Your Forces and How to Use Them

Before a single technique, Mulford's library opens with a one-page credo titled simply "God". It is not a warm-up. It is the floor every later chapter stands on.

The claim is stronger than most readers expect. A Supreme Mind pervades endless space and is in everything "from the atom to the planet" — and then he goes further: "The Supreme Mind is everything." Every atom of the mountain, the sea, the tree, the bird, the man, the woman.

So there is no dead matter anywhere in this picture. Rock, bird and you are made of the same intelligence, in different amounts and shapes. You are not a spectator looking at the universe from outside; you are one of the places it is happening.

Look at the foot of the pages in the old White Cross edition and you find the same three words printed again and again: "Thoughts are Things."

That footer follows straight from the credo. If mind is everything, then a thought is not a private flicker that vanishes when you stop noticing it. It is made of the same stuff as the world, only finer. Mulford says it bluntly elsewhere: "There is no chasm betwixt what we call the material and spiritual."

This is why a book that opens with God can call itself a book about your forces. Worry, resolve, good-will and grudges are not moods floating above real life; for Mulford they are substances you are always sending out and taking in. Every chapter after this one rests on taking that literally.

In Mulford's opening credo, how is the Supreme Mind related to the world?

• It is in everything, and more than that, it is everything✓Correct answer
• It lives in human minds but not in rocks or seas
• It reaches people only through prayer and scripture
• It made the world and now governs it from outside

Mulford moves from "in everything" to "The Supreme Mind is everything" — every atom of mountain, sea and bird included. A Creator standing outside the world, or a Mind confined to people, is exactly the picture the credo sets aside.

Right after claiming the Supreme Mind is everything, Mulford sets a limit that surprises people. That wisdom "cannot be understood by man or by beings superior to man." Not by you, and not by anyone further along than you.

He does not treat this as a problem. A person, he says, will gladly receive that thought and wisdom and let it work for happiness through him, "caring not to fathom its mystery."

This is the first practical move in the book, and it is easy to miss. Receiving does not require understanding. A great deal of spiritual effort goes into trying to comprehend the source before daring to draw on it. Mulford spends none of his there. The effort goes into letting that wisdom act through an ordinary day.

Here is the sentence that settles what "the god in yourself" means for Mulford: "We are the limited yet ever growing parts and expressions of the Supreme Never Ending Whole."

Two words carry the weight. Limited: you are a part, not the Whole. Growing: the part is not fixed, and can take in more and more of what it belongs to.

Many readers keep the second word and drop the first, and end up with "I am God, so what I will is law." Mulford says close to the opposite. The path to ever-increasing happiness is "a perfect trust and dependence on the Supreme" for the all-round wisdom we individually cannot originate. The divinity in you is real, but it is a share, and it grows by leaning on the Whole.

Mulford taught that because the Supreme Mind is in you, you can originate all the wisdom you need by yourself.

False✓Correct answer

He says the reverse: the all-round wisdom is something "we individually cannot originate", and happiness comes through trust and dependence on the Supreme. You are a part that grows, not a self-sufficient source.