your home: “Love not pleasure, love God.” Remember continually this truth: “There is in man a higher love than love of happiness; he can do without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness.” Emma Curtis Hopkins

"you are not you--you have no body

START un-doing.

You will get praise and honor among the people where you dwell by believing this message: “It shall come to pass that while they are yet speaking I will hear. Praise ye the Lord.” ECH

"Thoughts and moods that roam around the dark jungle of your inner self must be brought to the surface. That is basic, fundamental. Never forget it. The spiritual light exists for the purpose of shining down on the malicious marauders inside you, shining down and in it’s warmth and health and purity the spiritual sunshine can destroy the unconscious evils that make you miserable.
But you have to do something about the contact of the sunshine with the darkness. Your part is to allow yourself to see what is murky and foggy down there which is the same thing as bringing it up to the sunshine.

The Twilight Club

The Twilight Club was a venerable tradition of ethical activism originally founded in the late 1870’s as a “learned circle” of visionary thinkers from diverse disciplines. Inspired by the British philosopher Herbert Spencer, the founding members included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, Edwin Markham, and several others. Their stated purpose was that of ethical and cultural renewal of their world.

Poet's Code of Ethics

In the later decades of the 19th Century, the British philosopher, Herbert Spencer, took an honest look at world trends and predicted that civilization was on a downward trend, for culture, beauty and ethical practices were neglected in society. He believed that politicians were not likely or able to change the trends. If there was to be a change, how would it come about? He believed the poets, visionary thinkers and artists of the world would have the solution. In Britain he inspired men such as Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Darwin to consider the problem. In America, his friends Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Howard Bridge, Richard Watson Gilder, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Walt Whitman, Edwin Markham, Henry Holt, John Burroughs, Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie took up the question. These men, searching for a way in which to change the negative direction of society to positive action, formed a gathering, calling themselves the Twilight Club, because they met at twilight—not simply the twilight of the day, but, as they saw the situation, they were meeting at the evening twilight of the 19th Century and the morning twilight of the 20th Century—at the twilight of civilization, unless the downward trend could be stopped.

The Rags to Riches myth~A Propagandist?

Horatio Alger, Jr. (1832 – 1899) was a prolific 19th-century American author, best known for his many formulaic juvenile novels about impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of middle-class security and comfort through hard work, determination, courage, and honesty. He initially wrote and published for adults, but a friendship with boys' author William Taylor Adams led him to writing for the young. He published for years in Adams's Student and Schoolmate, a children's magazine of moral writings. His lifelong theme of 'rags to riches' had a profound impact on America in the Gilded Age[1].
Alger was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts in 1832, and entered Harvard College at age sixteen. At seventeen he became a professional writer with the sale of a few literary pieces to a Boston magazine. Following graduation, he worked briefly as an assistant editor for a Boston magazine before teaching in New England boys' schools for a few years. He graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1860, wrote in support of the Union cause during the American Civil War, and accepted a ministerial post with a Unitarian church in Brewster, Massachusetts in 1864. He left the church in 1866 following an internal investigation regarding sexual misconduct involving two teenage boys of the parish. He denied nothing, and relocated to New York City.
Between 1864 and 1866 Alger published his first boys' books: Frank's Campaign (1864), Paul Prescott's Charge (1865), and Charlie Codman's Cruise (1866). His literary niche was made secure in 1868 with his fourth boys' book Ragged Dick, the story of a poor bootblack's rise to middle-class respectability. The book was a great success. His many boys' books that followed were essentially variations on Ragged Dick and featured a cast of stock characters – the valiant youth, the noble mysterious stranger, the snobbish youth, and the evil squire.
The "Horatio Alger myth" is the rags to riches message in his books. The rags to riches theme which has been associated with Alger’s stories is in no way accurate, as his heroes rarely become extremely wealthy. His characters usually hold “low-level jobs in companies, often attaining personal stability but not wealth or prominent position.” Some of Alger’s novels assert that material wealth is insignificant unless it is paired with middle-class respectability. For Alger’s characters, wealth was the product of a meritocracy, and the direct consequence of “honesty, thrift, self-reliance, industry, a cheerful whistle and an open manly face.” However, in some of Alger’s works there is also an implied belief in hereditary determinism, explicitly contrasting achievement based on merit.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Alger’s works were virtually out of print and many commentators seemed to have regarded Alger as a propagandist, saying

“the author who celebrated capitalist markets and insisted that in the United States, any poor boy with patience and an unwavering commitment to hard work can become a dazzling success.”

While those moving between income brackets and improving their socio-economic status may not be experiencing dazzling success, there is some evidence that the United States may be a land of opportunity[citation needed], highlighted by,

“the potential greatness of the common man, rugged individualism, [and] economic triumph.”

[1]In United States history, the Gilded Age refers to the era of rapid economic and population growth in the United States during the post–Civil War and post-Reconstruction eras of the late 19th century. The term "Gilded Age" was coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their book “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today”. The name refers to the process of gilding an object with a superficial layer of gold and is meant to make fun of ostentatious display while playing on the term "golden age".

The Gilded Age is most famous for the creation of a modern industrial economy. During the 1870s and 1880s, the U.S. economy rose at the fastest rate in its history, with real wages, wealth, GDP, and capital formation all increasing rapidly. For example, between 1865 and 1898, the output of wheat increased by 256%, corn by 222%, coal by 800% and miles of railway track by 567%. Thick national networks for transportation and communication were created. The corporation became the dominant form of business organization, and a managerial revolution transformed business operations.

The Gilded Age.

The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today is an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that satirizes greed and political corruption in post-Civil War America. Although not one of Twain's better-known works, it has appeared in more than one hundred editions since its original publication. Twain and Warner originally had planned to issue the novel with illustrations by Thomas Nast. The book is remarkable for two reasons–-

it is the only novel Twain wrote with a collaborator, and its title very quickly became synonymous with graft, materialism, and corruption in public life.

The term gilded age, commonly given to the era, comes from the title of this book. Twain and Warner got the name from Shakespeare's King John (1595):

"To gild refined gold, to paint the lily... is wasteful and ridiculous excess."

Gilding a lily, which is already beautiful and not in need of further adornment, is excessive and wasteful, characteristics of the age Twain and Warner wrote about in their novel. Another interpretation of the title, of course, is the contrast between an ideal "Golden Age," and a less worthy "Gilded Age," as gilding is only a thin layer of gold over baser metal, so the title now takes on a pejorative meaning as to the novel's time, events and people.
The theme of the novel is that the lust for getting rich through land speculation pervades society, illustrated by the Hawkinses as well as Ruth's well-educated father, who nevertheless cannot resist becoming enmeshed in self-evidently dubious money-making schemes. The main action of the story takes place in Washington, D.C., and satirizes the greed and corruption of the governing class. The book does not touch upon other themes now associated with the "Gilded Age”, such as industrialization, monopolies, and the corruption of urban political machines. This may be because this book was written at the very beginning of the period.
The novel concerns the efforts of a poor rural Tennessee family to grow affluent by selling the 75,000 acres (300 km2) of unimproved land acquired by their patriarch, Silas “Si” Hawkins, in a timely manner. After several adventures in Tennessee, the family fails to sell the land and Si Hawkins dies. The rest of the Hawkins story line focuses on their beautiful adopted daughter, Laura. In the early 1870s, she travels to Washington, D.C. to become a lobbyist. With a Senator's help, she enters Society and attempts to persuade Congressmen to require the federal government to purchase the land. n the end, Laura fails to convince Congress to purchase the Hawkins land. She kills her married lover but is found not guilty of the crime, with the help of a sympathetic jury and a clever lawyer. However, after a failed attempt to pursue a career on the lecture circuit, her spirit is broken, and she dies regretting her fall from innocence.
Washington Hawkins, the eldest son who has drifted through life on his father’s early promise that he would be “one of the richest men in the world,” finally gives up the family's ownership of the still-unimproved land parcel when he cannot afford to pay its $180 of taxes. He also appears ready to overcome his passivity: "The spell is broken, the life-long curse is ended!" Philip, drawing upon his engineering skills, discovers coal on another characters land, wins that characters daughters heart and appears destined to enjoy a prosperous and conventionally happy marriage.

“Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”

Charles Dudley Warner (1829 – 1900) was an American essayist, novelist, and friend of Mark Twain, with whom he co-authored the novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.
Warner travelled widely, lectured frequently, and was actively interested in prison reform, city park supervision, and other movements for the public good. He was the first president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and, at the time of his death, was president of the American Social Science Association. He first attracted attention by the reflective sketches entitled My Summer in a Garden (1870; first published in The Hartford Courant), popular for their abounding and refined humour and mellow personal charm, their wholesome love of outdoor things, their suggestive comment on life and affairs, and their delicately finished style.
Charles Dudley Warner is known for making the famous remark,

“Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”

This was quoted by Mark Twain in a lecture, and is still commonly misattributed to Twain.

You have to love little kids.

The Candy With The Little Hole
The children began to identify the flavors by their color:

Red.....................Cherry
Yellow..................Lemon
Green...................Lime
Orange ...............Orange

None of the children could identify the one taste.

The teacher said, 'I will give you all a clue. It's what your mother may sometimes call your father.'

One little girl looked up with a smile and yelled,

‘Oh my God! They're HONEY lifesavers!’

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.
Mark Twain

Smile and the World Smiles With You.

PHINEAS PARKHURST QUIMBY By GEORGE A. QUIMBY (Part Two).

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby ~ Biographical Sketch.

[The New England magazine. / Volume 6, Issue 33, March 1888]

{Significant because his son, George Quimby, was privy to his father’s affairs. He describes Quimby’s method of inducing young Lucius Burkmer during the first years of his investigation and describes the latter years when he dealt with patients and the technique employed. He describes how the Misses Ware suggested to Quimby that he make notes. Evidently it was Quimby’s wish that George should continue his work but, alas, George’s interests lay elsewhere.}