You are what you think, not what you think you are.

We often hear people say that the object of religion is to make us happy. The question then arises, What is happiness. This question cannot be decided by the opinions of one man or a hundred, for it must embrace some wisdom higher than man's opinion. If the author had no wisdom superior to the common belief of the world and chose the word happiness merely to represent a quiet ignorant state, then I have no objection to the common definition of it. But if it includes the person that labors for the improvement of man and his development, then I say the word is misapplied, for the results are as wide apart as virtue and vice. You might as well apply the word virtue to the most vicious person on earth, as to apply the word happiness to a man who seeks every opportunity to defraud and get the advantage of his neighbor by every means in his power without laying himself liable to the law.

It is like the statue of David meticulously hewn from beautiful marble. To Michelangelo, it represented the “perfect man”. Now if we were to take this visage of perfection and subject it to the treatments of those casually passing by on the street we would see that some, in there ill thinking, have cast upon it rubbish and every kind of vandalism. Left uncorrected, this will continue until the statue is unrecognizable and ugly to the eye of any beholder. Now, has the perfection that lay beneath been altered in any real sense? No, it has not. It has only been distorted by the ill thinking of those whom have encountered it.

Now if those from whom this ill thinking was first displayed were to return and were to see the error of their ways, they would see at once what they had done. They could then, in succession, undo their wrong thinking with proper thoughts of Love, kindness, beauty and compassion, and one by one the disfigurements would be removed until once again the perfection which lay beneath is clearly visible to all whom behold it. And so it is with us, as we have manifested what only “appears” to be a disfigured world. But which in reality has never ceased in being the perfection of its original creation. We simply need to shift our thinking from the distortion to the perfection, and know that at every moment it is there, whether we see it clearly or not.

We must insist that everything is “perfect” right now, not at some "later" date after some "needed" repairs, but right now, that our collective manifestation will once again be restored to its original perfection. Returned to a state of paradise, knowing no defect, disease or death. If we look at the world and lament that it needs to be “fixed” then it will always need to be fixed. We must simply ignore any symptoms or evidence to the contrary as the manifestations of improper thinking, and not as any reality. These things have no source in “First Cause”, and thus have no self-sustaining nature about them. They only exist as long as we continue to believe in them, and give them existence in our thoughts.