Sunshine Jane Part 21

"I will certainly, if I can. What is it?"

"Do you really believe that wanting anything shows that one is going to get it? You said something like that the other day."

"I know that one can get anything one wants," Jane answered gravely; "of course the responsibility of some kinds of wanting is awfully heavy. But the law doesn't alter."

"Can you explain it to me?"

"Yes, that's it," said Susan, "you tell us how to manage. I want to get something myself. Or I mean it's that I want something I've got to go away again. Or I guess I'd better not try to say what I mean."

"But you won't either of you understand what I mean, when I tell you,"

said Jane. "It's just as I said before, it takes a lot of study to get your brain-cells to where they can hold an idea that's really new to you. Heads are like empty beehives,--you have to have the comb before you can have the honey, and every different kind of study requires a different kind of cells just for its use alone. When things don't interest us, it's because the brain-cells in regard to that subject have never been developed. That's all. That's what they taught me."

"I think it's interesting," said Susan. "I always thought that the inside of my head was one thing that I didn't need to bother about.

Seems it isn't, after all. Go on, you Suns.h.i.+ne Jane, you."

"I'm like your aunt. I thought that what I thought was the last thing that mattered," said Emily.

"Everything matters. There's nothing in this world that doesn't matter, because this world is all matter. Anything that doesn't matter must be spirit. Don't you see that when you say and really mean that a thing doesn't matter, you mean that to you it isn't material,--that it's no part of your world?"

"Dear me, I never thought of that," said Susan, "then I suppose as long as things do matter to us, it means we just hang on to them and hold them for all we're worth."

"Yes."

"But, Jane, thoughts can't matter much? Or we can forget things."

"There isn't anything that we can think of at all that we are ever free not to think about again--that is, if it's a good thought," said Jane.

"If a thought comes to us at all, it comes with some responsibility attached. Either we are meant to gain strength by dismissing it, if it seems wrong, or it's our duty to do something with it, if it's right.

Most people's minds are all littered up with thoughts that they never either use or put away. That's what makes them so stupid."

"Goodness!" exclaimed Susan. "Why, I never put a thought away in my life,--not as I know of."

"I've never thought anything at all about my thoughts," said Emily, looking rather startled.

"Lots of people don't," said Jane; "they act just as a woman would in making a dress, if she cut it out a bit now and a bit then without ever laying the pattern back even, and then joined it anywhere any time, and then was surprised when it didn't even prove fit to wear--not to speak of looking all witched."

"Is that what ails some lives?" Emily asked, looking yet more startled.

"It's what ails almost every life. It's what makes 'I didn't think' the worst confession in the world. A man driving a motor with his eyes shut wouldn't be a bit worse. Life's a great powerful force always rus.h.i.+ng on, and we swing into the tide and never bother to row or to steer or to see that our boat is water-tight."

"You make me feel awful, Jane. As if I'd been lazy, staying in bed so.

And it was the only way."

"You couldn't do any better, Auntie. At least you weren't doing anything wrong. Being moored in a little, quiet cove is better than being adrift and slamming into the boats of others."

"I'd really have had to think more about Matilda's thoughts than my own, if I'd known. I'd never have had time for much thinking as I pleased in the way you say; I was always jumping up and flopping down."

"Jane," said Emily earnestly, "then every thought matters?"

"Yes, or matterates." Jane smiled. "If a thought doesn't produce good, it'll surely produce bad,--it's got to do something. You plant your thoughts in time just as one plants seed in the ground, and any further thoughts of the same kind add to its strength until enough strength causes an appearance in this world."

"You really believe that?"

"I know it. I know it so well that I think that every seed that's ever fallen was a lesson that we were too stupid to learn. Every time a seed fell and germinated, G.o.d said: 'There, that's the very plainest teaching on earth. Can't you see?' Sometimes I think the world's all a book for us to learn heaven in, just as our bodies explain our souls to us."

Susan looked at Emily in an awed way. "I guess I can get to believe it all," she said, in a low tone; "it sounds so plain when you stop and think of it."

"I'll try to believe it," said Emily, "but what I care most about is to learn how to get what you want?"

Jane considered. "That comes ever so far along. You have to learn to get what you want out of yourself before you can be upon the plane where you naturally get what you want, because you are too far on to want what you couldn't get."

Emily didn't understand and didn't care. "Do tell me how it's done, anyway," she begged eagerly.

"I don't know whether what I say will have any meaning for you, but I'll say it, anyway. You'll have to know that it's what I believe and live by, and if you're to believe it and live by it, it will come to you quite easily, and if not it's because it isn't for you yet."

"I mean to believe," said Emily firmly. "I want something, and I'll do anything to get it."

Jane shook her head. "That's the very hardest road to come by," she said, "unless it's some overcoming in yourself that you are wanting. You see, the very first step has to be the conquering of ourselves, not the asking for material things. You have to open a channel for the spirit, and then the material flows through afterwards, as a matter of course.

But if you've gone on a good ways, you don't think of getting _things_ at all; you just want opportunities to grow, and you know that what you need for life will keep coming."

"But it doesn't with lots of people," said Emily. "Just look at the poor--and the suffering."

"They aren't living according to this law," said Jane. "They're living on another plane. There are different planes."

"Don't you see," interposed Susan, "we asked Mrs. Croft because it would get me on a plane where, when Matilda came back, she wouldn't mind so many changes."

Emily looked inquiring. "A different plane?"

"Yes," said Jane, "you can lift yourself straight out of any circle of conditions by suddenly altering all your own ideas--if you've strength to do so."

"I'd never have asked Mrs. Croft alone by myself, you know," said Susan; "n.o.body that looked at things the way other folks do, would. But Jane looks at everything different from everybody else. She said it would be a quick way of being different. I guess she's right."

"I never heard any ideas like that."

"But they aren't new," said Jane; "they're older than the hills. G.o.d made the world and then gave every man dominion over his world. We all have the whole of _our_ world to rule. This way of looking at things is new to you, but there are thousands and thousands of people proving it true every day. All the old religions teach it, and all the new religions bid you live it or they won't be for you. They don't kill men for not believing now. They just let them live and suffer and go blundering on. Why"--Jane grew suddenly pink with fervor--"why, everywhere I look, almost, I see just lovely chances being let die, because people won't fuss to tend them. People are too careless and too thoughtless. The truth is so plain that the very word 'thoughtless'

fairly screams what's the matter to every one, but hardly any one bothers."

"But the people who believe as you do,--do they all get everything that they want?" asked Emily.

"Or else they want what they get," said Jane; "it comes to exactly the same thing when you begin to understand. The beauty of every step nearer G.o.d is the new learning of how exactly right his world is managed. All my old puzzles have been cleared up, and it's so wonderful. Why, I used to think that when beautiful, dear little children died it was awful; but now I know that they came to help and teach others, and that when they'd spread their lesson to those others, they didn't need lessons themselves and just left the school and went back into the beautiful world of Better Things. It was such a help to me to know why splendid men and women who were needed went so suddenly sometimes; it's because they're needed much more elsewhere and respond to that call of duty at once. I don't think of death as anything dreadful now; I think of it as a door that will open and close very easily for me."

"It's one door that Matilda liked to keep setting open," said Susan,--"oh, dear me, Jane, I'm trying to grow brain-cells and be a credit to you, and I can't think of anything but old Mrs. Croft. Perhaps she's woke up."

Jane rose and went into the house.

"Do you think you can take it all in?" Emily asked, slowly and thoughtfully.

"I'm doing my best," said Susan, "she's so happy and so good I think she must know what she's talking about."