Applied psychology and scientific living; one in a series of books on the fundamentals of practical psychology, covering the field of success, health and happiness

Dedication

To the countless thousands of good people who have heard these lectures and who have contributed, by their presence, enthusiasm, and encouragement, to the success of my many great campaigns in theaters, amphitheaters, arenas, and auditoriums, giving me the inspiration without which no speaker can do his best; thus being co-laborers with me in carrying the message of Applied Psychology and Scientific Living to the multitudes throughout the world, this book is most gratefully and affectionately dedicated.

—DAVID V. BUSH.

WORKS

Contents

Chapter Page

I. What is God?. 15

II. The Subconscious Mind. 38

Preface

In my ministerial life and in my public speaking, I have had a cast-iron rule that seldom has been broken; namely, that each time I delivered a sermon or an ad¬ dress, I would give the very best that was in me. I followed this rule strictly for many years. It still is my ambition, each time I have the privilege of standing before an audience, to be in such physical and mental trim that I give the best that is in me, at that time.

In the preparation and the writing of this book, I have not been able to observe this rule. It has been simply impossible for me to give the time necessary to prepare this book as I should like to see it, from a literary standpoint. The demands upon my time, strength, and energy, during my great campaigns, together with the great need for this book to be placed in the hands of the public, and especially of those who have heard my lectures, have driven me beyond my depth. If therefore, I seem to have sacrificed literary style and finish, the sacrifice has been in the interest of making available without delay the truths herein presented. The book will be read, and its precepts practiced in the same spirit in which we write it—for the* greatest amount of good and service which we are able to apply to ourselves and to render to others and to the world.

This book contains many of the lectures which I have given in the theaters, amphitheaters, and arenas, in many of the great cities of the world, preceding my

PREFACE advanced course classes in Applied Psychology and Scientific Living, and in Healing. The multitudes of people who have heard these lectures, and who will profit by reading them, as well as those readers who have never heard the sound of the author’s voice, will, I am sure, greatly benefit by an understanding and applica¬ tion of the laws herein given; therefore, the literary style, as these pages are read, will be of no consideration.

In order to set before the student a comprehensive and concise statement of the theories and principles of psychology as discovered, proved, and enunciated by the best authorities, the author has, in many instances, quoted these wonderful men and women word for word, and takes delight in passing on the exact expressions of these great exponents of truth and light.

It has been 1 my great joy to contribute many mental children of my own thinking and practice; but, as we are all heirs of the great ages past, I claim but little orig¬ inality in these thoughts; for this great movement of Psychology, New Thought, Truth, or whatever we may term the Mental Science which is gripping the world in this generation, is based upon truths brought to light in the centuries that are gone.

To the discoveries and theories of the philosophers and teachers of the past, I have tried to add much from scientific, physiological, and psychological research and experimentation of our own day. This makes Applied Psychology and Scientific Living the very latest scien¬ tific, logical, physiological, and psychological text-book for students and for seekers after the Truth for the New Life.

PREFACE

The following letter, which speaks for itself, is from the great plant wizard, Luther Burbank, whose vision, whose ambition to serve mankind by making the most of the great talent God gave him, whose unselfish devo¬ tion to his chosen work, and whose spirit of keeping everlastingly at it, have been a great inspiration to the author:

Dear Doctor Bush:

“Will Power and Success” (The Psychology of Success), “Applied Psychology and Scientific Living,” and “Grit and Gumption” appear to me to be the most practical and useful works which have been published on these and similar subjects. By a perusal of these books, all people, young and old, will have their backbones strengthened, will take a new interest in life, will make better citizens, and will be improved in every way. There can be no possible doubt of this, and best of all, you bring in illustrations and samples abundantly to prove your statements.

I am glad that you have placed these psychological matters on such a firm foundation.

May your shadow never grow less.

Faithfully yours,

(Signed) LUTHER BURBANK.

Santa Rosa, Calif.

The author of this book acknowledges with much gratitude many such expressions as to the value of his teaching; it is from such appreciation of his efforts that he receives the courage, the determination, and the strength to go on.

—DAVID V. BUSH.

APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY AND SCIENTIFIC LIVING

Chapter I What Is God?

As the shores of time are strewn with the wrecks of loves and hopes, so have the waves of time washed away many old ideas of God and ushered in the new.

A little girl who was trying to draw a picture of God was observed in the act by her mother, who asked what she was doing, and the little girl said, “Why, I am drawing a picture of God.” The mother said, “Why, dearie, no one knows what God is like.” “Oh! don’t they?” said she. “Well, they will when I am through.”

Through the centuries we have had different concep¬ tions of God, and it is most interesting to look through a religious encyclopedia and see how the Christian Church, for instance, has, century after century, changed its theological interpretation of God.

What the church has considered God in one century, t has disowned in the next; and yet each theological enthusiast thought that he had given the final concep- ;ion of God. But had he lived for another hundred rears, he would have found that some other theological pant had been able to start a school which offset his, to be superseded in turn, in the next century by an¬ other.

Thomas Tupper says: “Some time ago the editor of a certain paper wrote an editorial about the house fly as a pest. With the article appeared an enlarged pic¬ ture of a fly's foot—perhaps five hundred times asi large as the fly itself. As I read this editorial, a fly lit on the paper and began to crawl over the picture of the fly's foot. Did it realize that it was walking on a pic¬ ture of a part of its own anatomy ?

“The fact is that the paper, the picture, the editorial, the brain that conceived the editorial, the machinery that put the paper into the readers' hands—all em¬ ployed to speak the truth about a fly’s foot—represent a form of life so far above the fly itself that even when the fly crawled over the picture it did not know of them."

We are probably crawling over the earth in more or less the same way. That is, like the fly, we conceive our own world, but not the realm of lofty intelligence that surrounds us and comprehends us as we comprehend the fly.

To change the picture, we are, each of us, like a bay of the great ocean, depending on it for the force of its water; the life of its tide-throb.

It is as natural for the soul to seek God as it is for the swallow to seek her nest, and in that quest we try to picture God.

The Scriptures tell us that God created man in His own image. In His own image created He him. An d man was created in the image of God. God breathed

WHAT IS GOD?

into him a living; spirit. Man is spirit, we believe now; but just what that image meant in Genesis, above quoted, and just what the spirit is within man, have been the subject of speculation by theologians throughout the centuries.

And just what that image and spirit are we have been speculating about ever since.

The woman who said that she believed absolutely in God, so long as she did not attempt to define Him, also hit upon a great fact in experience. Those who hold that nothing should be believed which cannot be defined, shut out from faith the larger part of the greater and more influential things in life. Most things that are formal and provisional can be defined; nothing that is vital and eternal can be defined. This great fact was understood when the second commandment was formu¬ lated.

Every living human being in the world today is an illustration of life; but there is not one final definition of life.

Life is vital, but we cannot define it. God is, but He has never been defined so that our finite minds can fully understand, much less comprehend.

Just what is that Spirit? Christ has given us the clearest conception when He says that God is love. We can understand love, although we cannot understand God. If we cannot define God we can experience Him.

The old idea of God was that He was seated upon a throne on one great star in the center of the universe, surrounded by planets, moons, stars, etc.

The new idea is not that some super-eminent star stands for the chosen abode of the Ruler of the Uni¬ verse. On gravitational grounds, we now think that there is no single huge controlling body, but that there is a center of gravity around which the entire stellar system is symmetrically arranged.

The modern conception of astronomy holds that it is at least three hundred and eighty thousand millions of miles from the circumference to the center of the universe.

Around the center rotate one thousand million stars in swarms, in streams, in scattered groups, following dynamic lines in symmetric assemblages. No telescope or photograph can reveal anything of the person or the abode of the Supreme Intelligence that ordered it all.

Terry Walter, M. D., a noted scientist, gives the human mind some idea of the immensity of the uni¬ verse in the following words:

“The unimaginable immensity and the tremendous forces of the universe suggest the infinity arid the power of mind. It would take 48,000,000 of years, going at the rate of 60 miles an hour, traveling night and day, to reach Alpha Centauri, the nearest fixed star; the energy required to turn the moon upon it axis is 50,000,000 times as great as that required to drive the largest steamer across the Atlantic; and the force required to turn the earth on its axis once a day is 800,000 times that required to turn the moon. So we recog¬ nize the vast universe, the wonder of the heavens, and the marvel of the molecule, one forty-millionth of an inch in diameter, and the leavening power of a smile—who or what is behind all? Mind, the All Mind, God Spirit.”

WHAT IS GOD?

As science brought these facts to light, we were forced to alter our conception of Deity as being fashioned physically like man, as being a person like man, only with bigger hands, extraordinary eyes, large feet, sit¬ ting in the center of the heavens on a throne of ivory with His lower extremities resting on the earth—a golden footstool.

It degrades God in the mind and imagination of men to limit Him to forms of matter.

Shakespeare’s witches are charming; but when they are acted by persons, they are ridiculous.

To think of God as Spirit and Love is wholesome, but to try to reduce Him to a figure like man is preposterous.

We can only liken God, if we must have an image of Him, to something that we have already seen in life or in pictures. In fact, pictures are all fashioned after some object which man has seen.

Try to picture the shape and form of people living on Mars and what have we? A distorted image, fashioned after man. We cannot conceive of any being without its having some of the form and shape of other beings which we have seen.

Give a scientist a bone of some antiquated animal like the mastodon which has lived long before man tilled the soil, and what kind of an animal does he produce? An animal which has some of the features, lines, legs, eyes, etc., of other animals which man has seen.

God must be unlike anything which man has ever seen, for God is spirit. Man has not seen this spirit— God— a t any time, yet we picture Him as a great personality and so offer our oblations and say, “This is the God which brought us up out of the land of bond¬ age, the land of Egypt.”

We err when we try to depict the form and features of God. The Hebrew Scriptures do not attempt it, but Christians do.

Isaiah, John, the apocalyptic writer, and Daniel try to give some conception of God, but it is only “Sub¬ lime indefiniteness. ’’ At their best they are only sym¬ bols playing on the imagination.

When they are reduced to a definite form, they not only lose their beauty, but become grotesque. How absurd is the picture of a lamb, as described by John, with seven eyes and ten horns, holding something in his split foot which resembles a head.

Where the Scriptures are silent, man ought to be modest enough to be silent likewise. But although silence is golden, man has not always been golden.

Christ came the nearest to giving us a conception by which we can fathom God. He did not try to define God or to picture Him, but to “reveal’’ the Father.

If we know God as a companion, a guide, a help in time of storm, a comforter in days of sorrow, a friend in stress and fatigue, we should be satisfied, without lowering His Divine nature by vain pictures and caricatures.

As Charles Kingsley, the great preacher, lay dying he was heard to say that “God is very beautiful.’’ That is what we should hold in mind.

WHAT IS GOD?

God is beautiful; but who can define or describe God, the Beautiful?

WHAT IS GOD?

The God I love, to man is shown As spirit, tri \ and kindly care,

Whose lavish han 1 for all His own Is manifested e uywhere.

He is my Father, mild but strong,

A counselor of boundless might,

Who heals the sick, forgives the wrong,

And makes the heavy heart grow light.

My God is Spirit, pulsing Life,

Whose vast creating watchful power

Solves every knot in time of strife And comforts in the darkest hour.

My God is Friend, Companion, Guide,

Who at His duty never sleeps;

Who’s always present at my side,

And lovingly His vigil keeps.

But not for me alone He cares,

Or for my nation or my clan;

The Life Celestial that He shares Is linked with every mortal man!

—From Inspirational Poems, by the author.

An old proverb says that man is the noblest work of God; but with reverence it may be added that God is the noblest work of man. In the large sense, every man must paint his own picture of Deity. All nature is a palette, all beautiful events and scenes are pigments, and each man, according to his gifts, paints his picture of God. No two men ever had the same conception of the Unseen One, because no two men have exactly the same eyes, the same intellect or the same horizon and circumstances.

In our effort to explain God, how many times we have misunderstood Him and how many times we have misrepresented Him!

There came to the city of Florence a stranger. He lived his life there with but few friends. As he made money he seemed to shun humanity. He did not mingle with others. He did not 'spend his money; the city considered him a gross miser; so he came, lived and died a stranger, without friends, without love.

Upon his death the will was read, which startled all of Florence and brought tears to nearly every eye. This man had lived a most sacrificial life, saved every penny he could get, going without the necessities of life for himself that he might leave enough money, upon his death, to bring fresh water to the Florentines. They had suffered for the want of fresh water. Contagion after contagion had swept the city, and in the bigness of this man’s heart he had promised himself to live sober, saving and sacrificing, so that he could give Florence the needed water supply. His will contained the glad news that his fortune was to be spent to build a viaduct leading from the fresh springs and streams of the mountains down to the city of Florence. Then

WHAT IS GOD?

shame overwhelmed the people who had misunderstood their benefactor.

Sometimes we misunderstand God because of our theological teaching, or in experiences of sorrow and dis¬ appointment, and think him deaf, dumb and as adamant to our cries and supplications, when really God is spirit —a spirit of love, a Being, beautiful—and that spirit is with man—you.

What awful things we have attributed to God in our misunderstanding of His character and attributes!

Washington Gladden became an international celeb¬ rity and pulpiteer. He was one of the great intellectual giants of his generation and has done an infinite amount of good by bringing light into darkness in theological places. When he was a boy he attended one of those old-fashioned typical hellfire-and-brimstone revival meetings in which the evangelist railed against every¬ thing that could be couched in the term of love and de¬ clared that God was a God of “ Justice” and that, be¬ cause God was a just God, He could not be true to Himself and the children of His creation unless He damned the greater number of men born for disobeying the man-made, theological rules for getting into the Kingdom of Heaven. It was declared that, because God is a God of “ Justice,’’ He had to damn His own creation.

That evangelist’s misconception of God, miscalled a a God of “Justice,” set poor young Gladden to think¬ ing. At first he pictured himself in hell writhing in pain and agony because he had not had the same kind of a conversion that the preacher talked about, then his soul revolted at such a tyrannical Creator, from the revulsion of his soul, he became heart-sick and gave up the notion of becoming a preacher, which he had so hopefully cherished; until he thought the thing through, when he finally made this expression: “That men should be judged and doomed before they were born; that men should be blameworthy and punishable for what was done by their ancestors; that justice could be secured by the punishment of one for the sin of an¬ other, are propositions unthinkable. ’ ’

By the leadership of Robertson and Bushnell, he finally got his feet back firmly on spiritual terra firma, by staking his belief and faith on God, who made the earth, by knowing “the Judge of the earth would do right. ’ y

Early Hebrews said, “He is a God of war, who has drowned the enemy in the sea.” Joshua and Elijah gloated in glee when their God turned the tide of battle against the enemy and they conquered in loot, blood, rape, and gore.

The Church of the Middle Ages made Him a God to slay all who did not believe as was taught. The post- Reformation Churches called Him a God of “justice perverted.” That is not Christian. If we are to chris¬ tianize our theology we shall have to get away from the old dogmatism. We shall have to get away from the old creeds, to put them to one side for the moment; at any rate, to realize what they are, how they came to be, what immense pagan elements are in them, how they speak to us more of Greek philosophy than of Christian thinking; and we shall have to come back to Jesus Christ, or, rather, to accept the teaching of Jesus Christ

WHAT IS GOD ?

and try to see God as He set Him before the world. The terms in which Jesus Christ spoke about God were not the terms of the throne or the lawcourt or the judg¬ ment-seat. They are the terms, as some one has said recently, of the home. It was “Father’’ and “love” of which He spoke.

When the Church drifted from the moorings of love, Fatherhood, and home, it watered its own stock and could not pay dividends on all the paper which it had issued.

We do not have to go back to the days of Constantine, or of Joshua, for evidence that God is here. Bergson is right: Life is God; and life which turns the clod into a man is the evidence of His presence. A boy asked his father, “What is the air? I cannot see it, nor touch it, nor weigh it.” “Come out, my son,” replied the father, “this spring day. Now breathe.” The boy drew in long breaths. “How good it is!” he said. “That is the air,” replied his father. “You cannot see it, nor touch it, nor weigh it; the way to know it is to breathe it.”

We breathe air, but we cannot see it. That is the answer of the present to the demand, 11 Give us some evi¬ dence of God.” “In Him we live and move and have our being.” We experience God—the Spirit within— but we cannot see God. No Church has a monopoly of Him. He is neither Catholic nor Protestant, Orthodox nor Liberal, Christian nor Jew nor Pagan; He is all and more than all; He is “all in all.”

“When we are not engaged in theological or eccle¬ siastical discussion, we recognize this Spirit in life who is more than the sum of all human lives. He is in all Churches and all religions, but He is more than all Churches and more than all religions. He binds us to¬ gether in families, in neighborhoods, in nations.

“We speak of the American spirit, the English spirit, the French spirit, the Italian spirit. And now we are beginning to perceive that, as no creed is sufficient to define and no ritual is sufficient to utter the human con¬ sciousness of the Great Spirit who makes of all religions one religion, so neither is any nation large enough to interpret it. It is this Spirit dwelling with us and in us who unifies us, binds us together, makes possible human brotherhood; who makes of a hundred million people of different tongues, traditions, faiths, races, one American people; and who, now, in spite of our ego¬ tisms and our prejudices, is bringing all nations together in an international brotherhood. It is He who binds the past, the present and the future together in a unity as impossible to deny as it is impossible to define.

“This Spirit in literature unites all interpreters of life, because life is more than all interpreters; unites all lovers of liberty, because liberty is more than all political sects, as faith and life and love are more than all religious sects. This Spirit in Abraham Lincoln is more powerful today than it was when he was Presi¬ dent, because he was only one interpretation of that spirit of justice and liberty and mercy which finds some interpretation in all pure, heroic, true men and women. It is not in a sun, halting for an hour in its journey to the western horizon; it is not in a cross shining for an hour in the sky and then fading, that we are to look

WHAT IS GOD?

for an evidence of God. If these phenomena should occur, they would be but a poor evidence of God and no indication of His moral worth. Spirit is the evidence of Spirit and it is in the Spirit in man that we are to look for a Spirit greater than the sum of all human spirits. For God dwells in His children and the evi¬ dence that He exists is in the children in whom He dwells.’’—Lyman Abbott.

All who believe in a power greater than ourselves, a power that makes for righteousness in ourselves, might well be summoned to unite in an expression of their gratitude for His inspiring presence in the past and to make humble and hearty petition for His guidance in the future.

We cannot define God, we cannot describe God any more than “I am”—God is Love, Spirit—and the only proof that I know of God, is the Spirit of God being in the children of His creation. That is God. God is within you whether Catholic, Protestant, Greek or bar¬ barian. If we want more proof than that, I wonder if w~e are not somewhat like the boys who wrote to Pro¬ fessor McKeever, asking him to “prove that there is a heaven, if there is one.”

When the boys asked Professor McKeever to prove that there is a heaven, “if there is one,” he told the boys that not long ago he went into the home of a stricken father whose only son was asleep in Flanders’ fields* where the poppies grow. The precious young life had been nipped in the bud and the blood of his darling boy was sprinkled upon the altar of democracy. As Mc¬ Keever entered the home of this grief-stricken father, the old man proudly led the scholar into the room where his son was wont to spend much time as a little boy. The father tenderly and sweetly toyed with the relics of the boy’s childhood with which he used to play. Then he led the professor into the boy’s bedroom and here, with all the sympathy and love and tenderness pouring from a heart that was open and bleeding, told, with a certain amount of patriotic pride, how his boy had slept in this room for many years, now never to return, whose final sleep was being watched by the angels of God in Flanders’ fields in France.

From here the professor went to see a mother whose little baby had lately been in her arms for the last time and who still had tear-washed eyes in the recollection of the little life which was with her so short a time; and she, in turn, spoke as only a suffering mother can speak of the great joy and happiness that had been hers for a little while and was now only the shadow of a recol¬ lection—a dim mist of memory.

After visiting these two places he went out under the starry heavens and looking up, saw countless numbers of stars and moons and planets, each one, in silent array, pursuing its course in its time and in its place. The professor had viewed these three scenes. He had seen love expressed by the father of the boy in khaki; he had seen the love of the mother’s heart wrung with anguish and pain; and then came to the broad, arching heavens and saw the love of God manifested in the glowing stars, in the reflecting moons and in the circling planets.

Who could define love? No one. Yet the great pro¬ fessor had seen love lived and expressed by the father

WHAT IS GOD ?

and by the mother and by the great creative principle of life. The love of the father was inexpressible and un¬ explainable. The love of the mother was unutterable and unfathomable. Dr. McKeever had seen what love is, but he could not define it. The father and mother knew love, but they could not explain it.

He saw in the heavens what? Movement of the spheres and the stars. And what is the wonderful law of the movement of the spheres? And the more sym¬ pathetic laws which control the clouds, and the rain, and the life from the seeds in the earth ?

Let us call it Zeus, Pan, Nature, or Law, or X, that which performs all these things. You know as well as you know your own name that there is an intelligent power. Why not call this power “God”? Can you think of any grander or more sublime object to worship ?

No, do not try to analyze and fathom the depths of a father's devotion, or the subtleties of a mother's love, or the mystery of the stars in the heavens, or the hidden essence of growing life in the earth, or the ma¬ jestic power that holds all these things and yourself in the form of an intelligent universal system.

The very best you can do is to act as if these things were true and eternally to be trusted. And lo and behold! the assumption works. Use the law of love, the law of growth, the law of eternal rhythmic change a9 eternal laws of your own being, and thus God Himself will come into your soul and bless you with the satis¬ faction that He lives and reigns forever and ever.

Orison Swett Marden has ably expressed the psycholo¬ gist’s opinion of God and mind in the following words:

When a man realizes that he is divine, when he sees that he is a part of the everlasting principle which is the very essence of reality, nothing can throw him off his physical or mental balance. He is centered in the everlasting truth, in¬ trenched there in infinite power from the taint of fear, or anxiety, or worry, or accident, because he is conscious that he is principle himself, a part of the eternal verity. The feeling that he is in touch with the power which made and upholds the universe, that nothing can wrench him from this divine presence, gives a sense of security and peace. When he awakens in the morning, refreshed and rejuvenated, he feels that he has been in touch with the divinity that created him; that he has passed the borderland of. sense and has come into the presence of an infinite power, an infinite life; that he has been created anew, and hence, when he is tired and weary and sad, how he longs to get back to this divine presence, to be made over, to quench his thirst at the great fountain-head of life.