Welcome to the Be Wonder Blog! So glad you are visiting. Learn More About Be Wonder HERE. Join the email list to get video and article updates HERE
The Be.Wonder Channel brings you chapter 3 of author Florence Scovel Shinn’s first book The Game of Life (GOL), The Power of the Word.
Listen NOW to chapter 3: The Power of the Word
READ ALONG | Download Chapter 3:
Here is a link to Chapter 3: The Power of the Word.
‘A person knowing the power of the word becomes very careful of his conversation. He has only to watch the reaction of his words to know that they do “not return void.” Through his spoken word, man is continually making laws for himself.’
– The Game of Life Chapter Three.
Everyday Examples
In the book The Game of Life & How to Play It (GOL) Florence gives valuable information in the form of what she calls laws. I think of these as insights packaged as laws. Each chapter is dedicated to each law or insight. These ideas are ways to think about life and the universe. You could call them filters for our perspective. Or even we could say these insights are really skills we can cultivate for a different type of life.
After talking about these insights, Florence then gives tangible everyday examples to illustrate the concept she writes about. This is an attempt to give an understanding of the lived experience of these ideas.
Insight: the capacity to gain an accurate and deep intuitive understanding.
The thing about Shinn’s tangible everyday examples is that they are from the early 20th century in New York. This was about 100 years ago and there are many cultural differences between her time and place of the 1920s and our everyday life in 2022. Also, life in New York today (and in the 1920s) is so different than life in other places. But we can find things we can relate to in anything.
Think On Your TERMS
Some things Shinn says may be difficult to comprehend and can even at first pass may sound a tad ridiculous. Especially, in regards to how these ideas may act in our own lived experience. Plus, the idea of words creating our world can seem so contrary to how most of us have been trained to think. In this dominant reality.
This had been a major struggling point for some. As many have told me that they always felt less than compared to these elegant manifestors. Maybe they are special. Like they don’t have anything in common. People wonder if they are even worthy. That these others are somehow better and different than me. Many think, “Who am I to have a sense of control of my life?” To that the response is “who are you not to be the one in control of your life?”
Each of us are beings of light, a child of God. A God-particle. Each of us are just from a culturally different place and time. And that’s okay. There is no one way to exist in the world or to create one’s world. The biggest lie we have been told over and over again is that we are bad and come from “sin”. Thus we have no power or worth.
I personally really love to visualize that time period (1920s) in America, and then find examples from my own life that parallel.
Share your examples with me! Send your examples through our Contact Us page. I will reply and share on the blog and YouTube channel.
Your Beliefs Create the Rules
Let’s look at an example of one of her examples. Here she is illustrating the basic everyday function of the power of the word and how we actually create our own laws.
Shinn tells about a father and a daughter. They are in New York hailing a cab (catching a car).
She says “The man (father) would say ‘I always miss a car. It invariably pulls out just as I arrive.’
His daughter said: ‘I always catch a car. It’s sure to come just as I get there.’ This occurred for years. Each had made a separate law for himself, one of failure, one of success. This is the psychology of superstitions.”
The father and daughter both had different expectations. Different beliefs in what would happen. And for each they have their expected outcome.
What they believe is true. Each one of us lives in their own little bubble of reality within this larger collective one.
I think finding a parking spot is a great alternative to the calling a cab example, that may be more relatable today. At least fo rme.One person can believe there is always the perfect parking spot available for them it takes no time to park. Another could believe there is never ever a good parking spot and it just takes so long to park.
This may be the case for so-called lucky people. They believe everything is working out for them. No matter how things appear.
This happens to me all the time. Where someone will think something is impossible. Yet I know it is actually possible.
This can be things just as simple as hailing a cab. Since it is these everyday little things that create our life. That if our thoughts and beliefs create our world, then we can definitely start their.
Have you ever experienced different outcomes based on different beliefs and expectations than someone close to you?
Our Belief Creates our Experience
Shinn goes on to say, “The horse-shoe or rabbit’s foot contains no power, but man’s spoken word and belief that it will bring good luck creates expectancy in the subconscious mind, and attracts a “lucky situation.” I find, however, this will not “work” when man has advanced spiritually and knows a higher law. One cannot turn back, and must put away “graven images.”
One thing I have learned in regards to the Law of Attraction (another law) is we are all in different places. We have different expectations and be
When it comes to the lucky rabbits foot it has to do with an individual’s belief in the luck. Our belief is so powerful, there is a name for it in medicine.
The placebo effect. The idea that your brain can convince your body a fake treatment is the real thing — the so-called placebo effect — and thus stimulate healing has been around for millennia.
Harvard Health Publishing
In clinical trials they have a group
Finding what you can relate to
A I said earlier, Shinn’s examples are typically centered on New York City in the 1920s. This is where Florence Scovel Shin was from. The man and his daughter are referring to hailing a cab in New York. The dad believes it just won’t work out, he will ‘always miss a car’. While the daughter believes she will ‘always catch a car’. And for each of them, their beliefs are true. One will always miss a car and struggle in order to catch one. The other will catch a car with ease.
So often our beliefs will actually write the programming of our lives, our beliefs define what is possible. Are beliefs could be considered
For me as a child, I began to notice how possibilities shifted. Depending on who I was speaking with. Meaning each person seemed to have more unlimited or limited outcomes based on their perception. And being around them I could see it quite clearly. This is based on their expectations and beliefs in what life was.
In her books, Shinn gives everyday examples in an effort to illustrate these aspects in our daily lives. It is quite easy for one to dismiss these examples. Saying they are imagined or improbable. That the people mentioned are from privilege. And that the examples do not applicable to everybody.
Yet, if we can suspend our disbelief. If we can choose to shift our beliefs and expectations in our ability to communicate with the source of all life and realize we are source embodied, God-icles (God Particles).
We are powerful when it comes to creating in our worlds and when we expect lack with contempt and criticism we get it. And thus are proven correct. And when we expect everything is always working out, even when things appear to not be, we get it also.
Some Quotes from Chapter 3
“…he must recognize that the power back of it is the one and only power, God, and that the object simply gives him a feeling of expectancy. “
“…found the only way I could make a change in the subconscious, was by asserting, “There are not two powers, there is only one power, God, therefore, there are not disappointments, and this thing means a happy surprise.” I noticed a change at once, and happy surprises commenced coming my way.”
“Someone has said that courage contains genius and magic. Face a situation fearlessly, and there is no situation to face; it falls away of its own weight. “
“Thus the invisible forces are ever working for man who is always “pulling the strings” himself, though he does not know it.”
“What man says of others will be said of him, and what he wishes for another, he is wishing for himself. “
“In the twenty-third psalm, we read: “He restoreth my soul.” This means that the subconscious mind or soul, must be restored with the right ideas, and the “mystical marriage” is the marriage of the soul and the spirit, or the subconscious and superconscious mind. They must be one. When the subconscious is flooded with the perfect ideas of the superconscious, God and man are one, “I and the Father are one.” That is, he is one with the realm of perfect ideas; he is the man made in God’s likeness and image (imagination) and is given power and dominion over all created things, his mind, body and affairs.”
