The Great Work The constructive Principle of Nature in Individual Life by John Emmett Richardson

The Conflict of "Authoritites"
Alleged "facts" do not always prove to be real facts. Neither are real facts always demonstrable on the plane of objective physical maifestations.

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Consciousness
It will be remembered that the data of the universe naturally divide themselves into four distinct classes in their relation to man as an Individual Intelligence or Soul. The first and most important class includes only the "Things We Know". And these are limited to "those things which are a conscious part of us, and those with which we come into conscious personal contact in nature".

In short the things we "know" are the things of which we are personally "conscious". This means that knowledge depends on Consciousness. In other words, consciousness is the foundation and essential support of all knowledge. Without consciousness there can be no such thing as knowledge.

1906

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Mental and Emotional Influences
Our mental and emotional conditions exert a most powerful influence upon the inflow and distribution of vital force. The author of The Great Work [~The Great Work: The Constructive Principle of Nature in Individual Life, ~by John Emmett Richardson {1853-1935}, Indio-American Book Company, Chicago, IL. 1907.] has described most graphically in the chapter on Self-Control how fear, worry, anxiety and all kindred emotions create in the system conditions similar to those of freezing; how these destructive vibrations congeal the
tissues, clog the channels of life and paralyze the vital functions. He shows how the emotional conditions of impatience, irritability, anger, etc., have a heating, corroding effect upon the tissues of the body.

In like manner, all other destructive emotional vibrations ob-struct the inflow and normal distribution of the life forces in and through the organism, while on the other hand the constructive emotions of faith, hope, cheerfulness, happiness and love exert a relaxing,
harmonizing influence upon the tissues, blood vessels and nerve channels of the body, thus opening wide the floodgates of the life forces, and raising the discords of weakness, disease and discontent to the harmonics of buoyant health and happiness.

Let us see just how mind controls matter and how it affects the changing conditions of the physical body. Life manifests through vibration. It acts on the mass by acting through its minutest par-ticles. Changes in the physical body are wrought by vibratory changes in atoms, molecules and cells. Health is satisfied polarity, that is, the balancing of the positive and negative elements in harmonious vibration. Anything that interferes with the free, vigor-ous and harmonious vibration of the minute parts and particles composing the human organism tends to disturb polarity and natural affinity, thus causing discord or disease.